March 31, 2004
I Love the Internet, part 3489737
Turns out there’s an entire Web subculture devoted to messing with the Nigerian investment fund scammers’ heads, just for fun. ‘419,’ as a shorthand term to describe this kind of fraud, originally came from the relevant section of the Nigerian penal code (not very consistently enforced, it would seem), not the FBI as I wrote earlier.
Much the best and funniest site here: 419eater.com
See also
419sport
419game
Artists Against 419
Scam-O-Rama
419game’s author explains the appeal:
It turns the tables on the scammers. They send literally thousands of emails out at a time: many are to non-existent addresses and so "bounce"; of those that reach a valid mailbox, most are ignored; out of that small percentage which land in the mailbox of someone gullible enough to believe that there really is someone out there who wants to give them ten or twenty million dollars, the scammer is hoping that just a few are too greedy to pass up the opportunity and end up being sucked into the trap. If everyone who receives an approach like this engages the scammer in a protracted exchange of time-wasting emails, his productivity will be reduced dramatically, and fewer people will end up losing their hard-earned money.
March 26, 2004
The almost-Union-Station bus station
The relationship of the Bay and Front bus platform and Union Station, where disembarked bus passengers have to jaywalk across four lanes of traffic to get to Union - or else walk up to Front and back, which nobody can be bothered to do - is easily the worst piece of small-scale urban design in the city. I defy anybody to come up with a more thoughtless or stupid one.
I’m serious. Legacy situations, like the Queen/Lansdowne/Jameson jog, don’t count. Nor do unavoidably awkward things like the eastbound Danforth bike lane being crossed by the entry lane for the DVP. I mean a piece of design that was approved in its entirety at a single time.
For one person, it’s not a bad place to jaywalk - you can cross two lanes, then pause on the concrete divider to judge your moment to cross the other two - but that’s not a solution for dozens and dozens of people at a time.
People are going to cross there, just as herds of students are going to cross Queen’s Park Circle at St. Michael’s College whether or not there’s a proper pedestrian crossing. GO has promised a pedestrian footbridge, (actually, they said last June that construction would start ‘in a few weeks’).
Some have suggested a barrier forcing pedestrians to go to Front, but that seems inelegant. I’d prefer a wide bridge with a gentle slope up from the bus platform, then another slope curving northward at a right angle.
(Last spring, Christopher Hume suggested that the bus terminal belonged south of the ACC, west of Bay; that area is now a parking lot.)
In the Guardian
A rare clear-headed column on Spain, in this case from Timothy Garton Ash. (Contrast with David 'Screw democracy' Warren’s effort, which the Citizen actually published, to its discredit.)
At phillymag.com
... a thorough takedown of David Brooks:
Brooks ... draws caricatures. Whether out of sloppiness or laziness, the examples he conjures to illustrate well-founded premises are often unfounded, undermining the very points he's trying to make.
In January, I made my own trip to Franklin County, 175 miles southwest of Philadelphia, with a simple goal: I wanted to see where David Brooks comes up with this stuff.
One of the first places I passed was Greencastle Coffee Roasters, which has more than 200 kinds of coffee, and a well-stocked South Asian grocery in the back with a product range hard to find in some large coastal cities: 20-pound bags of jasmine rice, cans of Thai fermented mustard greens, a freezer with lemongrass stalks and kaffir-lime leaves. The owner, Charles Rake, told me that there was, until a few years back, a Thai restaurant in Chambersburg, run by a woman who now does catering. "She's the best Thai cook I know on Planet Earth," Rake said. "And I've been to Thailand."
... Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured. He describes the ladies of Sprinkler City as "trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady." That chain of women's gyms has three locations -- all in New Jersey, far from any Sprinkler City. "The roads," Brooks writes, "have been given names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue." There are no Entrepreneur Avenues anywhere in the country, according to the business-directory database Referenceusa, and only two Innovation Boulevards -- in non-Sprinkler cities Fort Wayne, Indiana, and State College, Pennsylvania. There is also an Innovation Boulevard in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
rest here
At reason.com
A feature on Iraq that manages to be yet more depressing than anything else written on the subject.
March 25, 2004
unselective service
from Alternet:
Despite statements to the contrary, quiet preparations for the return of the draft have been under way for some time. The Selective Service System's Annual Performance Plan for Fiscal Year 2004 – despite a ton of obfuscatory jargon, acronyms, and bureaucrat-speak – can't quite manage to bury all of its bombshells.
