WWW.MADERBLOG.COM

Alright, it's official - I've moved. Please update your bookmarks and links and whatnot, and head on over to www.maderblog.com. It's rough, unpolished, but it works, and I'll be blogging from there from now on. (I'm not technologically savy enough to have some sort of auto-redirect). See you there.

Maderblog.com

The new site is up, but not what I'd call functional. I still have to mess around with the template a little - figure out how to make it unique and all. But note for your bookmarks or whatever it is you use - the new URL will be www.maderblog.com. And when I get through all this computer junk that's waaaaay over my head, I'll get back to regular blogging.

And who knows, there might be a shooting war by then.

Site Updates And Stuff

I've spent the morning registering hosting space and a domain name, and generally getting ready for a switch to MT. Don't hold your breath - it's complicated for a relative illiterate such as I am. In any case, the domain won't be active for a day or two; I'll certainly let you know. That's the exciting news here, though, and the reason I haven't been blogging very much. Excuses excuses.

Covering Up the Cover Up

The NYPost says that the PA's about-face regarding the filming of armed children comes to late - they've betrayed themselves already.

More Ben Stein

I just wanted to clarify that I'm a fool - the Archives of Ben Stein's column go back more than six years, so my 'believe it or not' was way out of line.

With all that wonderful Ben Stein in one convenient location, I've stayed up well past my bedtime. But Ben, being a wonderfully intelligent and perceptive man, has got me, his reader, thinking. Thinking about the eleventh.

In fact, I've been doing it more and more these days. It may have started when I bought 'The Rising', brought it home, and listened to it from start to finish - just sat here and listened to it. When was the last time you sat down and just listened to music like that? It's been a while for me.

But presumably something prompted me to buy Springsteen. I took a walk last Friday, and it was a beautiful day here in Montreal. The sky was blue, clear, beautiful, hardly a cloud. The sun was bright and warm, but there was a cool breeze. It was like that in Ottawa, I hear, and I'd imagine it was like that down most of the eastern seaboard.

It was like that on the eleventh. Exactly like that.

I've been re-reading the WaPo series 'Ten Days in September', which I can't seem to access on the WaPo site. It's a wonderful look at the White House's response to the terror attack. And it's immediate; that is, in reading about the decisions the President and his advisors made, we can remember those days, those issues - that unease, that feeling. I can still feel it, that feeling. And I remember - not just the eleventh, but the days after. I remember when the President went to New York. I remember when he said, "And the folks who knocked these buildings down -- they're going to hear from all of us soon." I remember how the assemble men cheered. I remember the speech.

I think we all do - because it happened to each of us. Which is certainly not to say that we are victims, or that we have suffered as those who lost their loved ones have suffered. Never would I be so presumptuous. But I don't think I'm out of line in saying, we also lost loved ones, loved ones we didn't know. We weren't hurt because our lazy, easy, straightforward America had been lost. We will miss it, but it is not in lament over ease that we wept. We wept for the dead, and for their children, and husbands and wives, and for their parents. We wept because we loved them too, only we didn't know it, because we didn't know them. We didn't know their names; but we do now.

In fact, I didn't cry on the eleventh. A lot of things certainly had me on the verge of tears, but I didn't cry. I haven't cried in ages - it's not some macho thing, I've just been blessed with a life that's given me far more reason to laugh.

I don't want to go on a whole kick about emotion - it's undignified. My point is that - we're coming up on a year since September 11, 2001. A year. And now I'm starting to feel it.

Ben Stein finally made me cry. Read his account of that terrible day, and his experiences in New York in the days after.

September 11 didn't get me blogging in the first place - I was inspired by those who were inspired by that tragedy. You could say I was second-generation. But I do feel inspired by this September 11, or rather by that day, only a year late.

It's been a year, almost. But why does it feel like it happened this morning?

New U2 Single

To be released in conjunction with the new Best Of this fall, it's called Electrical Storm.

Blogroll Addition

Believe it or not, the web-based musings of Ben Stein who, with Peggy Noonan, is at the top of my list of People Now Alive That I Would Really Love to Meet.

(Via Off-Wing Opinion, a self described 'free market sports
fan' - and a fine blog in its own right.)

Star Trek

It's true; people either love it or hate it. It's a dichotomy. Don't mix it up.

Beats Me

I've been tweaking the template, and it doesn't look quite so horrible now, at least from here. Comments no longer work, though, unfortunately. I'll see what I can do. Let me know if something is horribly wrong from your perspective.

In related news, I'm on the verge of buying some server space, so I could have a Moveable Type server up by the end of the week. Exciting! Regular blogging will resume when the technical craziness dies down a little.

