Graduate student in Classics living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Plays music, programs computers, and fights crime. Or something.
…and apparently plucks them and makes ridiculous suits out of their exquisite plumage. So okay, the last time—coincidentally exactly one month ago, when the playoffs began—that Don Cherry wore something this outrageous, I was really at a loss for words. But today’s Coach’s Corner just killed me:
This is so not okay. RCMP in Kamloops, B.C. tasered an 82-year-old man in his hospital bed to subdue him so they could get “more important work to do on the street tonight.”
Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.
“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.
Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.
You can see pictures of the burn marks on Lasser’s body on the CBC article. In fairness, it appears that he became delusional and pulled a knife, and wouldn’t let go of it after police showed up. But for goshsakes, there’s got to be better ways to deal with this than overreacting by tasering an 82-year-old hospital patient. This is the kind of thing that kills elderly Polish immigrants who can’t speak English. It’s gone on way too long.
Hat-tip: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon
I don’t know who’s in charge of headline writing at the BBC, but the headlines there usually take one of two forms: either nonsense ‘gems’ with random ‘quotes’ in ‘various places’, or nonsense phrases that are of rather infelicitous construction, such as this:
Great tits cope well with warming
It’s about birds (tits, like ‘tit-willow‘), of course, but who in this day and age is going to read it that way?
Hat-tip: Dan Savage
Via the Slog: the cutest thing ever, truly, is two four-year-olds debating the pros and cons of a certain two Democrats. It’s like that old Daily Show segment in which inane things said by TV pundits would be reenacted by children, but this one is definitely sui generis.
Tags: blogosphere, election 2008, funny, politics, youtube
If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.
Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.
Tags: america, canada, computers, democracy, election 2008, free speech, human rights, israel, lgbt, politics, turkey
If this isn’t modern asherah-worship, I don’t know what is.
Lazer Brody, our friendly neighbourhood chassidic nut, informs us—complete with video—about an intriguing custom that is apparently Jewish: saying blessings over fruit trees that are blossoming in the springtime. According to Rabbi Lazer, this is a great mitzvah because
According to Kabbala, this blessing is deeply significant, and helps correct the soul that is reincarnated within the tree. That soul is forever beholding [sic] to the person that makes the blessing, for he or she has done a great favor in helping that soul attain its tikkun, or correction.
You can’t make this shit up. (Actually, I guess you can.) I am stunned. Souls being reincarnated in trees?! This is the kind of thing the Kabbalah Center would come up with, and then sell twigs to unsuspecting celebrities and Angelenos for $150 a pop.
If this were not a Jewish ritual, and a Jewish (sort of) spiritual justification, Jews like Rabbi Lazer would instantly associate it with barbaric and misguided animism or spirit-worship or idolatry, just like the Bible condemns cultic worship involving the asherah. But since this one is sui generis Jewish, or something, it’s totally kosher and Kabbalistic and a beautiful and important mitzvah and a great way to “correct” reincarnated tree-souls.
If my spirit ever has to get reincarnated into a tree, I hope it’s one of those awesome bristlecone pines that live forever and are basically indestructible. Actually, what with the pine beetle going around these days, maybe not…
Tags: judaism, lazer brody, orthodoxy, stupid
Yet another hilarious example of government waste, this time from Natural Resources Canada. Apparently its wireless and mobile communications spending is way out of control. The CBC is reporting on a recent audit which has discovered that the lack of oversight in this government agency is so bad that they could not even provide an inventory of all the BlackBerries and mobile phones they own. This one department is costing taxpayers half a million dollars per year. Multiply that by dozens more government departments, and that’s one huge hell of a waste.
Among the particulars of this audit that I find so amusing: employees made their own contracts with the phone companies, resulting in a patchwork of over 1500 individual contracts, 20% of all the devices were owned by people who had no reason for owning one in their job, and the department in question had no procedures to recover the cost when an employee used a government-provided mobile device for personal matters.
This is a perfect example of what happens when laws and government policies are too slow to catch up to actual practice. It’s a shame that an audit—probably costing the taxpayers the equivalent of a year of wireless services for Natural Resources Canada—had to be conducted as the first step on the road (hopefully) to eliminating some of this waste. No surprises here, and I bet that nobody’s going to raise the issue in today’s Question Period because they’ll be too busy benefitting from government waste elsewhere.
If you ask Google Maps to calculate directions between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario—the only point where you go due south to enter Canada from the United States—and then ask for directions via public transportation, here’s what you get:
And here’s what you get if you reverse those directions:
There are, of course bus services operated by both cities’ transportation systems, naturally. I am uncertain as to whether you can walk through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, though.
Tags: america, atheism, election 2008, international, lgbt, news, politics, privacy, religion, stupid
In an effort to appeal to Canada’s large and growing Chinese population, the CBC has started to broadcast hockey games in Mandarin:
There’s no word for hockey puck in Mandarin.
