February 29, 2004
Source of Aht near my house
Went to the new gallery near me, at Dupont and Ossington, this afternoon; it may inspire a Buying Aht phase. It’s worth a look - they have lots of reasonably priced nice things, are really unpretentious, and claim to have a fast turnover.
(The Post noticed them back in January.)
Thanking bus drivers
Something I've only started noticing recently, but it's very consistent: bus passengers often thank the driver of an inter-city bus, but never the driver of an ordinary urban transit bus, except at night, when it's quite common.
February 28, 2004
Dept. of Glass Houses
The Globe's site is once again the victim of a potentially quite entertaining publishing glitch, in which the text of an article and editors' notes are all published together:
(BruceR gets finder's points for the last two examples.)
Sex clearly undefined for today's youthBy ALANNA MITCHELL
From Saturday's Globe and MailWhen is sex not really sex? When it's oral, manual, on-line or conducted over the phone and sometimes even when it involves intercourse without orgasm.
" ... He said the evolution is healthy. "It certainly helps to legitimize the sexual expression of people that is not specifically directing sexual behaviour toward procreation."can we please try to keep this graf in? The study also found that when it came to sexual jealousy, the students were prepared to say that almost any activity — including deep kissing and on-line sex — amounted to being unfaithful.
February 25, 2004
The white elephant in the corner
Back in December, the Conference of Defence Associations Institute argued, in BruceR's words, that
at current levels of spending ($12 billion a year) the air force will have to effectively disband by 2013, and either the army or navy by 2018, due to the massive equipment and personnel shortfalls brought about by three decades of bad planning.
The Post this week quoted an internal military report that was more or less as apocalyptic, predicting that the military's financial crisis would lead to four or five air force base closures. The list includes Bagotville, the fighter base from which (as BruceR pointed out) planes would be sent to intercept a hijacked airliner over the eastern half of the country.
(My own impression was that the idea was for the public to register the words base closures in the headline Defence minister denies base closures planned - the military is finally catching up to the game that every school board and municipal parks department perfected years ago.)
What part of the defence budget to cut next? We could give the army a sabbatical. Or we could tie up billion-dollar warships at dockside to save on having to pay the crews sea allowance. Or we could let the handful of people who pass pilot selection rot in boredom beside prairie runways. Sucks to be them, but as expensive as it is to recruit them, they're even more expensive to train. Let alone employ. Hey: a penny saved is a penny earned.
Damn - we've already done all those things.
Or we could ask another question: why, in this day and age, is Canada eking out money from a tiny defence budget to run an all-singing, all-dancing university, something that isn't even a federal responsibility, let alone a military one? Apart from the influence of its notorious alumni mafia, that is?
A decade or so ago, I spent a number of years as an officer in what we then called the militia, and now seems to always be referred to as the army reserve. I was trained under a program, now sadly diminished, which put reserve officer candidates through the regular army's training program.
On the way, I ended up with a pretty broad exposure to various kinds of very junior officers, regular and reserve.
Consistently, the RMC cadets stood out as the most rigid, unimaginative and insecure I had to deal with, as well as the most personally immature. The problem seemed to be that they had gone directly from the parental home to what amounts to an extremely rigid boarding school, at just about the time when the rest of us were embarking on the complicated and anarchic trial-and-error process of trying to figure out how to be adults.
Their culture had its cult-like aspects. I knew a couple who'd met on the parade square at Royal Roads: he was administering Saturday morning punishment drills, and she was marched out for some misdemeanor. He roared, she squished her nose into the immaculate asphalt; love blossomed. They were cute, in a scrubbed, abrupt sort of way.
In the Western world, there are two approaches to running military colleges:
RMC moved from the Sandhurst system to the West Point system in the 1950s: while the institution has a rich history, its current identity as a university is not integral to it.
It's a caricature, but the totalistic system tends to take the grind-'em-down-and-build-'em-up approach, molding the personality as far as possible. West Point and Annapolis, for example, won't accept applicants over 23: they don't want to have to deal with fully formed adults. (The U.S. Army’s cutoff age for officer applicants off the street is 29; the navy’s, 35.)
