Deja Vu

News item:

Duceppe to make French his priority in Parliament

Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, had some intriguing words for students at the University of Montreal this week:

He wants to change the law to make French the official language of Quebec and to ensure that Quebecers work in the French language.

Say what?

If that sounds familiar it’s because it is. French IS the official language of Quebec and laws already exist that enforce the use of French in the Quebec workplace.

Quebec Provincial laws, that is.

Duceppe wants the Canadian Federal Government to enact parallel laws as well.

Now on the surface that might seem to make sense. Duceppe is a federal politician, leader of a federal political party, even though that party only fields candidates in Quebec.

However.

The party that Duceppe leads, the Bloc Quebecois, is a “sovereignist” party, meaning it is dedicated to the cause of Quebec separating from Canada and forming its own country. It was founded for the purpose of facilitating the separation process, were it to occur.

Now, since it doesn’t look like this process is set to occur anytime in the short term, the Bloc justifies its existence by claiming to defend Quebecers’ rights in Canada – that is, as long as you’re a Francophone Quebecer but that’s a whole other issue.

But how is it logical, for a movement that wants a certain goal – the formation of a separate country – to campaign for changes in the laws of the country that it wants to separate FROM? It’s tantamount to an admission of defeat, to ask for the laws of Canada to fall into place with the laws of Quebec, for it anticipates a long association going forward.

Listen up, citizens of Quebec, your purported leader is at cross purposes with the goals and spirit of his own party!

Quebec has the laws that it (or to be precise, its majority) wants. Dictating what another country (Canada) should do is as ridiculous as the US telling Canada to hand over detailed passenger lists for its aircraft flying through US airspace!

What?

Oh.

Nevermind.

A Fractured Fairy Tale*

You know that old folk tale, where a man asks for advice from the village elder because his house is too small...

And the elder tells the man, bring six chickens into your home to live with you and your family.
The man does this, but it makes the problem worse and so he goes back to the elder, who tells him, now bring 3 pigs into your home as well...

And this repeats a few times, each time the elder telling the man to add other animals to the menagerie: some sheep, a cow, maybe a horse, whatever is around.

At some point the home becomes totally unbearable, and the elder then says, throw out the horse.

The man does this and reports how much better things are; then each animal is removed in turn, leaving the house ultimately the same as it was in the beginning, but with the people in it much more satisfied with their lot since it feels so much roomier and liveable now.

Well, US President Bush has just thrown out the horse.

A news item conveniently leaked – today – September 11 - by “anonymous administration officials” states that Bush plans to announce that he will reduce the troop levels in Iraq.

To the level they were at before the “surge”, 130,000.

By next summer.

Maybe.

Bush will place more conditions on reductions than his general did, insisting
that conditions on the ground must warrant cuts and that now-unforeseen events
could change the plan.

Doesn’t that house just feel bigger already.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Yes it's a Rocky & Bullwinkle reference. What can I say, I'm old.

Why?

Tomorrow morning, September 11, 2007, the MSNBC network plans to rerun the original NBC coverage of THE September 11, six years ago. CNN did the same thing last year but only online if I remember correctly.

Why? What is the point?

The usual answer to why media does anything is, ratings. Perhaps people will watch but again I have to ask, why?

Why put yourself through it?

Commemorate the day, of course.
Read the names of the 3000 dead slowly, one by one.
Assess the progress of rebuilding the Pentagon (done?) and Ground Zero (not done).
Assess what was heroic and what wasn't, that day and the days following.
Reflect upon the state of the US and the world and how we got from that day to this one.

Remember, of course. But relive? What on earth for?

Those newscasts have immense historical value; they should be viewed by future generations, but not necessarily by those who viewed them in 2001. There is no need to see it all again - it is permanently etched into our collective consciousness.
Will we learn anything from these reruns? Or will we just reinforce the fears that were born that day - the fears that enabled the US to be led down its current destructive path.

MSNBC calls it "living history". I call it self-serving sensationalism.

Facts and Arguments on Role Models

It has long been a contention of mine that schools ought to prepare students for the real world. School society should, in an age-appropriate fashion, mirror adult societies such as the workplace.

For instance: nobody in a workplace is going to sit down with a bully and ask them nicely to stop it. Bullying exists, will always exist, and while teaching children not to do it is an admirable goal, it is also vital to teach children how to deal with it. Otherwise, they will leave their bully-proof school without the means to handle such an interaction on the outside.

Conversely, what is unethical in a school context must also be unethical in society as a whole, and teachers and other role models have a responsibility to acknowledge mistakes when they are made, and rectify them as much as possible.

This all has to do with a recent column in the Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, brought to my attention by a listserv discussion. Each weekday the paper runs a personal essay in a column called Facts & Arguments. I first heard of it several years ago in a writing seminar, when the seminar leader seemed impressed that one of my fellow classmates had already been published there. “It’s hard to get into that one,” she said.

A little more digging in google shows that the column has hosted numerous award-winning essays and has quite a prestigious reputation.

But it’s probably just as well that I never got around to submitting an essay there, because now I’d be considering removing it from my resume had it been accepted, and would be really really peeved if it hadn’t.

The essay in question is The English Assignment by Sharon Melnicer, herself a well-established author and artist. It revolves around a purported school writing assignment that Melnicer, a former teacher, claims was done by her students in 1997.

It is well-written, entertaining and thought-provoking – but somehow familiar? That would be because the central part of this essay, the work that the students supposedly submitted, has been floating around the internet for at least ten years according to the relevant entry at Snopes.com.

(Update: the Snopes page now includes Melnicer's claim to have written the original piece.)

Hundreds of other instances of the story turn up in google searches for distinctive keywords.

Of course the letters to the editor started rushing in; I later learned that the response I received was the stock response sent to everyone and since it has already been posted online I don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable about reproducing it here:

Dear Pauline Brock,
Thank you for your e-mail re the essay of Sept. 4.
The essay writer, Sharon Melnicer, tells me she first presented this article at a province-wide workshop for Manitoba English teachers in 1997. She says she had found the idea ( 'Writing a Tandem Story') as explained in the essay, in a professional journal . The first part of a sample tandem story (the "Outer Space" theme) as well as the teacher's instructions for students were provided in the article. Ms. Melnicer says she tried it out with Grade XI and XlI students, as her essay describes, then wrote up what happened and presented it at the workshop. Copies of that paper were distributed to the 50 or so participants who attended. Nothing further happened regarding publication of the piece until she picked it up again after retiring, did some revisions, and submitted it to F&A.
Ms. Melnicer says she knows plagiarism is a serious offence, and not one she would commit. I have no reason to doubt her.

Moira Dann
Editor
Facts&Arguments

Okay, I suppose someone had to have written the original story and while I have my doubts, I have no proof.

However.

What on earth was the editor thinking when she decided to use the story? If it’s not a real example of plagiarism it’s doing a darn good imitation of one, and is certainly not worth the potential aggravation!

Obviously there was no fact checking going on, or somebody did a really sloppy job.
The Globe and Mail is a major national Canadian paper. If I can’t be assured of the originality of their essay page, what can I be assured of?

I replied to the editor saying that if I had been aware that they accepted recycled stories that I had a few hundred of my own lying around to send in, and that I was disappointed in the Globe and in the column; to her credit she did bother to answer that email as well but only to say she was sorry that I was disappointed and that she had acted in good faith.

I am sure she did act in good faith however that is not the point. The point is she, or someone, should not have published the essay without some kind of disclaimer, and the paper should now publish some sort of clarification, if not outright apology.

Which brings me to the extra special bit of irony in all this:
Sharon Melnicer had used the example of the student writing assignment to illustrate a point, which was:

Every good teacher - every effective leader, for that matter - knows that it is from our mistakes we all learn. It follows, then, that failure is something to celebrate; it is the very soil in which learning grows and knowledge blooms.

Nice – and something that the editors at the Globe should take to heart. So far no correction, apology, or explanation has appeared, and it seems as if they are hoping the whole thing will just go away.

What on earth does it say when a former teacher puts herself in the position of appearing to plagiarize and the editor who lets it slip by makes excuses and doesn’t address the issue? How can a society that permits this expect better from its students? Schools rightly make a very big deal about plagiarism and must have the backing of those in real life or the lesson will surely fail.

If you can’t trust the integrity of your teachers... and your editors... who can you trust?

Deja Veto

Bush vetoes stem cell bill.

The headline sounded familiar.

Indeed, it happened less than a year ago, in July 2006, when a Republican-led Congress passed a bill that aimed to loosen restrictions on public funding of stem cell research. Bush vetoed that bill, as yesterday he vetoed a similar bill presented by a Democratic-led Congress.

The will of the people? Not when it conflicts with the individual religious beliefs of he who has veto power:

"The Congress has sent me legislation that would compel American taxpayers, for the first time in our history, to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos," Bush said.

Still, it is laudable when someone stands up for the courage of his convictions. Or it would be, in this case, were it not for the massive hypocrisy involved.

Taxpayer dollars are not to be used in a venture that results in the destruction of embryos that would never become children in any case; but it's PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT to use taxpayer dollars in a venture that results in the destruction of real, living children because some military "official" considered the target to be "worth the risk of potential collateral damage".

You can't inadvertently cause death in the process of saving many lives but you can cause it in the process of killing.

The mind boggles.

And the Award...

...for the shortest* campaign in political history goes to...

GILLES DUCEPPE

Pauline Marois must have given him a really really big what-for!


*I don't know if one day is really the record but it's close enough.

Just Another Common Garden-Variety Outrage

So, it turns out that while you were busy with the holidays last month, the President of the United States was busy too. Besides not listening to the Iraq Study Group, the Generals, the Troops, the Democrats, many of the Republicans, the pundits and anyone else who bothered to weigh in, George W. Bush made sure he COULD listen to you – if you are an American or send mail to one.

He had already established that he may listen in on your phone calls and emails; his latest signing statement claims the right to read your mail – without warrant – if he feels like it, or something of that nature. “Exigent circumstances” is the wording reported.

Another nugget of info that didn’t seem to be widely reported last month was that thing about the FBI being able to use your cell phone’s microphone to listen in on you – even if the phone is turned off. And they have actually done it to gather evidence for criminal trials, according to the report on ABC News.

That sounded too much like a moonbat conspiracy theory claim, so I did a little checking. Looks like it’s for real, since a caution about this technological quirk turns up on a website for US Government employees meant to instruct them on their own security issues. It’s part of the US Department of Commerce/Office of Security, Western Regional Security Office, Employees’ Guide to Security Responsibilities, specifically, the page relating to cell phone vulnerabilities.

As scary as the Bush Administration's continuing erosion of civil rights is, I find something here even scarier: it hardly even makes news anymore. Some of the reactions I’ve seen to the postal signing statement include, “Well you know there are people that want to kill us!” to “So what, they have been doing that for years, anyway.”

Maybe "they" have been doing it for years – but not legally without a warrant, and that makes a very big difference. The results of the recent election imply that more voters are waking up to the reality that the United States is becoming something other than what it purports to be; the President and his Administration need to be told, in no uncertain terms, that this perversion of rights and freedoms in the name of preserving rights and freedoms is an oxymoron that Americans cannot tolerate.

The Cartoon I'd Like to Draw

If I could only draw...

This would be my political cartoon of the week:

A large housecat with the face of George W. Bush, presents a gift at the feet of his owner, George Bush I:

a dead rat with the face of Saddam Hussein.

Cats often present such gifts to their owners, unaware that the owners find them icky – to say the least – but to the cat it is the ultimate gift of homage and devotion.