And when my cold gets better.

I Dunno...

...what's wrong with the blog. Working on it.

Alllllrighty then

I'm back online at the apartment now... sort of. Something's fuqed, as they say - for starters, my modem's power button has a nast habit of turning itself off - I'm sending it back tomorrow, though. Bigger trouble is on my comp, though - I had a virus earlier this year, and in combatting it, either it or I deleted some files that shouldn't have been deleted. The result is that my IE and Outlook just don't work. Netscape does, though, so I'm now a Netscape man.

UPDATE: Um... my blog doesn't seem to load in Netscape - something about the Comments. Anybody else have this problem?

UPDATE 2: Okay, I downloaded the most recent Netscape, and it works... but it looks pretty terrible... in fact, the blogger interface I use to post looks terrible too. Ah well, at least it works.

The Canadian Military Tradition

She has a proud one, a fine one - but you wouldn't know it to talk to most Canadians. As an aside.

Steyn Watch

Wherein the columnist reprises the "That's-not-a-bug-it's-a-feature" argument, and discusses apparent Republican opposition to the forthcoming war.

Condi on Faith

Excerpt:

I've watched over the last year and a half how people want to have human dignity worldwide. You hear of Asian values or Middle Eastern values and how that means people can't really take to democracy or they'll never have democracy because they have no history of it, and so forth. We forget that when people are given a choice between freedom and tyranny, they will choose freedom.

That's actually a bad excerpt, because it's not at all indicative of the greater theme of the piece. So I guess you'll just have to read the whole thing.

The One Party Campus

This item, which has been making the blogosphere rounds, prompted me to note that for my upcoming "Introduction to Political Economy" class, the syllabus is as follows:

The Libertarian Reader, ed. David Boaz of the Cato Institute;

Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke;

Excerpts from The Black Book of Communism;

and What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity, published by the free-market Fraser Institute.

No Democrats here.

Old Media Comes Through - V

And finally, on a lighter note, the Post reports on the latest chart-topper in Russia - a song called "A Man Like Putin."

A man like Putin, full of strength. A man like Putin, who does not drink. A man like Putin, who does not insult. A man like Putin, who does not run away.

Some suggest the song - which has not been released as a single, and was produced by a little-known band, is in fact the result of a PR-campaign by the Kremlin.

Anyone for Stasi Peanuts?

Old Media Comes Through - IV

As I mentioned yesterday, the union of Palestinain journalists, the Palestinain Journalists Syndicate, has banned its members from taking film or photos of Palestinian children carrying weapons. Also included in the ban - masked 'militants' participating in rallies. The PJS claims that such pictures are a 'flagrant violation of the rights of these children' - while the child abuse involved in giving them weapons and teaching them to hate and murder Jews and Americans apparently is not. Of course, the 'rights' argument doesn't cover 'masked miltiants', does it? Helpfully, we are provided with the real explanation: "these pictures reflect negativelyon the image of Palestine [sic] in the international media." This, remember, is the official reason for PA condemnation of suicide bombings.

By the way, 'Palestinian Journalists Syndicate' - does that sound to anyone else like some horrible hybrid of sixties hippies and college granola crunchers?

Old Media Comes Through - III

On a lighter note, Queen's miffed by U.S. praise for McGill. In the past week, two (count em, two) American magazines have compared Montreal's McGill University - home of Mader Blog... and some other stuff - to Harvard University. The comparison has cheesed off the folks at Queens University (not the one in Belfast), who think that their school deserves the complimentary comparison. The difference being that unlike Queens, people have heard of Harvard.

And, on the same page (but not online), a report that 'Low Vacancies Put McGill 'Ghetto' Beyond Student Budgets." Those pesky laws of supply and demand are kicking in again, and "a room on Durocher in the ghetto goes for $850 a month..." Now, I have a room on Durocher, and I don't pay $850 a month. So I'm hoping against hope that my landlord doesn't read the post.

Old Media Comes Through - II

Next up - a wonderful juxtaposition of these two articles:

Genetically modified food safe, report says; Zambia refuses food despite UN assurances

The first story reports that a federally-appointed commission has found GM-foods to be safe both for consumption and for planting. "Research and development of GM organisms has been taking place for nearly 30 years with no evidence as yet of harm to human health or the environment," the report says. "GM foods currently in the marketplace have arguably undergone greater regulatory scrutiny than their conventional counterparts." Of course, just because GM foods are more demonstrably safe than their 'conventional' counterparts is no reason to stop the catterwauling: "We're told that 60% of processed grocery products have genetically modified foods in them, so we are exposing huge numbers of people to these products that have had only rudimentary tests," says Dr. Dennis McCalla, 'former dean of science at McMaster University in Hamilton and a GM food critic' according to the article.

