I think I finally figured out what bugs me about people who talk about being proud of their countries. I feel like I can’t disagree with them because to do so means I’m ashamed of my country, and that’s not the way I feel. But pride is something that I associate with personal accomplishments, not the place where I happened to be born. Shouldn’t you only be able to take pride in something you’ve earned or accomplished by yourself? Or at least assisted in?

This is what bugs me about people who take pride in (for example) the D-Day landings. If you were there, then by all means, let your chest swell with pride. You deserve it. But if you’re like me and you only read about it in history books, then what business do you have being proud of it? The fact that you happened to be born in the same country as the guys who were there?

So what do I feel about these sources of what people call “national pride”? I think I figured out what I feel about things like this: I feel gratitude, not pride. I cannot honestly take pride in the accomplishments of others, but I can be grateful to them for what they did. And I can be grateful that I was born in a country where I have human rights and material prosperity.

“National pride” bugs me because I think it gets in the way of constructive change; one is not allowed to criticize one’s country because you’re supposed to be proud of it, and being proud of it means not admitting its faults. But if we can replace this idea with the idea of gratitude to one’s nation, I think it’s a bit easier to be grateful to someone or something while still acknowledging its faults.

Well, it’s been roughly 36 hours since my beloved dog Fuzzy died. He suffered a cardiac arrest yesterday around noon, after fighting both cancer and heart disease for the last six months. But he was surprisingly strong for most of it, didn’t suffer, and only experienced a serious decline in the last couple of weeks. He went without pain; the doctors tried to resuscitate him several times without success, but he was unconscious through the whole process.

It’s a strange emotional roller-coaster. When he first died, I felt like it was his time. I knew it had been coming, and I was glad that he didn’t suffer. But as time goes by, I notice his absence more and more. Just now, the fireplace clicked on, and I instinctively thought that the noise was Fuzzy moving around. I actually jumped out of my seat, but of course, he wasn’t there.

Last night, I carefully put his bed in its customary spot, next to mine. It somehow felt right to have it there, even if he wasn’t in it. But this morning, I took it to the animal hospital. We’re going to have him cremated, and I know he would want his bed, so I left it with them so they could cremate him in it.

It’s such a strange, hollow feeling. Every single time I get up and walk around, I expect to hear the jingling of his collar as he moves to follow me. Even as he weakened in the last few weeks, he would still raise his head to watch me, and wait for me to come over and pet him. But there is only silence. The house feels empty and dead without him here.

I can’t complain about the way things happened. I know nothing could have been done to prevent this, and it’s not as if he was going to live forever. But I still feel hollow inside.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that we all think we know what’s right and what’s wrong. Even people who claim to subscribe to some sort of cultural relativism tend to admit they have a few pretty rigid ideas of what’s right and wrong if you push them hard enough. And for most people, they don’t really need to study some complicated ethical philosophy or read books on ethics in order to know what’s right and wrong. They just “know” it. It comes from their intuition. That’s how we “know” that certain rights and principles are “self-evident”, and that’s how Christians “know” which parts of the Bible are important to follow and which parts aren’t. And once we “know” what’s right and wrong, we can judge other people on their actions.

But what if we’ve actually got it backwards? What if we don’t judge people by their actions? What if we do it backwards, and we actually tend to judge actions by the people who commit them? I know what you’re probably thinking: “this guy is on drugs”. But bear with me for a moment here: didn’t you ever wonder why an Arab would make excuses for the actions of Islamic terrorists, while vocally condemning American military actions on moral grounds? Or, to turn the tables, why an American would make excuses for the death toll caused by American military action, while vocally condemning Islamic terrorism on moral grounds? Why do middle-class people in first-world nations wax poetic about the materialistic excesses of wealthy people like Paris Hilton, but get defensive when someone points out how the first-world middle class is obscenely wealthy and materialistic compared to the third-world nations that we exploit for resources and cheap labour?

