Posted by matt
Sat, 19 Nov 2005 05:45:27 GMT
I've been vaguely following the story of what Canada's been doing to help with the situation in the Darfur region of Red Cross, and also the story of David Kilgour who insisted that Canada send troops to Darfur, when the Sudanese gov't wouldn't let them in. The compromise that was come up with was that Canada would send APC's for the AU troops to use. The Sudanese gov't wouldn't even let those in, and there's been constant stories in the Canadian news on how these APC's were languishing in West Africa doing nothing. Then I read this story about the Sudanese gov't finally allowing the APC's in. But I only found out by reading the BBC Africa website.
Posted in politics
Posted by matt
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:45:21 GMT
I was riding up in the elevator, and I had bought a copy of The Ottawa Citizen, and had it tucked under my arm when a co-worker said, "Wow, reading a right-wing rag", "Yep". And I came across a telling series of events that illustrated my co-worker's point. The paris suburbs have basically descended into anarchy over the past two weeks, everybody agrees that they've been a problem for some time as this article points out. But instead of looking at what is actually going on in the country, this op-ed piece by Keith Spicer of which I can only give quotations because the Ottawa Citizen, among their other flaws, doesn't actually publish their material online. So I can only give you clap-trap like
Even more than elsewhere, French politicians paly in a little sand box of their own, with their own games, theit own ambitiions, their own vague, impenetrable vocabulary. "Social growth", "social fracture", "solidarity", damnable "ultra-liberalism". The entire French political establishjment is now mired in fuzzy leftist language. [...]
and
The dreamy model of multiculturalism promoted by Europe's leveral intelligentsia has been going up in smoke on the streets of Paris
Some have tried to link [the original two children's] deaths to police racism. That strikes as too simplistic
If you were to read the Citizen, you would think that the riots in Paris were caused by fuzzy leftist thinking. However, if you read real news, you realize that this analysis is 100% wrong. France is not a fuzzy leftist paradise. The prime minister can most liberally be described as center-right, and the minister of the interior is even far to the right of the prime minister. The riots in Paris have nothing to do with "Ultra-liberalism" and everything to do with the following, gleaned from the article linked to above in the beeb.
Last April, Amnesty International singled out the violence and racism of the French police towards the non-white people of the suburbs for particular criticism.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, now seems to be playing politics with the situation by appealing to the most basic and resentful attitudes of conservative France.
This second viewpoint fits in with what I know of France. France is not some ultra-left country, it nearly elected a neo-nazi not too long ago. It's very socially conservative, though their values are slightly different than conservative values in the US or Canada.
Normally I would chalk this up to a media bias that is different from mine, but the editorials in the Citizen seem to be attributing these riots to "fuzzy leftism" when, even as they acknowledge later, there is no evidence of this, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. When specified for details, they describe the french minister of the interior as a "Law and order man," they describe the prime minister as "on the right" They admit to the possibility that "The Paris riots are perhaps a backlash against France's clumsy efforts to homogenize the population" and "de Villepin ridiculed Britain's multicultural model, slyly referring to the London subway bombings as a consequence of too-soft policies"
What the Citizen seems to be saying is that, although all the people in control are right-wing, the riots are the result of "Fuzzy leftist thinking". Sounds like "Fuzzy right-wing thinking" to me.
Posted in politics
Posted by matt
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:39:34 GMT
I get an RSS feed from the BBC and this showed up, the day after I went to see Romeo D'allaire. It was, terrible timing, to say the least.
BBC NEWS Wars 'less frequent, less deadly'
That's a really rose-colored report. When you think of all the genocides
and ethnic cleansings and child armies that have exploded since the end of
the Cold War, war may have gotten slightly less deadly, but a whole lot
dirtier. I was at a lecture by Romeo D'Allaire, the commander of the UN
forces during the failed Rwanda mission on Tuesday, and he asked a
question which illustrates war in these times, I'll have to paraphrase it,
because I didn't take notes, but the question goes something like this.
"We came upon a small village in Rwanda, and we were looking for
survivors, and once we came upon the church, villagers started streaming
out of it, which was unusual, because the normal way of doing things was
to round up the entire village, lock all of the villagers in the church,
and burn it down. In this case, we thought we were lucky, because the
villagers came streaming out of the church when we came into view.
Suddenly a bunch of young boys between the ages of 9 and 14 came out of
the jungle on our right, and started firing at us with AK-47s. Then a
bunch of young girls about the same ages, some of whom were pregnant,
appeared out of the jungle on our left, they were being used as human
shields by yet more young boys with AK-47s firing at us, and the villagers
coming out of the Church. Now, knowing that most of these children were
forced into camps, brainwashed, and pressed into service under penalty of
death, knowing that these children had a "Buddy system" where if your
buddy ran away, you were shot, knowing that these children where only
unknowing automatons, probably given drugs to commit this act, what do you
do? You have nanoseconds to make a decision, and bullets are killing
both your soldiers, as well as the villagers all around you."
What do you do, indeed. It's a heartbreaking question. Luckily, he
didn't ask us the answer to the question, and I think the answer he came
up with on that spot has haunted his dreams for more than 10 years now.
Posted in politics, personal
Posted by matt
Mon, 17 Oct 2005 20:49:52 GMT
Aside from Voting in Howard Dean is as governor, they also run the minutemen out of town
Posted in funny, politics
Posted by matt
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:10:12 GMT
In the vein of The Rude Pundit, there's I Fucked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard, and Back in Ann Coulter's Ass-Saddle Again
Truly lowering the political discourse. And really really wrong.
Posted in funny, politics
Posted by matt
Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:15:15 GMT
I've heard lots of stupid reasons not to give money to the red cross. I'll give you one damn good reason to give money to the red cross.
They are the agency that best knows what they're doing, and how best to do it. MSF comes a close second.
www.redcross.ca, go there now, and donate 20 bucks towards Katrina Relief.
Posted in politics
Posted by matt
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 19:33:16 GMT
an exec working for the Chinese division of GM designs a minivan that gets 43mpg and sells for $5000. It makes the Chinese division of GM the most profitable car company in China. So, does GM bring him to the US to revamp their product line? Do they follow his success in building modern small vehicles?
No, he's seen as a threat to other executives and so they fire him
Posted in politics
Posted by matt
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 19:32:18 GMT
I wish everyone would pay attention to this judge. Human Rights, including the right to a free and open trial are the cornerstones of any decent civilization.
The transcript of U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour's comments during Wednesday's sentencing hearing for Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber
Some of my favourite points:
Secondly, though, I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.
Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.
Posted in politics
Posted by matt
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 19:22:39 GMT
As some of you may know, I spent two years (1985 - 87) in Somalia, I left Mogadishu while it was at its peak, before the civil war that started to destroy the country. I read all of the articles on this page from the BBC. It makes for fascinating reading.
Posted in politics
Posted by matt
Wed, 03 Aug 2005 18:25:10 GMT
This NY Times article talks about a study that once again, and in new ways, refutes any claims to a cold remedy.
Some cool quotes.
The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine,
involved 437 people who volunteered to have cold viruses dripped into their
noses. Some swallowed echinacea for a week beforehand, others a placebo.
Still others took echinacea or a placebo at the time they were infected.
Then the subjects were secluded in hotel rooms for five days while
scientists examined them for symptoms and took nasal washings to look for
the virus and for an immune system protein, interleukin-8. Some had
hypothesized that interleukin-8 was stimulated by echinacea, enabling the
herb to stop colds.
But the investigators found that those who took echinacea fared no
differently from those who took a placebo: they were just as likely to
catch a cold, their symptoms were just as severe, they had just as much
virus in their nasal secretions, and they made no more interleukin-8.
Now, with increasing evidence that echinacea does not work for colds,
scientists are confronting a problem, Dr. Sampson said, in that "there is
no 'demarcation of the absurd,' a point at which it is unwise to pursue an
investigation further."
For Dr. Turner, that point is here.
"We should assume that echinacea does not work until somebody proves it
does," he said. That, he added, "is the flip side of where we've been."
Posted in politics, personal
