Exit, Pursued by a Bear

You heard it here first

unless you heard of it at any one of a couple of other places, that is: Freeway blogging. I’m old enough to remember graffiti, but you know, kids today and all that.

link here

thx to Wonkette!, whose brilliant entry hed was 'Back in My Day, We Called It Culture Jamming and We Liked It! '

Thx to the Ambler, part 2

Confused, apparently endless, apparently unresolvable wars are bad; being handed orders to head off to one personally would be worse. Would leave one glum and lonely, one would think.

Enter a practical band of patriots offering to kiss it and make it better, as it were.

***BIG BIG WARNING*** the second part of our motto is BE DISCRETE! That means not letting on that you are on an OTOFTC mission. To the group in Galveston Texas (Yes, I got word the NEXT day), you CANNOT, and I mean CANNOT go to a bar and get loaded and start chanting 'TAKE ONE FOR THE COUNTRY' like a zillion times. That's bad. I love you Texan gals and love your spirit but that's not what we are trying to accomplish and it's not safe.

UPDATE: Wonkette! thinks it's a hoax.

Thx to the Ambler

Who reads the Post so I don't have to, and finds gems like this Elizabeth Nickson column -

We are free-riding, infantile Chicken Littles, bound for the slagheap of history, our destiny to be passed over, ignored then forgotten. The big fight, the moral imperative of our time, is upon us and we’re sitting it out, sucking our thumbs and whining about softwood lumber, and like, steel. And other stuff, we feel really resentful about.

rest here

hat tip to

BAGNewsnotes: A best-of presentation of the Bush/Cheney Sloganator prank. If the reference makes no sense, trust me and click on the link - all will be explained.

at FLIT

BruceR is testing the limits of the single-board comment system.

A happy ending

Guy has bike stolen, guy later sees bike propped up outside a scungy bar on Queen, guy has the presence of mind to put his own lock on the bike and call the police. A happy ending follows. Full story here.

Stolen bikes do sometimes come home. I had my bike stolen a couple of years ago by some teenagers who didn't have the wit to take it out of the neighbourhood, or to target bikes a bit further from home. I found it propped up against a wall four houses down from mine, and got to channel my inner provost sergeant.

*Not* cut out for a life of crime, those boys. I think I told them so, if memory serves.

Worse than I thought

Martin ripping off lines from Jean Chretien? Oh, dear.

In the New Republic

A frustrating exercise in missing the point.

Whatever the reason, several European converts to Islam have played a role in Al Qaeda activities. Three of the nine Britons detained in Guantanamo Bay after being captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan are Catholics who converted to Islam. A French convert, David Courtailler, allegedly has ties to a suspect arrested for the March 11 Madrid bombings and is allegedly linked to the Belgian group that procured false passports for the two Tunisians who assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, on September 9, 2001. (The attack appears to have been an attempt to decapitate anti-Taliban forces in anticipation of the U.S. response to September 11.)
To elude post-September 11 roundups of terrorists in Europe, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, bin Laden's now-jailed chief of operations, employed European converts, such as Christian Ganczarski, a Polish-born German. Ganczarski was Mohammed's liaison with Nizar Nawar, who in 2002 suicide-bombed a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killing 21 people, including several European tourists. Despite monitoring by U.S. spy satellites, Mohammed had avoided detection by using converts like Ganczarski as intermediaries.

The writer presents an unimaginative bureaucratic solution:

We could increase the odds of identifying such terrorists if we placed Homeland Security Department agents at airline check-in counters and sky marshals aboard U.S.-bound flights from Europe.

One thing Western police and intelligence services could generate quite easily, much more easily than instant armies of Pashtun translators, are agents who can play the role of radical Western converts to Islam - endless fake Lindhs. If Al Qaeda is seeking Western-born recruits – getting them, using them, depending on them - it is by far their most interesting security hole. Conversely, it was very foolish of them to start playing this game, whatever short-term tactical successes it might have brought them.

We know by now

what to expect from the Post, but I really thought that they would get things near to their hearts, like naval and military history, right.

The cutline on the main art on the front today -

HMCS Bonaventure, Canada's first and last aircraft carrier.
CREDIT: DND File Photo

Last, certainly, but hardly the first: they're forgetting Warrior (seen above) and Magnificent.