For all the high-minded moral rhetoric that people spout, there is one element which is common to all of these examples: we claim that we judge people by their actions, but in many cases we seem to make excuses for actions if they are committed by people we respect, while raining thunderous condemnation upon similar actions when they are committed by people we despise. Oh sure, we can write long essays about various high-minded religious, cultural, or philosophical justifications for our judgements, in which we seize upon some distinction between our enemies and ourselves (as if they can’t do the same), but doesn’t it seem like a lot of smoke and mirrors? Especially when we find ways to justify actions from party A while condemning them from party B even if they produce very similar outcomes?

There’s probably no more blatant example of this than the abortion debate: why is it so important for anti-abortion activists to paint a picture of a self-centred sexually promiscuous woman when they attack what they call “abortion on demand?” Because that way, you will associate abortion with people you despise. That way, you will want to ban it. And yet, if a rape victim wants an abortion, very few are willing to stand up and condemn her for the exact same action. Why not? Because it’s not about the action itself, and it never was. It’s about the people. In order to attack certain groups of people, we pretend to hate particular actions they commit, when we actually hate the whole package. If we don’t hate the whole package, we mysteriously find a way to forgive the action.

Am I being too cynical? Maybe, but when you look around at the massive double-standards that people have, it sure as hell looks like people do exactly what I’m describing here. Maybe not everyone does this, but the people who rely mostly on intuition for their moral judgements certainly do. And take a good look at typical Internet arguments: how often do you see people defend some group or individual who’s accused of an unethical act … by pointing out that he (or they) did something good elsewhere? How does that have any bearing on the accusation? It doesn’t, unless you’re trying to paint the defendant as “good people”, thus implying that somehow, the action isn’t as bad.

Is there some reason why womens’ jackets don’t seem to have the inside chest-level pocket where men normally keep their wallets? Rebecca has several jackets, none of which have that pocket on the inside. I guess it’s assumed that they’ll use a purse, but how silly is this? Meanwhile, every single one of my jackets has that pocket, and many of them have several.

Are women not supposed to store their wallets anywhere but a purse? Is there some concern that bulky objects in a womens’ jacket inside pocket might create an unattractive bulge? Is there any reason for this? Inquiring minds want to know.

Rebecca was talking about something she heard on the radio about how Rudy Giuliani is surprisingly popular even among people who oppose his views on abortion and marriage, and it’s pretty much widely accepted that it’s because he was the mayor of New York on 9/11. But do people ever stop to ask why this is so important?

Sometimes I hear people ask why it’s important that kids learn about evolution in school. “What difference does it make”, the argument goes, “since the origin of humans has nothing to do with anyone’s daily life anyway?”

Leaving aside the obvious retort that we can’t teach falsehoods about science just because they’re not relevant to daily life, I think politics is a good forum to demonstrate why people need to understand that we did, in fact, come from stupid hairy primates. And not just because politicians themselves are often stupid and hairy, although that is often true. I’m talking about the alpha-male syndrome.

You see, we humans are still stupid hairy apes, but we won’t admit it. That’s why we mindlessly follow the alpha-male. Why do you think George W. Bush won the last election against Kerry? Do you really think it was because Kerry’s policies were worse than Bush’s policies? Hell, 9 out of 10 voters aren’t even sure what to believe about anything any more, except for the core group of foaming-at-the-mouth Bible thumpers who would gladly vote for a hamster if he opposed gay marriage. People voted for Bush because he seemed like the alpha male, not because they thought he had better judgment.

Why do you think the accusation of indecisiveness was so devastating to Kerry’s political campaign? Because an alpha male makes a decision and stands by it. He is proud. He would never do something like re-examining his original position, or changing his mind in light of changing circumstances, or lying awake at night torturing himself with questions about what to do. Oh no, the alpha male stands strong and proud and makes his decision, no matter how stupid, with conviction! And we want to follow this kind of man.

Why do you think that every study of executive compensation shows that there is a direct correlation between height and promotion, as well as salary? Do you think that an extra three inches of height actually makes you a better executive? Of course not. We’re the smartest apes on the planet but we’re still apes, and we want to follow the alpha male. Why do you think there has always been a strong contingent of people who think that the rulers of the country need more power concentrated in their grubby hands, not less? Because we’re apes, and we want to follow the alpha male. Why do you think those same people tend to think the rulers need less oversight (or as they put it, “meddling”) from other branches of government? Because we’re apes, and we want to follow the alpha male.

