This blog’s first Hero Of Freedom Award goes to whoever first coined the term crotch-bomber to describe Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, along with all of those who have wisely promulgated its use. Ridicule is an important and all-too-underused weapon in the battle against global terrorism. It may not directly deter the depressed and anomic young loner types or the outsourcing psychokillers who recruit them. However, by refusing to act as if we are terrified, we can remove the alleged geopolitical benefit of bombing attempts. With it goes the psychological thrills these guys are chasing, and which keep their rolls called and their coffers filled.

At the same time I humbly submit that the alternate terms underwear bomber and especially pantie-bomber are overdoing it. They smack a mite of schoolyard desperation, where crotch-bomber somehow strikes the right note of dismissive contempt. Let’s, as Ron Burgundy would have us do, stay classy, people.

My hope is that the ridiculously restrictive new TSA regulations handed down after the failed attempt will trigger an overdue attitude adjustment. In the name of warding off a statistically unlikely catastrophe, air travelers have demonstrated a willingness to be ritually inconvenienced for about twenty minutes in the scanner line-up. Not being able to hold anything in your hands or open your carry-on luggage for the last hour of flight crosses a line that might get voters thinking about the costs of ill-targeted fearfulness. Until now, the career incentives for politicians and officials have pushed them in the direction of ever more restrictive measures. Call me a crazy dreamer, but I’d love to see some countervailing pressure that rewards them for playing it cool and not overreacting. Make the intelligence effort smarter, by all means. But airport precautions that don’t change the odds give the attackers much of what they want even when the bombs remain undetonated.

Granted, it’s easier to adopt a stiff upper lip in the event of a near miss. When a plane full of people dies as the result of human malice, odds calculation goes out the window. We are horrified and angered in a way that we wouldn’t be by an equivalent number of fatal road accidents or deaths from lack of preventative medical care.

But even if something spectacularly horrible happens, we North Americans need to toughen up. We’d muster defiance in the face of an actual war. Let’s try some in this ongoing low intensity conflict.

Tags: current events, hero of freedom awards, politics hut

(14 comments | Leave a comment)

As sources of communication are cut off and the regime crackdown murderously escalates, developments in the Iran uprising appears to be shifting from Internet speed to a more traditional pace. If you’ve been following the story you’ve probably read many reminders that the ‘79 revolution against the Shah took nearly a year to resolve itself. I wonder how many of the folks who greened their icons as a gesture of solidarity with the marchers will still be paying close attention six months from now, or nine. We burn out on news stories faster when doled out in tiny pellets of information than we would on in the old media landscape, with its daily papers and six o’clock newscasts.

The story would already be over, though, if another developing technology was already in the hands of the regime. I’ve mentioned my fears about pain ray weapons before, but these events put the issue in a stark context. Popular uprisings against repressive regimes are games of chicken played for deadly stakes. The people confront the security forces, hoping that the enforcers willl reach a point where they can’t bring themselves to apply the degree of violence needed to suppress them. Newly effective means of non-lethal force remove this tactic from the equation. A protester can consciously decide to risk her life to stand up to a man armed with a gun, but she can’t consciously choose to keep going when pain shuts her body down.

The weapons are being designed by the US with supposedly the best of intentions. It’s better to incapacitate than kill, right? And of course the technology will only be used to quell the bad protesters, whoever those are. Which you can tell thanks to the Orwellian name, Active Denial System. And from history we know that new weapons technologies never escape their original underwriters, get taken up by the powerful commercial arms industry, or trickle down into the hands of states we disapprove of.

Widespread availability of this technology will spell the end of the popular revolt, full stop. And that’s perhaps two generations away from us.

Tags: current events, iran, social networks, tech, warfare, weapons

(17 comments | Leave a comment)

I was planning to kick off the week with a few ramblings on my use of social networking sites. With events in Iran—including reformers’ use of Facebook as a messaging tool and the regime’s blocking of the site—that feels like something that ought to wait.

The regime’s clumsy election stealing and brutal show of force have increased the stakes. If the reformers prevail, they’ll be able to go much further than if Mousavi had been allowed to take the Presidency. The reformers face heavy odds. Modern totalitarian states crumble either when the leadership exhausts itself, or when the security forces lose their will to inflict mass casualties on civilian protesters. The turning point comes not when the regime loses the support of the governed, but when they or their proxies are unwilling to muster the violence required to secure renewed acquiescence. Burma is a recent example of what happens when a well-rewarded and emotionally isolated enforcer class looses itself on a rebelling populace. If we see hopeful signs here, it will be of backpedaling by the high leadership or their abandonment by cops, militias and soldiers.