With the evidence piling up, it would be easy to just dismiss these hysterical luddites. But we mustn't, because their irrationality is causing something else to pile up - bodies:

Despite nearly three million people on the brink of starvation in their country, officials in Zambia are resisting entreaties from aid groups, donor countries and United Nations experts to accept more than 40,000 tonnes of food aid, most of it from the United States, which they have refused to accept because it has been genetically modified.

GM crops have the potential to transform large swathes of Africa. Resistant to pests and disease, such crops could survive - and thrive - where domestic crops have failed. But these food shipments aren't in the form of crops - they're milled grains. Even though planting GM crops has shown no adverse effect to local environments, the "misinformed and misguided" Zambian government refuses to accept food for their starving people lest these milled cereals somehow get planted. This tragedy is certainly a symptom of the terrible government which is almost as great a scourge as any other facing Africa, save AIDS. But it is also blood on the hands of all those who in the face of evidence, reason and necessity continue to make unsubstantiated claims of harmfullness against crops in order to support an agenda of restriction and control. These people are the enemies of freedom, and the war they wage is costing lives.

Old Media Comes Through

I seem to be all about the newspapers these days. But today's print edition of the National Post is so damned good, I just have to rant and rave about it. The next few posts concern articles from today's paper.

First off, mad props go to Mader Blog correspondent and close personal relation Deej, who has an excellent Op-Ed piece in Canada's national newspaper. Excerpt:

To put it another way, school board trustees are elected to spend money. How it is raised is someone else's problem. This is a departure from the old system, under which local politicians were responsible for both setting tax rates to raise money, and setting education budgets to spend it. When you tell politicians that they can spend what they like but someone else is going to have to come up with the cash, do you really expect them to spend responsibly? Can anyone really be surprised that they haven't?

That's only part of it - it's a well crafted, multi-tiered argument, and I would blog it and tell y'all to read it even if D-J and I didn't have the same last name.

McAfrika Burger Riles Aid Groups: AP

Did you read the story?

Now tell me you didn't smirk just a little bit.

And, on a more serious note, let's be honest, it's not McDonald's' fault there's a famine in Africa. It's the fault of the useless socialist governments of Africa. That's not going to change by poo-pooin distasteful names for tasty sandwiches.

They Know We're Watching

The J-Post is reporting that the Palestinian Press Agency has banned journalists from taking pictures of armed Palestinian children. Pictures like these. Or like this. This one wasn't taken by a journalist, but we imagine it would be banned. Ditto this one. This cute little girl isn't armed, so would the photo be legit? Or how about this one - in which the children aren't armed, they're just rallying around their terrorist role-model? These guns aren't real, so do the children count as armed? And how old are children? After all, these kids are old enough to be dreaming about those 72 virigins - and they're definately armed.

So much confusion - better to stick with pictures like this one.

[Note - JPost now requires registration, and it keeps telling me I'm missing a field. I'm not, but it keeps telling me I am, so there you go. Anyway, all to say my link is just to the main page.]

Amiel: NYTimes is Orwellian

That her conclusion, anyway, in a column outlining the fall of the once-reputable newspaper. It can be found on the Telegraph site here.

And props to my hometown Ottawa Citizen for the shout-out. I've long been a critic of the Citizen, though in the few years after it was acquired by Conrad Black's Hollinger Group - when it became the only paper with an openly libertarian editorial-board policy - it was, in a word, superb. It has declined from those heights, in my opinion, but as Amiel's citation shows - and as David Warren's popularity shows - the paper is still capable of making an impact well beyond its domestic market. Bravo.

Mark Steyn Watch

If you haven't read this one yet, do. It was printed in last Thursday's National Post, I believe, on a page with two other excellent pieces of opinion. I'm going to try and find them online, but if you haven't put that day's Post in the recycling yet, I really recommend you dig it out and give it all a read. Cracking good stuff.

UPDATE: Here's one of them, about why Mugabe has been stealing land from white farmers. He's not a madman - it's about consolidating his power.

UPDATE II: Here's the other one. It's regarding the recent abduction and murder of two little girls in Britain; and, more broadly, about the phenomenon of a grotesque popular outpouring of emotion which, the author says, is really a guilty reaction to hide inner emptiness. Some very good points about dignity, with examples from Shakespeare. What more could you want?

Too Much?



Not my style, but certainly to the point, and something 'delegates' to the Earth Summit would do well to remember.