So Jason Wang, who’s been calling the Montreal-Boston series of the NHL playoffs in his native Chinese language for the CBC - a first for the public broadcaster - just uses the Mandarin word for ball.
It’s one of the many hockey terms Wang has had to translate and in some cases make up as he calls the games for a Chinese audience. He says it’s no easy task.
“Especially in hockey, where Chinese culture doesn’t have a context for it, so I have to translate a lot of the terms, all the penalty calls, and sometimes I have to borrow from other sports,” says Wang, sitting in the small recording booth at the CBC building in Vancouver where he calls the games while watching them on a large TV.
This appears to be a textbook example of translation involving cultural compatibility issues. There are many words and phrases that can’t simply be translated but which exert influence on the patters of idiom in a certain cultural context. Hockey in Canada is a perfect example. Consider this exchange during Question Period in the House of Commons the other day:
KEN DRYDEN (Liberal, York Centre): Mr. Speaker, with every scandal around him, the Prime Minister can pretend—
VARIOUS MEMBERS: Oh, oh!
SPEAKER: Order, order. This is question period, not a hockey game. We are hearing now a question from the honourable member for York Centre and we have to be able to hear the question. Order, please. …
DRYDEN: Last week [James Moore, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services] talked about something else he was almost too young to know. Pull the goalie? This is April. I do not get pulled.
JAMES MOORE: Mr. Speaker, he says he does not get pulled. He pulled himself on every confidence vote in the House of Commons. He did not show up. Again, I know 1972 was a fond year for my colleague from York Centre, and 1974 may be a fond one for him as well with the Nixon administration, but the reality is that we have spoken the truth. We have stood up and have consistently voted in the best interests of Canadians. The member for York Centre can sit there and sulk, and slowly skate to the bench as he sits there and does nothing for Canadians.
Devoid of a context in which hockey is part of the cultural discourse and the speakers can count on their interlocutors understanding and correctly processing these metaphors, this exchange makes much less sense. It can probably still be understood, but some of the flavour would be lost. The task of the translator, then, is not simply to translate the words, but to translate the cultural context as well.
I wish I spoke Mandarin so I could really understand the nuances of this process. And I wonder how the Chinese Ice Hockey Association and Chinese ice hockey teams, like the China Sharks, deal with these issues. Anybody who knows more than I about Chinese, hockey, or Chinese hockey, is encouraged to contribute!
A manuscript has recently been discovered in (PKhit 4.187c verso) on which an old Klingon drinking song is written, which has now been confirmed to be the source of the modern song “Chad Gadya“. Chad Gadya, which tells the story of a chain of death and destruction that is finally stopped by the intervention of God, is traditionally sung at the end of the Passover seder by Jews, and many theories have been put forth about its origins. However, it is now known that the song is Klingon, which not only makes sense of the seemingly senseless violence but also tells the story of the foundation of the Klingon Empire, through Kahless the Unforgettable’s slaying of the tyrant Molor at the end of the song.
| mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’, | One little targ, one little targ, |
| je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj, | That my father bought for two darseks, |
| mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’. | One little targ, one little targ. |
| vaj tut tI’qa, ’ej targhvatlh Soppu’, | Then came a tika cat, and ate the targ, |
| je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj, | That my father bought for two darseks, |
| mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’. | One little targ, one little targ. |
| vaj tut norgh, ’ej tI’qa’vatlh choppu’, | Then came a norg, and bit the tika cat, |
| targhvatlh Soppu’bogh, | That ate the targ, |
| je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj, | That my father bought for two darseks, |
| mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’. | One little targ, one little targ. |
| vaj tut qeylIs, ’ej molar HoHchu’ta’, | Then came Kahless, and slew Molor, |
| Hur’Iqvatlh HoHpu’bogh, | Who slew the Hur’q, |
| tIghla’vatlh HoHpu’bogh, | Who killed the t’gla, |
| biQvatlh tlhutlhpu’bogh, | That drank the water, |
| qulvatlh roQpu’bogh, | That quenched the fire, |
| yanvatlh meQpu’bogh, | That burnt the sword, |
| norghvatlh qIppu’bogh, | That struck the norg, |
| tI’qa’vatlh choppu’bogh, | That bit the tika cat, |
| targhvatlh Soppu’bogh, | That ate the targ, |
| je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj, | That my father bought for two darseks, |
| mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’. | One little targ, one little targ. |
As reprinted here, the manuscript cuts off writing out all the repeats after the first two verses and skips right to the last verse. Some of the handwriting in the manuscript is difficult to make out; this transcription is as accurate as possible given the limitations of current understanding of Klingon papyrology and manuscript tradition. Errors in spelling or grammar should be put down to thousands of years of transmission—and the fact that this is a drinking song in the first place, designed to scan and sound euphonic.