The humanistic approach tends more toward overlaying a military ethic, and specific training, on an existing personality. Some personalities lend themselves to this better than others, but there will never be a way around that problem.
I argue that the humanistic approach better serves the needs of a modern army, which needs a group of officers with diverse adult experiences, balancing imagination and personality with discipline and professional skill. This is particularly true if one looks at the wide range of things Western armies are actually sent to do in our own era: a punitive expedition here, an armed civil-affairs mission there, a traditional campaign somewhere else. More and more officers will end up as the modern equivalent of Victorian colonial administrators. They will have to think their way through situations that are impossible to fully prepare them for through training, in a way that was not generally true of officers in Cold War-era armies.
Given that this is true, officers are better off having had a wide range of broadening adult experiences - the broader the better. Institutionalizing them for four years at the beginning of adulthood is not the best way of making this more likely.
The profession of arms is monastic enough by nature without adding more monasticism. It's not a situation where more is better and even more is even better than that.
Here's what I'd do:
End undergraduate instruction at RMC. Establish the Canadian Forces National Scholarships, a financially generous and very demanding university scholarship program for Regular Force officer entrants (something in the nature of $15,000 a year, so it would be competitive and attractive, and dropping out or getting kicked out would have real consequences). The existing service requirement after graduation would be retained, obviously. Design the program in such a way as to stress self-discipline over externally imposed discipline, treating entrants as adults from Day 1. (If a student failed or dropped out, the scholarship payments already made would become a student loan obligation.) Create demanding but achievable PT and second-language requirements, tested at the end of each term. Help and advice would be available if asked for, but the onus would be basically on the student to figure out how to meet the requirements. Which builds character better: being roared out of bed to go on a five-mile run with fellow-sufferers, or going on a five-mile run on your own initiative? Require a minimum GPA, weighted to reflect the academic rigor of the university. For students who enter the program fluently bilingual, there would be a third-language requirement, in some useful modern language. There would be a requirement to live more than a certain distance (100 km?) from the parental home, with allowance for humanitarian exceptions. Make service in the reserves compulsory, with reports due to the program from units on candidates' character, performance, attendance and so forth. This means that they couldn't conveniently attend universities in towns with no reserve unit, but there aren't all that many: in the whole country, I think it's just StFX, Acadia and the University of Brandon.
Reserve units would get a new source of recruits, by necessity disciplined and motivated. Students' reserve pay would be in addition to their scholarship money.
It is an interesting question whether they would be better off in the ranks or entering as junior officers; my preference would be to keep them in the ranks, in a combat-arms occupation. Perhaps a separate and more intense training stream would be appropriate. Candidates would be strongly encouraged to try to get some kind of operational experience, on an overseas tour or perhaps on a warship.
To be a reservist, particularly on a university campus, is to have a more or less constant series of conversations about soldiering with people whose assumptions are often very different from your own. These are seldom along the lines of how-can-you-be-a-baby-killer, though those are educational too. They are all more or less forced to think through their own ideas about the ethics of warfare and the place of the military in society well enough to be able to articulate them. This is also healthy.
The new-model RMC would:
Administer the CF National Scholarships. Administer the existing War Studies MA program, if necessary with help from Queen's. Be the site of introductory officer training for all branches of the CF, regular and reserve, with an emphasis on the history and tradition of Canada's officer corps.
Royson James in today’s Star:
... describes how Miller has assembled an effective political machine as mayor (‘We don't need a strong mayor system; we need a strong mayor,’ James quotes him as saying). One of the things on Miller’s side, James observes, is how pathetic and demoralized the right-wing opposition on council actually is:
When council's right-wing members were supposedly in power, under Lastman, they were inept at exercising it — leaving most policy decisions to chance and council's goodwill. Now, they don't have an ally in the mayor's chair and are adrift.
They have no natural leader, no leader in waiting and little resolve to provide the type of counterpoint necessary for a vibrant democracy at city hall. Case Ootes, Lastman's deputy, is the natural for this leadership role, but he has shown neither the inclination nor the stamina for it.
Some of their members have been co-opted, some have poor work habits and are unwilling to battle and fight for anything but the most basic ward issue, and some are just not capable.