Think back to your childhood. Who did the kids look up to? Surely not the smartest kid in the class. They looked up to the alpha male. There’s always an alpha male, and because we’re nothing but smart apes, we want to follow him. Many people don’t even question this or dispute it. Some might even argue that it’s healthy and normal (funny how those two words are often spoken together, as if one necessarily includes the other).

But ask yourself why you want to follow the alpha male. Is it because the alpha male will necessarily make the best decisions? Of course not. History is littered with examples of alpha males making stupid decisions, such as Alexander marching his entire army across a barren desert, Napoleon advancing deep into Russia, or General Lee ordering his men to walk into a perfect killing zone at Gettysburg. And in so many of these cases, the bad decisions were not just a coincidence. They were directly caused by the alpha male’s weaknesses: his pride and his stubbornness. Worse yet, these are the best alpha males that history has to offer. Most alpha males skip the “brilliant success” stage and go straight to “arrogant and foolish”.

So why do we follow these kinds of men? Why do we want to follow the man who seems most like an “alpha”, rather than the man who seems to have the most prudent judgment, the most knowledge, and the most intelligence? Once again, it all comes back to our origins. We don’t make decisions like this for rational reasons. We make decisions like this because we’re apes, and we want to mindlessly follow the alpha while beating our chests and scratching our privates. We’re apes. Accept it.

Holy Christ, I can’t believe how much salt the city is throwing down on the streets and sidewalks. The blacktop is white. There are literally piles of salt at corners and around posts.

I know they need to limit ice accumulation for safety reasons, but this is ridiculous. They’re burning dogs’ feet and corroding cars into wreckage out here. I think I saw Lot’s wife at the fucking corner of the 401 and Highway 10.

Yesterday was Friday, February 16, 2007. The day I discovered that my 8 year old son David is on the American Homeland Security Department’s “No Fly” list.

Luckily for us, we ran into Customs agents who recognized the inherent absurdity of my little boy being identified as a possible terrorist, so they let us go through. After all, he’s 8 years old.

Of course, it has occurred to me that if he were a man rather than a boy, we might have very well missed our flight. When our flight took off (an hour late due to interminable Customs delays, by the way), we could have been sitting in an interrogation room trying to convince some bureaucrat that we are not secretly working for Al-Quaeda.

I hope you Americans feel really safe knowing that these kinds of smart security measures are in place, because it’s nothing more than a pain in the ass for the rest of us, and guess what: if I were a terrorist who was known to intelligence services, do you really think I’d travel under my real name anyway?

Today’s entry in the “pointless and absurd” column has been brought to you by America’s Homeland Security Department.

Today the morning conservative talk-show host Bill Carroll was doing a bit on evolution. Interestingly enough, I counted 8 people in a row who called in against evolution. I tried calling in myself, and instead of getting put in the queue to go on the air, as soon as I made it clear I was pro-evolution, I was told “I’ll pass your message onto him” and got hung up on. Was this because the message queue was too long, or was there a bias against pro-evolution callers? On most subjects, they’ll bump someone up the queue if he’s expressing an opinion that goes against the opinions of most callers, because they know they need to hear from both sides. But apparently (and rather ironically) they didn’t feel this was necessary on this subject.

Anyway, if there’s one thing that really pisses me off, it’s the way call-in shows about evolution are dominated by fundies. Now I know that this is partially because of zealotry; the fundies rush to the phone and speed-dial the instant they know it’s about evolution while I wait until I have a free minute. But it’s also partially because their message is so radio-friendly. Telling people that evolution is a crock is OK on the radio, but telling people that God is a crock will elicit a stream of angry E-mails, phone calls, letters, pulled advertisements, and boycott threats.

Carroll was pushing the standard middle-ground line, which is that evolution is “just a theory” but it should be taught because children “need to know what scientists believe”. Of course, he also emphasized that children “need to know what religions believe” as well, thus painting it as a neat issue of two competing sides, neither of whom is intrinsically superior to the other. And naturally, the children are supposed to decide on their own.

Well I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but that is just flat wrong. Children are not supposed to decide on their own. I don’t know where people got the idea that education was about children choosing for themselves rather than being educated by people who have far more knowledge than they do, but it’s simply idiotic. When you’re an adult, you can choose for yourself. But when you’re in 9th grade science class, you do not have the intellectual tools necessary to do that kind of thing. You do not choose for yourself whether calculus is valid; you are told that it is. You do not choose for yourself whether atoms contain protons and neutrons; you are told that they do (and by the way, for the science philistines out there; the atomic theory of matter is “just a theory” too; have you ever seen a proton?).

This “middle ground” idea is completely insidious and totally dishonest. Do we teach about Louis Pasteur’s germ theory and the Medieval Church’s demonic possession theory as two competing explanations of sickness and disease in health class? No, we teach Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, and guess what: we teach it as a fact. Not because it technically is one, but because children at that age are not ready to understand the distinction between “the only explanation which fits the facts” and “facts”. Hell, many adults don’t understand that distinction either.

In this world, the only people qualified to judge the effectiveness of a new civil engineering idea are qualified panels of civil engineers. The only people qualified to judge the effectiveness of a new neurosurgery technique are qualified panels of neurosurgeons. So why do we think that regular people (never mind children) are qualified to judge the validity of a scientific theory when it happens to be evolution? Do we give children competing theories of subatomic particle physics and ask them to judge for themselves? “Of course not”, a reasonable person would answer; “that’s much too complicated for children to figure out on their own”. And why isn’t biology also too complicated? It is very complicated, and people spend years learning it in university. Christian distortions of biology involve oversimplifying it so that people who do not really understand evolution think they do, and they even think they can poke holes in it. But in the end, they’re not qualified to make that decision, especially when they’re children.

Yes, you heard me right: children should not be given a choice about evolution. They should not be “making up their own minds” about evolution. They should be taught evolution and if they don’t get it, they should fail science class. If they reject science and all of its methods, they should not get a passing grade in science. And by the way, that’s no exaggeration; you must indeed reject the entire scientific method in order to choose creationism over evolution, as Dr. Behe was forced to admit on the stand in the case of Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District when he admitted that in order to classify “intelligent design” as a science, he was forced to redefine “science” so broadly that it now included astrology. And “intelligent design” is supposed to be creationism’s more reasonable cousin!

Of course, religious people will screech that if they must reject science in order to reject evolution (something which the more honest among them will admit openly), they have the right to do so. And that is true. I absolutely agree that free people in a free society have the right to reject science. But they do not have the right to reject science and then get a passing grade in science class anyway.

You know what I hate about cell-phones? The fact that you can’t look up the owner in a directory listing. There’s some asshole that’s been periodically calling my cell-phone for weeks. His phone number is 416-919-5435. I never pick it up because I don’t know the number. But I finally decided I’d better find out who this persistent caller was, so I read his number off the caller ID and called him back. Here’s how that conversation went:

“Who’s this?”

“Who are you? You called my number.”

“Fuck off! I made a mistake, OK? Fuck off!”

He than hung up. Interesting how he didn’t even bother asking any questions (and what kind of person answers the phone with “Who’s this” instead of “Hello”?). He obviously knew that he’d been calling me, and knew that it was the wrong number. But he’d been doing it for weeks! What kind of brain malfunction leads someone to act like this?

Am I the only one who’s sick of seeing people on TV (and in real-life) telling you that they know more about relationships than you because they’ve been divorced three times?

Maybe I’ve only had one marriage, but I didn’t fuck it up. So don’t talk down to me because I had one success, compared to your three failures.

Can you imagine a guy who flunked an exam in school three times, telling people that they should look to his expertise on how to pass the exam? People would laugh their asses off at him. But for some reason, when the exam is marriage, this kind of bizarre logic convinces people!

People are so incredibly irrational.

Even though I had no idea who Glenn Beck was, I had a feeling I would hate his show as soon as CNN started advertising for it. Call it a bad vibe, or a premonition, or just the fact that something about the short clips in the ads struck me as worthless. But it would be unfair to actually dismiss it without viewing his show, right? So I did watch his show, and as I expected, I hated it. But why? I suppose it could be his particular views, but I’ve known plenty of people with views like that in real-life, and I got along with them.

So what was it about his show that pissed me off and made me hate it? Curious, I tried watching a second show. Once again, I hated it. What’s more, I even started hating the commercials themselves, and even any mention of his show. When the vapid news anchors started spouting ads for his show at every turn, it set my teeth on edge. “Watch the Glenn Beck show for his unique take on current events”, they would say.

“Unique take”, eh? I heard that phrase a few times and I think I figured out why I hate his show. When I watch regular news, I want to see information I would not be able to easily get on my own, or that I wouldn’t bother seeking out. Or I want to see footage from foreign correspondents who are on the scene and can show me things that I obviously couldn’t see on my own. When I read Businessweek Magazine, I’m expecting them to offer insights and information that are new and interesting, and which I couldn’t pick up casually if I hadn’t read it there.

But what does Glenn Beck’s “unique take” on life offer? That’s the problem: there’s nothing “unique” about it at all. Instead, he offers the same kind of useless half-assed unresearched blue-collar opinions that I heard countless times at the cafeteria table when I used to work in tool-and-die shops. In short, there are millions of Glenn Becks out there; he represents the voice of the Guy In Overalls. But I’ve worked with plenty of guys in overalls; I don’t see any fucking reason to turn on CNN to watch a whole show devoted to one particular example of the breed. He doesn’t offer any special background or knowledge to offer any particular insight into the news, and he doesn’t offer news itself. All he offers is the opinion of the Guy In Overalls demographic, and that is anything but unique.

You know, you can call me an elitist, but I figure that if some guy gets a national TV show to discuss current events, he should be able to offer some special credentials to make his opinion more interesting or well-informed than mine. Otherwise, why should I watch it? To hear the kind of half-assed knee-jerk opinions that I could easily get from my mailman? No thanks. There’s something wrong with news channels when guys get TV shows precisely because they don’t have any special background by education or experience to cover the news. Of course, there’s also Glenn Beck’s belief that he’s genuinely funny; that’s yet another thing he shares with far too many guys in overalls.

Imagine a headline in the newspaper that said “Arsonist sentenced to 18 months for fatal fire”. Imagine if the accompanying article indicated that this arsonist had been convicted several times before for setting fires that didn’t kill anyone. Imagine if he asked for clemency based on the fact that he didn’t know anyone was home, so the death was an accident. Imagine that he tried to explain his behaviour by saying that he was deeply depressed after losing his job.

How would you react? “String the bastard up!” you might say. But what if you replace “arson” with “drunk driving” and “fire” with “crash”? Will you react the same way? If not, then why not? Because let’s face it, the above story has happened before with drunk drivers, and on many occasions.

For some reason, we as a society have collectively decided that drunk drivers cannot be held fully responsible for the results of their actions, in the way that an arsonist would be. They stand up in court and say things like “I can’t help myself” or “I will never do this again” and “I have made mistakes, but I am a good husband and father” and people cut them slack.

But why? This is something I have wrestled with for a while, and I cannot come up with a good reason for the double-standard. If anyone else has any ideas, let me know. Because for all the outrage and anger and calls for change that I hear after a homicide, I just don’t see the same kind of reaction to drunk drivers. And drunk drivers kill more people than murderers every year in this country. Do you think their dead victims feel better knowing that they were killed by a drunk instead of a robber?

Seriously, how sickening are these people?

“But wait Mike, what the hell are pop culture geniuses”, you say? Well, I freely admit that I just made up this term, because I couldn’t find an already-existing term for people who think that their choice of entertainment somehow makes them smarter. Still don’t understand what I mean? Maybe this will help you understand:

Words to remember:

• Watching “The Matrix” does not make you a philosopher.
• Listening to “U2″ does not make you a humanitarian.
• Owning all the “Star Trek” movies does not make you a physicist.
• Watching the “Left Behind” movies does not make you a futurist.
• Reading Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” does not make you a cosmologist.
• Reading Tom Clancy books does not make you a military strategist.
• Reading “New Scientist” magazine does not make you a scientist.
• Owning a copy of “The Day After Tomorrow” does not make you an environmental expert.
• Reading “Popular Mechanics” does not make you an engineer.
• Watching “The Passion” fifty times does not make you an historian.
• Listening to gangsta rap does not make you an expert on inner-city sociology, and it sure as hell doesn’t make you any tougher.