At any rate, a great mystery of the cosmos can now be put to rest. A zissen Pesach, or as they say throughout the Klingon Empire, veb DIS veng wa’Dich Qo’noSDaq!—”Next year, in the First City of Kronos!
(Edited to add: Yes, this is an original translation of mine.)
Tags: funny, judaism, klingon, translations
I do have what to say about the Pennsylvania primaries, but the race for the Stanley Cup is much more pressing than the Democratic Party race for the nomination for President of the United States…and it will be decided sooner, it appears…
Here are the predictions I made regarding the conference quarterfinals, with notes revised now that all the series have been concluded, plus a judgment (in bold) of just how right or wrong I was in my prediction.
Overall, not so bad, eh? Especially since I gave myself the latitude of upsets in three of the four cases where they actually happened.
The conference semifinals pit both conferences’ #1 and #2 teams against the #6 and #5, respectively. Someone more intrepid and bored than I should look up just how rare that is. Someone’ll probably bring it up at some point… Anyway, here are my guesses for Round 2:
My pick to win it all still remains the Sharks. After besting Calgary 4-3, they deserve it. Shame that series had to come so early, but at least everybody came out of it without horrendous injury…
The Yerushalmi (or Jerusalem Talmud, or Palestinian Talmud, though people don’t seem to be calling it that much these days), in Tractate Pesachim 68b, says:
האוכל מצה בערב הפסח כבא על ארוסתו בבית חמיווהבא
One who eats matzah on the eve of Passover [i.e. before the holiday has started] is like one who who has sex with his bride-to-be in the home of his future father-in-law.
Asher Ginsberg, alias Ahad Ha’am, is reputed to have said in response:
עשיתי שניהם ואינם דומים
I’ve done both, and they’re nothing alike.
Also, my good friend the Friar notes that Ahad Ha’am was an early blogger, griping about the state of things in the Holy Land decades before it was cool.
Hat-tip: DovBear
Tags: blogosphere, funny, judaism, passover
This year, a monkey wrench appears to have been thrown into Israeli Jews’ strict, Torah-true observance of Passover. An Israeli court has ruled that a law that only prohibits the display of hametz in a public place does not also prohibit the sale of hametz. The ultra-Orthodox are up in arms, as are a few secular officials, but Asher Maoz’s opinion in Ha’aretz is spot on:
The ruling by Judge Bar-Asher is a reasoned judgment, and it conforms with the logic on which the law is based. The judge refused to accede to the argument of the defendants that the law should be struck down because it violates their fundamental rights and is not in keeping with the values of the State of Israel. She did not accept their argument that the law represents religious coercion. The only thing she did was examine the definition of the “public” place in which the display of leaven is prohibited. She concluded that the interior of a business is not considered a public place according to the legal code, and therefore displaying chametz there does not violate the law, whose intent is not to offend the sensibilities of observers of Torah and mitzvot.
These people will in any case not enter a store or restaurant where nonkosher products are sold and served, and as such they will not be exposed to chametz and their sensibilities will not be offended. On the other hand, as long as there is no law prohibiting selling and serving leavened products to those who want them, why prohibit their display inside a place of business that is permitted to sell them?
The Israeli Haredi establishment won’t be satisfied until every square inch of Israel is a theocracy, and the men in black hats have all the power. Like Iran, but Jewish. People should have the right to buy, sell, and eat what they want during Passover. Just because some three-thousand-year-old law says you shouldn’t eat hametz, that means everybody in the country must be prohibited from it? Passover is about freedom. This includes the freedom not to give a damn about old laws and customs.
Many people know that on Passover, many Jews refrain from the eating of hametz, which is defined as food made from any or all of the “five grains”: wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt, in which fermentation has taken place by means of water for over eighteen minutes. If you bake whatever it is you’re making before eighteen minutes of hydration, it won’t rise but will turn into matzah instead. This (so goes the story) is in memory of when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, and had to leave in a great big hurry after all those ten plagues, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and various special effects.
Jews are also prohibited from “deriving any benefit” from hametz during Passover, so a legal expedient has been invented: you can sell your hametz to a non-Jew. Essentially, you sell all of your hametz for some trivial amount, like $1, and the sales contract includes a clause that makes the hametz automatically revert to you if the non-Jew doesn’t come up with the rest of the money for the full value of the hametz. Since the hametz presumably remains in your kitchen somewhere, the “wink wink” nature of this contract is clear: it is a legal fiction designed to allow Jews to get around the Torah laws. (This is nothing new, by the way. Two examples: (1) The eruv, a kind of “boundary” created around a large area like a city to “enclose” it and thus make it one “domain” for purposes of carrying things within it on the Sabbath. (2) The Prozbul, a legal fiction wherein a debt can be “transferred” to a rabbinical court so it cannot be defaulted on during a Sabbatical year.)