February 24, 2004
Back in the saddle
I thought I was pretty hard-core to dig out my bike (literally) and ride to work today, though it was humbling to realize how out of shape I am – hibernation has left me soft and flabby. A few years ago, I would ride in most winter conditions, but never mind.
Now, (thanks again to crazybikerchick) meet a really intense commuter cyclist: David Peterson of Geneva, Illinois.
His commute is normally half an hour each way, mostly using local bike paths.
In winter, snow is a problem. Peterson decided that it would be less work in the long run to clear the snow away and ride on smooth pavement than to ride over uncleared snow for the rest of the winter.
“My first test at clearing a path was walking with a regular snow shovel,” he explains. “This worked fine, although the constant lifting and dumping quickly tired my arms and back. Scraping the shovel on the pavement for a mile or so also wore down the aluminum tip.”
Back to the drawing board. Peterson’s next solution: a bike-propelled snowplow.
After going through one winter pushing his plow, he redesigned the system so that he pulled it instead. This is his current design.
His new problem: a small-minded park bureaucrat is trying to get him to stop.
February 23, 2004
Encouraging signs
Noticed this morning in my front garden. Thumbnails link to larger images:
As the snow disappears, some of the 50 snowdrops I planted last fall are coming up. Current total: 3.
The witch hazel is showing an interest in blooming. I've never had a witch hazel before; this is a new adventure.
February 21, 2004
I’d have been relieved, in her place
This sort of thing defies comment. The whole Amiel Black/Mills exchange can be read at the Spectator’s site. They’ve made it stupidly difficult to link to, apart from requiring registration, but the duel can be read at on the Feedback pages for 7, 14 and 21 February.
From today’s Globe:
“ ... The article cited, as an example of their excesses, a 1998 dinner party at their lavish home on Cottesmore Gardens in fashionable Kensington. According to the story, Lord Black realized he was "short of a woman" for dinner, so he called Charles Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph, also owned by Hollinger International, for some help.
Mr. Moore turned to Ms. Mills, The Telegraph's then 26-year-old features editor, and asked her to hurry over to the Blacks' home. "An hour later, hastily groomed, made up and brushed, Ms. Mills was sipping predinner drinks in Cottesmore Gardens," the Spectator article said.
"Then disaster struck.
A male guest, Max Fisher, dropped out. Mills was approached by Conrad Black. 'Finish your drink and skedaddle,' he told her. Barbara Black then told her to go to the kitchen and out through the servants' door, where the driver would pick her up and take her home," the article continued.
February 20, 2004
Bring ‘em on, the man said
Very depressing, beautifully written feature in the New York Times Magazine on American soldiers wounded, some horribly, in Iraq. Worth a look today or tomorrow, before it disappears into their paid-access archive.
“ ... One day, as Shrode was walking down a hospital hallway, a civilian passing by happened to toss out an innocent ''Howyadoin','' which somehow, in that moment, became the last straw. ''Ninety-nine percent of the time, I tell them what they want to hear,'' Shrode says. But in this instance he couldn't help blurting out a truth that was becoming more evident each day. ''Buddy,'' he said, ''I'm going to hurt the rest of my life.''“ ... The low point came on the day she managed to change the sheets on her queen-size bed -- a task that, one-handed, became a two-hour ordeal. In the end, she was nothing short of triumphant, with a bed orderly enough to pass a military inspection. And then the children arrived, tumbling through the door as they always did, eventually settling down on McKinley's bed to watch TV as she cooked dinner. But sitting on the bed led to jumping on the bed, which in turn led to tearing off the sheets in an exuberant frenzy. McKinley became unhinged. ''I completely lost my mind on them,'' she said, sounding as if she were still startled by it. ''I was throwing sheets and screaming.'' For a full month afterward, she slept on the living room couch, unable to confront the bed again.
“ ... His wife, Andrea, who was pregnant with their first child, begged him to ask his doctors for antidepressants. He says he resisted, knowing his request would become part of his medical records, potentially affecting security clearances and promotions in what he hoped would be a full military career.