The people who most care about this sort of thing, cranky retired admirals and the like, probably all read the Post - wait for the flood of droll or choleric letters to the editor.

An angry man

I like this guy's attitude. (Start at the link, work backward.)

Let them hate, so long as they fear?

from Juan Cole, via BruceR:

Sean Rayment of the Telegraph reports a story today that should be on the front pages of every American newspaper. He reports extremely deep dissatisifaction in the British officer corps with American military counter-insurgency tactics.

The critique begins with attitudes. The officer quoted says that the US military looks at Iraqis as "Untermenschen," a Hitler-derived term for inferior human beings. ' "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are." '

rest here

The Smart Car, redux

The Star's Wheels section last Saturday was mostly devoted to the Smart Car:

Mark Richardson is a skeptic:

In Europe, where the cost of parking is exorbitant, gasoline is precious and congestion is prohibitive, I'd like to drive a Smart. It's the four-wheeled equivalent of a scooter, which I've often touted in this space as the future of urban transportation for its simplicity and intelligence.

But here in Canada, I'm not so sure. Everybody else should drive a Smart, but I don't know if I want to pay the financial penalty of being so conscientious. Not when a new Chevy Cavalier can be picked up for less than $11,000 and will drive me around in just as much comfort, albeit with less fanfare.

Jim Kenzie, on the other hand, has found love:

Okay, so it only has two seats. That'll still handle the average passenger count in a Toronto rush hour of 1.4 persons per vehicle with 0.6 of a seat left over.

Need more seats? Buy another Smart. You'd not be far off the purchase price of an average Canadian new vehicle, you'd still use less fuel than one bigger car would, and both cars wouldn't necessarily have to follow the same route.

We also hear from a freelancer who pootled around France in one, and Kenzie again on the car's safety record.

Ancient cats

This from Science magazine via AP: I was raised with the idea that the domestication of dogs far predates the domestication of cats. This, it was explained, was why dogs are loyal and obedient, while cats are reserved and self-possessed: cats still have the idea that they can slink back into the Neolithic mists if they have to.

Now, a nearly-10,000-year-old grave site in Cyprus provides evidence of domesticated cats existing far earlier than could be proven previously through archaeology:

While ancient Egypt provides the first written record of cats, a burial discovered on Cyprus indicates humans and felines may have become associated much earlier.

... Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris believes the relationship first blossomed with the development of agricultural societies 10,000 or so years ago.

"It seems that cats probably came more and more frequently into villages where grain stocks attracted numerous mice," said Vigne.

The cat belonged to the Felis silvestris species, a wild cat, which was significantly larger than modern domestic cats. The cat's bones were placed carefully, parallel to the human, and showed no signs of butchering, another indication the animal may have been a pet, Vigne said in a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

... Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a biology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, agreed the finding is "the first suggestion that there was a significant emotional attachment" between a human and a cat.

full article

My new favourite Iraq blog

A View from A Broad, a livejournal.com site written by a U.S. soldier in southern Iraq. She introduces herself thus:

Good to know: Unabashed blue collar--as opposed to college---feminist with an interest in debate and/or bitching. If you're not a feminist or are actively hostile to the concept, you're in the wrong spot, to put it mildly. Book addict with workaholic tendencies. I have the world's weirdest job background. Sybil's resume looks more normal. Have no education whatsoever, possibly because I got tossed out of Catholic school three times. Used to be a ballet dancer, broke ankle. Quit, got bored, joined Army. Now I'm used to travelling to at least four countries a year and am spoiled rotten. I speak two other languages, and I bore, really, really easily, which might explain why house is decorated like a combination harem/Victorian whore house. I'm destined for eccentricity. Oh, yes, and for some odd reason, I write really schmoopy fanfic. Personally, however, I'm a bitch.

By the way, if you're anti-war, you're better off not reading my journal. Just giving fair warning. I'm a realist. I don't believe in Utopia or the Tooth Fairy. I think the world is a messy, scary, vivid place that can't be tamed, and that's what I think of people, too--if they're halfway interesting, which a lot of them are not. It might be nice if people were reasonable, but if they were, I'd be left writing travel brochures or something, because people would be too damned boring to write about. If people were reasonable creatures, they wouldn't be having interesting sex with the wrong people at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, and people wouldn't fall in love...they'd sort of...step into it, like getting into a car. And did I mention how boring that would be?