Anyway, I’m glad for the judicial ruling that recognizes that if people—Jews—want to sell and buy hametz during Passover, they have every right to do so. This is victory for rationality, consideration, and tolerance, and against caving to the Haredim and surrendering personal choice to the theocracy that some Jews are intent on creating in Israel. People have rights, including the right not to observe old (and frankly, quite silly) traditions.
Let Israeli Jews who don’t want to eat hametz on Passover do what we do in the Diaspora: get really jealous at everybody they know who does eat hametz, and then have a massive pizza-and-pasta party after eight days of self-affliction. And if they happen to walk by a store selling cookies, cakes, breads, what have you—they should give thanks that they live in a country that allows people to buy, sell, and eat what they want when they want.
Tags: free speech, israel, judaism, orthodoxy, passover, stupid
Tags: america, blogosphere, first nations, israel, judaism, lgbt
I use JabRef to compile and maintain BibTeX bibliographies, because while I could be all 1337 and hack them together by hand, this would be extremely painful and not as easy to sort or take in at a glance as using a GUI. However, JabRef, while an excellent program, still shows signs of its origins in the shadowy underbelly of Java applications. It won’t do things like open .bib files from the Finder, or by the open command, or any of those terrific shortcut ways of doing things that Mac users take for granted. So whenever I double-click on a .bib file, it opens in BibDesk. Which is a fine BibTeX editor, and I have lots of friends who use it, but it’s not my preferred program.
But once in a while, it chokes so hard for some unexplained reason that it completely garbage-izes your file and throws up a hilarious error message to let you know that it’s finished trashing every last byte of data in your 200-item bibliography, such as the following:
If BibDesk cannot open files in the “BibTeX” format, what the heck have I been working with all these years?
The ever-reliable Lazer Brody has written a blurb about why pi is the coolest number ever. Hint: it has to do with God. And Toyrah:
Our Torah is sweeter than honey. Within it, you can find all the secrets of creation.
I’m going to share with you something that none of the math or geophysics professors in MIT or Cal Tech know, nor does anyone on the staff at NASA. Now hear this from your buddy Lazer:
I think there might be a reason they won’t tell you these things—but anyway, why make the facile assumption that nobody who works in science or engineering or mathematics is a Jew who takes this sort of stuff seriously?
Pi is the secret of creation. Kabbalah, our esoteric portion of Torah passed on to us by Rabbi Yitzchak Luria Ashkenazi (the famed “Arizal”) and his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital, may their holy memories arouse mercy on us,
(Yes, he did actually write ‘arouse mercy on us’. I am not making this up.)
explains that Ain Sof, Hashem The Infinite, created the world by a process known as tzimtzum, or contraction, whereby Hashem had to designate a point in the middle of his Divine and all-encompassing light to make room for a physical universe. This process, super simplified, was done by hishtalshelut, a series of cocentric [sic] circles the correspond to each of the sefirot, the holy spheres that mainifest [sic] Hashem’s different attributes.
Okay, whatever. It’s the conclusion that our sage mathematician/kabbalist comes to immediately after this point that really blows my mind:
Therefore, nothing in creation is square. All of creation is round, from electrons and protons to the great galaxies.
Nothing is square? Everything is round? What about: squares, cubes, right angles, television sets, sofas, stereo speakers, pianos, and books (sorry, seforim), just to name a few things? Also, many galaxies have shapes other than circles. But if you’re intent on making a silly, poorly-informed point, I guess you can’t let little details like these stop you.
A magical number, the key to computing circles, diameters, and circumferences is Pi, or 3.14 with subsequent fractional digits to infinity.
The Holy Name that Hashem used and uses (for creation is renewed every single day) in the contraction process is שד”י, the Hebrew name Shaddai, which is made up of 3 letters, shin, dalet, and yud.
All Hebrew letters have a numerical value. Shin is 300, yud is 10, and dalet is 4. Together, the Holy Name of Shaddai equals 314. If we divide this number by 100, the number that signifies perfection - which only Hashem is - we get 3.14, or pi, the secret of creation.
All right, so if you add up the letters you get an approximation of pi times a hundred. So you have to divide by a hundred to get a meaningful result out of this. What’s the justification for doing this? You could come up with so many other than ‘it signifies perfection’. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader. But more important—and interestingly, from my point of view—is the fact that unless you believe in some form of the documentary hypothesis—which I presume Lazer does not—the name Shaddai leads you into all sorts of contradictions. For a terrific example, see Exodus 6.3 and Genesis 22:14, which seems to suggest that Abraham knew the name ‘Yahweh’ (translated as ‘the LORD’). Also, Shaddai seems to have been a Mesopotamian cult title of one of the Semitic chief gods El. For a useful point of comparison, see Psalm 82, which begins: ‘God (elohim) stands in the congregation of El‘ (god? El? could this mean the council of gods under El?). At any rate, this is quite a vexed issue, much more complicated that Lazer is making it.
However, these are but minor obstacles to the determined mind of our esteemed rabbi. If he wants to believe that pi is holy, mystical, and the secret to knowledge of creation, then by all means let him go ahead and believe it. The rest of us will keep on thinking that it’s pretty neat in its own right—or, if not, then at least an opportunity to hold a demonstration.
Tags: blogosphere, judaism, lazer brody, mathematics, orthodoxy, stupid
A couple of interesting tabs I’ve had floating around in my browser for the past couple of days, to slake your thirst for the time being, but hopefully whet your appetite as regards the future—all right, I’m done:
The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.
Tags: academia, british columbia, canada, funny, israel, judaism, stupid, vancouver
Across Canada, people protested the recent decisions by the CBC to axe the only remaining radio orchestra in North America and change the character of Radio Two away from classical music as a major focus. At the protest in Vancouver, about three hundred people showed up: this was the biggest turnout in Canada, but this is, after all, the city that is the home base of the CBC Radio Orchestra. Many important people in the Canadian music scene—not just strictly classical music—were there to address the crowd and lead us in very well-tuned protest songs and anthems and chants.
The full album of pictures is here (I’m slowly migrating my photo software to Plogger). Here are some ‘best of’ hits:
Also, check out Adam Abrams’ blog post, with which I express my complete agreement, as well as his photo album from the event. Also, if you have Facebook, check out the event page for the nationwide protests, as well as the Facebook groups for classical music at the CBC and for the CBC Radio Orchestra. Also make sure to check out the web site for Stand on Guard for CBC.
I know Don Cherry is a loudmouthed tool, and his fashion sense would get him laughed off the set of Project Runway in a heartbeat, but what sort of animal did he have to rip the hide off of barehanded to get the jacket he was wearing on Coach’s Corner on tonight’s Hockey Night in Canada?
Forget March Madness (that shouldn’t be too hard in my case—I never knew who was playing anyway, nor did I care), because it’s Stanley Cup Playoffs time!
I’m going to attempt something I’ve never attempted before: making predictions. We’ll see how well I do as these series end; I’ll try not to spam my miniscule readership with sports analysis that nobody cares about. So, here we go. Matchups to watch in this first round:
You may have noticed I’m not predicting any upsets. The only ones I think could happen are with the Ducks/Stars series—road wins will be key—and Rangers/Devils. Sharks/Flames is a possibility, as is Wild/Avalanche, but I doubt either of those will go to a game 7. My pick to win it all: I’m afraid I’ll have to agree with Don Cherry and pick the Sharks. No team from the Eastern Conference could beat any team from the Western Conference this year, and the Sharks are going to win the West.
Tune in soon to see just how wrong I am!
I seriously have no idea why this story has been getting all sorts of press in Europe and virtually none in North America. It makes Eliot Spitzer’s recent sexual escapades look positively heartwarming. From the New York Times:
The tabloid newspaper that broke the story of Mr. Mosley’s Chelsea session, The News of the World, described it as “a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy,” and said Mr. Mosley had paid the equivalent of $5,000 in cash for the five-hour session.
In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German — “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!” — as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women.
Okay, so he was caught on tape in a Nazi S/M orgy. Sounds bad, right? But wait. It gets creepier:
The video, which has been removed from the newspaper’s web site, also captures a prostitute commanding Mosley to strip before she inspects his head and genitals for lice, which the paper suggest was “mocking the humiliating ways Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II.” Placed in chains, Mosley leans over a torture bench and whimpers as a dominatrix strikes him with a rod, saying “You’re going to be shown how we treat prisoners in our facility.” Later, when Mosley takes hold of a whip, he states that a blonde inmate “needs more of ze punishment.”
This guy plays both the concentration camp guard and the concentration camp prisoner in the same Nazi-fetish orgy. How sick is that? (And, I have to wonder, how unusual is it, from your run-of-the-mill BDSM point of view, to play both the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ characters during the same orgy? Multiply that by ‘Nazi’, and see what happens.) As a Jew, I am completely squicked out. As (I like to think) a mostly decent, rational human being, I am simply in a state of aporia.
Turns out that this Nazi-fetish thing didn’t come completely out of nowhere:
Mosley’s background ensures that he won’t get off that easily. His mother, Diana Mitford, was a celebrity British Nazi sympathizer in the prewar years, while his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded and led the British Union of Fascists — a guest of honor at their wedding in 1936, at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, was none other than Adolf Hitler.
Also, Mosley is the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of things like the Grand Prix and Formula One racing. Which depends heavily on car-makers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz for support. Gee, I wonder what their reaction is, given these companies’ histories vis-à-vis Jews and the Holocaust. And how is the esteemed Mr. Mosley responding to this, er, incident? With an apology? Nah, see, you’re still thinking like a reasonable person. He’s employing a device that we Westerners have raised to an art form since Roman times: the lawsuit. From the NYT article:
Mr. Mosley has acknowledged participating in the session. But he has denied that the role-playing had a Nazi motif, and announced Friday that he had filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, claiming “unlimited damages” for invasion of privacy.
In a letter on Saturday to the head of Germany’s motoring federation, he renewed his insistence that the Chelsea session was a private matter, and added, in a reference to the F.I.A.’s role in promoting road safety around the world: “Had I been caught driving excessively fast on a public road or over the alcohol limit, I would have resigned the same day. As it is, the scandal paper obtained by illegal means pictures of something I did in private, which, although unacceptable to some people, was harmless and completely legal.”
The issue isn’t whether he should be prosecuted, because what he did was legal, though distasteful, as he rightly points out. However, in the YouTube era, privacy has been redefined: when the video of you beating women dressed as concentration camp victims—or whatever else it happens to be—goes onto the Internets, there’s simply nothing you can do about it. The issue is whether he should resign, which would be an expression of humility and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, I don’t think this guy is smart enough to put two and two together.
He has refused to resign his F.I.A. post, appealing to the federation’s global network of motoring organizations for support. But denunciations have cascaded from much of the racing world, from Jewish groups, and from F.I.A.-affiliated motoring organizations around the world, including the American Automobile Association, which said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Mosley, as F.I.A. chief, needed to set “the highest standards of ethical behavior” if he was to represent millions of motorists worldwide. It added: “It would be in the best interest of all concerned if he were to step down.”
Perhaps more significantly, calls for his resignation have come from four major car companies, each of which owns or substantially controls grand prix racing teams: BMW, Daimler Benz, Honda and Toyota.
Ugh. I simply don’t know what to say, except why the heck isn’t this story getting more press in North America? Also, why hasn’t this guy resigned? Actually, the answer to that’s an easy one: shamelessness. But I’ll have to leave the solution to the grander problem as an exercise for the reader.
From today’s Ha’aretz:
Palestinian lawmakers probing the death in custody of a preacher from the
Islamist Hamas movement said on Thursday he had been “tortured to death” by security men loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.A self-appointed investigation team comprising six independent lawmakers determined that Majd al-Barghouthi died as a result of torture and said the head of the Fatah-run intelligence services, Tawfiq Tirawi, should be held to account. Another commission which Abbas appointed in late February to investigate the matter has not yet delivered its verdict, although a pathologist working on behalf of Fatah said he had not found signs of torture on Barghouthi’s body. …
Human rights groups accused Hamas of torturing to death four Palestinians in Gaza since it took control of the Strip. Both Fatah and Hamas accuse each other of arresting and torturing their supporters in the enclaves.
I hadn’t heard of these last incidents, but as far as I know, this is the first independent accusation and confirmation from Palestinians of this sort of thing happening on an intra-Palestinian level. The BBC is also reporting on this. I wonder if these incidents will bring back to light the conflict between the two different Palestinian societies: the West Bank, dominated by the old-guard, better established, (mostly) secular nationalist, and internationally acknowledged as the ‘legitimate’ representative of the Palestinian people, against the younger, militantly Islamic, and poorer Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Tags: human rights, news, palestine
The last remaining radio orchestra in North America, the Vancouver-based CBC Radio Orchestra, will be disbanded after 70 years. From the CBC:
The decision to disband the orchestra—formed in 1938 when radio orchestras were common—comes down to dollars and cents, a CBC executive in Vancouver said Thursday.
“We know for example that for a concert that we fund through our CBC Radio Orchestra, we can extend our reach to three by doing it through other musical organizations,” said Jennifer McGuire, executive director of CBC English Radio.
In other words, it’s too expensive to fund classical music, since nobody listens to it except old fogies and you can’t compete with the private sector that way. Needless to say, this decision has many people—not least the musicians—ticked off. From today’s Globe and Mail:
“It is a travesty that this decision has been made. It’s a travesty that the government continues to cut the funding to the CBC. But it is also a travesty that bureaucrats that occupy the top echelons of radio don’t have the guts to stand up for this orchestra,” said violist Andrew Brown as he emerged from the meeting, receiving an impromptu standing ovation from other musicians who had gathered in the hotel’s lobby.
“Just bafflegab,” said Brian G’froerer, who has played principal horn with the orchestra for 30 years, when asked how CBC executives Jennifer McGuire and Mark Steinmetz had responded to the musicians’ concerns inside the meeting.
This weekend I had a terrifically long conversation with my mother about the British North America Act, the precise nature of the relationship between Canada and Great Britain (read: the United Kingdom) and the Commonwealth of Nations, and the proper name for the country. The last common one that I know of is ‘Dominion of Canada’, but I haven’t heard anybody ever refer to it that way—at least not ironically. Of course, the country is referred to as a ‘dominion’ in a number of different contexts even today, yet by and large these are archaic, such as, perhaps most famously, the third verse of the original text of ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’:
Our fair Dominion now extends from Cape Race to Nootka Sound,
May peace forever be our lot and plenteous store abound,
And may those ties of love be ours which discord cannot sever,
And flourish green o’er freedom’s home the Maple Leaf forever!
But as far as most people who live here are concerned, I believe, the name of the country is simply ‘Canada’. However, on landing at YVR today, I was officially welcomed by the (Los Angeles-based) flight crew to some place called the ‘Republic of Canada‘, much to the amusement of about 75% of the plane. I suspect that this is not the short-lived Republic of Canada from the 19th century, but rather some magical mystical country without a Queen and an absurdly long list of successors.
I am absolutely stunned by this story. It’s like something out of a deranged episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Oy Vey. Except much darker. From the Canadian Jewish News:
An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.
Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.
Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …
The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …
Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …
Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.
Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”
The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”
And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:
Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.
There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.
(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)
This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.
Tags: british columbia, canada, israel, judaism, news, orthodoxy, quebec, stupid
Today in Toronto, Stéphane Dion extolled the gains the Liberals made in yesterday’s byeletions, despite the fact that such gains were rather thin. The Liberals took two seats in Toronto handily, both with former leadership candidates running. They squeaked by to take a third seat in Vancouver by 151 votes, and lost a fourth in Saskatchewan to the Conservatives. Yet Dion still sees this as a smashing victory:
“Yesterday has been a very good day for Liberals,” Mr. Dion announced at a Toronto news conference.
Okay, sure, that’s where the spin is going, I see that. But it gets crazier:
Mr. Dion seemed particularly pleased about the win in Vancouver Quadra, B.C., where former provincial environment minister and onetime tree planter Joyce Murray took the vote, despite heavy losses to the Green Party.
Conceding that “the main point in Quadra has been the Green vote,” he dismissed suggestions the increase in Green support was a concern for the Liberals, who have sought to distinguish their environmental policies as more far-sighted than the Conservatives’.
Just have another look at those numbers from yesterday’s elections returns. The Liberals scored 36% of the vote, down from 49% when they last took the riding in 2006. Meanwhile the NDP and Greens took 13–14% of the vote each. The whole platform of the Greens has been that neither the Liberals’ nor the Conservatives’ positions on climate change and the environment were far-sighted or aggressive enough enough. Joyce Murray’s laughable assertion that ‘The public has spoken and it’s about the environment’, as we discussed on Monday, is flatly contradicted by the polling numbers. When 13% of the voters choose the Green Party over yours, you can bet your boots it’s about the environment. Just not in the way you think.
The Liberals saw their share of the vote in Vancouver Quadra fall to 36% from 49% in the 2006 election, despite devoting weeks in the House of Commons to questions on the Cadman affair, which the party hoped would resonate in the riding.
Oh, so that explains why the Liberal leadership have been wasting time during each and every Question Period to asking the same questions and getting the same non-answers from Harper and Moore and other Conservatives about the Cadman affair. I’d wondered about that: why were they letting the Bloc Québécois and the NDP ask real question about real matters, such as NAFTA-gate or, y’know, the environment. These then end up looking like pet political issues because the official ‘opposition’—if the Liberals truly deserve that moniker—won’t take them up. Instead, they devote their time to making the Conservatives repeat the same half-truths about ‘financial considerations’ because they think this will resound in Vancouver Quadra.
Well, the Cadman affair didn’t resound in Vancouver on Monday. The environment did.
A mock political advertisement from this week’s edition of the Rick Mercer Report on CBC. (Again, the transcription is mine, as is the addition of hyperlinks.):
[The scene: a father reading a newspaper, talking to his son of about ten years.]
Billy: Dad, why is Stephen Harper suing Stéphane Dion?
Dad: Well, Billy, the Prime Minister had no choice but to sue Stéphane Dion. Mr. Dion said some pretty nasty things about him.
Billy: But he’s the Leader of the Opposition. Isn’t it his job to do that?
Dad: To a point. But if you damage someone’s reputation, well, then that’s libel.
Billy: But what about Dion’s reputation? Harper ran all those ads saying he’s not a leader. He looked like a total tool.
Dad: Yes, yes he did. But that’s not libel.
Billy: Why not?
Dad: Well, if it were, Mr. Dion would sue Mr. Harper.
Billy: Oh.
Dad: You see, Billy, suing people makes Stephen Harper feel good inside. Like when you score a goal in hockey.
Billy: Is that why he’s also suing Ralph Goodale, and Michael Igna…
Dad: Ignatieff. I believe it’s Russian. Always sue everyone, Billy, remember that.
Billy: Thanks, Dad.
Dad: Take no prisoners, Billy. [The two of them high-five.]
[Shot of Parliament at night, with inset of Harper.]
Voice over: Stephen Harper is bringing change to Ottawa. Strengthening democracy. Through lawsuits.
[Back to scene of home.]
Billy: [whining] Dad, Stephen Harper’s suing me now!
Dad: Well, it’s your own fault, Billy. You asked too many darn questions. Should have kept your mouth shut.
Billy: [Grunts, falls backward onto couch.]
[Conservative Party logo.]
Voice over: The Conservative Party of Canada. Consider yourself warned.
You can watch the original video here (season 5, episode 18, second item: ‘Mercer: Consider yourself warned’).
The Canadian government is cracking down on Internet scams offering a miracle cure for cancer. Now, if only they (and allied governments) would go after Hasidic rabbis with quack cures for the same:
The websites advertise medicines, herbal remedies, other supplements and treatment regimes of questionable value. It’s impossible to know how much money has been lost to bogus claims, but the amount could be huge. Health information is the third-most-searched topic online. An estimated 8.7 million Canadians are turning to the Internet for medical advice, but only one-third actually talk to their doctors about what they found online, according to Statistics Canada.
By taking decisive action against scammers who trick unsuspecting cancer victims into paying millions of dollars for snake oil, the Conservative government in Ottawa is showing its resolve to crack down on people unfairly and illegally taking the money of innocent people afflicted with cancer. Unless, of course, the cancer victims in question are independent MPs whose votes they’re trying to buy in order to bring down the government…
Author, sci-fi author, scientist, futurist, inventor of the artificial satellite, co-creator of 2001, part-time philosopher and theologian, citizen of the world, formulator of one of the most memorable set of three laws since Newton or Kepler, a man whose writings had such a profound impact on me and my own writing—Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. R.I.P. Sir Arthur.
The final numbers in Vancouver Quadra from Elections Canada are in, with all 237 polls reporting:
| Party | Candidate | Votes | Pct. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberal | Joyce Murray | 10,155 | 36.1% |
| Conservative | Deborah Meredith | 10,004 | 35.5% |
| New Democratic Party | Rebecca Coad | 4,064 | 14.4% |
| Green Party | Dan Grice | 3,792 | 13.5% |
| neorhino.ca | John Turner | 110 | 0.4% |
| Canadian Action Party | Psamuel Frank | 40 | 0.1% |
Turnout was abysmal: 28,165 of 83,121—a mere 33.9%—of registered electors voted. Still, this is a higher turnout than any of the three other elections held today, none of which even hit 28%.
Joyce Murray takes the seat for the Liberals, but by a margin of only 151 votes. This is a stunning result because the seat was considered so safe for the Liberals, even with many voters expected to vote for the NDP and the Greens, thus causing a spoiler effect. Furthermore, the counting showed a clear and consistent lead for Joyce Murray right up until the end. As this CBC article makes clear, the election was called before the results got really close, and the celebration was a hair’s breadth from being premature.
Murray said Monday night’s victory in Vancouver, and Liberal wins in byelections in Toronto, will make the Liberal Party more effective in holding Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper accountable in the next weeks and months.
“The public has spoken and it’s about the environment,” she said, promising to be a tireless advocate for the reduction of greenhouse gases and to push for social housing for those in need.
Yeah, not quite—if the Liberals had owned the environment issue, 28% of voters wouldn’t have voted for the NDP or the Greens. As I pointed out in my previous post, this should send a stunning message to Stéphane Dion and the Liberal leadership. The fact that over 28% of voters who might have voted for the Liberals did not do so stands for a stunning repudiation of the Liberal Party. There are a zillion issues on which he and his party appear not to have connected with voters, especially here in liberal (small l) Vancouver, B.C. The environment. Government transparency. Western alienation. The opposition’s failure to be effective against the ruling Conservatives in Parliament. These combine to give enormous appeal to parties like the NDP, and especially the Green Party, which finished only 0.2% behind the NDP in Toronto Centre.
Here’s another good quote from Joyce Murray:
“Tonight we are sending a very clear message to Stephen Harper: The Liberals are strong.”
The Liberals’ failure to own any of these issues—especially the environment, which Murray cited as the reason she won so, er, resoundingly and convincingly—is spoken to by the huge percentages of the vote being split by the NDP and the Green Party. If the Liberal
