Thing #812764 that is better about Canada:

Canada’s Parliament votes to scrap two contentious anti-terrorism measures

TORONTO: Canada’s House of Commons voted Tuesday to end two anti-terror measures adopted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, one that allowed for preventive arrests and another that permitted forced testimony.

It was defeated 159-124 when all three opposition parties opposed it on Tuesday.

Opposition Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said the measures are an unnecessary infringement on civil liberties. Dion rejected conservative Tory charges that he is soft on terrorism.

“These two provisions especially have done nothing to fight against terrorism, have not been helpful and have continued to create some risk for civil liberties,” Dion said.

Note that this includes thing #412973: Multiple parties providing flexibility in political action without being tied to the master plan of one of two parties, and thing #120984: Legislators that identify with their constituents, which ties into thing #98521: Citizens that give a fuck about things like actual liberty and freedom and associated principles.

Compare to the U.S. congress’s action, which opted to keep its laws keeping us free by removing our freedoms.

Oh great. I can’t wait for the anti-viaduct crowd to add “It encourages crime!” to their repertoire.

Two people carjacked under viaduct

Two people were forced from their car at gunpoint late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning in downtown Seattle, the Seattle police reported.

The carjacking occurred around midnight in the 900 block of Alaskan Way, police spokesman Sean Whitcomb said.

What new Microsoft innovations are available in Windows Vista? Let’s take a few examples.

• Transparent windows
• Filesystem snapshots
• Directory path buttons
• 3-D window navigation
• Desktop sidebar (one, two, three, hell, even four)
• A breakup of Outlook into multiple applications
• Obvious improvements to minor tools
• A new card game!

Oh yeah, and IE7.

There’s been a lot lately I’ve felt was blog-worthy, but haven’t scraped up the minutes to post about. (Like the Paula Zahn atheist slamfests, or how US troops drive through Baghdad like Massholes on a bad day, or Seattle’s frustrating pissing match over a fricking state highway.)

Anyway, this is about Hillary Clinton. I usually don’t pay her much attention. She’s gone from mildly annoying Southern Belle poseur to mildly annoying Upstate NooYock posah. Neither of which have much currency with me.

But if she’s going to be the front runner of Dean’s Democrats, she needs to learn: giving the progressives the finger is what got Gore not elected president. (Ironically, Gore would doubtlessly do better today among progressives than he did seven years ago, no small thanks to Inconvenient Truth.)

From Blue Hampshire:

Sen. Clinton is famously refusing to say “I was wrong” or otherwise apologize for voting in favor of the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq. She says that, had we known then what we know now, she would have opposed it — and it wouldn’t have even come to a vote.

That’s just great. Basically, says Clinton, hindsight is 20/20. So what about the progressives who saw the travesty before it happened, and who consistently called bullshit on the WMD rumors, or the laughable Saddam-Osama ties (while our own historical US-Saddam ties made Saddam-Osama look like Jackson-Presley), or the completely and blatantly fraudulent yellow cake nonsense?

The point: If you’d wanted foresight, Hil, you’d have gotten it, if you weren’t such a deplorable establishment Democrat.

There’s no reason at all that the U.S. got in this mess. We had a Democratic majority in Congress at the time the resolution was passed. We didn’t lose that majority until three months later. The problem is, most of the Democrats, including line-toeing Clinton, failed to check and balance the executive.

In fact, Clinton’s own words, on her floor speech, were: “Now, I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt.“ (my bold) She then proceeded to lay out the administration’s case without a single crumb of disagreement. Her final argument was that we should only go ahead with the backing of a UN resolution — which George Bush I had advocated as well. She chides Bush Jr. for his anti-UN behavior, but ultimately, she votes for the war.

Now we all know what the progressives said from day one: there was no WMD, there was no Saddam-Osama collaboration, there was no yellow cake. Not only that, but also: the Iraqis will not fall in love with us, they will not give us free oil, and we will lose international respect. Frankly, I don’t know if anyone predicted the massive Sunni-Shiite civil war that our invasion opened the doors to, but I can’t say it’s all that surprising; though I’d have expected Iraqis to unite to expel the occupying foreigners.

Anyway. The establishment Democrats failed the progressives and in turn failed the country. They should apologize. Some have; Clinton won’t. She’s too damned proud.

Some argue that her position not to apologize is to avoid the damnable (and usually completely hypocritical) accusation of flip-flopping. Well, it’s really not about her changing her mind, but rather her admitting that she completely ignored the voices of her party’s ideological base and instead bit a big neocon hook. She can try to heap all the blame on Bush and play the “fool me once” line, but it’s hollow and obvious.

As it stands, I’m leaning Obama. Newbie or not, he’s untainted by this establishment Democrat blame-passing game. And in general, he’s not entirely full of shit.

I recently got a Joe’s Goals account. I’d seen Joe’s Goals when it went around the buzz a few months ago, but didn’t see a use for it. Now, I realize that there are some goals that I do want to take better care of tracking.

What’s also nice about Joe’s is that you can add “anti-goals” and track things you *don’t* want to do, to show yourself how often you do them. (See “Drive to work” above.) The interface is very Ajaxy, so it really is a matter of a few simple clicks to mark your daily achievements.

You get a point for each positive goal (minus one for each negative goal) which is tallied daily, and can be plotted on a 1-3 month chart. What’s more, you can “weigh” goals, giving them more points than others. With mine, I increase the weight on goals I don’t intend to do every day — for example, I don’t typically need to drive the recycles up to the transfer center more than once a week, so it gets a significantly higher weight.

If you can be honest with yourself, and have a desire to catalog your habits, this is an encouraging way to do it. Seeing the Joes Goals icon in my bookmarks will remind me either “hey, i need to mark down that I took my vitamin today”, or else “crap, I didn’t take my vitamin today”. Tomorrow you’ll be less willing to skimp on Joe, or on yourself.

McCain Shifts the Blame on Afghanistan

Notorious war hawk John McCain, who for some reason keeps coming up as an “acceptable” republican, even so much as being included in fantasy bi-party tickets, wants to blame the troubles in Afghanistan on Europe, for not committing enough support.

If that’s true, John, is Iraq also their fault?

Plus, as DailyKos points out,

…four months after the US began a war on Afghanistan, it began redeploying troops to prepare to invade Iraq.

Not only, that, but:

• Number of U.S. troops per 100 sq mi in Afghanistan: 27.6
• Number of U.S. troops per 100 sq mi in Iraq: 304.3

Seriously, when the U.S. isn’t committed to a war to find the person behind a U.S. terror attack, how can you expect Europe to be?

(Granted, if we took all our troops in Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, that number would only go up to 139.1, less than half our current density in Iraq. But that would also be a 5-fold improvement. And Afghanistan is largely rocky and mountainous, unlike the flat desert terrain of Iraq — it needs more coverage.)

Update: Nato asks how this compares to the populations of the two countries. Well:

• Afghanistan — Population - Density: 119 pp. sq. mi.
• Iraq — Population - Density: 171 pp. sq. mi.

Via NoGodBlog: Hearing about this made my blood boil. From About.com:

On the January 31 edition of Paula Zahn Now, the problems experienced by atheists in America were discussed. This segment began by exploring some of the discrimination, hatred, and bigotry atheists have faced.

The intro to the show was sympathetic: a Mississippi family who becomes ostracized and harassed in their community and workplace after complaining about the (illegal) bible-study and prayer time at their local school; another couple who are ostracized and later evicted shortly after coming out to a friend.

How does Zahn’s show follow up to this pretty clear-cut opening? By flipping completely. Of her panelists, a conservative Christian and Jew and moderate Christian — no atheists – the former two spend the entire time lobbying vitriol at athiests.

But before we get into that, a clip from a spokesperson for the ur-ecumenical First Things Journal, who plays a rather familiar-sounding tune:

We feel, to a certain extent, that atheists are very much on the attack. Part of the public persona and the public image of atheism is what’s presented by people suing to remove “In God We Trust” from the coins or God phrase in the pledge of allegiance. And when that militant atheism becomes kind of like the public image of atheism, I think that gives rise to a lot of discontent with atheism.

Them Aytheeists only got themselves to blame for how people treat them, apparently. If only they’d wear less atheistuous clothes and keep their minds closed together, they wouldn’t get what they get.

The “sit down and shut up” theme continues with Zahn’s panel.

The worst of it comes from Karen Hunter, a J-school prof at, surprisingly, a Manhattan state university. She advocates segregation for christians and atheists in greeting cards, and then begins to directly attack the victim.

“Maybe they need to get some atheist cards and get that whole ball rolling so more people can get involved with what they’re doing. I think they need to shut up and let people do what they do. I think they need to shut up about crying wolf all the time and saying that they’re being imposed upon.”

Maybe Hunter didn’t see the intro to her segment. Maybe she doesn’t think being kicked out of your community for your spiritual beliefs isn’t an imposition. Or maybe she plain just hates athiests.

“Believe or don’t believe what you want. Don’t impose upon my right to want to have prayer in schools, to want to say the pledge of allegiance, to want to honor my God. Don’t infringe upon that right.”

You hear this a lot out of anti-atheist bigots. By preventing triumphalists from forcing others into group prayer, or having to follow solely religious rules for solely religious reasons, they are taking away the rights of christians. Apparently, christians — and only christians — have the right to force others to do such things, and to have public services like schools and courts spread their religious beliefs. (Atheism, of course, has no corresponding right to receive such treatment.) Hunter’s wording is even more peculiar than the usual saw — she portrays the fight for a government and society that respects atheist views as one that infringes on her right to want. I’ve no idea how you infringe on a right to want, without psychic abilities.

Putting it in even worse perspective is conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel who, despite being openly Jewish, also feels that atheists should shut up, because despite her own religion, she freely accepts that America is a christian country. She would, never, I suppose, advocate for asking that a menorah be included in a winter holiday display, for example. Cause this is a christian country, not a Jewish country, despite herself being Jewish.

“…[Y]ou have these atheists selectively I believe attacking Christianity. …I really believe that they are the ones who are the intolerant ones against Christians. … They are on the attack. It’s obnoxious and they do need to shut up. … “

Schlussel actually manages to one-up Hunter by being doubly bigoted. As she argues, when you have too many athiests, you get a lot more — OMG — Muslims!

“Look where there are more atheists and where they’ve lost God, where the church is not that strong. Europe is becoming Islamist. It’s fast falling and intolerance is increasing.”

So, if you don’t want America becoming all “Islamist” like Europe, you should thank God that the athiests here are being kept down.

The third commentator actually tried to be sympathetic, from a populist égalité sort of way rather than a direct support of atheists. At least the guy acknowledged that atheists are discriminated against, especially in the South. But even he stereotyped atheists as “being on the attack”, and rejected Zahn’s statistic that atheists are more hated in American than the gays.

Austin Cline, the atheism/agnosticism coordinator at About.com, gives good coverage with a few choice points:

If three Christians were invited to comment on discrimination against Jews, would that be acceptable? If three white people were invited to comment on discrimination against blacks, and all three insisted that racism is dead, might that not legitimately be treated as a part of the problem itself? For all his otherwise good insight, Smith didn’t think to look around and ask why atheists were excluded from a discussion about atheism and whether that might itself by evidence for the truth of atheists’ complaints about being excluded in American society.

As I likewise said in a comment to CNN: If Martin Luther King were alive, and Zahn did a panel on her, she’d no doubt invite David Duke and Strom Thurmond.

The final punchline: After the Jan 31 episode sparked an outcry, Zahn’s show tonight (Feb 8) was to include a rebuttal segment, featuring renowned evolutionary scientist and rationalist Richard Dawkins. But unfortunately the day’s events preempted it: tonight’s show ended up being an obituary of Anna Nicole Smith instead.

Update via neonpablo: The Dawkins appearance is moved to Monday.

…but I mean it as an idiomatic expression.

By now you’ve heard about Boston’s singular reaction to a bunch of handmade lighted cartoon characters hung up all over town — by shutting down major transportation routes, pulling two undergrad freelance street artists/advertisers into jail and court, and then spent hours of rhetoric blaming Turner Broadcasting for what happened, in a very mature version of “Look what you made me do.” In the end, Turner shut Menino and Patrick up with a $2M lollipop, which is about 2.5 times what the Aqua Teen movie cost to make.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, particularly the nine other cities which, like Boston, had also had the ads up around their town for weeks, reactions were much more tepid. In Austin, for example, police simply went to — calmly — take them down, though many had already been removed, probably as cultural souvenirs. In Philadelphia, officials threatened to fine Turner for violating zoning codes, of all things.

But the absolute best response was from the cities on the West Coast. In San Francisco, an art gallery owner found one on one of his signs, and laughed. In Portland, the word used was yawned. And in Seattle, the official position of the King County police was: “they’re so obviously not suspicious.”

Regardless of such biting inaction from other major cities, plenty of people, especially Menino and Patrick, insist that what Boston did was completely proper and appropriate.

As a former Boston resident who still considers the place his historic home, I was disappointed to see this all unfold. What it comes down to is this: you know that Hell has completely frozen over when you find Massachusetts leaders in agreement with Fox News columnists.

Around the Internet, geeks and other netizens, of which Boston traditionally has a tremendous share of, had a literal field day. For example, the Boston Livejournal community was posting nearly nothing but rants, jokes, and memes about the event. For days. While the Internet at large knew nearly instantaneously that the Boston authorities had made a terrible error of modern cultural literacy, the Boston police and officials did not. Menino went so far as to accuse Internet users of being irresponsible in not telling them what they knew sooner.

For their part, the two guerilla marketers, Berdovsky and Stevens, saw the fiasco and circus for what it was — a joke — even in the courtroom being arraigned. Outside, the dreadlocked Berdovsky preempted the media circus outside, diving into a debate about hairstyle history, rejecting reporter’s hackneyed questions with “I’m sorry, that is not a hair question.”

It’s sort of creepy that a month ago, my current town was national news, and a week ago, my former town was national news. In both cases, for being idiots, one way or another.

Inconvenient Truth still isn’t above the water in Federal Way. While the school board made a very emotional and incredibly ironic speech two weeks ago, announcing the end of an outright ban, the movie’s showing in Federal Way schools is still hamstrung by the onerously selective and dubiously interpreted application of Policy 2331P, that the movie must be presented alongside materials giving opposing views — a remedy which is actually not at all mentioned in the district policy.

Teacher Kay Walls, whose intention to show the movie in a 7th grade science class containing the Hardison’s daughter (well one of them) sparked the controversy, expressed frustration at that same meeting that she couldn’t find any suitable materials. In other words, she still couldn’t show the film. I don’t know whether she has yet been successful.

Even if she did, this is still a problem. It is no less damaging to science education than the Kansas state board’s decision a few years back to label evolution as “controversial” and require it to be disclaimed, and to have alternate viewpoints presented alongside it. In the subsequent state elections, the majority of those who voted this way lost their positions, and it was overturned.

Meanwhile, England, Norway, and Sweden are all getting An Inconvenient Truth for their schools. And in Washington, a few hours over the Cascades in far-from-liberal Eastern Washington, a science club’s showing of the movie is fully cleared after administrators take the expedited initiative to watch the movie themselves.

For more info, see my “Heating up in Federal Way” page for a catalog of major news and blog articles related to the story.

Between 1961 and 1989, the communist and isolationist German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, barricaded their territory from Western lands both along the East/West German border as well as surrounding the city of West Berlin (which was an enclave within the GDR).

This barricade, which became known as the Berlin Wall, eventually consisted of two actual concrete walls, a series of metal fences, and a central 100-yard void known as the “death strip” between the two walls. The purpose of all this was to allow plenty of time for border guards to see, and shoot, anyone who tried to cross it. Which, incidentally, only happened in one direction.

Over 200 were killed attempting it. Many who failed to cross it but lived were sent to prison camps. A few thousand made it across; many through tunnels.

I can’t help but think of the Wall when I see images like this (from the LA Times):

This is an armed border guard, gun at the ready, following down such a tunnel under the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexicans seeking to flee Mexico for the U.S. have built elaborate tunnels under the border to sneak through. Often they terminate in people’s houses. The longest such one was half a mile long.

The U.S. Border Fence is a project to build an actual barrier between the U.S. and Mexico, to prevent people from crossing illegally. Some expect that there will be an increase in underground tunnels, which are notoriously hard for the Border Patrol to handle and eliminate, once that fence is constructed.

Compare to the tunnels built under the Berlin Wall. Early on in the Wall’s construction, escape was possible by jumping out of windows of buildings close to it. Eventually this was solved over the decades by making the wall bigger, and eventually by razing houses near the Wall in order to build the second wall and the 100-yard separating “death strip”.

One main difference between the Wall and the Fence is that the Wall was made (though not ostensibly) by East Germany to keep East Germans from leaving, whereas the Fence is made by Americans to keep Mexicans from entering.

I also can’t help think of the Minuteman Project, the vigilante border patrol with the nationalist bent, the white power ties, and the horribly misappropriated name. These people hate Mexican border-crossers so much that they go out to the border on their own, and watch for cross attempts. They insist that all they do is report crossing attempts to the real authorities, but despite this, they also insist on being armed to do so. Today they focus more on advocacy. They are of course in favor of the border fence.

There is clearly a strong desire among many Mexicans to leave their country and enter America for whatever reason. As the LA Times reports:

The migrants, they say, are willing to brave anything to get through. Every day, they see the evidence of the risks the illegal immigrants take: the scattered clothing, letters and family pictures left behind by bandits rummaging through migrants’ stolen backpacks; the prayer books and offerings left behind by illegal immigrants in a tunnel nook fashioned into a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

U.S. agents often can’t go into the Morley Tunnel because overpowering ammonia and chlorine smells leave them nauseated and dizzy. On the Mexican side, some stretches of the tunnel are so low that Grupo Beta agents ride their all-terrain vehicles lying on their stomachs.

It seems that one thing is certain: The Border Fence isn’t going to keep determined immigrants out. Even with the help of the Minutemen, the border can’t be completely patrolled and monitored. Today, the Border Fence; tomorrow, the Border Wall with 100-yard spotting strip, tripwires, sunken concrete barriers, periodic hammering to collapse tunnels, and a shoot-on-sight order, with rewards for successful kills?