Her blog is four parts vivid accounts of battle, one part Buffy fanfiction.

Two municipal columns today:

It’s all about *you*, isn’t it? It’s always about you –

Female? Single? Tolerant of very, very bad didactic fiction? Agree with sentiments like

Suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence - man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone's altar nor for anyone's cause - life is not one huge hospital.

The niche online dating service for fans of Ayn Rand, with 498 men and 139 women, is an obvious hunting ground.

A sign of things to come?

A second U.S. army deserter has shown up in southern Ontario, this time in St. Catharines. (Perhaps inevitably, he’s promising a blog.)

James Bow points out

that he raised the idea of electing the Senate through PR on his blog in January of last year. It's a much more thoroughly argued essay than mine:

We need more witch hazels

It wasn’t clear until this spring, but it turns out that one of my most successful garden ideas last year was to plant a large hybrid witch hazel behind the Japanese maple in the front bed. The concept was that its spring display would show through the bare branches of the Japanese maple.

Witch hazels bloom far earlier than anything else (except the native varieties, which come out in late fall). Mine bloomed for about exactly a month, from the beginning of March until a few days ago. This makes them a very valuable part of the all-season garden. An outdoor plant in full bloom in Toronto at the beginning of March, and carrying on for a full month: what’s wrong with that?

A nurseryman explained to me last year that the garden centre trade finds witch hazels frustrating: most people make plant decisions during the big hormonal moment that happens in early May, and by that time, witch hazels are into their ugly-duckling phase and people can’t be talked into buying them. There have been several organized attempts to promote them, none of which has been very successful.

It’s very unfortunate; they really should be one of the commonly grown blooming shrubs, like bridalwreath spirea or forsythia.

More images here.

A PR Senate

Here’s how to cure the two main problems with Canadian parliamentary democracy with a single measure, without amending the constitution. You read it first in blogland. (But not necessarily in this part of it: see above.) Ready? It goes like this:

First, the two main problems I promised:

1) The existing electoral system distorts voter intentions, punishes parties that it would be healthier to encourage, encourages parties that it would be healthier to punish, and inevitably lacks dynamism.

We have three kinds of political parties: 1) first-tier national parties, like the Liberals, and also sometimes the PCs, historically; 2) second-tier national parties, like the NDP and the former PCs, most of the time; 3) regional grievance parties, like the Bloc and the former Alliance. The math of our electoral system rewards types 1 and 3, while penalizing type 2. If there is no rival type 1 party, the result, necessarily, is permanent cabinet dictatorship, in which the only real dynamism comes from internal struggles in the party in power. Which is what we see.

The extreme example of this going very wrong is the 1993 federal election. The numbers have been cited before, but they’re worth looking at again:

2) The Senate is ridiculous.

The solution? Leave the Commons alone, and make the Senate the PR house of Parliament.

The advantage of proportional representation is that legislatures reflect voters’ intentions, at least as party preference is concerned, fairly accurately; the disadvantage is that it removes the healthy messiness of the present system of nomination meetings and constituency-based elections, while intensely centralizing power within parties.

In Canada, proposals for proportional representation always seem to involve tinkering with the House of Commons. Some schemes involve adding a number of PR-elected members to the existing total; some call for cutting the number of directly elected members to add a number of PR-elected members. However, given the amount of trauma, hand-holding and bloodshed that goes with a routine redistribution – look at Copps/Valeri or Parrish/Mahoney – these are not proposals that are ever going to get further than the poli-sci seminar/op-ed page level. Not going to happen.

The two systems have their strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, we already pay for two houses of Parliament, and can afford to have two different systems - democratic systems, that is - for selecting their members.

For many of us, that’s an original thought. Senators for years have had a tacit bargain with Canadians: Tolerate us, and we won’t assert ourselves as we would if we were legitimate. The result is that Canadians aren’t used to having a working bicameral parliament with, you know, debates, meaningful votes, interaction between the houses and so forth.

Canadians have been brought up to think of the Senate as ridiculous, which it certainly is, and has been for generations. However, we pay for a bicameral legislature; we might as well get some use out of the other half of it. There’s nothing wrong with having an upper house – we’re just not used to the idea that it could have a point.

The Gigantic Hound’s Plan: