Archive for: January 2010
Protecting Sable Island
[Correction appended]
Harper Environment Minister Jim Prentice wants to protect Sable Island by turning it into a national park. He has a funny notion of protection:
- Prentice would protect the island by ending the current ban on visitors impediments to tourism.
- He would protect the island by inviting the private sector to ferry tourists out to visit Sable.
- He would protect the island by continuing to allow oil and gas drilling off its shores.
- He would protect the island by permitting the slaughter of seals that whelp there.
- He would protect Sable by building park facilities to “take care of” the tourists he would “encourage” to visit.
With protectors like that, who needs Vlad the Impaler. Call it “protection—Reform Party style.”
So why is the NDP government playing footsie with this reckless scheme? Natural Resources Minister John Macdonell mused that Park status would bring the province closer to its goal of protecting 12 percent of the province by 2015. Sure, if you don’t mind destroying the place on the pretense of protecting it.
The last time a federal official had a bright idea about Sable was in the 1990s, when Environment Canada decided to trim a few hundred thousand dollars off its budget by terminating the 200-year-0ld manned presence on the fragile island. It took years of hard work by Zoe Lucas, Gerry Forbes, and their grass roots citizen coalition to scotch that bit of fiscal lunacy.
OK… here comes the Facebook Group: Hands Off Sable Island!
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Correction: There is no ban on Sable Island, but people wanting to visit the island must go through a lot of hoops* and this limits numbers.
* A lot of hoops n my opinion, anyway. Not everyone agrees.
Another take on grief porn
Contrarian reader Miles Tompkins:
I would like to see that little kid ask Anderson Cooper where the hell he’s been for the past 20 years.
Why this prorogation is different
Defenders of Harper’s three-month prorogation lean heavily on the talking point that Jean Chretien and Pierre Trudeau both used prorogation without provoking a fuss. Contrarian reader C. Leonhardt thinks the analogy is flawed:
Both these prime ministers had a majority in the House when they prorogued Parliament. If their decisions had been challenged, they would have won the vote in the House. Harper’s party does not hold a majority of the seats in the House. He would have lost the vote. To claim that his actions repesent past practice is false. At this point one man controls this country.
The last line overstates things, but the distinction is important. Both times Harper used prorogation to thwart the will of a Parliament whose majority opposed him and his policies.
The folly of security theatre
I’m late getting to this, but Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria captured the fundamental fallacy of Washington’s reaction to the Christmas Day [un-]Bomber.
The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.
Hat tip: Cameron Bode, Excerpticize.
Meek slags Ormiston’s grief porn – feedback
Cliff White defends Ormiston:
I happened to catch both the clip of Ormiston holding the hand of, and then carrying, the little boy, and the one of Cooper tousling the head of another. I didn’t think there was any comparison. I was moved by the first and disgusted by the second.
Watching Ormiston’s reports over the last week or so, it’s obvious she has been deeply affected by what she’s seeing and reporting on. Her actions conveyed a real human warmth. It’s not such a bad thing for viewers to occasionally see that reporters are not just automatons, but are real people with real emotions. On the other hand Cooper’s actions seemed a classic illustration of the opposite, a reporter cynically faking concern hoping to heighten the impact of his story.
As I said in the original post (about a Herald column by Jim Meek), I did not see the Ormiston piece. I did see, and didn’t like, Cooper’s display of affection, but I would not presume to say he was faking. My objection is to making the reporter’s display of compassion, real or contrived, the focus of a story, when the focus ought to be on the people who have been harmed by the catastrophe, and those who are trying to help.
It’s obviously a difficult line to walk, but surely this is a situation that calls for the most rigorous possible factual reporting, rather than titillation.
Meek slags Ormiston’s grief porn
Herald columnist Jim Meek takes a shot at CBC reporter Susan Ormiston:
In one story, the viewer was treated to moving pictures of CBC-TV reporter Susan Ormiston, who held the hand of a small Haitian child as they walked through a devastated, crowded neighbourhood.
Ms. Ormiston later collected the tired child into her own tender arms, and on they marched. The made-for-TV pictures provided proof of Ms. Ormiston’s compassion, and I did wonder for a moment if the reporter or the youngster’s family was the intended focus of the story.
I didn’t see the piece in question, and I winced to see Ormiston (a friend) treated so harshly by Meek (another friend), but I’m pretty sure I would have shared Meek’s dyspepsia. During Friday night’s telethon, I did see, and was faintly nauseated 
by, CNN’s Anderson Cooper repeatedly tousling the heads of Haitian youngsters rescued after days entrapped in earthquake wreckage.
The reason for my discomfort is the same as Meek’s. I detect no curiosity or informational value in these cameos, rather an effort to confirm the reporters, and vicariously the audience, as Truly Caring People. We’ve come a long way from Edward R. Murrow reporting the Blitz from the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Meek again:
This was all part of a drama in which the CBC tried to connect the kid’s mom by phone with a relative — the father, I think — back in Canada.