Oh, how easy it is to become a pop culture genius. All you have to do is listen to the right music, watch the right movies, or read the right novels and magazines, and whammo, you instantly duplicate the effect of years of higher education and/or experience. How convenient. It’s almost as bad as creationists who think that the best way to study evolution science is to ignore what virtually all actual biologists are saying.

Is it just me, or are bathroom fans weak and pathetic? Listen to the pitiful, apologetic whirring sound that a typical bathroom fan makes: it’s quieter than a woman’s vibrator. Now compare this to one of those good high-powered fans that you find above a large stove or better yet, one of those Japanese places where they cook food on a giant hot-plate.

Why aren’t we using those fans instead of these pansy little quiet whirring things behind the effete white plastic covers? Try going into your bathroom and turning on the fan. Do you really get the feeling that any significant amount of air is being evacuated from the room by this weak-kneed device?

The stench produced by a man’s shit cannot be dealt with by an effeminate little fan. A man’s shit requires a man’s fan. Or maybe two.

Have you seen those residential room air cleaners that are increasingly popular? The air cleaner on a home furnace is OK, but it’s nowhere near as efficient as these specialized room air cleaner units. And have you seen how there are several types, such as HEPA filters and electrostatic air cleaners? Did you know that an electrostatic air cleaner can burst into flames? Neither did I, until about ten minutes ago.

I have an Oreck electrostatic air cleaner in my basement. I had been remiss in cleaning it, and it got full of dust. I took out the metallic filter element, cleaned and washed it as per instructions, and then stuck it back into the machine. I started it up, and the airflow out of the outlet was definitely restricted. The design of this machine is such that you can’t take apart the blower and the outlet, only the inlet and the filter assembly. So the only way to get the dust out of the outlet area was to try and suck it out with a vacuum. That got out a lot of the dust, but I suspect it must have also kicked quite a bit loose which fell back down into the blower area.

Anyway, I started it up again, and whooomp, great gouts of flame shot out of every orifice in the machine. A fireball literally shot up about one foot out of the top, and if I’d been leaning over it any closer, I wouldn’t have eyebrows now.

Naturally, I immediately shut it off. It was quite obvious that whatever dust shook loose from the outlet and fell into the blower must have somehow gotten into the electrostatic filter unit despite the mesh screen, and it was also quite obvious that the voltage applied to the plates in the electrostatic filter unit was sufficient to ignite this dust.

I took the machine apart and discovered that while the metallic electrostatic filter unit was OK, the mesh screens on the front and back of the unit were destroyed by the fireball. I don’t want to blame Oreck because they probably have a warning in the manual about letting the unit get too dusty, but I thought I had taken reasonable precautions, so I was rather taken aback to have this happen.

In any case, since I happened to have a small Honeywell HEPA air cleaner sitting in a box (it’s the old-fashioned kind which simply blows air through paper and charcoal filters, with no high-voltage plates), I plugged that in and now I’ve got an air cleaner running in the basement again. So, if you’re ever thinking about getting an air cleaner, bear my story in mind. Electrostatic air cleaners can burst into flames if they get too dusty. Maybe I’ll just stick with the Honeywell.

Do you ever have one of those days when you wake up, and as you go about your daily routine it suddenly strikes you how very, very lucky you are?

Today was one of those days. Nothing special happened; I dropped off Matthew at school, had to go to work, etc. But as I kissed Rebecca goodbye for the day and got into the car with my son, I was suddenly struck by the revelation of how many people in the world have never achieved what I have.

A boring middle-class job, two great kids, a cute little dog, and a loving wife is not the kind of “life of significance” that gets written up in newspapers or glorified in the movies, but do you really need any more out of life than that?