On a note of lesser importance, the failure of all three US cable news networks to engage with the story as it unfolded shows how increased competition can lead to a degraded product. To keep up with Fox and MSNBC, CNN gutted its expensive foreign bureaus and international coverage in favor of much cheaper in-studio chatter. The Turner-era CNN would be all over this. Here competitive pressure led to a cheaper, not a better, product.

Tags: censorship, current events, politics hut, television hut

(9 comments | Leave a comment)

So, you’re asking, hey, Robin, what’s up with your Parliament being suspended?

I try as much as possible to keep the Great White North out of Politics Hut. My more direct stake in the results cuts into my customary Olympian detachment. Plus, there’s too much flipping backstory to dole out to the 86% of this blog’s readers who are not scions of the silver birch.

( OK, deep breath: )

Tags: cancon, current events, politics hut

(29 comments | Leave a comment)

Toronto just had itself a weekend-long transit strike , in a misadventure that illustrates the difficulty of predicting an organization’s actions based on an outsider’s view of its rational self interest.

Relations between the Toronto Transit Commission and its union have been rocky for decades. The city has a good transit system, once the envy of the world — and thus one that a large chunk of the population has come to depend on. Each strike has dealt a blow to the system, causing it to lose riders who never come back. Thus is a death spiral effect kicked into motion. With fewer riders brings cuts in services and threats to the job security of its workers. Every time a contract negotiation comes up and the threat of another disruptive strike looms, calls go out from residents to make transport an essential service, like the cops and firefighters, who aren’t permitted to strike.

This time around, as negotiations went to the wire and a new strike seemed likely, Toronto’s mayor David Miller found himself under pressure to call on the province to declare the TTC an essential service. This put him in a bind between the popular position and his progressive inclinations. He went with the latter, opposing essential service status.

( Read more... )

Tags: current events, gaming hut

(9 comments | Leave a comment)

Tags: current events

(13 comments | Leave a comment)

Today is the inaugural edition of a new holiday in Ontario, added by the provincial government to fulfill one of their campaign promises from the last election. A long weekend in February has been long debated—do these dreary gray days scream out for an additional holiday, or is it pointless because the weather is too glum to do anything fun?

The name of the holiday: Family Day. Apparently the committee tasked with coming up with the name focus-grouped it until they came up with the most boring moniker imaginable. I hear that Generic Holiday was also in the running but ultimately rejected as too intoxicatingly meta.

Manitoba kicks off a new public holiday today, too, but they’ve named it after a rebel visionary madman culture hero. Take that, sober-sided Ontario!

Tags: current events, history

(17 comments | Leave a comment)

There’s been a lot of talk about this season’s bumper crop of serious message movies about the Iraq conflict, and how they’ve landed in theaters with a series of resounding thuds. Undoubtedly this is because they’re serious message movies, and who wants that?

Last week’s episode of My Name Is Earl, on the other hand, marked a true shift in the cultural zeitgeist. Holy mackerel! It was another of their COPS episodes. (Strained a bit by its expansion to an hour-long episode, but that’s neither here nor there.) The wild thing about it was when it was set—in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Added to the show’s trademark mix of cheerfully madcap dark humor were plenty of expected shots at the Bush administration, Homeland Security and so on. But the writers of the episode went further than that to make fun not just of the government, but of ordinary Americans’ reaction to 9/11. What would have been unthinkably out of bounds just a few seasons back is now comedy fodder on a popular, major network show.

Tags: current events, television hut

(14 comments | Leave a comment)

The World Cancer Research Fund released a daunting omnibus study on the connection between cancer and diet last week. Apparently it isn’t enough to be reasonably trim; now you have to shoot for gaunt. Also, try not to be tall. Or to have ever gained weight since the age of 21.

The study’s authors propose limiting one’s consumption of processed meats and mammals to 500 g or less per week. Poultry gets the green light, as does fish.

Fish consumption in North America is already on a rapid upswing, thanks largely to the increasing popularity of sushi. Check out Trevor Corson’s book The Zen Of Fish for all manner of fascinating info on the history and science of sushi, with special emphasis on its reception in the US. Corson cites recent projections by fisheries experts that if we continue to harvest the oceans at our current rate (let alone an accelerated one fueled by sushi love and heightened nutritional awareness), that there will be nothing left in the seas but squid by 2050.

Farmed fish are a troubling solution to the problem, as they’re fed on concentrated pellets made from wild fish. This has the effect of placing the fish we most like to eat, like salmon and tuna, higher up on the food chain than they normally are. Thus they ingest way more PCBs, also a cancer risk, than their wild counterparts.

So in part this study raises the prospect that, by increasing my fish intake, I am more likely to live long enough to see the oceans entirely depleted of them.

Tags: apocalyptic, current events, food

(19 comments | Leave a comment)

It's all too apparent now that the uprising in Burma, like its larger predecessor in 1988, has been successfully crushed by the ruling junta. (Of course I wish we’d see some sudden turnaround that would prove that statement wrong.) It’s another example of how peaceful so-called People Power revolutions rise and fall on a dynamic outside the control of democracy activists. What they test is how many people the regime is willing to kill to remain in power, and how quickly and effectively they can mobilize the required violence. The Burmese junta went to great lengths to ensure its survivability in the face of a new wave of protests. It invests dictatorial power in an entire committee of generals, ensuring institutional continuity if the primary strongman is incapacitated, or falters in his dedication to repression. Unlike many similar regimes, its army is privileged and kept at a remove from the people, to prevent them from identifying with protesters when ordered to open fire. (A few soldiers fled to Thailand rather than betray Buddhist principles by firing on monks, but overall the loyalty of the armed forces held.) The junta is only lightly constrained by world opinion; it has cultivated economic links with India, Thailand (also now ruled by a militarist regime) and China, giving them protection both on the Security Council and from effective economic sanctions. The regime has also proven adaptive to weaknesses in their structure of oppression. When their secret police fell into disarray, they created a network of informal street gangs to mobilize quickly to deliver beatdowns to regime opponents. Modern communication technologies, from Internet to cell phones, were efficiently cut off, preventing spontaneous organization by an unhappy populace.

It may be true that the overall trend of global political development is toward greater openness, information access, and democracy. That doesn’t mean that the forces of oppression and corruption can be relied on to complacently crumble from within. They can be clever and predictive, also learning from past history.

Other technological developments threaten to tip the dynamic in favor of repressive regimes. Mass-scale non-lethal weapons, paradoxically, offer an enormous boon to tyranny. When the pain ray technology currently under development for the US military reaches the hands of repressive regimes—as it inevitably will—they’ll gain the ability to quell uprisings and demonstrations without having to summon the will to slaughter people in droves. Non-lethal repression will not incur nearly the same degree of global outrage, hugely reducing the amount of outside pressure they’ll face during and after a crackdown. The pain ray may turn out to be the single most disastrous invention of the twenty-first century.

Tags: current events, tech

(12 comments | Leave a comment)

I’ve been wavering on whether it’s appropriate to write lightly about the following, the now-notorious incident of a student rabble rouser getting himself tasered at a John Kerry Q&A at the University of Florida.



Having read this bit of reportage, which, if true, puts the incident in sharper context, I now feel empowered. According to an eyewitness, what’s missing from the scene is the bit at the beginning where the student, Andrew Meyer, jumps the queue of waiting questioners and grabs the mike. This explains why the campus cops are already bunched around the microphone, and why it is that it’s a police officer telling Meyer to cut short his interminable preface and ask his question. Without the queue jumping, both of these police actions are not just weird and inappropriate but scarily suggestive of a society-wide erosion of respect for free speech rights. With the queue jumping, what we’re seeing in the video is a minor civil disturbance already in progress.

Also, even when one is unjustly arrested by police officers, it behooves one, if one wishes not to be tasered, to avoid physically resisting them. Bro wasn’t tasered for what he said to Kerry, or even for jumping the line. He was tasered for resisting first the campus cops’ efforts to escort him out of the hall, and then to restrain him after he started struggling with them.

Hence I regard this incident with mixed feelings. First, the clip evokes a feeling of profoundly mixed sympathies as deftly as any great work of cinema. What happens to Meyer is horrible, especially in its Orwellian imagery. But, thanks to his special combination of arrogance, naïveté , and blatant attention hogging, it’s also funny.

