Evel Knievel

Not too much on my mind tonight, but one can't help but note that we're losing even more links to the past ...

Robert "Evel" Knievel died today at the age of 69. True, he was a showman who showboated; but he did it with a lot of class unlike the show-offs of today.

It's two bags

I'll let other bloggers talk about Karlheinz Schreiber's testimony, or lack of it, today. Instead, an update to a post the other day about the garbage question in Hamilton.

Last night, city council voted to have a two bag garbage limit with a one bag limit phased in eventually. The catch is that the second bag must be clear so collectors can see that it's real garbage and not stuff that could otherwise be recycled or composted. The city also vowed to get more aggressive in forcing landlords to set up recycling programs in their buildings.

That's good. The goal should still be zero garbage though. I've been able to achieve it several times as have many other residents since composting began aggressively. There's no reason why we can't all do that. It'd set a good example for Toronto, which currently trucks its trash to Michigan and soon will be doing so just outside London right on a site disputed by First Nations.

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After hours trading in Canada, now

One downside to the antiquated securities regulation system in Canada where the provinces monitor stock and bond trading (and not the federal government) is that after hours trading is still prohibited in this country. This is wrong. Canada does not operate on a 9:30 to 4:00 Eastern time schedule exclusively. We are a 24/7 nation and we have investments worldwide; our currency has long been considered one of the "benchmark" currencies as well and is traded while most of us sleep and on Canadian and US holidays no matter what the CBC says.

It's simply not fair to force Western Canadians to get up in the wee hours of the morning to do their stock trades or tell them they have till the end of their lunch else they're out of luck. All Canadians should have the right to trade and on their time, not Bay Street's.

So I'd suggest permitting "after hours" trading, as a start for two hours before and after the TSX closes. That would be 7:30 am to 6:00 pm Eastern. Over time, this should be extended to all day and all night. Canadian exchanges are no longer floors but all electronic anyway; and it's time the regulators stopped living in the 1920s. This can be done without any consolidation of the securities commissions -- all they have to do is say yes.

By the way, yes, I do support a single regulator for Canada. It's time inside traders and corporate thieves are treated as criminals, not as traffic ticket offences; and only Criminal Code offences carry penalties of greater than two years.

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Schreiber stays for now

At almost the last possible minute, the Justice Department has decided not to fight Karlheinz Schreiber's extradition to Germany -- for now. Tomorrow, the businessman is going to testify before the House Ethics Committee under sub poena; rare in Canada since the last time such an instrument was used was back in 1913. (Normally, witnesses are invited and those called simply agree or decline to attend, not at all like the States where Congress has quasi-prosecutorial powers.)

I have no clue as to what Schreiber's going to say tomorrow. No one does, really. But the more we hear the more it becomes impossible to believe that he and Brian Mulroney were merely passing acquaintances. We know for a fact that Schreiber sent in a couple of planeloads of Mulroney supporters to that wild convention in Winnipeg that saw the beginning of the end of Joe Clark (remember Clark's assertion that 67% support wasn't enough?). We know the two guys were photographed together in 1991 and they appeared to be best of chums.

The real question many of us have is why did Schreiber wait so long? If top government officials took bribes, a claim made more than a decade ago, why did that man refuse to talk to investigative reporters about what he knew and when? Those documents, if they are accurate, would have been very useful to the Mounties back then.

So the first question I'd ask is not what he knows ... but why he obstructed justice so long. He's not a completely innocent figure either.

One can also only wonder about Clark. He could have easily beaten Turner, too -- and I think Canada would be a much saner country than the one that evolved during the Mulroney era.

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Don't hold your breath

Haven't we been down this road before?

In the last days of the Clinton presidency, Slick Willy thought he had an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Palestine would become a state at last, with full control over Gaza, 94% of the West Bank (also called Judea and Samaria) and custody if not outright ownership of most of the holy sites in Jerusalem. In return, Jews and Christians would have full access to sites not just in Jerusalem but also in Bethlehem (site of the Church of the Nativity) and Hebron (the Cave of the Patriarchs, burial place of Abraham and Sarah among others; and holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians).

By all accounts it was a sweetheart deal. Yasser Arafat, fool that he was, said no.

What sunk the agreement? Stubbornness from Fatah? To a large part, yes. But another factor, I believe, was the huge "Israel lobby" (i.e. Christians who subscribe to the Kingdom Now philosophy), who insist that there is no West Bank, no Gaza; in fact they believe Jordan and the western part of Iraq has no right to exist; they believe it's all Israel. Dominionists also have joined the Armstrongists who support the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. Many older than I have a clear memory of 1969 when a disciple of Herbert Armstrong tried to destroy Haram al-Sharif to try to speed up Jesus' return to the Earth.

Abu Mazen, the current President of Palestine, now admits Arafat's stubbornness cost his people dearly, and whatever state emerges, whenever it happens, will be way smaller than what was offered seven years ago. No shit.

So don't hold your breath with this week's talks at Navy. There isn't going to be a Palestinian state anytime soon, not until Mazen can get at least what was offered to Arafat, and that's a long ways away.

Obviously, nothing will ever please some Palestinians; let along Hagee, Roberts and Flurry. But here are some guidelines I'd go by:

1. The borders have to come along or very close to the 1967 ceasefire line. If Israel is to keep any settlement, there has to be a land swap in return; the ideal is to get close to contiguous areas or if that is not possible at least a corridor between Gaza and the West Bank.
2. Fair compensation for dispossessed Palestinians. Giving them their land back is impossible; that would mean the end of Israel. Other countries like Canada may have to contribute to a fund to finance this but it must be done.
3. Full access to holy sites for any who wish to go there, provided they come in peace.
4. Real security guarantees. Once the borders are finalized, Israel just can't execute an incursion when it wants -- that would be considered an invasion anywhere else.
5. The United States must stop subsidizing Israel. The foreign aid transfer is presently $3 billion. No other developed country provides aid to another developed state except in times of a natural disaster -- not even Canada.
6. Iran must recognize Israel. Period. If it will not, it must completely dismantle its nuclear weapons, in return for Israel doing the same (with international inspections to confirm this).
7. Israel must be permitted to nominate judges to the International Court of Justice. Its continued exclusion is complete nonsense. (After all, if the Vatican wanted a seat, it'd get one.)
8. The "Israel lobby" must once and for all pony up to provide housing for their Christian brothers and sisters who just happen to be Palestinians as well. Their current blindness on this key count already condemns them to damnation.

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The one bag limit

Some localities in Ontario, like Stratford and Wellington Centre (the mostly rural areas around Guelph), treat garbage the same way as electricity or water -- a public utility. You pay depending on how much you use. This is entirely fair. A single person living alone shouldn't have to subsidize a family that goes through a couple hundred diapers a week.

Hamilton currently has a three bag limit -- it used to be six, until composting and recycling became mandatory last year. But the megacity is still nowhere near the 65% diversion target. So city staff is proposing, reasonably I believe, to bring it down to just one bag a week. And city councillors are hearing it from ratepayers, thinking Hamilton shouldn't join other cities' sensible programs because "we're special."

BS.

We're not. Just drive around town and one can count the number of dumps -- sorry, PCers, landfills -- on both hands. Among the most notorious are Upper Ottawa, Rennie (which had to be partially excavated to make way for the Red Hill Parkway and which has methane pipes coming out on both sides of the highway), and 86 Acre Park (at 10th East and Green Mountain) which was supposed to be a nature preserve but turned out to be a toxic waste dump all along.

Stratford has the right approach. When they started charging for tags -- $1.75 per bag -- ten years ago, the impact was immediate. Everyone in town, from the acting company on down to the street buskers, found ways to reduce and reuse and recycle. It's not that hard. And after a while, it became second nature -- like buckling up our seat belts when we go out for a drive.

I say Hamilton should do the same, and force both residences and apartment buildings to play by the same rules. There's no reason why the diversion rate should approach 100%. The longer we can keep the Glanbrook site open, the better for all of us in Hamilton.

As for that other alternative, incineration ... anyone remember SWARU? Sure, the Europeans have figured out a way to make it cleaner and produce electricity from it, but I actually like going to Confederation Park without having to smell burning garbage anymore.

UPDATE (8:37 PM, 0137 Tuesday GMT): s.b. pointed out Guelph doesn't have a pay per bag system but the surrounding areas do. Duly noted -- and I've updated this entry to reflect that.

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Aspire to what?

Stephen Harper knowing full well that John Howard was going down in flames this past weekend in the Australian elections, losing big time to Labour's Kevin Rudd, managed single-handed to torpedo this past week's Commonwealth summit. Rather than hard targets, the guy who long ago sold out his soul to Big Oil bullied the other 52 leaders into saying the Commonwealth would only seek to "aspire" to carbon dioxide reductions. With no clear definition as to what those targets should be.

No, I'm not happy the previous Liberal government didn't do more to get Canada to meet Kyoto. But for the Conservatives to just throw in the towel and not try to reduce pollution levels, even if they are way off, is disgusting.

He wants Canada to aspire to something? How about aspiring to eliminating child and elderly poverty in Canada. Cutting poverty in Africa and South Asia by half; primarily through disease prevention, sex education and micro credit. Declaring the high seas and Antarctica are strictly off limits to pirates and reckless exploration and Canada will join with other allies to enforce this principle.

Those are aspirational goals, realistic and achievable goals.

To aspire to cut pollution is only to say that the Conservatives support increased pollution. Because intensity only means cuts in pollutions per person, which is fine since the population is growing anyway.

We need real targets, with real consequences. Because there's no point in making the world a better place, if we can't breathe the air and drink the water.

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Happy (US) Thanksgiving

Blogging will be relatively light the next few days. To my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving.

And .... there was no magic bullet, there was a second shooter, and Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

My third secret assassination, if I had one

There's the old joke that every world leader gets three secret assassinations. If I was Prime Minister of Canada, here are the three people I'd want bumped.

1. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe.
2. Than Shwe, Burma.
3. King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia.

The first two, pretty obvious. The third, I held off on because I couldn't decide who should be the third; until this week's news that a rape victim has been sentenced to two hundred lashes.

The victim is whipped while the perpetrator gets off scott free? Forget the Al-Saud's human rights abuses up till now. This one is truly worse than all the rest put together.

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Mr. Rhodesia dead, Personal files stolen in UK

Ian Smith was one unreconstructable SOB. Like Hitler, he vowed his country's regime -- the illegal, pro-white "Republic of Rhodesia," named after the even more racist Cecil Rhodes (founder of the De Boers diamond dynasty and the Rhodes Scholarships), would last a thousand years. It lasted just two years longer than Nazi Germany, when a guerrilla leader named Robert Mugabe overthrew Smith and founded what we now know as Zimbabwe.

Smith was an awful man, but at least there was relative economic prosperity in his country when he ruled. We've all seen how the breadbasket of Africa turned into a basket case.

Smith died today in Cape Town, South Africa. He was 88. To paraphrase Mark Antony, we should bury him, not praise him.

The other story of note today should send shivers up the spines of most. The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted that two disks containing the personal information of 25 million Britons -- nearly half the population -- went missing while being transferred from one department to another, in the mail.

The MAIL?

Anyone here in Canada remember a few years back when there was a woman who bought a second-hand computer from the Manitoba government -- and it contained the names and addresses of everyone in the province on social assistance?

Truly, some countries would be better off if they were ruled by a Prime Minister who graduated from clown college and not schools like Upper Canada, Bishop Strachan or Eton.

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Underdogs face off in Grey Cup

I can't remember the first time we've had an all-Western Canadian football final. On Sunday, two underdogs -- the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers -- will meet in Grey Cup XCV. (That's 95, for those who can't read Roman numerals.)

Actually seeing two teams no one but a few took seriously at the start of the season makes me want to watch the game this Sunday; the first time in several years I've wanted to watch. Good luck to both teams.

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When public service actually mean something

The idea of patents and copyright is a relatively recent concept. While Charles II established the principle of registering books, it was actually Queen Anne I who gave us the modern idea of granting limited licenses to people for their creativity.

It's only fair and proper that if someone comes up with an invention they should reasonably profit from it -- the key word being reasonable. The same is true with novels, original journalism, plays and songs. But what if the concept or creation is so revolutionary, so important to public health or national security (and in some cases both) that the invention should rest in the public domain?

There are two major examples I can think of. The first is cell phones and Wi-Fi. Not many people realize that the code-hopping which underlies wireless technology today was co-invented by the actress Hedy Lamarr who was more than just a screen siren but also a brilliant mathematician; she and composer George Antheil submitted their patent application in June 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor; and received their patent in August 1942. They promptly signed over the rights to the patent to the US Government. It was so ahead of its time that the US military couldn't use it until the early 1960s (and the first civilian cell phone as we now know them wasn't available until 1984).

Lamarr actually volunteered to join a think-tank that was charged with coming up with inventions to win the war but was instead told (notwithstanding her genius) her celebrity status could help raise money for war bonds -- and she did pretty good in that department too, raising millions in the Hollywood community.

When Lamarr was finally recognized for her work in 1997, it was pointed out to her that had she and Antheil held onto the patent and taken it to its logical conclusion they could have made well over $2 billion (over $20 billion in the equivalent in the 90s). Lamarr said no. There was a war going on and the United States needed all the help it could get.

Think about that. Duty first, self second. Whatever happened to that concept?

Last night, I browsed through some of the bonus materials in the DVD of Sicko, the Michael Moore film. One of the interviews was with Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, and a policy analyst who is very critical of the drug industry and its knack for presenting "me too" drugs as "breakthrough" ones and thus being able to extend a patent on a drug by another twenty years (and thus, windfall profits too). She pointed out that most of the research on drugs is done not by Big Pharma but by the National Institutes of Health, one of the few functional agencies of the United States government.

She also noted Jonas Salk, the inventor of the injectable version of the polio vaccine. (Angell notes that she herself is a polio survivor.) Did he profit from a mostly middle class scourge? No. He made sure it was widely available. His attitude was, how could someone patent something that saved lives?

Contrast that with Albert Sabin, the Canadian who invented the competing vaccine, which is taken in oral form. He did make a huge profit out of it. But even then, he made sure that it was reasonably priced so Third World countries could afford it. True, both men competed against each other and probably even hated each other. But both men's shared civic mindedness made sure that polio is now so rare in the developed world that we don't even think about it -- and were it not for some African tribal leaders who think we're trying to poison them and their communities, as well as al-Qaeda, we actually could have abolished polio all together two years ago. (The target now is somewhere around 2015.) But note that Sabin got rich even though the vaccine was fairly priced.

Note also that even in countries with strict price regulation, Big Pharma thrives. One of the world's most prescribed anti-cholesterol drugs was invented and is manufactured in Dublin, Ireland. Why it then that the price for a thirty day supply in Canada is $13 US while in the States it is $169?

There was something poetic about what Marx and Engels wrote: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That's something I am actually in agreement with them on, in principle.

It's the practice -- both in capitalist and communist countries -- that's the problem. And it's something that's been lost even in the limited amounts that used to exist. As we take another look at our copyright and patent laws this is something we need to think about, seriously.

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Why did Bush trust Musharraf?

Many firm believers in democracy have been wondering for a long time why and how George W. Bush could have been suckered by a deceiving man such as Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan. Musharraf has never been a small-d democrat. Democracy and martial law are inherently antithetical to each other. Bush fell for the line, the NYT will report in tomorrow's Sunday edition.

Yet it should not be a surprise. Augusto Pinochet, Alfredo Strossner and Manuel Noriega were all installed by conservative US regimes who didn't distinguish between democratic socialism and communism. When Ngo Dinh Diem proved to be too inconvenient for John F. Kennedy, the CIA assassinated the former. And given the choice between Taliban style rule and "the alternative" one would naturally choose the devil one knows; especially when that devil has his fingers on the nuclear button. So of course, Bush would continue to support Musharraf even once he knew he had been had. He now wants the General to drop martial law and proceed with truly fair elections; but we all know it's not going to be totally fair.

But even if Musharraf keeps his promise this time (which he probably won't) and before we get too quick to thinking Benazir Bhutto is Pakistan's salvation and the key to capturing Osama Bin Laden, let's not forget that Bhutto had her hand in the cookie jar while she was Prime Minister. And despite her denials at the time about the country's nuclear intentions it's now clear that the country was well on the way to having a bomb before her ouster; it was just a question of when the country was going to do its first "test" detonation.

So why won't Bush do the morally right thing and cut Musharraf loose all together? As the article notes, look at how long he held onto Rumsfeld and Gonzales after even most Republicans wanted them out. I can hardly wait until a terrorist group actually seizes power in Pakistan and gets control of "The Button." It's really just a matter of time.

Then we'll see how Bush reacts to that.

During the civil rights struggle, many white people told the blacks, "Wait." Martin Luther King pointed out that really meant "never." Surely Bush should have learned that the word "wait" means exactly the same thing in a country with a military government. One doesn't need friends like that. Instead one must insist, democracy now -- or we'll cut you loose.

A world leader can be a true democrat without being a tool of the United States.

UPDATE (Sunday 8:49 am EST, 1339 GMT): I said the CIA assassinated Le Duc Tho. It was, of course, Ngo Dinh Diem. Le Duc Tho was the man who co-won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for the treaty that "ended" the war in Vietnam; then declined the prize since the war hadn't actually ended.

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Try plain English, surfer dude!

Earlier this month, a snowboarder named Garrett Lisi claimed he had come up with a so-called theory of everything, the missing link between relativity and quantum mechanics. There's just two problems. One, it's been widely criticized by some as being simply unproveable. Second, the math is so complicated that even most Mensa members couldn't understand it. Thus, it violates one of the premises made by Stephen Hawking nearly twenty years ago; that a Grand Unified Theory should be understandable by the masses just like Einstein's relativity theory.

Unlocking the secrets of the universe shouldn't be limited to a select few; it should be available to all. Lisi had better explain it in terms the rest of us understand or he will be a laughing stock.

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Welcome to Canada, we speak Taser!

Why am I not surprised that Stockwell "Flintstones was a Documentary" Day refuses to even rethink the circumstances under which it may be necessary to use the Taser?

Guess this "New" Government doesn't like even immigrants from the European Union. Would it have hurt just to find someone, anyone at YVR, who spoke Polish?

The Mounties more than just dropped the ball, they sullied the Red Serge. It's not just those at the top of the chain who embezzle pension money. Now it's the front line officers we're supposed to count on; the crème de la crème among all law enforcement agencies in the country. They didn't calm him down, they didn't try to ask what help he needed and they didn't perform CPR.

They've been watching too much American TV. I thought our police were better than that; and that if they used a Taser they would have done it as the last line of defence, not the first. I support the use of deadly force if and only if it's needed. This immigrant didn't even have a chance to contribute to this country.

Lesson for the world: Canadians speak Taser; and Canada is not a country worth immigrating to. As for trade -- any hopes of Canada entering even exploratory talks about free trade with the EU as a possible shield against increasing American trade belligerence against Canada are pretty much shot, as long as PMS and Co. are in power.

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