It was a quest story, a tale of a journey taken in search of a prize, and it even had an ending that was both poignant and happy. The family was connected, but only by phone.
Ms. Ormiston’s report, a becalming pastiche of journalism and missionary work, revealed all the elements of good visual story-telling — real people, a narrative you could follow, great pictures.
But even as I couldn’t stop watching it, I knew I was being manipulated. Still, I might have been moved by this little saga if it had been less contrived, patronizing, and scripted.
Instead, I was struck by what our response to the Haitian crisis says about our national broadcaster, and our national character.
Finally! Praise for iceberg lettuce!
It will not surprise regular readers to know that Contrarian is the founder and charter member of the Iceberg Lettuce Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to defending the iceberg’s humble, moist, crunchy goodness from calumny and abuse at the hands and tongues of self-appointed food snobs.
As you may imagine, this can be a lonely crusade. Thus it is with joy in our hearts (and thanks to Contrarian reader C.C.) that we offer membership to UK Guardian food columnist Tim Hayward for his recent, eloquent paean to the glories of the iceberg. Moneyquote:
[T]he iceberg… was the real revelation. When did I stop eating these things … and God help me, why?…
Iceberg was the perfect thing for a callow, show-off food lover to reject out of hand in favour of more nutritious romaine, the challenging bite of rocket, the briefly fashionable lamb’s lettuce, the honourably local butterhead or the frankly inexplicable appeal of frisee…
Iceberg was never about taste. It was about temperature, texture, and being a vehicle for other stuff. Suddenly I was like a man possessed. I couldn’t make iceberg BLT’s fast enough to feed my raging craving … I tried a series of experiments to see if I could emulate the peerless chicken katsu sarnie from Tsuru with iceberg. I made ranch dressing, and green goddess (though I confess I stopped short of Thousand Island – only a barbarian would put that stuff in his mouth).
Security theatre: an asylum for authoritarian nuttiness
Last Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute, got off a flight from Haiti to New York. While attempting to find his way out of Kennedy Airport’s American Airlines Terminal, he accidentally opened an emergency exit door and set off an alarm.
Jules Paul Bouloute
This has happened to most of us. In confusion, inattention, or an ill-considered attempt to find a shortcut, we open a restricted door and set off an alarm. Sometimes it leads to an embarrassed chat with the on-duty Commissionaire; sometimes there are no consequences at all.
In Bouloute’s case, however, security officials evacuated Terminal 8 for more than two hours. Police scoured the building with dogs and SWAT teams, and required hapless passengers to go through security theatre screening a second time. Arrivals were stuck on the tarmac; departures delayed for hours.
As for Bouloute, he was charged with first-degree criminal tampering and third-degree criminal trespass, and he faces up to seven years in prison.
Salon columnist Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, analyzes the consequences:
[W]hat shocks me the most is that throughout all the coverage of the incident, including numerous interviews with ticked-off passengers and somber-voiced officials, not once has anybody raised the point that maybe — just maybe — we overreacted. Everyone, instead, is eager to blame Bouloute.
“As a result of the defendant’s actions, thousands of people were required to evacuate and to be rescreened by TSA, causing substantial delays in the airlines’ schedules,” District Attorney Richard Browne said in a statement.
No, I’m sorry, Mr. District Attorney, but that’s not it. What caused the delays and what hassled so many travelers was not the defendant’s actions, but our mindless and hysterical response to them.
Smith goes on to recite the interesting history of air terrorism, and details how a country that once took real terrorist attacks in stride became a “nation of scaredy-cats.” He cites other recent examples of ludicrous overreaction, and urges us all to calm down.
Calming down will not make us “less safe,” as security zealots are wont to argue. Quite the opposite, it would free up time and resources, allowing us to focus on more credible and potent problems.
The whole piece is well worth a read.
Homeopathic overdose – rebuttal
Contrarian would not have thought it possible for a defense of quackery to set me chuckling and nodding my head, but my old pal Warren Reed has done it. [Previous installments here and here.] Knowing that the best defense is a good offense, Reed began by catching me in the act of scientific error:
Amedeo Avogadro
One of the few things I remember from Nat. Sci. 3 is Avogadro’s Number — 6.023 x 10**23. So it isn’t roughly 10**23 as you state — it’s actually 6 times that. Six is called The Republican Constant – any Republican can stretch the truth by a factor of six without raising an eyebrow on Fox News. Journalists often get the same exemption.
But we don’t read Contrarian just for the science. More puzzling is the notion that a group of pub-crawling Brits is claiming to know what constitutes “proper medical assistance.” Of the reasons for healing—the passage of time, the placebo effect, natural defenses—”proper medical assistance” is on the list, but is an evanescent concept at best. It depends on many of the same principles for success as Homeopathy. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
More after the jump.
