Taylor & Company

Canadians still successfully ignoring elephant in the room

So, potential iPhone customers in Canada will get the shaft, via the carrier's wireless data plans.  Don't be too surprised—€”we've been getting gouged (relative to our southern neighbours) on dairy products like eggs, milk, butter and cheese for decades.  And we're all much more likely to buy any of those items.  Yet dairy lacks the sex appeal of cell phones, so instead of getting angsty about the essentials, people get angsty about the toys.

I am a little sympathetic to the situation, since I am also required to be a hostage to the nation's only GSM service provider.   But I'm not going to blame Rogers for taking advantage of their monopoly situation, which was, after all, blessed by the CRTC and thence by politicians.  Companies, large or small, always adapt to market conditions.  Or they go out of business.  It has always been thus. More appropriate targets for popular agitation and reform might be:

• Various federal politicians and their departments, who protect sectors of Canadian industry from the hurly-burly of unfettered interaction with foreign competitors.
• Voters, who have consistently elected protectionist politicians. There is still a widespread notion across all major parties that Canadian firms cannot hope to survive against global competitors.  They must therefore be protected by the regulations and restrictions of our artificial economic hothouse.

On a global playing field, you can have protectionist safeguards to preserve local industry, incurring potential costs of stagnation and non-competitive pricing.  Or you can have innovation and competitive pricing at the potential cost of losing your local industry.  It is an either/or proposition.  You can't have protectionism accompanied by innovation and competitive pricing, because competition is the very thing that spurs companies to innovate and stay nimble.

To be blunt: lack of competition is a structural problem afflicting large sectors of the Canadian economy.  The CPRP and OECD say so.  It is not mere avarice on the part of one company, or even one industry.  It is the natural, logical result of trying to protect companies from the very catalyst that forces them to improve.

So by all means, write angry letters to Rogers, the CRTC, your MPs, et cetera.  But don't expect an awful lot of change unless you're prepared to let certain sacred cows die first.

Finally, a place to eliminate all of my disposable (and non-disposable) income!

737 Simulations plans to open a facility in Toronto early next year, allowing the general public to put a 737 NG simulator through its paces.

If this thing gets off the ground and gets built, I would probably save more money if I just had a simple crack or hooker addiction.

Independence Day

I am enough of a Loyalist and 18th century Tory at heart to still have misgivings about the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, but it would be churlish to focus on the negative.  In spite of throwing off centuries of limited royal governance and the mantle of Westminster parliamentarianism, the United States has done very well for itself and its citizens.

So, happy 232nd to our North American brethren.

Ville de Québec, 1608-2008

The once-abandoned Iroquois village of Stadacona celebrates it's 400th anniversary today, now a historic and storied place which began its life as a European settlement under French explorer Samuel de Champlain.  Champlain tried to fortify the settlement by constructing three buildings, each two stories tall, ringing them with a moat; he called his settlement, iconically, "l'Habitation".

Québec is also well-known in Taylor lore as the place where my mother, then a scrawny 16-year-old girl, fought off a drunken would-be rapist under the benevolent gaze of Bonhomme Carnaval.  Also the place where I and other underage drinkers retreated to get (relatively) sober after spending the day drunk or hungover on the ski slopes of Mont-Sainte-Anne.  Of course, modern Quebec City has many other things going for it besides Bonhomme, proximity to ski resorts, drunkenness, and the possibility of sexual assault.

But to be perfectly honest, it's not the present Québec that I find most fascinating.  As the only walled city in North America, Vieux-Quebec and Basse-Ville are fairly alive with the ghosts of Bourbon France and (very faintly, despite enormous effort to eradicate it) Georgian Britain.  There are times when one can look at the Old Town and feel what C.S. Lewis called "inconsolable longing" (or the Germans call "Sehnsucht"):

You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported . . .

-- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940.

Québec is not such a place for me now, but it hints that it might have been, once upon a time.  Visible on the Cap-Diamant are battlements and sturdy, symmetrical 18th century architecture.  One feels as if you can almost peer through time and see the city as it was, post-conquest.  There are times when I wish I could see it as Champlain saw it (and as it's depicted on the commemorative silver dollar), three modest buildings set below a forbidding promontory, several months and a few thousand miles away from the mother country.

I have a certain respect for those early habitants, who gave up the much gentler weather of the Continent for deadly Canadian winters and long isolation from the known world.  There is no doubt that if not for their tenacity, we would not be celebrating the continued existence of Québec today.

While I have mixed feelings regarding the modern inhabitants and their attitudes to non-francophone Canada, I have nothing but praise for the architectural and historic significance of the city itself.  Here's to a happy 400th anniversary, Québec, may you have at least 400 more.

Hitch takes one for the team

Image by Gasper Tringale for Vanity Fair.

I am not normally a big fan of Christopher Hitchens.  While I appreciate his aggressive support of Enlightenment values and an anti-fascist foreign policy, he has a tendency to be more wrong than right about much else.  But I am remarkably pleased about his decision to undergo waterboarding for an article in Vanity Fair.  First because humiliating ex-Trotskyists is all in good fun, and second because he is is fair enough to muster strong arguments for and against such treatment.

I find myself in agreement with this point in particular:

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

We will, of course, continue to train professionals to resist it, but as any POW can tell you, every man has a limit—and the enemy will waltz right up to that limit and kick it in the balls until it is no more.

Citizens of democracies may be tempted to think of waterboarding as an interrogation procedure because what we want from enemy POWs is information.  Not the unquestioning compliance of the prisoner; nor the satisfaction of having known we have destroyed his will.  Not the propaganda victory of seeing him recount his errors on television, nor the sly knowledge that a private seed of inexpungible guilt has been planted in the victim.

Lately, the enemies we have fought―Nazis, Japanese militarists, Communists and jihadists―have been totalitarian systems at heart.  They want control of the prisoner and destroy his will to resist.  They want him to appear in mass media as a propaganda tool.  They want to bend free men to their will just as they have bent their captive populations.  Any information that is gleaned is purely icing on the cake, and emphatically not the point of the torture.  If history is any guide, even if a POW coughs up classified information, his captors will likely be sadistic enough to torture him just for laughs. 

And we will want to prosecute them and wring their necks for having done so.   But that task may be made more difficult if the enemy can point to torture being carried out by our own armed forces, sanctioned by our institutions of government.

Read the whole thing.  There's video, too.

(Via Reg of Mitchieville, who linked to this first.)

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

Conservative media site Libertas has a typically unfavourable review of Pixar's new movie, WALL•E.  Its crime: the director's Christian faith is apparently undetectable in the movie, or is detectable but is out-shouted by pandering to trendy green socialism.  Or something.

There is a danger, I think, I trying to understand the world through the prism of a particular political worldview.  The best example comes from the comments to the post, particularly this one by reader K:

From the “Christianity Today” interview:
The reason I made them look like big babies was because a NASA guy told me that they haven’t yet simulated gravity perfectly for long-term residency in space.

This is a very disingenuous explanation. The story is supposed to be 800 years in the future, farther in time than the Star Trek universe. Virtually all SciFi stories, and particularly movie SciFi stories posit some form of artificial gravity. So he had to ignor virtually all SF conventions to make a story decision which just happened to also, as he put it “. . . make some sort of mean-spirited comment on consumerism or today’s society.”

To paraphras P.J. O’Rourke, Liberals are always alternately denying God’s existence or hiding behind his appron strings. The Christianity Today interview is a textbook example of the latter.

I hardly know where to begin.

Anti-grav capability is, apparently, a staple of science fiction stories (put aside things like The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the moment).  If I understand this commenter correctly, one sci-fi story positing a lower level of technological development over a greater period of time than another, more famous sci-fi story constitutes some kind of creeping backdoor socialism.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I am pretty sure that the level and type of technological sophistication is at the discretion of the author, for the purposes of advancing the storyline.  Whether or not one fictional universe has greater or lesser technological sophistication has nothing to do with genre conventions, and everything to do with whether it moves your story along at the pace and tempo you desire.