Personally, I don’t think so. I’ve grown up in a first-world nation, I’ve found the love of my life, I have enough to get by financially, and my kids are not brats. I’ll probably never make the newspapers, but I think, in the end, that I don’t care. There are plenty of people who have become rich and famous but who never attained some of the simple things.

Allow me to take this opportunity to say that I’m sick of people out there (such as local radio talk-show host Bill Carroll, although he is by no means the only one) attacking Toronto as Canada’s Murder Capital. This is a complete falsehood, and it is based upon the apparent inability of radio talk show hosts, other assorted media alarmists, and rural bumpkins to perform simple mathematics. Now of course, I know that some of you will get angry and write me to complain that I used the term “rural bumpkins”. You will no doubt complain that I shouldn’t generalize about the education of rural people despite all of the statistical evidence showing that you are much less likely to be well-educated. Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. I understand that you don’t know any better.

In any case, for those of you who flunked grade-school math (and it appears, based on calls to radio talk-shows and letters written to newspapers, that many of you did), a city with five point two million people living in it (ref: StatCan) can have a low crime rate but still produce many dozens of murders in any given year. I know some of you people out there are allergic to numbers, but the fact is that numbers tell an objective tale, as opposed to a sensationalist one. And here are the numbers, from Statistics Canada’s The Daily report from July 21, 2005:

Oops, that’s not what you expected, is it? It looks like Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Abbotsford, and Halifax all have much higher homicide rates than Toronto. It also appears that Montréal and Calgary are in the same ballpark as Toronto, despite hardly ever being fingered as high-crime cities by the national media. In fact, the highest homicide rates among Canadian cities (defined by this source as census metropolitan areas above 100,000 population) are found in Winnipeg (pop: 700k), Regina (pop: 200k), and Abbotsford (pop: 150k). Yes, that’s right: the worst murder rates in Canada are in some of the smallest cities, not the biggest ones.

And hey, how does this compare to American cities? Well, based on the FBI’s statistics for 2002 as reported in Best and Worst Cities for Crime, Toronto has a lower murder rate than all large American cities, most mid-sized American cities, and even a majority of the tiny little burgs ranging right down to 55,000 population (try looking through their charts for a murder rate below 1.8; you won’t find that many).

But of course, those are just numbers, and as Bill Carroll would say, “don’t give me statistics”, and “just try telling that to the parents of the 4-year old who got shot”. Yeah, I’m sure all of those other murders in other cities did not leave grieving parents behind. This is the problem with fearmongers; they appeal to emotion and hysteria in order to dismiss these odd and annoying things called “facts”.

And the facts say this: Toronto, which is Canada’s largest and most multi-racial city (in fact, with more than a third of the population consisting of a highly mixed group of visible minorities, it is one of the most multi-racial cities in the world), has the lowest overall crime rate among all of Canada’s large cities, and it has the third lowest overall crime rate even if you include the small cities. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill Carroll.

I think it’s high time that people who keep their mouths shut are charged as accessories to a crime. From the Toronto Sun:

Catholic Children’s Aid Society investigator Osiris Villalobos wiped away tears of his painful memory of the 5-year-old boy at the Hospital for Sick Children on Nov. 30, 2002.

Villalobos was testifying at the trial of Baldwin’s grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, both 53, who are accused of first-degree murder. Jeffrey died of acute bronchial pneumonia, but extreme malnutrition was the underlying cause.

…

While all the other rooms at the home were heated, properly furnished and clean, Jeffrey’s room was barren, freezing and disgusting, court heard.

Jeffrey’s bed was literally soaked in urine and caked in dried feces. The floor around his mattress was urine-stained and rotten, Villalobos testified.

A bag of soiled diapers lay on the floor and food remnants lay in what appeared to be a dog bowl, he said.

…

“Every adult in the house had knowledge of what was happening to Jeffrey (and the other girl) and had failed to report,” Villalobos testified.

Now, it goes without saying that Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman are worthless subhuman scum who should be tortured to death. But what about the other fucking people who were living in this house, who had full knowledge of the torture being inflicted upon this helpless child, and who did nothing? According to the article, there were four other adults living in this house, apparently related to the grandfather. One of them was asked if he knew, and he said that he knew but he didn’t want to report them because he would get kicked out of the house. Yes, that’s right; he turned a blind eye to child torture so he could get free rent.