“ ... She described the first time he was able to call her from the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, about four days after the incident. (''He told me he was fine,'' she said. ''I lied through my teeth,'' Robert added.) And then she talked about his homecoming -- about meeting his medevac flight, ''scared to death,'' and first taking in the sight of his scar-ridden face, his weak body and missing arm. She remembered smiling as hard as she could at Robert before stepping out of his line of vision as the medics transferred him to a stretcher and letting herself weep.
“ ... Then he wants to go to college to become a history teacher. ... But while the dream of this moment kept him going, it also -- he finally admitted -- prevented him from seeking psychological help for the grief and anger he felt in the wake of his time in Iraq. ''I can't have any of that on my record,'' Bricklin told me, as if there were absolutely no choice in the matter. ''I mean, who's going to hire a teacher who has flashbacks?''
(“But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.”)
February 19, 2004
February 18, 2004
Wallpapered
Just for fun, a best-of list of wallpaper images I've taken over the last year or so. All files are 1074x768 -
February 17, 2004
From a Museum of Civilization press release:
Until quite recently, many organizations (such as libraries and newspapers) kept extensive clipping files, thematically organized, and ready at a minute's notice for use by a columnist, researcher, or those who were just plain curious. One such organization was the Hamilton Spectator, a Canadian newspaper which kept a collection of 144,000 newspaper articles (culled from various Canadian newspapers) during the Second World War. With the cooperation and assistance of the Canadian War Museum, this rather amazing collection of articles is now available online, and is fully searchable as well.
God made bikes and SUVs; Sam Colt made 'em equal
Sample post:
Sample post:
# I have ridden bikes for years (both bicycles and motorcycles) and have
# never come up with a satisfactory way to handle a firearm safely while
# moving on two wheels. Yet I _always_ carry (legally - usually in my
# fanny pack).
If you're wearing a jersey, a Kel-Tec or other small pistol would be pretty
easy to slide into the center back pocket, reachable easily with either
hand, without breaking cadence. I'm not the best at no-hand riding, but one
handed outside of offroad riding really isn't an issue at all. I also
practice off-hand as much as I practice on-hand, so I personally wouldn't be
terribly concerned with my accuracy offhand at any distance it would be
reasonable and proper for me to use a firearm.
February 14, 2004
From the LA Weekly:
Rather than only asking how a young George W. got out of the National Guard, we ought to ask how he got in when 350 American men were dying each week in Vietnam and 100,000 were on National Guard waiting lists across the country. For years the talk in Austin political circles had Bush using his father’s stroke as a Republican congressman from Houston to secure one of two or three rare open billets in an Air National Guard Unit — after scoring in the 25th percentile on the standard test given to flight-program candidates. There was also the story of a political contribution conveyed to the Democratic speaker of the Texas House to secure a slot for Bush. When Bush moved into the Governor’s Mansion, the stories dried up — as did two of the sources who circulated them in Austin bars frequented by the state’s political cognoscenti.
... In 1999, as George W. Bush was running for president, Barnes and the Bush military record were going to court. Barnes told his story in a five-hour deposition and then told the reporters what he had told the court. As speaker of the Texas House, he would sometimes find slots in the National Guard for the fortunate sons of friends and supporters. It had already been reported that two of his aides would take the names of the lucky young men who won the legislative lottery over to the commandant of the Guard, who would find space for them. In 1969, a Houston oil-service company executive called on Barnes and asked him to get George W. Bush into the National Guard.
Thank you, Player One
from today’s Star -
Why fire someone when a simple thank-you will suffice?The ruling Liberals have ousted former Tory cabinet minister Al Leach from his post as vice-chair of GO Transit, the only GO board member who didn't get an extension to his posting.
He wasn't officially fired, or even told goodbye. He was merely given a three-paragraph letter that says "thank you" twice and speaks of his service to the board in past tense."I am writing you to thank you for your contributions to the GO Transit Board," wrote Transportation Minister Harinder Takhar in a letter dated Jan. 28.
Posted by Patrick at 01:33 PM
February 12, 2004
I want one!
Or maybe two; I have the parking space.
This fall, Mercedes will finally offer its two-seat 'smart car' in Canada, priced at about $15,000. They've been available for a while in Australia.
We were admiring these in Spain two years ago: they could park at a right angle to the street, or use the wasted half-parking space at the end of a row. The maker claims two can park side-by-side in one parking space.