To then go one further and evaluate the strength or commitment of the author's faith in God on the basis of a single work seems a little presumptuous, to say the least.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va), student of war

Rockefeller said he believes either Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton "would be good presidents for West Virginia."

...Rockefeller believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.

"What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

-- Paul J. Nyden, "Jay defends endorsement of Sen. Obama".  The Charleston Gazette, April 8th, 2008.

With respect, Senator Rockefeller, you are mistaken on several points.

First, then-Lieutenant Commander John McCain was shot down over Hanoi on October 26th, 1967.  While Paveway I LGBs had been in development since 1964, they were not used operationally in Vietnam until 1968.  Thus LCDR McCain had no opportunity to drop LGBs during his Vietnam service.

Second, A-4E tactics of the time would necessitate releasing non-precision ordnance a lot lower than 35,000 feet, if you wanted to have any hope of actually striking the primary target.  In non-permissive airspace that would be a difficult proposition regardless of altitude.  John McCain's own recollection of events places him in a diving attitude over Hanoi, passing 4,500 feet when the SAM took out his ride.

Third, one does not "drop" missiles.  Missiles have active propulsion, they are launched off the rail with their powerplant producing thrust.  See high-speed video clips here.  Bombs (guided or unguided) are dropped, with no propulsion beyond the speed of the launching platform, their own inertia, and gravity.

NEWS FLASH: Toronto extends municipal boundary to the Pacific!

The distance between the city of Toronto and the city of Vancouver is approximately 3,354.71 kilometres.

Unless you happen to work for the Canadian Press.  Then Toronto is a gigantic megalopolis that stretches all the way from Lake Ontario to the Burrard Inlet:

Oops.

Friday WTF: McCain endorsed by NVA jailer

Not an expat Vietnamese who fled for freedom and recants his former views.  But a prison guard who lives in Haiphong and talks about McCain as if they were pals.  Oh, and he denies American POWs were ever tortured, of course.

"If I were an American voter, I would vote for Mr. John McCain," Tran Trong Duyet said Friday, sitting in his living room in the northern city of Haiphong, surrounded by black-and-white photos of a much younger version of himself and former Vietnam War prisoners.

At the same time, he denies prisoners of war were tortured. Despite detailed PoW accounts and physical wounds, Duyet claims the presumed Republican presidential nominee made up beatings and solitary confinement in an attempt to win votes.

-- "McCain endorsed by his NVA jailer" Associated Press (via the Toronto Star), June 27th, 2008.

And I suppose all the other POWs who claimed they were beaten and tortured were hoping to gin up support for their eventual presidential campaigns, right?

This story is just plain weird.  I can't decide if this goofball is genuinely trying to help, or if he's trying to torpedo McCain by painting him as some kind of Manchurian Candidate collaborator to the GOP base.

Duyet, 75, grew testy during the interview when repeatedly questioned about torture and why so many other former PoWs say they too were mistreated. He preferred to talk about McCain as an old buddy.

His photo collection doesn't include one of him with PoW McCain, and he said they have not met on any of McCain's postwar visits to Vietnam. But Duyet said he often met the young navy pilot when off duty, that McCain would correct his English, and that he had a great sense of humour. And although they never saw eye-to-eye on the war that killed some 58,000 Americans and up to three million Vietnamese, he said they listened to each others' views.

"He's tough, has extreme political views and is very conservative," Duyet said. "He's very loyal to the U.S. military, to his beliefs and to his country. In all of our debates, he never admitted that the war was a mistake."

Well, "old buddy", John McCain didn't have much choice as to whether he listened to your views or not.  I strongly suspect he heard your views and told you to f*ck off and die.  And hearing his views, you decided to share a rebuttal with him.  Respctfully.  By way of the toe and heel of your boot.  I'm sure he had all the time in the world and could think of nothing better to do than to correct your English.  Like buddies.  It's not as if your welcoming committee crushed his shoulder and bayoneted him in the field, right?  Nah.

McCain's wife, Cindy, was in southern Vietnam last week doing charity work. She said if her husband wins the election the couple would delight in paying a presidential visit to the country.

If that happens, Duyet said, "I hope to meet with him again as two old friends. At that time, I would toast to congratulate him as U.S. president.

"We would talk about the future, and we would not talk about the past."

If McCain ever does meet you, I hope he has the good graces and foresight to kick you in the nads.  And then correct your English.  Since you're buddies and all.

Terrorists don't care about Canada?

Inspired by this post at Dust My Broom.

The kid bristles. "Speak for yourself. Canada is a safe country. We don't have terrorists here. He (Khawaja) lives in Ottawa. He didn't do anything to Ottawa, he didn't do anything to Canada, he's charged with being part of that terrorism thing in England, not here. When was there a terrorist attack in Canada? Why would a terrorist care about Canada? C'mon, get real."

-- Earl McRae, "No kidding about terrorism".  Edmonton Sun, June 25th, 2008.

Here are a few reasons terrorists care about Canada, culled from terrorist events on Canadian soil (or those that have resulted in Canadian fatalities) within my lifetime, plus or minus a decade:

• You travelled by train along a route that the Prime Minister was also due to travel. (FLQ bombs rail line, 1963)

• You are a civilian security officer at a federal building that happens to house a Canadian Forces recruiting centre. (FLQ, 1963)

• You happen to work at an establishment that terrorists think is easy to rob. (FLQ robs banks and businesses, 1963-64)

• You happen to own a small business and your ethnicity is objectionable to the terrorists. (FLQ bombs stores and businesses, 1964-66)

• You happen to work at a place the terrorists think is objectionable. (FLQ bombs Montreal Stock Exchange, 1969)

• You are the democratically elected mayor of a city. (FLQ bombs Jean Drapeau's house, Montreal, 1969)

• You are a police officer. (FLQ kills policeman, 1969)

• You are a minister in the cabinet of the provincial government (FLQ kills Pierre Laporte, 1970)

• You work at a foreign embassy, consulate or trade delegation the terrorists do not like. (Anti-Castro terrorists bomb Cuban embassy, consulate or trade delegation offices in 1966-67, 1969, 1971-72, 1974, 1976 and 1980; Canadian security guard killed by Armenian terrorists occupying Turkish embassy, Ottawa, 1985; Iraqi MEK terrorists assault Iranian embassy in Ottawa, 1992)

• You use hydroelectric power and the terrorists think your generating station is environmentally damaging (Squamish Five bomb BC Hydro station, 1982)

• You work for a company that produces electronics that could be used in missiles (Squamish five bomb Litton plant, Toronto, 1982)

• You have watched porn (Squamish Five bomb adult video stores, 1982)

• You are a passenger aboard an aircraft owned by a government the terrorists do not like. (Terrorists bomb Air India 182, 1985).

• You are visiting Canada as an official representing a government the terrorists do not like. (Assassination attempt on Malkiat Singh Sidhu, Vancouver, 1986; Turkish commercial counselor attacked and paralysed in his Ottawa apartment, 1982; Turkish military attache killed in his car by Armenian terrorists, Ottawa, 1982)

• You take the subway or train to work, and the Pope will visit your country soon. (Thomas Bernard Brigham bombs Central Station, Montreal, 1984)

• You publish a newspaper the terrorists do not like (Tara Singh Hayer shot and paralysed, 1988)

And that's not even including the most famous terrorist attack of this decade, on September 11, 2001.

The motivation can all be boiled down to three basic points, which are:

• You are doing something that somebody else doesn't like.

• If it's not you,  somebody else is doing something someone doesn't like, and you just happened to be in the area at the wrong time.  You're going to pay for it anyway, though.

• He or she is prepared to use violence to achieve their ends, isn't going to give you the courtesy of an argument or warning beforehand, because they don't think you deserve it.

And as history shows, no such people exist in Canada, nor would anyone want to injure Canadians unnecessarily.