Strategic Objective 1.2 of the 2004 plan commits the Selective Service System to being fully operational within 75 days of "an authorized return to conscription." Strategic Objective 1.3 then commits them to "be operationally ready to furnish untrained manpower within DOD timelines." By next year the government intends to turn the ignition key on a mobilization infrastructure of 56 State Headquarters, 442 Area Offices, and 1,980 Local Boards.
It’s hard to know what to make of all this. The Selective Service System is in an impossible position: it has a mandate to prepare for organizing a draft, but if it does it in a way that sounds at all purposeful, it sets off political explosions. All you have to do repeat phrases like “a mobilization infrastructure of 56 State Headquarters, 442 Area Offices, and 1,980 Local Boards” in an official voice to set any number of Americans of a certain age hyperventilating.
The whole trend of Western armies in the last generation has been against conscription: Switzerland and Israel are now the only serious holdouts, while France and Germany have closed down the induction centres. (In France, interestingly, the left has traditionally supported conscription, while the right has opposed it; when it was finally abolished, it was as a measure of a right-wing government, angrily denounced in Libération.)
A serious debate in the U.S. over a practical return to the draft, as opposed to just maintaining the ghostly bureaucracy for one on a tiny budget, would resemble the Canadian conscription crises, minus the Anglo-Franco politics, more than anything the U.S. itself has seen. The U.S. has traditionally had draft machinery ready to go at the beginning of a conflict, whereas Canada’s two experiments have involved resorting to conscription late in the game out of desperation – after we had run through the really enthusiastic volunteers – something a draft under these circumstances would resemble.
In any case, I’d be surprised if it happened.
The disciplinary systems of volunteer armies only really ever have to deal with acquisitive crime and inappropriately directed aggression, and both at a manageable level. Conscript armies, on the other hand, are constantly forced to answer the question ‘Yeah, and who’s going to make me?’ This is particularly true if the conscripts are inducted for an unpopular war, or a not consistently popular war, like Iraq or the next imperial project. It will be less true if there is real, widespread support for the war effort, though on an individual level it’s never really going to go away.
I love this country
OTTAWA (CP) - A shadowy fund earmarked to help save Canada was such a state secret that its existence was never revealed in any budget document and its name never spoken to Paul Martin in his years as finance minister.
What terrible secret lies here, the reader asks? Exotic weapons programs? Shady espionage projects? Hard-eyed assassins, discreet, deniable, ruthless?
... Yet another official said every expenditure from the fund was personally approved by Jean Chrétien when he was prime minister.
He cited several examples of initiatives that received cash from the fund, like Canada Day parades and youth travel exchanges between francophones and non-francophones, and contact between aboriginals and non-natives through the Katimavik youth-development program.
... One federal official offered an example of how the fund worked: the Heritage Department would approach the Prime Minister's Office for cash to pay for a Canada Day parade, and the requested sum would be added to the Heritage budget.
Sometimes the funding initiatives were initiated by the Prime Minister's Office, the official said.
March 24, 2004
in case you were wondering
Current Terror Alert Level
more here
Noted elsewhere
from Pogge:
In the run-up to the war Harper was extremely vocal in his support for Canadian participation and displayed nothing short of contempt for the government's decision to stay out of it. While he seems to have dialed back the rhetoric, he continues to hold to that position. None of the revelations of the past year that have undermined Bush's public justification for the war seem to have made any impression on him.
With the Liberals intent on hanging their hat on Paul Martin's popularity in the upcoming election, it looks like we're going to see a campaign that's as much about leaders as about issues. That means that Harper himself becomes as much an issue as Paul Martin.
Richard Clarke is due to testify before the 9/11 commission in Washington this week, a commission that will undoubtedly attract more and more attention as the July deadline for its report approaches and as the pre-election atmosphere in the States heats up. Between the virtual fireworks in DC and the literal fireworks in Iraq it's certain that the whole issue of the war will remain very much in the public eye. And with that, Harper's position on the war will remain an issue his political opponents can use against him.
from City Comforts:
The British political opposition has a shadow-cabinet; why not a Shadow Blog for Arts & Letters Daily to help keep that estimable group on its cerebral toes? Like many people -- how many tens of thousands? -- I often start my day by browsing Arts & Letters Daily to see what the intelligentsia is up to. Sometimes I am impressed; but too often I read one of their links and my reaction is "Huh? Why point us to that piece of tripe?"
March 22, 2004
Planning ahead
John Ibbitson today:
We could easily have a situation in which a Liberal minority government is defeated because it cannot work with the NDP, and then a Conservative minority government is defeated because it can't let itself get too close to the Bloc. Since a new governor-general is to be appointed shortly, the Prime Minister should take great care to ensure that he or she is qualified to handle an unstable Parliament.
