May 2007
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie written in the month of May 2007.
Sarko won - which I think is hugely good for France - but Segolene Royal still wins the best looking gal to run for a major office since Benazir Bhutto.
Update: Greg Staples has a rather intriguing question…
Update II: 600 arrested, 700+ cars torched. The “youths” - and Lord knows we would not want to identify them to much more precisely - are not amused with the election of Sarko who, accurately, called them scum the first time they went car burning and reiterated his view a few days before the election.
I suspect Sarko is not entirely dismayed that the “youths” are providing him with the pretext necessary to crack down and crackdown hard on the yobs living in the housing projects which ring many French cities. And I think it is fair to say that many of the police, frustrated by Chirac’s endless dithering, would rather like to put down this suburban intifada. It is not going to be pretty but it will be necessary.
Update III: And for video of the Paris riots. The “youths” look pretty outgunned. But no question, cobbled streets give an edge to the intifadistes.
Written by jay on May 8th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and International and Liberal Leadership and Liberals.
The end of the suburban build-out will be a stupendous trauma for the United States because, unfortunately, we have made it the basis of our economy for a generation, as well as our living arrangement. Not only will incomes and livelihoods be lost on the grand scale, and never come back, but, as the global oil predicament deepens, the existing fabric of our vast suburbs will become increasingly useless and worthless. The people stuck in them will lose whatever wealth they have accumulated and our arrangements for daily life will become increasingly nightmarish.
This is the part of the story that the mainstream media still can’t put together. Peak oil and the housing bust are a mutually-reinforcing clusterfuck. jim kunstler
I like to stop by Kunstler’s blog once in a while. I think he is pretty much wrong about almost everything he writes but he writes so very well and has a gift for sustained outrage.
I think he is right about the end of the build out of suburbia. Housing starts are way down. The need for yet another strip mall is next to zero. The price of gas is going up - though not, I suspect, because of peak oil but rather because of an increased global demand and a reluctance in the West to construct more refineries in the face of the greenie onslaught - and the virtues of suburban living are coming under increased scrutiny.
In Canada this is likely to mean that people will be moving back downtown. But this is less of an option in many large US cities which have become donuts with a rather nasty black or Hispanic underclass inhabiting the hole. Canada has been pretty good at keeping the centers of our major cities alive. We need to keep doing that and recognizing that density is the only way that can happen.
Written by jay on May 3rd, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and US Politics and culture and tech.
General Hiller is pretty much the best thing that’s happened to the Canadian Forces since WWII. He understands morale and he understands Canadians.
Rosie Dimanno catches it:
The ever-effusive Hillier wrapped his arms around the Cup after it was un-crated, still on the tarmac, a greeting party of delighted Canadian troops as wide-eyed as children, the trophy sparkling under a blistering Afghan sun. Immediately, cameras came out and posing commenced.
“Every boy — and girl — grows up with a vision of playing in the NHL,” the suddenly politically correct Hillier told the gathering, as he thanked the league, commissioner Gary Bettman and the NHL Players’ Association for allowing the Cup to come halfway ’round the world, in the middle of the playoffs no less.
“We appreciate the opportunity to see it and touch it … before it comes home to Canada this year with one of our two teams.” the star
Lord how the Zerb must hate the fact Rosie works at The Star. I mean the woman wrote a news story which actually made a Canadian General and a bunch of old timer hockey player look good.
It will come as a surprise to the NDP and the pathetic Libs but there are a lot of Canadians who both understand and support the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. And with that support comes a great deal of gratitude that, somehow, we have a General who is a warrior and not a Deputy Minister. I suspect the troops are rather pleased as well.
Written by jay on May 3rd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and International and Terror.
To Walsh and other journalists, the relevant metric is true versus untrue. To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful.
There is a term for this sort of political discourse: propaganda. The word has a bad odor, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Propaganda is often true, and it can be deployed on behalf of a worthy cause (say, the fight against Nazism in World War II). Still, propaganda should not be confused with intellectual inquiry. Propagandists do not follow their logic wherever it may lead them; they are not interested in originality. Propaganda is an attempt to marshal arguments in order to create a specific real-world result–to win a political war. jonathan chait, The New Republic
Chait is writing about the emergence of the netroots as a political force in the American Democratic Party but the above has a direct relevance to the intellectual collapse of the CPC which we are witnessing here in Canada.
One would think that for a politician in government the metric would be “true versus untrue” but to the activists whose only motivation is the creation of a majority CPC government, “the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful”. Which, goes a long distance to explaining the truly wacky approach the CPC is taking to global warming. Doesn’t matter a damn if the measures proposed deal with a real problem in a cost effective way; what matters is that they are seen by an awfully stupid electorate as doing “something”.
Update: Greg Staples has new polling numbers and this comment:
all this morphing into Canada’s New Liberal Party isn’t getting them into magical majority terrority, it’s getting them defeated. political staples
Yup.
Written by jay on May 2nd, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and CPC and Canadian Politics and US Politics.
Send mail and I will send you my Canadian address for service. Oh, and, before you do, you might want to check to see if the Digital Millennium Copyright Act applies in Canada.
Read more at Boing Boing. Those take down notices sure are effective….
Update: Well, that is one dead little bit of code….Here’s what DIGG did after pulling the posts containing the code.
What this snippet of code was designed to do was preserve the business model of the movie biz. Now they are going to have to think again. Sadly this will cost them several millions of dollars. Their net unsavvy lawyers basically blew the game by demanding that big blogs and others take down notice that the proverbial cat was out of the bag. Surely the divx hack could have taught them something. Apparently not.
Update#2: the damn number is showing up all over.
Update#3: Now they are just getting mean…09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com and, er, some pirates have posted it in Sweden. Pirates who deal with takedown notices thusly:
We are well aware of the fact that The Pirate Bay falls outside the
scope of the DMCA - after all, the DMCA is a US-specific legislation,
and TPB is hosted in the land of vikings, reindeers, Aurora Borealis and
cute blonde girls. the pirate bay
And so on…
Update #4John Dvorak blames the tone deaf lawyers…Always a safe move.
Written by jay on May 2nd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on tech.
No older articles
Newer articles »
