Panglossian Notes

Top 10 book dumps in the UK

Some North American newspapers run weekly lists of how books are selling. One of the most referenced is the New York Times best seller list. This list can even, it seems, have an effect on book sales:

"According to the [Stanford] Business School’s Alan Sorensen, an assistant professor of strategic management who has studied the effect of best-seller lists on sales of hardcover fiction, the majority of book buyers seem to use the Times’ list as a signal of what’s worth reading. Relatively unknown writers get the biggest benefit, while for perennial best-selling authors such as Danielle Steel and John Grisham, being on the list makes virtually no difference in sales."

Stanford Business
February 2005

People like to make sure they read or maybe just own, for awhile, what others do? It really is a question.

Hey, but Travelodge, in the UK, has started to put together one of my new favourite book lists - "most dumped book".

Last year they released the top 20 dumps but this year they've limited the list to the top 10.

For comparison purposes at the beginning of this, I hope, significant new reader's aid, I've put the 2 annual lists, I know of so far, together for easy viewing.

The first thing that hits me, analyst that I am and I know other things will hit other people, when I look at the table, is that Jordan [aka Katie Price] has maintained her high, 3rd place rating as the most popular authoress dumped in Travelodge's digs and with the same bloody book, for 2 years in a row.

Wow.

Gad zooks?

Now, you say, you'd like to read Katie's tome, but haven't seen it on any of the remainder tables at the brick and mortar stores of Chapters, Barnes & Nobles, etc., etc., etc. then click over to John Crace's digested version and enjoy a lampooned flavour of it.

Myself I like Jordan, I also like Boris Johnson so maybe there is no hope for me.

However, I'm thinking that anyone who can run in a UK general election [Katie Price], on a platform of free breast implants for all, more nude beaches [in Britain burrrrrr, but, after global warming kicks in, hey who's to say. A growth market maybe!] and a ban on parking tickets may have some potential.

In the UK press, the Alistair Campbell hernia inducing brick, The Blair Years, is, this year getting some attention for being a popular dump, now here, and then here.

Again, so you don't have to read it, even if you possess it, here's a digested version from John Crace.

Technorati Tags: Lists, Literature, War criminals???, Writers

Controlling the media in the North - a clash of cultures.

Hunters and Trappers Organizations (HTO) in Nunavut have quite a bit of power when it comes to how the Inuit, and qallunaat (kabloona), interact with wildlife. In effect, HTOs oversee the harvesting of most country food in local communities.

It seems now they can also oversee other things.

The Arctic Bay HTO banned tourists from filming at the floe edge earlier this year. The floe edge is where the ice which is attached to the land meets the open sea. In the spring it's the place harvesting of marine mammals- narwals, belugas, walruses, some seals - usually takes place thus a place to observe the local Inuit in a traditional activity - a sort of tourist attraction if you're not use to it.

"... the film ban [was imposed] in May, [by the HTO] after seeing a draft article by a photojournalist who had spent some time on the floe edge photographing hunters during the annual spring narwhal hunt.

Members of the organization say the article, which was prepared for National Geographic magazine, cast Inuit in a negative light because it included quotations from hunters talking about a number of narwhal being shot but not retrieved."

CBC North
August 27, 2007

The Inuit maybe getting a bit touchy because their traditional way of living could be characterized as cruel, they kill for food, or wasteful, sometimes what they kill can't be found in the sea. Neither is true, of course. Their way of living isn't cruel nor wasteful but they do know it can look both at times to some qullunaats. Bans on the use or importing of seal skins, as a result of animal rights and anti-seal hunting groups, in Europe have helped make sure Inuit know, or think, they must be on guard about how others characterize them.

Unfortunately they sometimes may go overboard in response to what they perceive as an insult. Thus the strange Arctic Bay film ban to, in effect stop tourist from watching the few Inuit in that small community from hunting in the Spring. Tourist will, of course, simply go to another community, after all one narwal hunt is the same as another.

As everyone gets ready to head North to stake out claims and global warming increasingly changes the traditional Arctic land and draws in more tourists, wanting to get a first and last peak at the barrens, the poor Inuit are liable to get trampled under foot. What they now take for granted, in places like Arctic Bay which I think is not as culturally strong as say Igloolik maybe lost forever.

I suspect local newspapers may not soon be able to print pictures like this one:

Technorati Tags: Arctic, Inuit, Nunavut

The Iraq war in a nutshell, a swindle?

On the heels of Mr. Gonzales's resignation this morning, down in the great state of Texas, I needed to clear my grey matter for the contortions and pretzelled verbal contrivances to come from the Whitehouse and the US Senate as they shadow box through an advise and consent process looking for a Fredo replacement. So I turned to this article in The Rolling Stone and I haven't stopped laughing gasping yet.

The story describes contractor corruption, now, I think, standardly expected as a part the Bush 43 monarchy and definitely since the reign entered the reconstruction phase of the Iraq fiasco. But it actually may not be corruption just, unfortunately, business-as-usual in "something has gone wrong US".

The article is a bit reminiscent of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City", a taste of which can be had here, but only just. It opens with the tale of how Earnest O. Robbins finally succeeds in achieving the american dream - by screwing someone or something big:

How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.

You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be" is your deadpan answer.

The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.

Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company's compensation. Touchy subject -- you've got a "cost-plus" contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you've got to cut him off. "So you won't voluntarily look at this," Van Hollen is mumbling, "and say, given what has happened in this project . . . "

"No, sir, I will not," you snap.

". . . 'We will return the profits.' . . ."

"No, sir, I will not," you repeat.

Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president's administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now assessed at $929,974, and you're sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.

Just a samplier, the rest of the article is an equally entertaining gonzo rant.

Technorati Tags: Accountability, Iraq

Weasely US/French politicians? Who could have predict?

Since the new crap excuses for US failure in Iraq started coming out of D.C. and of all places Paris, you just had to suspect that the great politician brains of the new barbecue alliance between the US-France, would start spouting off.

Seems all the difficulties over in that place are the fault of the current Prime Minister of Iraq, Nuri al Maliki. The poor guy is just not getting the job done to the US politicians', and it seems the Frenchy's, satisfaction. Heavens he maybe be sectarian and favour Shiites and Kurds over the Sunnis. Wow, eh, that's an earth orbit stopper.

So, of course, some politicians from 2 Western so-called democracies, along with the CIA's and maybe every other intelligence agency in the Western world's beloved buddy, Iyad Allawi, are telling Iraqis to get rid of him and find someone else.

Iyad Allawi wants to be the someone else, and seems to have a lot of US money to throw around lobbying for the position, least in D.C.

You remember him he was the US's hand picked interim Prime Minister awhile back.

Remember before any elections in Iraq. That's him, yes! The candidate who didn't get enough votes from his fellow citizens to win the position of washroom cleaner in the Green Zone. You do know him right Saddem Hussein's old buddy, before they fell out over something. Yes also the guy that approved the US's attacking both Najaf and Falluja.

The Gulf Daily News had one summary:

In an interview with the US magazine Newsweek, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called for Maliki to be replaced and said the US government had utterly failed to understand the country's ancient rivalries.

"I just had (US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) on the phone 10 or 15 minutes ago, and I told her, 'Listen, he's got to be replaced," Kouchner.

That came after two Democratic US senators, Carl Levin and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, urged Iraqi lawmakers to choose someone else to lead the ruling coalition and seek faster national reconciliation.

....

Former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi also assailed current leader Nuri Al Maliki as leading a sectarian government and called on the US to re-examine its pro-Maliki stance in Iraq.

It's interesting that the new French Foreign Minister is lecturing the US on its lack of knowledge regarding the the rival factions in Iraq. Do you think he might have been using code to suggested what Josh Marshall at TPM has now written -see my highlighted sentence:

"Finally, unexpectedly, out of the blue even, we appear to have arrived at a grand cross-party consensus on Iraq: it's Nuri al Maliki's fault and he should be fired. Faced with the tough task of biting the bullet one way or another, pols across the partisan divide seem to have arrived at this as the one position they can get behind and push on the Sunday shows.

Which, of course, puts into a rather sharp relief the simple but less and less often spoken fact that Iraq is a country under foreign military occupation.

But watching the Sunday shows today -- both in what would-be-premier Allawi said as well as the comments of various US political leaders -- you see what's behind the dump Maliki movement: a crystallizing belief that democracy just hasn't panned out in Iraq and that it's time to install a strongman government that can get the country in its grip and calm things down. In Allawi's interview with Wolf Blitzer he basically make this point pretty close to explicitly.

The Allawi boomlet is the other shoe dropping on America's democratizing mission in Iraq."

Marshall, I think, is a bit too polite. It's likely not just a strong man, it's a new Saddam Hussein the US administration wants.

Holy smokes, could the befuddled Bush political operatives have worked out some bipartisan consensus on Iraq or is there just something magic for both US political parties in getting another non-sectarian beast in Bagdad to brutalize what's left of the population - i.e. restore order.

Technorati Tags: Allies, Iraq, Politicians, USA, wow

Ottawa's mayor has an interesting chit-chat with Bush

I've waited all day hoping that one strain or other of Canada's MSM might have picked up the same interesting tidbit I heard on the Ottawa CBC radio morning program on the 6:30 or 7:30 local news.

Nothing, though, as I've said before, it could be my Google search technics and something is out there in the ether but I'm not skilled enough to capture it, yet.

There is a story on the local CBC Ottawa site about the Montebello mayor thanking everyone for not making a mess of his place. It is a nice little town and I do like the Chateau so that's good.

Why would I wait for MSM coverage?

To provide collaboration for what I remember was reported verbally, of course. It was early!

So, what was reported?

Ottawa's mayor Larry O'Brien was at the airport to wave good-bye to George the POTUS yesterday as he, George, left our nice city following the meeting of the 3 Amigos.

Larry, its seems, got a few brief quality moments with Bush on the tarmac, likely arrange by his good buddy John Baird through Harper.

Larry told the CBC that he was a man of faith similar to Bush so they had something in common and I guess they chit-chatted about this quickly - maybe they exchanged their beddie bye greetings to the "GREAT ONE" for protecting them after a hard day of dealing with politics and politicians - Larry didn't say precisely.

What Larry did share with the reporter was that:

he admires Bush, and

Bush had told him "he rejoices at the end of each day".

The fact that Larry O'Brien admires Bush, I guess, isn't much news. Larry is really Ottawa's problem, increasingly becoming an embarrassment, that I hope we deal with next municipal election time.

But the comment that George W. "rejoices" each night before he retires at 9:00 PM has to be news, I think?

I wonder if Lincoln, FDR, Truman, gads, Bush's hero, Winston Churchill, were euphoric as they drifted off to nodsville in the middle of the crises in their terms in office.

Boy, there is a story here or has everyone simply become completely blasé about the Bush fiascos.

Just for reference, if some may not know what rejoice means, a few substitutes for the word, lifted from my thesaurus:

1 be happy, be pleased, be glad, be delighted, be elated, be ecstatic, be euphoric, be overjoyed, be as pleased as punch, be jubilant, be in raptures, be beside oneself with joy, be delirious, be thrilled, be on cloud nine, be in seventh heaven; celebrate, make merry; informal be over the moon, be on top of the world;
.

2 take delight in, find/take pleasure in, feel satisfaction in, find joy in, enjoy, revel in, glory in, delight in, relish, savor.

Our Larry, the mayor, is one of the dimmer mayoral light bulbs, we have kicking around up here in the North part of North America, and, without his handlers, this guy actually had some before they all quit, he is usually honest - serious man of faith an all, you know.

So I believe Larry, when he says that George W. told him, he "is thrilled and on cloud nine" as he heads off to beddie bye each evening.

The question really is WHY?

Technorati Tags: CBC, Confused, Ottawa, Politicians, POTUS aka the Decider

In honour [honor] of the George W. Bush visit to Montebello.

George W. Bush, Harper and the other guy from North America will be at the biggest log-cabin in the world today and tomorrow, in Montebello, just down the Ottawa River from the city of Ottawa.

Poor Bush, last week, lost his brain when Karl Rove headed off to talk up the "Bush legacy", and his part in it, with US TV gossip talk shows current analysis news programs. All, of course, a prelude to the coming hernia inducing sized book which is expected in a few short months - any bets on the timing of the release date: will it be folded into the final days of the 2008 clusterf#$k to the Whitehouse or not - telling the real story about the glorious reign of Georgie boy.

But to honour Bush and more so Rove really, below, courtesy of Harper's February 2000, is a list of some of the domain names Karl made sure he had control of back in 2000 to prevent others from establishing mock websites:

georgewbushsucks.com
georgewbushsucks.net
georgewbushbites.net
georgebushsucks.org
bushsucks.com
georgebushsux.com
georgebushsux.net
georgebushsux.org
bushsux.com
georgebushbites.com
georgebushbites.net
georgebushbites.org
bushbites.net
bushbites.org
georgewbushblows.com
georgewbushblows.net
georgebushblows.org
bushblows.com
bushblows.org

Karl, it seems was always thinking and may have been preemptively attempting to defend the dignity of George W. Bush or maybe even the office/position of the POTUS.

Technorati Tags: Canada, Mexico, Politics, POTUS aka the Decider, USA

Are the real "very serious people" (VSP) grunts in Iraq?

The New York Times contained an op-ed this morning, by 7 grunts of the 82nd Airborne, which is the most concise and clear analysis of the Iraqi disaster I think I've read to date.

I've been waiting most of the day to see what the whole ideological spectrum of the blogosphere will have to say about it. Little reaction, yet. [Maybe everyone thinks it is a hoax or tainted because of some minor technical detail and are worried about commenting, just yet.]

The grunts' assessment likely paints a picture that the official higher ranking evaluation, coming in September, will only cover in the usual bumphinator style - i.e. the truth, [maybe], but buried deep in bullshit platitudes, chicken shit slogans, fake sentimentality, jingoistic bravado and bureaucratic obfuscation.

It is always hard to defend against an assault of bumph. Only after the waves of awful have passed and the air clears do, usually alert, minds start to work property, if you are not a Nobel laureate. Most minds simply implode and boxcar loads of Kleenex are needed to mop up the drool from slack mouthed very serious elected people (VSEP).

My favourite incident of intelligent individuals being bumphed, almost to death, was during the Rogers Challenger disaster inquiry

One of the commission's best-known members was theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. His style of investigating with his own direct methods rather than following the commission schedule put him at odds with Rogers, who once commented, "Feynman is becoming a real pain." During a televised hearing, Feynman famously demonstrated how the O-rings became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures by immersing a sample of the material in a glass of ice water.

Wikipedia

Feynman had, of course, discovered what caused the NASA disaster and demonstrated it clearly for all intelligent, none intelligent, sophisticated, none sophisticate, leftist, rightist, sane and crazy people to see and understand. After his demonstration the bumph from NASA and contractors was understood clearly for what it was and the jig was up.

If the US Senate reads what the grunts wrote in the NYTs op-ed today maybe they will be ready to cut through the wave, after wave of bumph that will come with the general staff - Petraeus and gang et al - and the September very serious peoples report on the "surge"

Technorati Tags: Iraq, New York Times, Politicians

Mr. Fish always gets it. Hey Putin nice thing's, eh.

"This is Steven Harper's war" - Michael Valpy talks to Michael Byers

This morning's Globe and Mail, in the Focus section of the print edition and here, in the web version, has a question and answer exchange between Michael Valpy, the questioner, and Michael Byers, the answerer, on the matter of Canadian foreign policy.

Mr. Valpy, for those that don't know is a senior staff writer at the G&M, whose most recent claim to fame, so-to-speak, was writing an article at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Vimy Ridge battle. Some people weren't too happy about him having a look at how that WWI engagement has become a Canadian myth. I wasn't one of them.

Michael Byers is, a well-respected scholar in the law of armed conflict and international law field who, now, teaches at the University of British Columbia where he holds a Canada research chair in global politics and international law. He frequently writes articles for the London Review of Books on international affairs and law and, now, he's home, for The Tyee. The Tyee articles more specifically relate to policy matters in Canada, for example this one which, I think, gives the most clear and concise explanation of the issues about our claim to sovereignty over the Northwest Passage.

The to and fro in the Globe this morning is, to use the customary blogger's term, well worth reading, though I might be more imperative, it should be required reading for the thinking Canadian.

They first set aside what political observers think here, but may not write about, if in the MSM, bloggers are less reticent, but we know most of use, bloggers, can be more honest and less "objective" in the new sense of that word.

MICHAEL VALPY (MV): Let's start with your interpretation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cabinet moves.

MICHAEL BYERS (MB): The minister of both foreign affairs and defence is Mr. Harper and I think that's widely recognized, and as a result I think one needs to look at this as a political move intended to do what any minority government seeks to do, which is to prepare for the next election. There's nothing cynical about that.

A couple of things have been accomplished here. We now have two of the better communicators in this government taking the two files that are most associated with this government's most prominent and problematic policy, which is the counter-insurgency mission in Kandahar.

It's noteworthy that they're both thoroughly capable in French, the Van Doos are in Kandahar right now, and certainly through the fall and into the new year the issue of how this war plays in Quebec will be central to determining Mr. Harper's future.

Great, clear, crisp statement of the Harper cabinet shuffle, period.

MV: We're talking about domestic communication and not external communication?.

MB: This comes back to my point that this is Stephen Harper's war [This seems to be a jump in the published piece, I think we may not be seeing all the chitchat between MV & MB, maybe MB made his point about Harper at the UBC faculty club over lunch with MV but not a concern, I think]. It's probably a result of his centralized approach to government, but it's also a reflection of trends that are common in other Western democracies. Tony Blair centralized foreign and defence policy in 10 Downing Street to an enormous degree, and one of the things about Gordon Brown is that he's given some of those powers back to Parliament. But the seating of the big foreign-policy and defence issues in a sort of West Wing- type leader's office is something that's been seen elsewhere and it's certainly been seen in Ottawa over the course of the last couple of decades.

In both cases, we're talking about domestic and not external communication?

They have a major problem on their hands in that somewhere around 50 per cent of Canadians are opposed to their central policy - and it's higher than that in Quebec. And they've made it very difficult for themselves to back down on that policy.

So, I do think that this is mostly domestic. I think it's mostly electoral politics, and that actually is a crying shame, for the simple reason that young Canadian men and women are dying, and it's less serious to play politics with money but it's unfortunate and irresponsible to play politics with lives.

As I said I think the question and answer article should be read in its entirety so I'm jumping down a few questions past considering Darfur to kept the this post short.

MV: What is the debate that we have to have on Afghanistan?

MB: On whether the mission is succeeding. And realistically on what are the prospects for success and how do we measure success? And is it worth the cost inclusive of Canadian soldiers' lives?

I've been pushing this point for a year, that you don't need to have any particular ideological or moral perspective to realize that any kind of decision like this should be analyzed in cost-benefit terms, and we haven't done that, largely because it's become so mixed up with domestic politics.

MV: What would a cost-benefit equation look like - achieving Y is worth X number of Canadian lives?

MB: I don't want to put a price tag on Canadian soldiers' lives. But I do want to know if 22 soldiers who died in the past six months actually died in a mission that is accomplishing something. And if various indications are that the mission is failing rather than succeeding, then we do need to be questioning if we're being responsible to our soldiers and their families. I am proud of our soldiers because they're doing their damnedest, but the decision as to whether they should be there is not their decision, and it's not a decision that should be a political partisan electoral decision.

MV: What should it be?

MB: It should be based on a clear-eyed assessment by ministers who are exercising their responsibility as decision-makers acting for the national interest. And I know it's very difficult - in a minority-government situation where a war has taken on these political overtones - to step back and to try to be objective.

A spade is after all a spade, right? whether you are a Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, Bloc, Green or Rhino.

MV: You write that our mission in Afghanistan could, over time, lead to the development of a Canadian Armed Forces that is focussed almost entirely - in its training, ethos and equipment - on aggressive missions conducted in concert with the U.S. What's the evidence of that happening, and why is that not a good idea?

MB: The evidence is widely manifest. One saw it in [Chief of Staff Gen. Rick] Hillier's comments about fighting "scumbags and murderers." One saw it in terms of the reluctance to deal with international law on detainees comparable to our European allies. We essentially embraced the American approach starting with Day One, certainly in terms of our embracing the search-and-destroy component.

Part of the reason the Dutch have not lost nearly as many soldiers is that they rejected that particular approach even though they're in the south. They're working on stabilizing and winning hearts and minds closer to their bases.

But the Canadian military has embraced the tough-guy approach. You ramp up the aggressive nature of your equipment, your rules of engagement, your choice of mission, your rhetoric - and then, of course, it becomes more dangerous, and that in turn justifies ramping up some more, and the end result, I fear, is we wind up with a mini-version of the U.S. Marine Corps.

And quite frankly, the world does not need another U.S. Marine Corps. It needs soldiers who can do things the Americans can't or won't do. And that comes back to the remarkably successful specialization we had in military diplomacy - peacekeeping. And, as I say in my book, peacekeeping is not for wimps.

But purportedly our military never liked that role.

Certainly the current crop of generals didn't ... and I think partly their dislike of that role is that it made it more difficult to argue for budget increases and new and better equipment [because] for some governments, peacekeeping was a way of having a military on the cheap.

I don't think that attitude was correct. I'm a supporter of substantial military spending. You need strategic aircraft, you need good helicopters, you need good armoured personnel carriers, and you need a good navy that can support peacekeeping operations.

And, to finish off, Lament for a Nation seems to have had an effect after all.

MV: A last question on foreign policy. You say we continue to be an influential middle power - whatever that means - but whereas we once punched above our weight, we now pull our punches. Why is that?

MB: There are a number of reasons, but I think a lot of Canadians, particularly my generation, bought into [philosopher] George Grant's thesis that Canada as an independent country has effectively ceased to exist. That has had a quite pervasive effect on how Canadians think about Canada's place in the world. And so, essentially, on the really big issues, we've been content to drift along on the slipstream of the United States.

Whatever, eh. I've read most of MBs articles, I think, and now I've gone over to the Chapters on Rideau Street, here in Ottawa, ON, CA., and picked up a copy of "Intent for a Nation: What Is Canada For, a Relentlessly Optimistic Manifesto for Canada's Role in the World", I may have to arm-wrestle my son to see who will read if first.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, Arctic, Canada, foreign policy, Globe and Mail

Thank Forseti, finally an apology from the bloody Norseman

What the Irish have been waiting all these years. Now, as a group, wherever we are, we will finally be able to move forward. Hey where's the compensation, eh?

Danes say sorry for Viking raids on Ireland

More than 1,200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants. Yesterday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.

The Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to participate in celebrations marking the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted. "In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered on the dockside at the river Liffey. "But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven."

Owen Bowcott
Ireland correspondent
The Guardian
August 16, 2007

Technorati Tags: Justice, The Guardian