Regret The Erorr
The Year in Media Corrections, including;
In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up. The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.
And…
On 16 April we reported on an interview given by Bryan Ferry to a German newspaper. Our article was headed “The Nazis were so amazing” and claimed that Mr Ferry had been “singing the praises of the Nazis”. We now accept this was not true.
In fact, Mr Ferry had spoken only of his admiration from an artistic point of view for some aspects of German art, architecture and presentation which were associated with the Nazi regime. He made no mention of the Nazi regime nor did he use the word “Nazi”. We accept that Mr Ferry abhors the Nazi regime and all it stood for. We apologise to Mr Ferry for the offence caused by our report and are happy to set the record straight.
Let’s just say Mr. Ferry has my “sympathy”.
Via
News From The Land The Canadian Media Forgot
Absent from media coverage of late is the fact that the central government of Iraq has reached its 2007 budget revenue target of $30.2 billion. This figure is derived from oil revenues — revenues of which the Democrats have criticized the Iraqis and President Bush for not capturing to fund the cost of the new government in Baghdad. This criticism now rings hollow.
Repent Islamophobe, Or We Kill You!
When the concept of “multiculturalism” was introduced to Canadians, most assumed it meant “more pavilions at Folkfest”;
If convicted, Aqsa’s father and brother must be awarded the strictest penalty available under the law. As for the imams and clergy of Canada’s mosques, who constantly berate young women for not wearing the hijab or snub them for “violating Islam,” they need to reflect on the consequences of their sermons.
Consider, as an example, the Montreal mosque that recently posted on its Web site a warning to the effect that if young girls took off their hijab, they could end up getting raped and having “illegitimate children.” Other proferred risks included “Stresses, insecurity and suspicion in the minds of husbands” and “instigating young people to deviate towards the path of lust.”
As if the threat of rape and the fear of illegitimate children were not enough, these pre-teen girls were told that if they took off their hijab, they would cease to be Muslims: “By removing your hijab, you have destroyed your faith. Islam means submission to Allah in all our actions.” Little wonder then, that Canadian girls walk away from sports tournaments rather than remove their hijabs.
Muslims need to stand up to this sort of emotional and religious blackmail by imams who spread the competing agendas of Saudi Arabia and Iran into Canada. Young Aqsa Pervez’s death cannot be reversed. But in her memory, we can at least challenge those whose message leads to rage and madness.
A Case For Electing Judges
“However much you may think that’s a totally acceptable symbol, and that is totally neutral, that might not be entirely the case for everybody who comes to court,” Woolcott told the Waterloo regional police officer.”
h/t Mississauga Matt
Not Watching For The Asteroid
Look up! Little dinosaur, look up!
Dances With Digital Dogs
It’s been many years since I watched the film Dances With Wolves, a wholly forgettable experience were it not for a scene in which Kevin Costner is filmed playing on the prairie with a wolf. The scene is unusual, because it continues for some minutes without a cut.
But that’s not why I remember it.
I remember it because it was the singular occasion in which I’ve witnessed one of my dogs stand before a television, transfixed.
Like us, our canine friends are able to form abstract concepts. Friederike Range and colleagues from the University of Vienna in Austria have shown for the first time that dogs can classify complex color photographs and place them into categories in the same way that humans do. And the dogs successfully demonstrate their learning through the use of computer automated touch-screens, eliminating potential human influence.
In order to test whether dogs can visually categorize pictures, and transfer their knowledge to new situations, four dogs were shown landscape and dog photographs, and expected to make a selection on a computer touch-screen.
In the training phase, the dogs were shown both the landscape and dog photographs simultaneously and were rewarded with a food pellet if they selected the dog picture (positive stimulus). The dogs then took part in two tests.
In the first test, the dogs were shown completely different dog and landscape pictures. They continued to reliably select the dog photographs, demonstrating that they could transfer their knowledge gained in the training phase to a new set of visual stimuli, even though they had never seen those particular pictures before.
In the second test, the dogs were shown new dog pictures pasted onto the landscape pictures used in the training phase, facing them with contradictory information: on the one hand, a new positive stimulus as the pictures contained dogs even though they were new dogs; on the other hand, a familiar negative stimulus in the form of the landscape.
When the dogs were faced with a choice between the new dog on the familiar landscape and a completely new landscape with no dog, they reliably selected the option with the dog. These results show that the dogs were able to form a concept i.e. ‘dog’, although the experiment cannot tell us whether they recognized the dog pictures as actual dogs.
I think I can assure them with some confidence that they recognized the dog pictures as dogs.
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Counterproductive control
Normally, when members of our esteemed press here in the Great White North complain about access at the Department of National Defence, I don’t pay much heed; operational security isn’t something most of them know anything about, and so they whine.
But in this particular case, they’ve got a point:
Important information and interview requests directed to the Canadian military must now be cleared by senior bureaucrats who are under the direction of the prime minister’s office, say defence sources.
The Privy Council Office directive applies to all matters of “national importance,” but is primarily focused on shaping information related to the war in Afghanistan.
The order was issued within the last two weeks and caps a determined effort by the Conservatives to assert more civilian control over the military, which has been seen in government circles to have too much influence in the conduct of the war.
“Big deal,” you say. “So the PMO wants to control the message and make sure everyone’s on the same page, so what?”
If only that was all there was to it. Unfortunately, this informal directive is so draconian that often even the simplest of requests for information never come back down:
So I asked DND whether anyone would like to comment on the piece for a reply I was composing. The very pleasant officer I spoke with on the phone at the Media Liason Office took note of my questions, and asked the usual question about my deadline. I’ve given up trying to explain that I don’t have an editor looking over my shoulder, so I told her noon the next day would be fine, since I figured twenty-four hours to put me in touch with someone in procurement who could provide me with some context wouldn’t be onerous.
She quickly disabused me of that notion: “It will probably be at least a week.” A week? For someone to talk with me for five minutes about a story that will be dust-covered and stale by then? What if I actually did have an editor hovering behind me, beating me with a rolled-up newspaper to meet a deadline?
It’s now been six days since I made my inquiry. I’ve received no response. Not a challenging response, where their line of argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Not a weak response, where they don’t really address my questions. Not even a flaccid response where they tell me that “DND is continually assessing its munitions needs and purchasing accordingly” or some such bafflegab.
No, the only response I’ve received from DND is a deafening silence.
When the PMO and PCO are stifling communications rather than coordinating them, that’s a problem. Especially given the fact that DND consistently does a better job speaking to the Canadian people than any other department in government. Anyone care to speculate where public opinion would be on the Afghan mission if the CF had stayed silent these past years like CIDA and DFAIT have?
One of the few Canadian journalists well-versed on defence issues put it to me this way the other day:
For Canadians to get an accurate picture of military issues and challenges, the military needs to speak up. Not in carefully scripted letters approved by 5 levels of bureaucracy, but in open dialogue. Refusing to answer questions about the status of various programs or various challenges, just looks like they have something to hide. Plus it results in speculation and inaccuracy, and while in the short term the public will be the loser, over the long term, I believe the military will be the biggest loser.
I’d go a step further than that: the Canadian public will be the biggest loser.
The public needs good information in order to make good decisions about our military. The CF needs an informed public in order to pursue its mandate with sufficient support and resources. And the public in turn needs a competent military to further its domestic and international goals. By removing the first link in that chain, the bureaucrats responsible for this shift in Public Affairs are putting the whole fragile construct at risk. What could possibly justify that?
It’s not a rhetorical question. I’m beginning to wonder if this whole affair isn’t about putting those who serve in uniform back in their place. Hillier is an extraordinary leader, and it’s no secret that his personal popularity and charisma are threatening to those who inhabit the backrooms of power in Ottawa. One wonders if a chastened and diminished Canadian Forces out of touch with the Canadian public is exactly what the senior bureaucrats and political staffers want in all of this.
It’s time for Harper and the Conservatives to put an end to this internecine bureaucratic political warfare, and let the CF do its job. It’s time to take the shackles off them, and let them inform the Canadian public about who they are and what they do, as they have in the recent past.
