How much has our world changed since 9/11?

In a recent episode of the Freakonomics Podcast, Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who hosts the Ask a Pilot website, told a wonderful story about his fascination with airplanes and flight as a Boston pre-teen: One of the things my friends and I used to do during junior high school was we would take the subway out to Logan Airport in Boston—back in those days, of course, you could just walk through security without a ticket—and we would stake out the jet way when a flight came in. And after all the passengers were off, we would walk down the jet way and approach...

Officials defend a Stubborn omission of accessible washrooms

  The Stubborn Goat's controversial new pub on the Halifax waterfront will operate on provincially owned land without an accessible washroom, in violation of the Nova Scotia Building Code and several other statutes. And that's just fine, said Waterfront Development Corporation (WDC) spokeswoman Kelly Rose in a terse, one-sentence email: The accessible washroom is located next door at the Visitor Information Centre and meets the requirements for the seasonal Stubborn Goat location. Tourism Nova Scotia's Visitor Information Centre is not "next door." It's 225 feet away, across a boat slip and beyond the next wharf, along a boardwalk often jammed with people. In distance and inconvenience, asking customers in wheelchairs to...

I will win because I’m a winner. I just won. I will continue to win.

  Dave Pell, whose free daily email newsletter is the most entertaining news aggregator on the internet, has written a simple but wonderfully clear analysis of the media's role in creating Donald Trump's winning candidacy. Political races and sports are covered in the exact same way in America. You get predictions about what a competitor needs to do to win, a brief spurt of action, postgame analysis, and a bunch of repetitive talkshows during which former players provide often obvious insights—which consumers continue to rehash around the social media watercooler. It's not just the media, it's you, too, dear reader: [Y]ou know it’s true...

In court today

Sydney lawyer TJ McKeough will be in court Monday, pursuing a Charter challenge on behalf of one of the 27 men charged in last summer's controversial prostitution sting. I'll be in court as well, hoping to live-tweet the hearing. Last August and September, female police officers posing as sex workers lured the men, ranging in age from 26 to 81, into conversations that police allege warranted solicitation charges. McKeough argues the alleged crimes would not have occurred but for the actions of police. Trials for the accused me became something of a moot point after CBRM Police Chief Peter McIsaac took it upon himself to release their names,...

Kids are safer outdoors

  In response to Friday's post lamenting the overregulation of childhood play, Monika Dutt, Medical Officer of Health for Cape Breton, Antigonish, and Guysborough, points to a Participaction report, The Biggest Risk is Keeping Children Indoors, and highlights three main points: The odds of total stranger abduction are about 1 in 14 million based on RCMP reports. Being with friends outdoors may further reduce this number. Broken bones and head injuries unfortunately do happen, but major trauma is uncommon. Most injuries associated with outdoor play are minor. Canadian children are eight times more likely to die as a passenger in a motor...

Parks Canada video makes the case for a moose cull

  Parks Canada released a video yesterday explaining how the extreme overpopulation of moose in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park threatens the area's boreal forest—a region of spruce, fir, tamarack, and yellow birch that covers much of northern Canada, but only a shrinking portion of the Cape Breton highlands in Nova Scotia. [video link] One of many explainers on the Parks and Natural Resources Canada websites (see also here, here, and here) describes how the situation got out of hand: [I]n the 1970s, spruce budworm consumed large areas of mature boreal forest in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, removing 90% of the forest cover in...

How news coverage of rare events distorts childrearing

  Yesterday, I saddled up a favourite hobby horse, the unintended and harmful impact of overprotecting children, a policy increasingly enforced by child protection workers and police. An interesting response from longtime Contrarian reader Tim Segulin points out the perverse dynamic by which the extreme rarity of stranger attacks on children all but insures the news media will turn them into sordid grief porn.

Sadly, children do get abducted, sometimes raped, sometimes even murdered. Thankfully these are very, very, rare events—so rare that when they do happen they make sensational headline news. Despite the intense tragedy, this kind of story must be manna from heaven for news media. Stories these days include crying, pleading parents, shocked local community members, and understated, resolute police. (Remember when people who had lost their composure were never presented on TV?) Such intense human interest stories have always put bums on seats before advertisers and sold newspapers. They are both absorbing television and implied cautionary tales, the very essence of news. The consequence seems to be that people remember the vague outlines of them for a long time and come to believe this kind of thing is happening all the time. I'll bet you still recall the name Holly Jones.

[Here I would normally link to one of the stories commemorating the 10th anniversary of Jones’s death, but those I could find were so nauseatingly prurient, I have reluctantly linked instead to the Wikipedia entry about her killer. No disrespect intended.] Back to Segulin:

Crimes against children are by definition the ultimate motherhood issue, and that makes them political. Either the police are seen as community heroes for arresting "the bastard"—although at this point an alleged perpetrator's guilt has not yet been proven in court—and reuniting the child with their grateful family, or their actions are seen to have failed to prevent a tragedy, and hard questions will inevitably arise. Carefully managed, such tragedies offer excellent political opportunities to opposition parties:

• Why has this government repeatedly ignored police warnings about inadequate funding?
• Why are sentences for serious crimes so lax?
• Why does the parole system for which this government is responsible allow such people back on the street?
• Why didn't the government see this coming?

Nobody will explicitly say so, but with the right management, careers in policing, law, news media, and politics can be made from such tragedies. Although these events are really rare, they are hyped in such intrusive detail that they instil irrational fear in parents, simply because they dearly love their kids. It's like fear of flying—no matter how often you quote the statistics showing it is much more dangerous to drive on public streets than to fly, people will believe what they want to.

After the jump, Segulin recounts the level of freedom he was shown as a child in a much larger city than Halifax, and the absurd steps he had to go through to volunteer on his son's school trips.

How to make children truly unsafe—updated

The best thing about this CBC story, which plumbs the perils of being kind to strange children, is the photo of Jane Kansas and Bill Wood. The worst is the evil practice it exposes: conditioning children to be fearful of everyone and everything; conditioning grownups not to engage children under any but the most rare and strictly supervised circumstances, such as Thanksgiving dinner with the cousins. We are acclimating our children to a sterile, cosseted, predictable, and straited world—in short, a world that does not exist. In the process, we deprive them of the opportunity to interact with Kansas, Wood, and their ilk. Don't go out of my sight. Don't explore...

How the press gallery misread the country’s reaction to elbowgate

If denizens of Canada's Parliamentary Press Gallery used the Victoria Day weekend to visit with family and friends back home, they will have noticed a vast gulf between their impression of elbowgate and the views of citizens at large. Gallery reporters pounced on Prime Minister Trudeau's gaff with alacrity rarely displayed during the dark decade of Harper. CBC reporter Catherine Cullen pronounced it "clearly the worst day this prime minister has had in office." Many early reports ignored the role of the NDP in provoking the confrontation, and failed to indicate Trudeau's elbowing of MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau was inadvertent—though the video makes this incontrovertible. One-sided initial accounts were followed by editorials condemning Trudeau and declaring his...

Live streaming the Blue Nose wheelchair speedsters

I'm going to test my technical skills to live stream the start—and with luck, the finish—of the Blue Nose Marathon's invitation-only, 5K "showcase" for elite wheelchair athletes, beginning Saturday at 2:45 p.m. You can watch on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Download the free Periscope app, log with your Twitter account, and follow me at @kempthead. Gus Reed, the disability rights activist who makes his home in Nova Scotia half the year, can't be in Halifax tomorrow to witness this first-ever event. Since he single-handedly prodded ScotiaBank and the Blue Nose committee into their long overdue gesture toward equal treatment, I wanted to find a way for...