Archive for: June 2009
Greens face imminent deregistration – Update
Nova Scotia Green Party leader Ryan Watson says the party will publish its 2008 audited financial statements “within a few weeks.” Based on regular conversations with Elections Nova Scotia, he believes this will be soon enough to avoid loss of official party status.
By law, the financial statements should have been filed by April 30. Elections Nova Scotia communications director Dana Philip Doiron told contrarian earlier today that Chief Electoral Office Christine McCulloch had issued the required 30-day notice of deregistration required under the Elections Act, and a report due for release Tuesday would detail the issue. He said deregistration could follow shortly.
Watson said the late filing resulted from the party being new, its treasurer taking an untimely vacation, and its reliance on volunteers who were “wading through the election regulations,” and busy preparing for and fighting the June election. Read more »
NDP & Grit riding associations race to avoid deregistration
Three NDP and one Liberal riding associations are racing to comply with financial disclosure requirements that could result in their deregistration. As reported earlier, the entire Green Party also faces imminent deregistration.
Joanne Lamey, provincial organizer for the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party confirmed that three NDP riding associations have been warned of possible deregistration for failure to disclose financial information.
She said financial statements for the Digby Annapolis, Yarmouth, and Inverness riding associations were in various stages of completion, and she expected to submit them “very quickly—perhaps this afternoon.”
Glennie Langille, who was co-chair of communications for the Liberal campaign, said one riding association had been asked to supply tardy financial statements, but she denied the deadline was imminent. She refused to identify the riding association because no official action had been taken against it. Read more »
Greens face imminent deregistration
The Green Party of Nova Scotia, and riding associations for the Greens and two other recognized parties, face imminent deregistration under the Elections Act for failing to publish audited financial statements for the last fiscal year as required by law.
Dana Philip Doiron, communications director for Elections Nova Scotia, confirmed that Chief Electoral Officer Christine McCulloch will file her annual report under the Members and Public Employees Disclosure Act (MPED) Tuesday, and deregistration could follow shortly thereafter.
“Sometimes [the report's release is] a ho-hum event, and Frank is the only one interested,” Doiron said “In this particular case the report will be looking at compliance for reporting, and that report will be interesting.” Read more »
A monumental man with monumental flaws
New York artist Mairia Kalman gets a jump on American Independence Day with a visit to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father whose brilliant contributions to democracy are honored mostly in the breech. The New York Times published her multimedia account today. Hat tip: Sarah Cooper-Ellis.
If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous you need to go to his home in Virginia. Monticello…
Thomas Jefferson was a scientist, philosopher, statesman, architect, misician, naturalist, zoologist, botanist, farmer, bibliophile, inventor, wine connisseur, mathematician…
He vehemently believed in separation of church and state. He founded the University of Virginia, one fo the first non-religious colleges in the country.
There are a few more little things. He wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was 33. And on July 4, 1776, the Founding Fathers adopted it. A revolution was under way.
He studied Hessian flies and Voltaire and maps of Africa and the Kiran and Shakerpeare. In the study were his telescopes and polygraph copying machine and revolving biookstand and books. He knew Greek, Latin, French, Spanis, and Italian. When he read Spinoza, he read him in Latin. When he read Euripides, he read him in Greek.
The many who wrote the Declaration of Independence and said of slavery, “This abomination must have an end,” was the owner of several hundred slaves. The monumental man had monumental flaws.
You have my iPhone and I know where you are
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One minute Kevin Miller had his iPhone 3G with him at the sketchy Chicago bar where he and two friends were taking a break from the Brickworld Lego convention.
Next minute it was gone.
The waitress was sympathetic, but the phone had vanished. As the minutes ticked by, the chances of getting it back looked more and more like a Jewish environmentalist’s chances of getting into the Nova Scotia cabinet.
But Miller had recently activated the Find My iPhone feature of Apple’s otherwise dubious MobileMe network. Using a friend’s laptop, Miller logged on to MobileMe and clicked the Find-my-iPhone link.
He picks up the amazing story here.
Curveball
It’s an old debate: Does the curveball really bend, or is it just an illusion, like the river that runs uphill at Marshy Hope? Both says Arthur Shapiro, Associate Professor of Psychology at American University in Washington DC. Shapiro’s demonstration of the illusory component won the Neural Correlate Society‘s Best Illusion of the Year Contest.