This aspect of the governor general's role is, to my mind, the most serious reason Romeo Leblanc was such a bad choice for the office - in a real constitutional crisis, he would have had no way of presenting himself as a neutral arbitrator.
Perhaps, given that prime ministers are always going to treat Rideau Hall as a genteel patronage appointment (Hnatyshyn; Leblanc; Clarkson) it would make more sense to give the parliamentary referee function to the Chief Justice, or perhaps to the whole Supreme Court. Or maybe a jury of nursery school teachers; they would have the right conflict resolution skills at their fingertips.
In the meantime, it's a pity Louise Arbour is booked elsewhere. Any other ideas?
March 19, 2004
A 'little' kickback? Well, that's all right, then.
Repeat after me: Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
The scariest thing about these people is not that they behaved this way, but that it was so normal in their environment that it seemed natural to be frank about it, to the point of cheerfully explaining their scheme on national TV. Man.
from cbc.ca:
Don Williams is a flag retailer in British Columbia and one of the many who took a financial beating when Ottawa began giving away flags for free. Now he's revealed that he did receive compensation in return for a fake invoice for flags he never supplied.
"We made about $5,000," Williams told CBC News. "We provided no flags ... just an invoice and that was it. We did nothing, zero." When asked directly is it was a phoney transaction, he said "Oh, yes."
"... Another flag retailer, Doreen Braverman, said last week that she too was paid for a phoney invoice. "It was a little kickback, yes," she said.
Braverman at one time was president of the federal Liberal party in B.C.
March 18, 2004
Borden? Come on, people.
I guess this is what you get for letting the central bank be in charge of actually designing banknotes, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, somebody else.
Borden wouldn't have been my first choice. What about Baldwin and Lafontaine together? Brock? For that matter, Trudeau's been dead long enough. So has Pearson.
Or we could have had Abrasive Reformers(tm): William Lyon Mackenzie, with sturdy fellows trudging through the snow with pikes and flintlock shotguns on the back*, or Emily Murphy with some suffragettes.
Or we could have had Stan Rogers, if it comes to that. Lots of raw material for the poetry-in-three-point-type thing on the back of the bill. I wouldn't be able to resist 'With one fat ball, the Yank stove us in,' more or less applicable according to the state of the money market, but you may have other ideas. It would be worth it for the French translation alone: 'God damn them all!'| 'Tout le monde au diable!', and so forth.
Borden. Heaven preserve us.
* Mackenzie was a crazy man
He wore his wig askew,
He donned three bulky overcoats
In case the bullets flew.
Meet the neighbours
Enter your zip code into this U.S. site, and out pops a breakdown of all your neighbours' political contributions, up to date to the end of 2003.
(thx to the reason.com blog)
March 17, 2004
Pew poll
The poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, measuring attitudes toward the Bush administration, fear of (or enthusiasm for) terrorism, attitudes toward the Iraq war and so forth, got eight or ten inches in today's Globe, but the full text is worth a look.
They ignored Canada, but an AP poll released a week or so ago didn't.
One frustrating tidbit -
" ... one of the largest gaps between Americans and Europeans concerns the question of whether people who move to the U.S. have a better life. Americans overwhelmingly believe this to be the case – 88% say people who move to the U.S. from other countries have a better life. By contrast, just 14% of Germans, 24% of French and 41% of British think that people who have moved to the U.S. from their countries have a better life."
This seems to me to be a waste of a question. There wasn't large-scale immigration to the U.S. from France or Britain in the 20th century - the several large waves of British emigrants ended up for the most part in the Dominions. German emigration to the U.S. wound down by 1914. So it isn't clear whose experiences the poll respondents had in mind when they answered the question.
It would have been much more useful to ask Western Europeans whether they thought immigrants to their own countries, who are numerous and very visible in each case, were better off.
Shiny new toy
On the Toronto Fire Department site: a page with all their current calls, and at least some of the details. Updates automatically every five minutes.
too late for the fun, sadly
fm Clive Thompson's blog:
Ah, interactive democracy. It appears that the Republicans have become a bit jealous of the remarkable things that Democrats like Howard Dean have been doing with Internet technology. So the Bush/Cheney folks decided to set up their own super-fun interactive tool -- a slogan generator.
rest here
March 16, 2004
In the New York Times Magazine:
Unlike most of the litigation filed in the aftermath of Sept. 11, which involves a fairly traditional body of laws and assumes a predictable pattern (the victims' families suing the airlines suing the insurers), the sweeping antiterrorism case brought by Ron Motley relies on new and evolving legal terrain, and its key defendants live in a Muslim monarchy halfway around the world ...
While Motley is aiming at other foreign parties, too, and while he is not suing the kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself, he is making a rather provocative statement by going after the kingdom's prominent citizens, banks and even some of its leaders. The State Department, while not formally weighing in against the suit, is watching it warily: the last thing it desires is the transformation of the American legal system into a blunt instrument of foreign policy. Bankrupting terrorism is certainly a national priority, even an urgent one, but hardly the task the diplomatic corps wants to entrust to a man who once, during closing arguments, wore a toy stethoscope in court.
“... What (is) Motley's case, exactly? A glorified, globalized tort suit? Or an example of a new wartime jurisprudence, one that fights terrorism with lawyers as well as guns and statesmen? The answer, in a sense, is both, and it could be the new way of the world. Those who take a dim view of Motley's work, dismissing it as nothing more than worldwide ambulance chasing, will be startled to learn that it is theoretically possible, in today's borderless society, to follow a screaming siren all the way to Riyadh.”
Full story here. As always with the NYTimes Magazine, the full text will go behind a wall this coming Sunday.
I guess it was inevitable, but still –
Iraq blogger Bob Zangas (a U.S. Marine reservist working for the CPA as a civilian) was killed last week in a roadside ambush outside Baghdad. Here’s his last entry.
In Salon today:
A useful back-of-the-envelope analysis of the Spanish election:
Clearly, the Popular Party rightly feared that attention to an Islamist attack would remind the public of its responsibility for war on the side of the United States. Its subsequent attempts at deception were politically suicidal -- the work of leaders in the grip of panic. It enraged many in the public, recalled the government's arrogance in the recent past, and offended a populace that had good reason in familial memory to take democracy seriously. The distrust of the Popular Party, heightened by its response to the bombing, also reminded the citizens of their other grievances, economic and social. Zapatero's straightforwardness, originally depicted as boring, now became attractive.
March 12, 2004
Madrid
The BBC has a helpful, one-stop-shop summary of the arguments for and against blaming ETA.
March 10, 2004
I am patron, hear me roar
I'm with Joey Tanenbaum. Sure, his ego is involved, but why shouldn’t it be? If I'd given nearly $100 million to an art gallery, my ego would be involved, too.
Now, what we need - need, need, need - is for Tanenbaum to build his own gallery, where nobody will ever say anything to him except ‘At once, Mr. Tanenbaum,’ on the south side of Queen’s Quay E. between Yonge and the Queen’s Quay Loblaws. Ideally, it would occupy the scungy parking lot at the foot of Yonge, obliterating the regrettable Captain John and giving the waterfront its second interesting building after the police marine unit.
(The police, to give credit where credit is due, have started to commission some quite interesting buildings. The marine unit is one; the new building for 51 Division is another. I’m looking forward to their new traffic services building, off Strachan, but there aren’t details on their site yet.)
March 09, 2004
Richard Florida, call your office
From The San Francisco Chronicle. I wish I could say we were taking systematic advantage of this, given the force for good that the last influx of bright and interesting Americans were, a generation ago.
On this side of the border, advocates of same-sex rights are calling it a "brain drain," while their counterparts in Canada are boasting of a "gay gain."
Since Canada's immigration law was changed in 2002 to recognize same-sex partners for immigration purposes, an ever-growing number of gay and lesbian couples have uprooted and migrated -- especially couples in which one partner is a U.S. citizen and one is not.
When immigration lawyer Michael Battista began working with lesbians and gays a decade ago, he was one of two such lawyers in Toronto and handled roughly one inquiry month from gay, binational couples. Now, he said, he receives hundreds of inquiries a year and knows at least 10 lawyers with the same specialty. The majority of his clients are Americans in relationships with foreigners.
"As long as the United States is continuing to be oppressive in their lack of sanctity of unions for gays and lesbians, then they're going to continue to lose really good citizens," said Mary Joseph, a Toronto immigration lawyer. "Your loss, our gain."
rest here
Not a bad thing, either, really
Under the circumstances, that is. Newsweek discusses the Connecticut minimum-security facility that likely awaits Martha Stewart -
According to Danbury alumni, the women's camp has no fences or barred cells; instead of breakouts, guards have worried about nearby residents trespassing to enjoy the lake. ... For recreation, there are two TV lounges, a law library, a track, and a gymnasium used for Pilates, yoga, dancersize or aerobics (but not tai chi, which the Feds have deemed a martial art).rest here
March 08, 2004
Emily Pankhurst, call your office
KABUL (CP) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai offered Afghan men a trade today in an attempt to convince them to let their women vote in upcoming elections."Please, my dear brothers, let your wives and sisters go to the voter registration process," Karzai told a gathering to mark International Women's Day. "Later, you can control who she votes for, but please, let her go."