Because the informal policy they’re working under right now isn’t a communications strategy, it’s an abandonment of the idea of communications in the first place.
The Bulldozers Remained Silent
As the military took the keys;
Most of Latin America’s leaders breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week, after Venezuelan voters rejected President Hugo Chávez’s constitutional amendment referendum. In private they were undoubtedly relieved that Chávez lost, and in public they expressed delight that he accepted defeat and did not steal the election. But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.
Now, it makes sense.
Repent Islamophobe, Or We Kill You!
When the concept of “multiculturalism” was introduced to Canadians, most assumed it meant “more pavilions at Folkfest”;
A 16-year-old girl is in critical condition after being choked by a man believed to be her father, apparently after a dispute with her family over her refusal to wear the hijab, the Islamic headscarf worn by some Muslim women.
Peel Regional Police arrested a 57-year-old man yesterday morning after receiving a 911 call from a suburban home in Mississauga from a man saying he had killed his daughter. When police and paramedics arrived at the house they found a 16-year-old lying on the floor without any vital signs, police said.
[…]
Friends of the teenager, a Grade 11 student at nearby Applewood Heights high school, identified her as Aqsa Parvez and said they were shocked by the attack on the outgoing, likeable girl, but said she had been threatened by her strictly religious family before.
“She got threatened by her father and her brother,” said Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson, who had known Aqsa since they both started high school together. “He said that if she leaves, he would kill her.”
Ebonie Mitchell, 16, another friend of the victim, said the conflict with her father over wearing Islamic dress came to a head at the beginning of this school year. “She just wanted to dress like we do,” she said.
“Last year she wore like the Islamic stuff and everything, the hijab, and this year she’s all Western. She just wanted to look like everyone else. And I guess her dad had a problem with that.”
Aqsa Parvez has now reportedly died. A commentor at the linked site has it right. In addition to murder charges, this case demands to be prosecuted as a hate crime.
Stocking Stuffer
For those with the Canadian Islamic Congress on their gift list!
What If You Raised A Flag
And nobody cared?
Buoyed by soaring oil prices, the Newfoundland government projected a surplus Monday of $881.8 million – more than triple its most recent forecast – and in doing so accepted a deal from Ottawa that Premier Danny Williams previously denounced as unacceptable.
[…]
[Finance Minister Tom Marshall ] acknowledged the province will receive an additional $66 million from the federal government by opting into a new equalization formula introduced March 19 – a deal Williams said he wasn’t prepared to accept because it offered less than what Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised.
After Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald accepted the same deal two months ago, Williams accused Harper of “preying on the weak” and MacDonald of saying “yes to less.”
“It’s not a plan that we want,” Marshall said, noting the province will accept the deal for this year but may opt out in the future. “If we can use it to the advantage of the people of this province, well obviously we’re going to do that.”
Last month, Williams met with the prime minister in St. John’s and emerged to say he would be willing to end his equalization feud with Harper, but it would take about $10 billion over 15 years in compensation.
At time of posting, this is the only news report on the new Newfoundland equalization deal that I could find on Google news. It’s 7 hours old.
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“I’m glad I did it”
Fallujah today is an impoverished ramshackle mess, but it’s not a war zone anymore. In 2004 it was by far the worst place in the country. It was still a hotbed of insurgent activity as recently as the first half of 2007.
“The unit we relieved was monitoring the city, watching the city,” Corporal Koch said. “We took that over from them. Then we started our push. It was a couple of months before the regular civilians got back in the city.”
“Months after you came in?” I said.
“We came in in November, on November 6th,” he said. “It took about two or three weeks altogether. The civilians stayed out of the city for another month or month and a half after that. We were still doing operations then, but it wasn’t an all out push. It was just cleaning up. It was loose ends. Weapons caches. Just basically getting this place ready for the civilians to come back in. We made sure people weren’t going into their homes while they were rigged to blow.”
Civilians were evacuated from the city before Al-Fajr began.