It shares its tiny niche with Feel Good Cars' zero-emission vehicle, which is of course nothing of the sort - 'coal-fired vehicle' would be more honest.
The role for either car, as far as I can see, is serving commuters who are stuck with having to drive to work but don't need to move very much except themselves. (They're really just updated Austin Minis, come to think of it.)
Great Puritan magazines!
eye weekly has an article this week on the 20th anniversary of Xtra! The writer, fairly far down, referred to "our sometimes puritanical city". Which set an odd train of events in motion.
The right-hand nav on the story has a couple of ads, one clearly there because a computer found one of: puritan, puritanism, puritanical and so forth:
Puritan magazines
Great Puritan magazines! Search for Reformation Advocate on this page.
www.swrb.com
Which in turn leads to a page advertising tracts with names like Rev. Steve Schlissel's Flawed Conception of the Regulative Principle of Worship Corrupts His Arguments. (Also "32 PURITAN CDs for FREE -- while they last!") Go figure.
I want one (2)
An Australian yard wants to sell the U.S. Navy a 350-foot aluminum catamaran with a top speed of 53 mph.
February 11, 2004
Tornado in a Can
The Washington Post discovered it first, then the New York Times. Now, the promoters of the Windhexe, otherwise known as ‘Tornado in a Can,’ have their own Web site.
As its nickname implies, the Windhexe works by literally creating a tornado inside itself, reducing pretty much anything inside to inert dust, at a much smaller volume than it started out having. At right: a beet before and after its encounter with the device.
The promoters' original field was chicken processing; the chicken industry has a deep interest in anything that can help it deal with problematical mountains of guck.
It's also caught the eye of an Australian mining company which wants to dry out large quantities of coal, and a pharmaceutical company which wants an economical way to separate egg shells from membranes. There are people who could explain how artifical tornadoes can separate egg shells from their membranes; I am not one of them. There has been very little discussion of using it on a large scale to deal with municipal garbage, which is what first came to my mind.
To date nobody, including the inventor, actually understands why the contraption works. I find this very pleasing, for some reason.
(A Google search turns up an unlikely number of sermons.)
from OJR -
Bloggers mount an "adopt a journalist" campaign to track election coverage. Along with CJR's nonpartisan Campaign Desk, the effort puts some of the nation's top political reporters under intense public scrutiny.You write the story. Your editor checks it. Your copy editor checks it. The story runs. Then your "watcher" reads it and writes a scathing critique on her Weblog. Welcome to the new workflow for prominent political reporters, as citizen bloggers and the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk Weblog have created another layer of oversight for the Fourth Estate.
Full story
February 08, 2004
New wallpaper files, at last
posted here. The bottom two images are the new ones. I've been trying to capture the subtlety of snow; it's harder than it seemed at first. More successful winter pix, mostly taken on Christmas Day 2002, are here.
February 07, 2004
Truth in advertising
'Sharp's Pygmy' is a kind of dwarf Japanese maple which I bought on impulse last summer, after I gave away the rhododendron that refused to thrive in my garden. This is a rare example of my buying a plant that is reasonably scaled for the space it will have to occupy.
Plant Fact: The variety was developed in a nursery in Boring, Oregon. Really. There is, apparently, nothing to do in Boring. This is either too good or too bad to be true.
From the Globe:
"Jeremy Hinzman tells MICHAEL VALPY that he enlisted to get an education, not to kill people. But his superiors wouldn't listen and ordered him to pack for Iraq. Instead, he packed up his family and hightailed it north. Now, Canada must decide: Can a U.S. Army deserter be considered a refugee?"
from reason.com:
History shows that
"technological progress in a society is by and large a temporary and vulnerable process, with many powerful enemies with a vested interest in the status quo or an aversion to change continuously threatening it. The net result is that changes in technology, the mainspring of economic progress, have been rare relative to what we now know human creativity is capable of, and that stasis or change at very slow rates has been the rule rather than the exception. It is our own age, and especially the rapid technological change in the Western world, that is the historical aberration."
rest here
Posted by Patrick at 05:19 PM
Found on the Web
February 06, 2004
A little piqued, I think
Well, not really, but still. Turns out I was beaten into the blogosphere by over two weeks by this man. Jimmy Carter is out there too, adorably referring to "my "blogs" (Web logs)". Don't get me wrong: I'd happily vote for either of them. But still.