Second, screenings at the film festival are often followed in Q&A sessions, which I have learned to avoid like the plague. For every decent question, there’s a screamingly dumb one that makes me cringe. And as the years have gone on, the long-winded, rambling prefatorial statement has become an ever-increasing scourge. No one wants to hear from you, questioners. It's not about you. We're here to listen to the speaker. So quickly give him or her a subject of your choice to tee off of, and then shut the heck up! I can’t help but think that if people knew that a statement without a question, or an annoyingly long preface, could lead to a good tasering, the quality of Q&As would go up enormously.

I might be prepared to open the Q&A taser rule up to stupid questions in general, but only if I were the sole arbiter of who got zapped. And at the film festival I just don’t have that kind of time. Also, on the grounds that unchecked powers will always be abused, usually in short order, I am naturally uncomfortable placing this enforcement mechanism in the hands of the state. We would have to come up with some reliable system for individual festival patrons to brandish the taser, under strict and reviewable conditions.

The precise logistics require additional thought...

Tags: current events, toronto international film festival

(35 comments | Leave a comment)

Yesterday's incident at Virginia Tech was, it goes without saying, distressing and appalling.

What makes it moreso: these mass-murder/suicides have become sufficiently commonplace that they now feel familiar. Even with a gruesome record body count for the cable news to tout in their on-screen graphics.

We think of fiction as having genres but reality, as shown to us on the news, is often rendered accessible by resort to formula. This is especially true of catastrophes, from bombings to natural disasters. Killing sprees at schools fall into this category now. They’ve happened enough times now that they’ve developed their own enveloping narrative into which any breaking incident can be plugged. The authorities’ press conferences, survivor accounts, interviews with experts, the search for other institutions or people to blame—they reflect the reality of what happened, but also function as genre tropes. Like their counterparts in fiction, they exist partly for the convenience of the storyteller, partly because they’re the natural way to arrange narrative elements, and partly, through their familiarity, to aid our comprehension, and to comfort us.

Because we know the narrative structure already, the news cycle can move quicker. We know the drill already. The pipe has been laid for denser storytelling. The news cycle has so sped up that you cut reflexively to the political debates on gun control and the supposed violent influence of video games before the authorities have even had time to ID the killer.

The maladjusted S.O.B.s who decide to take a bunch of people with them before they shoot themselves are taking part in a pre-programmed discourse. What they’re enacting is spiteful, callous, sadistic—and a hideous cliché.

Tags: current events, violence

(18 comments | Leave a comment)

Due to illness, schedule conflicts, and March’s decision to come in like a lion, our game of cybered-up special forces and the cabinet officers who get them into trouble has been on hold for several weeks.

When we reconvene, I’ll need to find a way to incorporate the dynamic described in Phillip Carter’s analysis of the revelations from Walter Reed Army Medical center into the mix. Carter describes a bureaucratic, command structure where low-ranking officers are punished for sending unwelcome information to their superiors.

Until now I’ve been assuming a more or less accurate transmission of information from one set of characters (the grunts on the ground) to the other (the cabinet officials.) But the CYA principle of the contemporary military would only be magnified in the futuristic authoritarian regime of my game setting. I’ll have to find a way for the players to send sanitized reports to themselves.

On a tangential note, decades worth of board games carefully simulate military engagements. Are there any board games in which the players compete to rise through the ranks in a bureaucratic modern military structure? Games in which the various armed forces compete, with the assistance of defense contractors, to secure the biggest slice of the budget pie for themselves, while stiffing their rival players?

Tags: current events, gaming hut

(6 comments | Leave a comment)

My mom called the other day to report her safe return from her volunteering mission to New Orleans. Rather than being invigorated by the communal effort, she seemed overwhelmed by the difficulty of the task, and how much rebuilding is left to be done.

Apparently one huge problem the residents face is that most of them got their government grant money swindled out of them by unscrupulous contractors. They demanded money up front, and got it, since demand for their services was so high and the flood victims had no bargaining power. Then the contractors abscond without doing the work. Mom spoke to one woman who knew what was going on and went with contractors she’d known for years—and still got her ten grand of assistance money stolen. Many people are still living in FEMA trailers in their front yards—which are due to be taken away from them in a few months, though they might get an extension until summer…

On the other hand, she left impressed by the utter determination of the people there to rebuild what they’d lost. Too bad they’re still being weighed down by so much incompetence, greed, and stupidity.

Tags: current events

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

Tags: craziness, current events

(13 comments | Leave a comment)

I realize that famous people are supposed to die in threes, but it’s cheating when you take the third guy out and hang him.