“When the civilians left,” I said, “did you help them leave orderly, or was it a mad scramble to get out of here?”
“They left in an orderly fashion,” he said. “Camps were set up outside the city for people who didn’t have family or relatives to go to and for people who couldn’t make the journey.”
A few civilians, though, did not make it out.
“There are people everywhere who want to ride out a crisis,” said India Company’s Captain Stewart Glenn. “Just like those people in New Orleans who stuck around for Hurricane Katrina. I’m going to ride it out, they said. So a few around here rode it out. There were, I think, six or so families that did that. We painted the word Family on the walls of their houses so they wouldn’t be confused with combatants.”
[…]
“I definitely think it was necessary,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets. I’m glad I did it, and I would do it again. It’s good to see the city the way it is and to go to the same neighborhoods. They’re so much cleaner now. These people are doing things on their own, they’re taking care of their own stuff. When I was here three years ago, I never would have imagined this place would ever be like it is now. It reminded me of Tijuana. When we got here it just seemed like everything you could think of that was bad, this city had it going on. Now they have regular families thriving in the city. There are people working neighborhood watch, working together. It has turned around a lot. I didn’t even want to come on this deployment, but now seeing the city the way it is, I’m glad I did. It’s like a closure on everything.”
Read the whole thing. Michael is supported by reader donations, so if you’re inclined to hit a tip jar today, make it his.
MACLEANS MAGAZINE: A CASE STUDY OF MEDIA-PROPAGATED ISLAMOPHOBIA
Click to download the complaint(pdf) against Macleans. I haven’t had time to read it, but the juicy part is said to be contained in the first 15 pages. Want to make your voice heard? Here’s the best idea I’ve seen to date;
“Regarding ways that we can all support Mark Steyn, isn’t the most obvious one buying his book (again)?”
Kathryn, better still. Order it online and deliver it to:
Canadian Human Rights Commission
344 Slater Street, 8th Floor, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1E1, Canada
Telephone: (613) 995-1151
Toll Free: 1-888-214-1090
TTY: 1-888-643-3304
Fax: (613) 996-9661
Meanwhile, Richard Warman’s reputation goes international; “You know you’ve lost your freedom when you cannot call a censor a censor.”
Well the Americans are noticing. So where are our Canadian media?
(Update: Welcome Warren Kinsella readers! (All 12 of you.) While you’re here, have a look around. I recommend this post, in which an individual using an assumed identity posts from a server registered to the Pollara polling company. )
A Church Shoots Back
Here’s a detail they may have left out of your morning news. I know they left it out of mine;
New Life Church Pastor Brady Boyd is speaking to the media right now. He reports that the female church security guard rushed to the building when she heard shots ring out. She was stationed at a rotunda. She has a law enforcement background. “She probably saved a hundred lives.” They put the security/evacuation plan in place after hearing about the first church attack. Volunteers joined security details. Armed security all have licenses to carry.
Pastor Boyd: “We’re so grateful to God for giving us the wisdom to do that.”
Emphasis mine. More: When you legislate gun-free zones, only the mass murderers have guns.
h/t
Y2Kyoto: Think Of The Children!
“The planet has a fever, If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, `Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
The babies are plummeting. There is just time to catch them (with a tax shift to carbon). As a nation, I’d like to see us either save this generation, or at least stop pretending we care about them.
A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.
Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.
Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and “greenhouse-friendly” services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.
Oh, that didn’t turn out the way I thought it would.
The Sound Of Settled Science
A Nobel Peace Prize denier;
Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report’s first table of figures – inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent – listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.
[…]
At the very heart of the IPCC’s calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.
Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation – that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC’s 2007 report do not mention it once.
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Guns don’t kill people – reporters kill media credibility. Magnum stupidity at the Toronto Sun.
“I can’t know what they were thinking, obviously. A few must have wondered whether I was about to explode. But evidently they’d rather be blown up than exhibit any behaviour that might be construed as intolerant.”
“I can’t complain. I had it good.”
Daniel M. Ryan is live-blogging the Conrad Black sentencing.
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