So I'm not an early adopter. Can we live with this?
And I thought they didn't like the press being aggressive -
From a Toronto police press release -
MEDIA ADVISORY NEWS CONFERENCE 4 DIVISION & GUNS AND GANGS RECOVER STOLEN WEAPONS AND AMMUNITION FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6TH, 2004 3:30 PM TORONTO POLICE HEADQUARTER 40 COLLEGE STREET MEDIA GALLERY
Corporate Communications
416-808-7100
Members of 41 Division CIB and Guns and Gangs will be avialble at a news conference to provide information on a search warrant exucuted in Durham Region. PHOTO OPPORTUNITY: Weapons and ammunition have been recovered and will be made available to the media. The news conference will be available on the Bell TOC feed. An audio version will be available on the TPS website following the event.
from Salon:
Did Bush drop out of the National Guard to avoid drug testing?
The young pilot walked away from his commitment in 1972 -- the same year
the U.S. military implemented random drug tests.
Full story
from Slate:
"Democrats are cute when they're being pragmatic. They furrow their brows
and try to think like Republicans. Or as they imagine Republicans must
think.
" ... By the time this is all over, most of the serious contenders will
have been crowned the practical choice for at least a moment. First it was
Lieberman the Centrist. "I'm actually for Dennis Kucinich," a Democrat
might say, "because I like his position on nationalizing all the churches.
But I'm supporting Joe Lieberman. His views on nearly everything are
repellent to me, and I think that's a good sign."
" ... Some Democrats cheated and looked into their hearts, where they
found Howard Dean. But he was so appealing that he scared them. This is no
moment to vote for a guy just because he inspires you, they thought. If he
inspires me, there must be something wrong with him. So, Democrats looked
around and rediscovered John Kerry. He'd been there all along, inspiring
almost no one. You're not going to find John Kerry inspiring unless you're
married to him or he literally saved your life. Obviously neither of those
is a strategy that can be rolled out on a national level. But he's got the
résumé. And gosh, he sure looks like a president (an "animatronic
Lincoln," as my Slate colleague Mickey Kaus uncharitably described him).
Full story
February 05, 2004
'Yorkville's a mess'
In today's Star: Christopher Hume offers a robust defence of the Yorkville condo tower projects. My own sense, with all due respect to Jane Jacobs, is that the Yorkville that the projects' opponents are defending, and are sentimental about, has long since been erased.
"For many of Yorkville's self-appointed defenders, the big issue is height. Like many Torontonians, their fear of tall buildings borders on the pathological. Maybe they have forgotten that they live in a city, a contemporary city where highrises are - and should be - a fact of life.
" ... Yorkville already has its share of anti-urban buildings, short and tall, that should never have been allowed. What it needs now are buildings that give back to the neighbourhood, that reinforce the streetscape and re-establish at least the scale and rhythm of the Victorian city. That can be accomplished whether or not there's a tower on top. Indeed, the 18-storey condo at 100 Yorkville would bring more residents, rather than shoppers, to the area and help make it a real neighbourhood. Eyes on the street, as Jane Jacobs might say.
February 04, 2004
Am I not a Man, and a Brother?
Wonderful article in the online version of Mother Jones by Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, about the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire - "the first human rights campaign" - and how, with direct-mail fundraising letters, publicity stunts, product boycotts, and newsletters designed to rally supporters, it set the pattern for those that followed. (It was also founded on the first systematic exercise in investigative journalism.)
The slave lobby's response reads like an eighteenth-century version of Toxic Sludge is Good For You:
The slave interests were piqued. In the biggest slave port, the editor of the Liverpool General Advertiser bemoaned the "infatuation of our country, running headlong into ruin." Pro-slavery forces now launched counterattacks. They bought copies of a pro-slavery book for distribution "particularly at Cambridge" (college towns leaned left even then) and printed 8,000 copies of a pamphlet about how each happy slave family had "a snug little house and garden, and plenty of pigs and poultry." They sponsored a London musical, The Benevolent Planters, in which two black lovers, separated in Africa, end up living on adjoining plantations in the West Indies and are reunited by their kindly owners. But Britons dependent on the slave economy were worried. Some doggerel made the rounds in Liverpool: If our slave trade had gone, there's an end to our lives / Beggars all we must be, our children and wives / No ships from our ports, their proud sails e'er would spread / And our streets grown with grass where the cows might be fed.