I place my faith in the ultimate primacy of cultural achievement. People will still be listening to “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “Cold Sweat” long after the Nixon pardon has become a historical detail as obscure as any element of the Teapot Dome scandal.

From today’s vantage point, it’s harder to imagine the day when Hussein’s legacy will be reduced to footnote status. Forget the current conflict and its likely spiral a catastrophe that will color world events for a generation. Saddam started the Iran-Iraq War, which left up to a million people dead.

Bloodlust and tyranny are a constant in human history, so much so that they become horrifyingly transient. There are too many atrocities to remember them all properly. By contrast, individual acts of profound cultural creation, by their very nature, live on. Some day, Saddam will be just another butcher, and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” will still be a sublime two minutes and forty-five seconds of perfect pop music.

James Brown was himself a famously combative, unpleasant and even violent man. Like many of the world’s great artists, writers and musicians, he caused a lot of pain to the people in his personal orbit. On the other hand, he (more or less) invented funk music. That will continue to matter.

Tags: current events, music, obits

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

“You've probably read a hundred times from this and that pundit that what Islam needs is its own Reformation along the lines of the Reformation in Europe that took up, in one sense or another, the better part of two centuries.

“But if what you care about is geopolitical stability, less religious extremism in the political realm, or just fewer people being sawed in half or burned alive, then you can really only say this if you know little or nothing about what the Reformation actually was.”

— Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

Tags: current events

(19 comments | Leave a comment)

Tags: current events, esoterrorists, gaming hut

(7 comments | Leave a comment)

I guess I’m settled in the new place because I now have time to be preoccupied by current events again. For two months there was nothing rattling around the brain but work and moving-related chores. Kind of refreshing to pay attention only to things I could directly affect through my own actions.

My rule for talking about issues on the blog is that I do it only when I have something to say about them that I haven’t seen somebody else write.

I was pleasantly surprised by the sanity of the Moussaoui verdict, but so were many others. Nice to see that even in a symbolically demanding situation the jurors kept to the principle that you put people to death for the acts they commit, not those they wish they’d committed. I can only imagine the look on the face of Shoe Bomber Guy when Moussaoui roped him into his last-minute 9/11 fantasy. I also wonder what would have happened if Moussaoui had warned his captors in advance of 9/11. The man presents as fruit-bat insane. Would anyone have paid any attention to him?

As a dedicated follower of the truthiness movement, I’ve also wasted a sack of time reading responses to the Stephen Colbert appearance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. I enjoyed seeing the complacently deferential press corps squirm in horror as it slowly dawned on them that they'd hired a satirist instead of a mere purveyor of topical humor. As is often the case Jon Stewart had the pithiest observation when he said that there should have been no surprise that Colbert would do exactly the same thing he does on his TV show four nights a week.

Now the Hookergate scandal, with its trifecta of money, sex and the CIA, intends to nibble away at my attention span. How delightful, after the -gate suffix has been pounded into the ground by overuse, to have a story that really warrants it -- by virtue of being partially set at the Watergate Hotel. Sweet nostalgia.

But I’ll get my revenge on this story. I’m incorporating it into my work.

Tags: current events, life, writing life

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

So how is the Ken Livingstone suspension playing over there? The initial coverage of this story over there made it seem like your fine nation has taken a sudden rocket ride to free-speech-suppression Crazytown. Now it’s seeming more like the suspension of an important elected official by an unaccountable appointed body is the unintended consequence of poorly framed legislation.

Disclaimer #1: Not that I think it’s cool to compare people, no matter how much one might dislike them, to concentration Nazi camp guards. (Unless they literally are concentration camp guards, but how often does that come up these days?) The statement is offensive not only in its offensiveness but also in its banality. (See also: any moronic Internet debate.) But the right to free speech includes the right to stupid free speech.

From this frosty Canadian vantage point, it seems like Livingstone could have climbed down without backing down, disassociating himself from the charge of anti-Semitism while still maintaining his contempt for the reporter and his employers.

Suggested wording: “I apologize to the gentleman for my misuse of invective. I foolishly reached for an inappropriate Holocaust reference when I should simply have compared him to a suppurating heap of noxious pond scum.”

Disclaimer #2: I’m not saying that the reporter Livingstone insulted is noxious pond scum. On this question I lack both opinion and expertise.

Tags: current events

(12 comments | Leave a comment)