The cartoon is meant to suggest that the current Pres. Bush was motivated not so much by a desire to make the world a better place, but by a desire for parental approval and revenge against Saddam who apparently had plotted to assassinate the former Pres. Bush. So while nobody is arguing that the rat should be spared, the gift of it remains, well, icky.

I'll spare you the other 800+ words - for now.

It's Already a Success; All it Has to do Now is Occur!

Why I object to giving out *best of the year* awards before the year is actually over: this one is definitely a contender for

Best Attempt at Elevating Truthiness and Spin to a Whole New Level

It's about halfway down the page in this CNN transcript from Dec. 28, in which some reporters are interviewing one Fran Townsend, billed as a “Homeland Security Adviser”:

HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we're going to get him. Still don't have him. I know you are saying there's successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That's a failure.

TOWNSEND: Well, I'm not sure -- it's a success that hasn't occurred yet. I don't know that I view that as a failure.

A success that hasn’t occurred yet.

Finding that quote about made my day. It is the one simple phrase that sums up the Bush administration’s philosophy: facts be damned, just stay the course and expect our goals to fall into our laps. Sooner or later. (And if they don’t, it’s the fault of our opponents.)

Will it work for me too? Shall I start shovelling the snow that hasn’t fallen yet from my front walk?
Perhaps I should take a trip to Oslo next year to collect the Nobel Prize that I haven’t been awarded yet, or start spending the lottery fortune I haven’t won. Yet.

That kind of thinking would get me thrown in the looney bin; in Washington, it gets you hired as a government spokesman.

Buyer beware.

Sex Offenders, Guns, and Jimmy Buffett, Oh My!

Update on a news story I blogged about in October, in which an American teacher, convicted of a sex offense for fondling an underage student, was allowed by US authorities to serve his sentence as a parolee, living in his home with his wife and child in Canada:

The good news is, Canada has deported Malcolm Watson.

The bad news is, he remains here nevertheless, pending an appeal which could take as long as a year.

Part of the issue is what kind of *rights* Watson has, as a permanent resident. That is for the lawyers to figure out. What continues to irk me is how an American judge can unilaterally decide that a person convicted of a sex offense may return to live in another country. I’m sure the US is only too glad to be rid of him on a day to day basis, and if he were a Canadian I’d understand if he were to be deported back home, but he is not a Canadian, merely a resident married to a Canadian.

While Watson may or may not pose a realistic hazard to the Canadian population, it is not acceptable for this decision to be made by a foreign court, and if there is a loophole in Canadian law that permits this to occur, it needs to be closed. Immediately.

Somewhat better news, for those living near the Great Lakes on either side of the border:

The US Coast Guard has abandoned its plan to carry out live-fire machine gun training exercises from ships on the lakes. This was a bad idea for many reasons, one of the least obvious perhaps being that the accumulation in the lakes of ammunition containing lead is a serious environmental hazard. Unfortunately, some such training was carried out last summer but was then suspended pending public hearings.

According to this article,

the exercises were justified by the Coast Guard as essential if officers were to be properly prepared to defend the United States against terrorists who could attack by boat from Canada.

Essential? There is no other way to train people to fire guns from boats? A wave pool comes to mind...

Finally, singer Jimmy Buffett has decided that he cares more for seals than for working people and their families. He has joined the chorus of rich and famous celebrities who protest the annual seal hunt in Canada but apparently has it in not only for the sealers, but also for those in the fishing industry. How else to explain his restaurant chain’s boycott of Canadian seafood?

I just love how these privileged celebrities parachute themselves into an issue with the result that real harm may be done to hard-working families that barely manage to eke a living out of the land and sea. In contrast, those who carry around guns and shoot forest creatures for sport get a free pass to the point that in Texas, a law is pending that will permit the blind to hunt with special, laser-pointing-equipped guns. According to the bill’s sponsor:

This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that's great.

In a world in which the blind in Texas must not be denied the fun of hunting, but sealers and fishermen are to be denied the means to make a living, something is clearly wrong.