Adrift

Sailing school for little kids is really just floating-aimlessly school, punctuated by screaming for help because the waves are pushing them towards rocks. At best, they are getting good preparation for any future military experiences they may have where they spend their time being bored with intermittent bouts of terror.

Conspiracy Theory 4 - Winding down

The scientists ruling our technocracy would have you believe that the leap second that took place at the end of June was perfectly normal, simply the result of everyday adjustments of time to keep clocks in sync with the changing rotation of the Earth. But, sheeple, did you ever stop to ask yourself why that extra second was necessary? Why, that is to say, the Earth is slowing down?

FACT: The second is a standardized unit of measurement of time that was defined in 1960 as 1/86,400 of an average day. In other words, there should be 86,400 seconds in the average day, by definition. FACT: Since the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard was established in 1961, negative leap seconds have never been needed, only extra ones. How come?

Clearly, something is sucking energy out of the system that spins the Earth on its axis. Is it really a coincidence that since the introduction of industrial wind turbines to the troposphere in 1979, the technocrats managing UTC have been forced to slyly add sixteen leap seconds. The big-city bureaucrats in capitals around the world that are responsible for the UTC have done their best to hide the additional seconds by throwing them in at midnight when people are asleep and on December 31 when they are overlooked amidst the New Year's revelry.

Don't you think it is odd that our society has been encouraged in so many ways to lose itself in New Year's Eve celebrations since 1979 when wind turbines first started to put the brakes on humankind's fragile spaceship? I implore all of you not to celebrate on New Year's when it is so blatantly a contrived shemozzle perpetrated to distract us from what is really going on.

It is plain that industrial wind turbines are dooming us all to a hellish endgame that is only generations away. At the rate leap seconds are being added, models suggest that in 80-90 years (long before the heat death of the universe), humans and the rest of Earth's denizens will be forced to contemplate a nightmare reality where the world has stopped spinning.

When the Earth grinds to a halt, there will be decimating wars fought over the few lands that are stuck on the edge between day and night. If we are fortunate, most of these habitable zones won't end up being the ocean. Those of us caught on the dark side of the Earth will rapidly perish from a lack of flora and vitamin D while those caught flush in the sun's rays will literally fry. Meanwhile, those self-satisfied bureaucrats at the National Science Center in Fort Gordon, Georgia will be wantonly expending all the wind energy they've saved up in their fortress like Scrooge McDuck taking one last dive into his silo of gold coins before the nuclear holocaust. Well guess what, boys? You can't take it with you! But that will be little solace to our progeny as they say goodbye one last time to the entirety of everything on behalf of sentient animals all over this wet rock of ours.

To avert such a catastrophe, it is everyone's duty to smash, hit, dent, break, punch, kick, crush, bang, shoot, topple, bomb, obliterate, and destroy every single wind turbine they can find. The wind turbine industry has declared war on humanity, and in the words of Mr. President from Independence Day, "You will be fighting for our freedom, not just from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist." So grab the nearest pickup truck and drive it right into the base of the most grotesquely elephantine wind turbine out there because the bigger they are, the harder they FALL. Our lifeblood is being sucked out of the very air we breathe by legions of tripartite fans lazily spinning humanity's last decades right now and we have to do everything we can to stop it.

We only have one Earth; if Big Wind gets its wish, our unborn children may not even have that.

My favourite Royal Navy ship names starting with “H”

Halberd

Halcyon

Half Moon

Handmaid

Happy Ladd

Harpy

Harlequin

Haughty

Hawkins

Hazardous

Heart of Oak

Heir Apparent

Helmsley Castle

Henry Grace a Dieu

Holigost Spayne

Honeysuckle

Hostile

Hotspur

Hubberston

Too Twee and Surreally Saccharine

The Five-Year Engagement was a great movie. The way it combined goofball humour with a realistic portrayal of the ups and downs of 21st century romance was artful and thoroughly enjoyable. It was further buoyed by the heavy use of Van Morrison songs.

Morrison's most important appearance on the movie's score is as the soundtrack for the main couple's meet-cute at a New Years Eve party with Van Morrison's poignant "Sweet Thing" playing in the background. The scene is flashed-back to repeatedly as a synecdoche for the couple's deep and abiding connection.

Here's the problem, though: there is no way "Sweet Thing" would ever get played at a New Years Eve party in a club around midnight. "Sweet Thing" is the type of song you hear the first minute of as a bride walks down the aisle. Jason Segel basically admitted as much in this GQ interview where he describes the opening strings (the strings!) on the Van Morrison album in question (1968's Astral Weeks) as "absolutely beautiful" and mentions "Sweet Thing" in his answer to a question about what his wedding playlist would sound like.

"Sweet Thing" is not a song that you see drunk twenty-somethings exchange spit to on the sloshiest night of the year. As a moviegoer, when I first saw that scene I was prepared to overlook the absurdity that the characters could converse at a normal human volume in that environment and I could even stomach the possibility that someone who looked like Emily Blunt would give Jason Segel the time of day. But it was the use of that song which ultimately undermined any air of reality to their encounter:

"Sweet Thing" is soft. It has little percussion (and what little it does have is irregular). It sounds sad. It has a string section. In fact, here is Van Morrison himself describing the nature of the song:

"It contemplates gardens and things like that...wet with rain. It's a romantic love ballad not about anybody in particular but about a feeling." 

None of these elements lend themselves to dancing at a raucous New Years Eve party where people normally dance to songs with the word "party" right in the title. Granted, there were a lot of white people there so maybe the person in charge of tunes was trying to save people from embarrassing themselves on the dance floor, but it would still be a record-scratch moment if a bold-to-the-point-of-foolishness DJ ever tried to pull that song off in such an environment.

Which is all bad for the movie because having the couple meet at a New Years Party in silly costumes was a nice idea and so was pairing it up with that wonderfully romantic song. If I was a more charitable reviewer I might even chalk it all up to the filmmakers intentionally highlighting their theme that it is hard to achieve the ideal of the classic love affair within the constraints of modern reality. But I doubt it.

Donate Today!

Hey Fatty! Did you know that all the crumbs that have fallen underneath your laptop's keyboard could feed a Namibian family for a week? It's true! So stop stuffing your cakehole and watching cat videos for a second so you can flip your computer upside down with a plastic baggie underneath to donate today!

Stormin' & Deformin'

Did you know that Hannah Storm is still on TV? It's true! I just saw her talking about someone crossing Niagara Falls. She is a good case study in how the cumulative effect of many cosmetic surgeries can add up to be more grotesque than going the natural route. It is the cosmetic equivalent to the knee surgeries that Kobe gets in Germany; they make things better for a little while but the extra wear and tear ends up more than cancelling out the benefits over the long-term.

This isn't Hannah Storm

I also want to point out that Hannah Storm (née Hannah Storen) adopted the last name Storm in the early 1980s after the first appearance of the Marvel character in 1975. These things matter.

Canadian Federalism: A Giant Clusterfuck - Chapter 2

Below are a few more problems with Canadian federalism, the system that gives a certain list of powers to the provinces and a different list to the federal government except where they are shared or overlap in a million different ways.

See, back when Canada was getting started there was a great deal of "colonial diversity," which is to say that there was a sharp contrast between the white, northern European, Christian farmers in Nova Scotia and the white, northern European, Christian farmers in Quebec. Canadian hero John A. MacDonald originally wanted to impose a unitary system on this cornucopia of cultural diversity, but after seeing the United States torn apart in the four bloodiest years of warfare ever witnessed on the continent when the American federalism collapsed, Mr. MacDonald changed his mind and favoured a federalist system because of course he did.

At first there were some fairly bright lines between the two levels of government responsibility, but the modern Supreme Court of Canada has decided that that approach was too easy for everyone involved and shifted instead towards a "flexible" approach to federalism where jurisdictions interact and overlap to make things maximally complicated. Basically, the court's approach to Canadian federalism is to ask everybody to get along, "harmoniously, in the spirit of cooperative federalism."

Since everyone doesn't get along in a system with eleven responsible governments, that leaves us with a bunch of problems: 


Inter-provincial disputes

The federal-provincial battles I talked about in chapter 1 are just a sideshow compared to the inter-provincial battles that take place.

Alberta hates Ontario who hates Quebec who hates every other province. Newfoundland used to hate the rest of the country because we loathed them for gulping transfer payments to maintain the illusion Newfoundland belonged as part of a first-world country; now they loathe us because the tables have turned. New Brunswick is mad because no one cares about New Brunswick (even people from New Brunswick wouldn't notice if the province disappeared from the face of the Earth). British Columbia: (a) resents being stereotyped as Vancouver-only; (b) is pissed off that it didn't get any oil but still wants to participate in Western alienation and hate Ontario; and, (c) is mad that it will never win a Stanley Cup.

Tensions are exacerbated by assymetrical federalism that gives hicks on Prince Edward Island more seats in the House of Commons than they have high school diplomas and guarantees Quebec 25% of the seats in the House of Commons, contradicting the basic democratic principle that each citizen's vote should be worth the same amount.

These tensions manifest themselves during inter-provincial negotiations and drag all of us down by giving cabinet ministers axes to grind when they should be focused on negotiating concordances that maximize everyone's interests.


Redundant laws

If nothing else, federalism creates redundancies. You have 10 different provinces regulating "property and civil rights" under section 92(13) of the Constitution Act, 1867. This is important because the Supreme Court of Canada has basically said that "property and civil rights" is most things that can be regulated. Canadians in general agree on what the law should be in some cases so all ten provinces have their own similar -- but slightly different -- versions of the same laws and regulations whose only differences are below the level of what the average citizen cares about.

For example, every province has their own version of the law for changing your name. That is not the end of the world in and of itself, but it is just one example of a phenomenon that is repeated for every area of regulation. When everything is being regulated, it adds up to a lot of superfluous redundancy. And having so many variations of the same thing adds nothing to the quality of life of Canadians nor, I suspect, do they care about it. Ask a hundred what the law on changing your name is or should be and I bet approximately 2.7 of them will have any opinion or knowledge and that holds true even if half of them are lawyers.

Small provinces like PEI don't have the population to justify customized laws on every subject; that's why they will simply copy the laws in Ontario or other provinces onto their books wholesale sometimes.

Further redundancy in the law is caused by overlaps between provincial and federal authority. The Canadian model of federalism exacerbates the multi-jurisdiction problem by not having cleanly circumscribed ambits of authority for the federal and provincial governments. A good example of this is family law because marriage and divorce are federal matters so divorcing families deal with their issues using a separate sets of Acts (such as the Divorce Act) from the couples that never married even though both courts deal with child support, spousal support, custody, and access. They even use the same guidelines for child and spousal support, and they use the same test (a child's "best interests") for custody and access.

Extra resources spent

Another cost of federalism is all the extra money we end up spending for little return. For example, we have way more elections, each of which costs a significant sum ($120 million in Ontario last October) and, as a special bonus, contribute to voter apathy.

Extra resources are also spent because you have 10 versions of the same committee for each major question facing a province. This is true even when there is no good reason for provinces to disagree about the course of action, such as with cancer treatments since medical science in one province should be the same as in any other province. Maybe some provinces can afford to spend more than others but that should not be the case because equalization payments are intended to guarantee the same levels of service across the country.

Another good example is the ratings of films as appropriate for certain audiences, like "PG" and "NC-17". Unlike their American counterparts, Canadian film ratings are decided by each province individually. Unless the citizens of each province have significant differences of opinion on how much boob should be shown on television


Federal-Provincial Battles 2

I already talked about the squabbles between the federal government and the provinces that can only exist because of federalism, but I came across another good example so I want to bring it back up. Basically, Alberta and Canada are fighting over who gets to tax aboriginal cigarettes. That's stupid enough to begin with since Canadians don't care which level of governments taxes what exactly as long as there is enough as each level to balance the budgets, but it also highlights another unnecessary complication of federalism in Canada: jurisdiction over aboriginal affairs.

Aboriginal reserves are supposed to be federally administered within the provinces. That means that even if a province is running a perfectly good police force (police being a provincial responsibility under subsection 92(14) of the Constitution Act, 1967) in the area or a perfectly good hospital (subsection 92(7)), it would be a federal responsibility to administer police and hospitals on the reserve. So there are pockets of federal responsibility for what would otherwise a provincial concern dotting all the provinces wherever there are reserves. Add to that the complications caused by the disputed and (relatively) new aboriginal right under the Constitution Act, 1982 to aboriginal sovereignty.

Here is another example of federal-provincial incompatibility and intractability: I was speaking to a judge a while back. He happens to be a Superior Court judge so he is a federal employee (whereas if he were an Ontario Court of Justice judge he would be a provincial employee and show up on the sunshine list, for example). Because the courts are administered provincially and he works at the courthouse his secretary is a provincial employee. When it came time to hire a new secretary for him he was allowed to sit in on the interviews but could not ask any questions because it was strictly a provincial hire, even though he is the guy who is going to be the secretary’s boss and will be the most affected by the hire. He is also, being a judge, in a position you would think would command him some degree of power over his situation, but nope, federalism.