The slave interests' tactics bore a fascinating resemblance to the way industries under assault try to defend themselves today. When, for instance, there were moves in Parliament to try to regulate the treatment of slaves, the planters hastily drew up a lofty-sounding code of conduct of their own and insisted no government interference was necessary. They considered other P.R. techniques as well. "The vulgar are influenced by names and titles," suggested one pro-slavery writer in 1789. "Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave-trade."
In Parliament, slavery's most colorful spokesman was the Duke of Clarence, one of the many dissolute sons of King George III. As a teenager, he had entered the Royal Navy and gone to the West Indies, where he was wined and dined enthusiastically by the plantation owners. He showered marriage proposals and cases of venereal disease on their daughters and thoroughly imbibed their attitudes. In his maiden speech before fellow members of the House of Lords in their red and ermine robes, he called himself "an attentive observer of the state of the negroes," who found them well cared for and "in a state of humble happiness." On another occasion, he warned that Britain's abolishing the trade would mean the slaves would be transported by foreigners, "who would not use them with such tenderness and care."But before Parliament could act, there were lengthy hearings. Witnesses like James Penny, a former captain, made the slaves on the middle passage sound almost like cruise passengers: "If the Weather is sultry, and there appears the least Perspiration upon their Skins, when they come upon Deck, there are Two Men attending with Cloths to rub them perfectly dry, and another to give them a little Cordial.... They are then supplied with Pipes and Tobacco.... They are amused with Instruments of Music peculiar to their own country...and when tired of Music and Dancing, they then go to Games of Chance."
Rounding up eyewitnesses willing to speak against the trade was as difficult as finding military or corporate whistleblowers today. For a seaman or ship's officer to testify critically meant he could never find work on slave ships again. At one point Clarkson rode 1,600 miles in two months, scouring the country for more witnesses. Often, he complained, "when I took out my pen and ink to put down the information, which a person was giving me, he became...embarrassed and frightened."
Full article
That's so ... 1948?
James Bow explains why Dean's support, though it seemed enormous if you looked at one chunk of the Internet, was thin on the ground in Iowa, in the Actual Real World of live human voters. He uses what became (after 'Headless Body Found in Topless Bar,' maybe) the most famous headline ever run in a daily newspaper:
"Opinion poll after opinion poll showed Dewey with a substantial lead, right up to the day before the election. So certain of the results that the managers of the strike-riddled Chicago Daily Tribune had the inexperienced print-setters set out the headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN and sent everybody home early, much to their later embarrassment because, of course, Truman defied all expectations and won handily.
"It was a shock. The pollsters hadn't anticipated this at all, and they had all of the latest technology at their fingertips. They'd used the telephone, and America's burgeoning telephone network to reach thousands of Americans and gather their opinions. ... So why didn't it work?
Turns out, it was the technology that was the pollsters' downfall, because although many Americans had telephones, many Americans did not. Those that did not own phones tended to be poor, rural, and disproportionately open to Truman's New Deal message, which he continued to aggressively campaign on, state-to-state, town-to-town and person-to-person. ...
"Humans can't picture how big the world is, and sometimes they think that if they're speaking to an active community of hundreds (which describes the blogosphere to a 'T'), they have the ear of the world, or at least the part of the world that matters. Sometimes, in that amplified setting, our discussions and our opinions get pulled off of what's seen as conventional wisdom in the offline world. And sometimes, when reality snaps back at us, we are shocked.
The whole thing is worth a read.
This war is a hideous mistake!
Phil Carter gets finder's points:
Slate has posted a series of 1971 Doonesbury cartoons by Garry Trudeau which take potshots at then-Vietnam Vet Against the War (now presidential candidate) John Kerry.