March 07, 2004
Time bomb for the unite-the-right folks?
In Saturday’s Post: Andrew Coyne raises a scenario for the federal Tory leadership that I think is plausible, and hasn’t been discussed nearly enough: Stronach gets a minority of actual votes, but ends up winning anyway through the one-riding-one vote system the party foolishly imposed on itself, and the unite-the-right effort disintegrates under the stress of internal recriminations and the derision of its enemies -
When it was announced that only 9,000 memberships had been sold in Quebec, many assumed this meant her campaign had failed. Quite the opposite: Because of the cockamamie voting system the party has installed, in which every riding has equal weight, that's all she needs - maybe not to win, but to influence the outcome. The 75 rotten boroughs of Quebec, representing just 4% of the party membership, can be bought at a fraction of the cost of organizing even one of those massive Conservative riding associations in the West, yet they represent nearly as great a proportion of convention delegates as the three westernmost provinces put together. If Quebec decides the result - not because it's Quebec, but because it has so few actual voting members - the party will be finished before it began.Full story
March 05, 2004
March 04, 2004
One big happy family
So. Abdurahman Khadr was a CIA informant who got himself sprung from Guantanamo by informing on his father, later killed in Pakistan. This is kind of sordid, but it’s not as if the world is much diminished by Khadr Sr.’s absence. More surprising: it seems not to have entered Khadr Jr.’s mind that this is something he might want to be in any way discreet about. The result is a TV interview that feels like a highway pileup in slow motion.
What seems to have happened is that Khadr Jr. has gotten it into his head, or had it put into his head by the CBC, that he has to clear his name by presenting himself as having been the lone voice for truth and right, and that the best way of doing this is on TV. He's not bright enough to pull it off by himself, though; the results are edifying, but perhaps not in the way that he'd hoped.
A family moment: All the other kids have joined the apocalyptic death cult, Khadr Sr. tells his son, so why can't he?
And yet, he told the CBC, he still could not meet the expectations of his father, whom he recalled saying, " 'Why do you not act like the rest of the kids, so Osama can always mention you, and you could be the commander of a training camp?'
from cbc.ca -
TORONTO - A Canadian who was released from Guantanamo Bay in October says he lied about his family's ties with al-Qaeda and that he was trained to become a suicide bomber.
In a documentary aired Wednesday on CBC's The National, Abdurahman Khadr said his father was old friends with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and that his brothers attended terrorist training camps.
"Until now, everybody says we are an al-Qaeda-connected family but when I say this, just by me saying it, I just admitted we are an al-Qaeda family. We had connections to al-Qaeda," said Abdurahman Khadr.
from the Globe
It was in Afghanistan that he became friends with Mr. bin Laden.
Khadr family members told the CBC that they watched Mr. bin Laden ride horses and play volleyball when the families lived together in a compound.
Abdurahman recalled astonishment at meeting the man he had seen described in a magazine of America's most-wanted terrorist suspects.
"But I would say he's a normal human being. He has issues with his wife, he has issues with his kids. Financial issues, you know, the kids aren't listening . . . and this and that.
So it comes right down to he's a father and he's a person." Said Abdurahman's sister, Zaynab: "It was very important for him to sit with his kids every day at least for two hours in the morning."
She told the CBC that Mr. bin Laden liked to read poetry and history to his children. "He loved playing volleyball and he loved horse-riding.
Amongst people he was not Osama bin Laden; he was just the sheik.
"And kids played around him. Kids would go shake his hand. . . . When they'd go shooting, he'd go with them, and if he missed they'd laugh at him."
Full stories here, here and here.
March 01, 2004
Passenger Mitty, please identify yourself
from today’s Star -
An unsuspecting passenger on a Vancouver-Toronto flight last week found himself on the receiving end of a peculiar encounter with the Air Canada pilot at the controls.The passenger, apparently not from Canada — and definitely not from Ontario — didn't know that the gentleman sitting beside him was Premier Dalton McGuinty.
About 20 minutes into the flight, the pilot appeared in the passenger cabin, leaned over the Premier and asked the man sitting beside him, "Are you trained in mid-air interventions?"