People love to talk about “personal responsibility”, but there is also such a thing as “social responsibility”, and when you know that a child is being starved, frozen, made to eat out of a dog bowl, and forced to sleep in his own feces, you have to fucking tell someone. Every single adult who lived in that house should be dragged into court and charged as an accessory to murder. I’m sick of this notion that you can’t charge someone for failing to act. Charge these fuckers for failing to act, goddammit. If it were up to me, I’d make them starve, freeze, drink their own urine, and eat their own feces. This poor kid had fecal matter in his lungs, goddammit. News stories like this make me want to vomit.

Do you remember how, after 9/11, Pat Robertson got in trouble for saying that it was God’s divine retribution upon America for her sins? Well, I guess it’s deja vu time; fundies all across the nation, before the city’s corpses have even been recovered, are already blaming “sin” for causing the disaster.

There is, of course, the Woodland Hills Baptist Church in Jacksonville TX, which put up the sign at right. According to KLTV 7, its pastor says “New York City’s 9/11 was a call of judgment and New Orlean’s horrible incident was judgment on a wicked city.” Agape Press says “God is speaking”. According to them, New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas fears “God’s going to cleanse us.” According to the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef declared that Katrina was divine retribution upon the USA for supporting Ariel Sharon’s pullout plan. According to one of the many “Islamic websites” known to publish Al-Quaeda propaganda, Katrina was God’s wrath for the oppression of Muslims. And of course, “this act of God destroyed a wicked city” according to Repent America. These nutcases are everywhere.

No doubt some apologists will say that it’s only a tiny minority of fundies who believe this, but I’m not buying that bullshit any more. It may not be all fundies, but it’s obviously not a “tiny minority” either. Ancient primitives always assumed that natural disasters were caused by the gods, and no matter what science says, people still seem to think this way. After all, we still can’t exactly predict the behaviour of hurricanes, so it must be Jebus! No wonder creationism is so popular in the United States.

If Katrina was God’s wrath against the “sinful” city of New Orleans, why did he trash the shit out of the rest of Louisiana too, not to mention Mississippi? Bad aim? Louisiana is #1 in church attendance and the state banned gay marriage by a whopping 78% vote almost exactly one year ago, so if “God is speaking”, one could just as easily say that instead of supporting these southern fundie churches, he’s actually sick of them speaking on his behalf.

Or maybe we should leave the Dark Ages behind and try a radical new idea: why don’t all of you idiots ask the scientists why it happened? Or is the idea of this disaster being caused by physical forces, thermodynamics, and poor urban planning just too logical for you? American fundies think the world is polarizing into Christians and non-Christians, but the similarity of their behaviour to that of Osama and Co. shows that this polarization is not between Christians and non-Christians. It’s between wackos and non-wackos. Which group do you want to be in?

For years, I’ve been hearing about how Louisiana has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. According to Eric Johnson, testifying before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the House Committee on Ways and Means in May 2002, the region of Orleans and Jefferson Parish has a staggeringly high poverty rate of 54%!

But after Katrina, I’ve been hearing about how important New Orleans is to the national economy: how it is the country’s largest shipping port and responsible for a significant fraction of the nation’s oil refining capability as well. So here’s my question: if Louisiana is so important to the national economy, why is it so fucking poor?

Or is it really poor at all? Perhaps it is not poor, and the wealth is simply distributed in an extremely uneven fashion. I discovered recently that according to the US Department of Labor at dol.gov, Louisiana is one of six states that has no minimum wage law. Assuming the DOL is not in error, this does not sound like a state which is particularly interested in helping the poor work their way out of poverty. Of course, a minimum wage hardly guarantees that anyone will climb out of poverty, but the total lack of a minimum wage reveals a certain cavalier attitude about the poor, does it not?

Of course, if someone can explain how Louisiana can be so important to the national economy while simultaneously being one of the country’s most impoverished states, be my guest. I freely admit that I am not an expert on the American economy, so perhaps there is something I have overlooked. It does certainly seem incongruous on the surface, though.