Two solitudes
Finder's points to marginalrevolution.com. This one only works with the visual:
Valdis Krebs uses data from Amazon to draw a network map of books related to current politics. Two books are linked if they were bought together. Like other maps this one shows the red and the blue. Notice how few books link the clusters.
Excuse me, I'm very important. Can I condescend to you now?
The cover feature in the Globe's Focus section this week is a kind of exercise in packing together everything that can go wrong with print feature writing in one convenient place. (It would be quite a good teaching tool.) Lack of self-awareness on the part of the reporter, selecting experts to fit the reporter's prejudice, no attempt to provide context, assuming a reader who is a version of the reporter, unstable, gassy generalizations, ('A world in decline?') the always-useful pseudo-trend, and - did I mention a lack of self-awareness?
" ... From a distance, the kids seem fresh and full of potential. They can't be anything like the ones who have spawned the parent-freaking headlines of the past few years: suicide, gangs, early sex, pregnancy, alienation, Littleton, Taber, Reena Virk and other random acts of violence from coast to coast.
"Or can they? Let's try talking to them.
"White coat bolts straight away, without making eye contact, and flees in horror to the embrace of the rest of her pack several metres away. Tan jacket stands her ground with the boys, a hostile look on her face. So what is it with teens today, they're asked.
"Delivered by one of the boys, the brush-off is immediate and absolute. "We're kind of busy," he says, with a hard look on his face. Then he turns his back.
"When Gordon Neufeld hears this story a few days later, he laughs. An experienced clinical psychologist in Vancouver, he recognizes the symptoms all too well. This is a sign of what he calls "peer-orientation" or "peer-attachment disorder," which he contends is a modern blight responsible for today's dangerous teen landscape and getting worse all the time.
The cover feature in the Globe's Focus section this week is a kind of exercise in packing together everything that can go wrong with print feature writing in one convenient place. (It would be quite a good teaching tool.) Lack of self-awareness on the part of the reporter, selecting experts to fit the reporter's prejudice, no attempt to provide context, assuming a reader who is a version of the reporter, unstable, gassy generalizations, ('A world in decline?') the always-useful pseudo-trend, and - did I mention a lack of self-awareness?
" ... From a distance, the kids seem fresh and full of potential. They can't be anything like the ones who have spawned the parent-freaking headlines of the past few years: suicide, gangs, early sex, pregnancy, alienation, Littleton, Taber, Reena Virk and other random acts of violence from coast to coast.
"Or can they? Let's try talking to them.
"White coat bolts straight away, without making eye contact, and flees in horror to the embrace of the rest of her pack several metres away. Tan jacket stands her ground with the boys, a hostile look on her face. So what is it with teens today, they're asked.
"Delivered by one of the boys, the brush-off is immediate and absolute. "We're kind of busy," he says, with a hard look on his face. Then he turns his back.
"When Gordon Neufeld hears this story a few days later, he laughs. An experienced clinical psychologist in Vancouver, he recognizes the symptoms all too well. This is a sign of what he calls "peer-orientation" or "peer-attachment disorder," which he contends is a modern blight responsible for today's dangerous teen landscape and getting worse all the time.
"... Three girls sit primly at a round table, feasting on McDonald's food and so less likely to bolt if approached. They look identical, right down to the silhouette, the colours, the long hair, the heavy eye liner and thick makeup. One has just put down her cellphone to launch into a tirade about her boyfriend.
"Perhaps they would like to offer their views on today's teens?
"One responds with a withering look. "It's not a good time right now," she says dismissively. The girl just off the phone doesn't miss a beat, as though grownups are invisible. "That speech I just gave," she tells her friends, gesturing to her cell, "he didn't hear a word. He hung up on me."
"To the authors of Hold On, that kids can behave this way illustrates abject failure for parenthood. But to U.S. researcher Judith Rich Harris, parenthood never had a chance -- it's been next to irrelevant all along.
More from the Toronto archives site:
A collection of wonderfully cheesy Victorian advertisements:
here
and here
and here
and here
and a personal favourite here.
From the city archives site:
The Central Tech playing field before they put a playing field on it. The photographer would have been standing about ten feet from what's now Pizza Gigi.