Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of a famous man, former congressman, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and professor at Pace University, used a column in the Huffington Post to laud the CRTC for resisting efforts by the PMO to lift Canada's ban on false news. Kennedy links the PM's efforts to Sun Media's plans for a Canadian version of Fox News. Moneyquote: Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of...

02 March, 2011

In response to my post on the Dexter government's obsessive management of routine government communications, Bruce Wark writes: When I arrived in Nova Scotia in October, 1986 as CBC Radio's National Reporter for the Maritimes, I found that the Nova Scotia government's public relations system was generally third rate. I had just come from six years covering the Ontario legislature and was used to dealing every day with a professional civil service and public relations officers who provided accurate information quickly and efficiently. In fact, I realized  during my years at Queen's Park that the Conservatives' decision to create a professional (and...

27 February, 2011

http://contrarian.ca/2011/02/13/spirit-place-how-about-atheist-heights-instead/ Contrarian readers are sharply divided about plans to build a seven-storey old people’s apartment where St. James United Church now stands. (My own misgivings here.) First the Cons: Liz Cunningham, owner of a Charles Street creperie just down the street from the proposed apartment complex, writes: Finally somebody who sees through the smokescreen, holier than though, social justice, inclusive "nonsense." St John's United Church is a developer first and foremost. They are seeking variances on lot coverage, height, density, etc, etc, etc. That is all we should be talking about. My hat’s off though to Louisa Horne and the rest of that group. They...

26 February, 2011

Engineers from Google, Twitter, and SayNow, a voice messaging startup Google bought last week, put their technical chops to work over the weekend devising a way around the Egyptian government's Internet shutdown. From Google's Official Blog: Like many people, we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt, and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection...

01 February, 2011

Faced with the conspicuous failure of the war on drugs, the Harper Government proposes to escalate it, as if doing more of something that failed is likely to succeed. Portugal took a different approach. On July 1(!), 2001, that country decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs, a move many feared would accelerate social decay. The British Journal of Criminology has published a study of what actually happened: This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in...

28 January, 2011

My parking ban post and Bruce Wark's rebuttal has sent readers to their keyboards. The ban enrages North End Halifax homeowner Cliff White: The rage is prolonged by the following sequence of events. Eventually it snows either during the day or during the night. If it's during the day and it's a modest amount the street may get plowed during the same day, with cars parked on both sides of the street. If we are lucky the plow might return in the next few days and do the street again, and if very lucky this will happen at night and some...

26 January, 2011

Bruce Wark, writing from an HRM neighborhood where the ban on overnight parking is not enforced, critiques my critique of the ban: [Y]ou use "reasonable accommodation" as though you have proved it. It is as though you are saying that your assertion in the first paragraph is sufficient to support what you're saying in the second. The rules of logic say that he who asserts must prove. Furthermore, your assertion that "traffic tsar" Ken Reashor "evinces no interest in reasonable accommodation" is a neat, but logically unconvincing way of first, labelling Reashor as a Russian dictator, then glossing over necessary proof...

24 January, 2011

Claire Hirschkind, 56, is a rape victim. She has a medical implant similar to a pacemaker. She set off an airport security metal detector. Solution? Grope her. When she objects, shove her to the ground, cuff her, and drag her out. Text version here. H/T: KVUE News via Daily Dish....

26 December, 2010

For all its foreign policy lapses, the United States has long stood as a beacon of individual freedom. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights constrain government action against individuals to a degree unimagined elsewhere in the world. Even the most criticized parts of the Bill of Rights, like the Second Amendment guarantee of the right ro bear arms, are, in William O. Douglas's felicitous phrase, "designed to take the government off the backs of people." It is commonplace to observe that the September 11 attacks undermined those constraints. In the run-up to Christmas, Glenn Greenwald, Salon's tenacious legal affairs reporter, produced...

26 December, 2010

According to this crowd-sourced interactive graphic from priceofweed.com, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI have the best retail reefer rates on the continent: This is a screenshot. Click here to view the interactive chart, then click on any dollar sign to get data on that state or province. Detailed Nova Scotia price reports here. (Click any of the Police reporters might want to bookmark this chart for ready reference next time the boys in blue claim the half dozen, half-grown plants they seized in Upper West Boot have a street value of 47 gazillion dollars. Hattip: Floatingsheep.com....

15 December, 2010
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