In the game of baseball, a pitcher stands on a mound and throws a 2.9-inch diameter ball in the direction of home plate. The pitcher creates different types of pitches by releasing the ball at different velocities and with different spins. A typical major league “curveball” travels at about 75 mph, and spins at an oblique angle at about 1500 rpm; this means that the travel time from the pitcher’s hand to home plate is about 0.6 sec, during which time the ball undergoes about 13 rotations.
The spinning of the curveball creates both a physical effect (“the curve”) and a perceptual puzzle. The curve arises because the ball’s rotation creates an imbalance of forces on different sides of the ball, which leads to a substantial deflection in the path of the ball. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection of the ball should appear gradual, but from the point of view of the batter standing near home plate, the flight of the ball often appears to undergo a dramatic and nearly discontinuous shift in position (this sudden shift is referred to as the curveball’s “break”).
Try it for yourself here.
Retired Ontario judge slags Herald’s Steve Maher
Writing in this morning’s Toronto Star, retired Ontario Superior Court Justice Daniel Ferguson waxes indignant over the decision by Chronicle-Herald Ottawa reporter Steve Maher to listen to and report on an accidental recording of a private conversation between Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt and her communications director, the recently fired Jasmine MacDonnell. Moneyquote:
Does this scenario not merit any comment from his fellow journalists?
If his colleague had left her briefcase in the washroom, would he have rummaged through it, too?
His comment about MacDonnell leaving it with him for five months sounded like a weak argument that perhaps she had abandoned it. But there is no such evidence. He knew whose it was. He knew it was personal. But he listened to it nevertheless.
In fact, the scenario has provoked comment from Maher’s fellow journalists, including a tortured defense of Raitt by Tory hack Christie Blatchford, and a roundup of reaction from the inside-Ottawa journal Hill Times. For our part, contrarian has praised Maher’s exemplary restraint.
Paving the way for Tories — feedback (cont.)
The anonymous senior official inside Transport Canada who responded to contrarian‘s revelation that the Harper Government steered Infrastructure Stimulus Plan paving projects to federal Tory ridings in Nova Scotia, responds to reader feedback:
What your readers may not know is that senior bureaucrats are moved at the behest of the Clerk of the Privy Council and approved by the Prime Minister — a subtle but important distinction. They (we) are not Liberal appointees any more than the current crop are Conservative appointees. When the Liberals were in power, they were convinced that some deputies were closeted Conservatives (as many were/are). It doesn’t matter. The job of the professional public servant is to give your minister the best possible advice, and then execute whatever they decide — and that may often be contrary to your advice. And this is what we do.
The problem with Baird and his minions is that they are ignoring the process in place to determine where the money should go — a process predicated by previous political scandals. The stink that is going to waft out of the “stimulus” project should make the Libs’ previous troubles seem minor in comparison.
A caution: Anonymous complaints should always be viewed skeptically. If our correspondent is indeed a senior federal Transport official, he or she has a credible reason for requesting anonymity: certain dismissal if unmasked. But that doesn’t prove she has no axe to grind, is telling the truth, or even holds the position she claims to. On balance, though, contrarian thinks the views expressed merit consideration.
Soundtrack: Am I legally required to answer that question?
Steven Bierfeldt: Flush, iPhone-carrying, libertarian security risk
Last March, Steven Bierfeldt, a 25-year-old libertarian who works for US Congressman Ron Paul, tried to board a plane at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, when a security x-ray machine turned up a metal box in his carry-on baggage containing $4700 in cash, proceeds from the sale of tee-shirts and literature at a Ron Paul event the previous day.
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials hauled Bierfeldt out of the lineup and detained him for half an hour, demanding to know the source of the (perfectly legal) money, along with a raft of other personal information.
Bierfeldt, who covertly recorded the interrogation with his iPhone, politely responded to each question with one of his own: “Am I legally required to answer that?” As the officers grew increasingly belligerent — “You want to play smartass, I’m not going to play your fucking games… Are you from this planet?” — Bierfeldt remained calm and repeatedly asked for clarification of his legal rights. What the TSA officers’ questions had to do with flight security is unclear.
On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on Bierfeldt’s behalf, charging that TSA is “subjecting innocent Americans to unreasonable searches and detentions that violate the Constitution.” The ACLU also posted Bierfeldt’s recording of the incident:
