Author Archive | John Cameron

1 DISPATCHES FROM THE SCIENCE FRONT The CBC learned at the start of the month that Canada’s federally-mandated and -funded scientific body has been ordered to march to the beat of Canadian industry’s drum. And, because Stephen Harper’s science minister is apparently just fine and dandy with sitting and letting his portfolio crumble like a dried leaf (the social conservative tendency to do this, by the way – put in charge of a cabinet portfolio somebody grossly unqualified who has no interest in the thing they’re ostensibly supposed to be functioning as a minister for – is so frequent these days that most ministries in Canada should probably be renamed to the opposite of what they’re currently named), well, that also involves letting us get dumber. We just welcomed a Canadian guy back home from space – where he proved very popular! – but if current trends continue we’ll be lucky if we’re able to figure out how to fart in a bag and let the wind carry it upward til we can’t see it anymore.

2 BOYS CLUB Hey, did you guys know that Google thinks you might be looking for “RCMP Sexual Harrassment” before you look for “RCMP Sex Offender Registry”? That is probably not a good sign, and it’s probably because of stories like this. Anyways here’s another (alleged) reason why that may be: a former member of the musical ride says that she was sexually harassed by her male colleagues and discriminated against because she’s a woman – discrimination that involves the dragging of a new recruit through literal horseshit. If true, this is the fucking worst.

3 SCRAPING BY A third of Canadians live paycheque to paycheque, which is a lifestyle I’m sure I know nothing about. Incidentally, what does “RRSP” mean and what does an RRSP do and what is being alive, even.

4 DUFFYGATE ROLLS ON The Senate speaker will be proposing new rules on travel today, which, like, sure, that’s the main problem. That the rules were unclear and that there weren’t enough of them. Not the confluence of wealth, influence, and power that put a man with deep personal wealth in an office where judgement, not liquid assets, ought to be one’s primary trait; it’s not like that ended with the dude inevitably trying to make the problem go away by using money.

5 SOMETHING IS BROKEN HERE Chief Terrance McArthur of the Pheasant Rump Nakota Nation in southeast Saskatchewan pleaded guilty to sexual assault [i]on a teenager[/i] last month and is somehow still in office. Worth noting how few people on the reserve come to his defence.

6 CAPITAL IDEAS The Leader-Post is reporting that the construction of Capital Pointe has been handed off to a third company. Because I like the idea of saving a fun way to kill some time for the last link in a Six post, this is the spot where I link the L-P’s interactive Capital Pointe timeline, because hee hee! Look at baby Capital Pointe on the second slide! My, how they grow up.

1 SOME JOKE ABOUT PEAK HOUSING, SUMMITS, ET AL Mayor Michael Fougere took to the stage at this week’s housing summit to announce that he plans to establish some kind of special committee on housing, a development nobody could have predicted and which is sure to have a definite and immediate impact on the totally fucked housing and rental market in Regina right now. Plus apparently “[Fougere] also announced he will host another housing summit next year to revisit the rental housing issue.” Yaaay! Okay, sure: in his defence, Fougere has committed to bringing the vacancy rate from one percent up to three percent by 2017, and the committee will be charged with streamlining our bylaws so that it’s easier to build and rent housing, both of which are good things. Now they just have to come to pass.

2 MY AMBITION AS A HUCKSTER Speaking of conference summit networking whatevers: Brad Wall is in Pittsburgh right now, promoting Saskatchewan’s carbon capture technology. I wonder if he has the legal right to even bring it up. Ha ha, just jokes!

3 YOU GO, GIRL The Toronto Sun ran a transsexual Sunshine Girl for the first* time in its history and, in a refreshing turn from a Quebecor-affiliated outlet, the editor’s response was literally, “She’s cute and we ran her photo.” In other words: Whatever, who cares! It’s pretty cool how chill the paper’s being about it, and it’s also obviously really funny reading the comments from Sun readers experiencing serious inner turmoil over the whole thing. (*Note: Apparently editor-in-chief James Wallace claims the Sun has run transsexual Sunshine Girls before without anyone noticing, which, alright, cool, dude! But Bangladeshi immigrant Amelia Maltepe is the first one to be recognized as such and is so matter-of-fact about the whole thing that she deserves serious props. Go Amelia!)

4 FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff paid off the $90,000 in housing expenses of ambulatory thumb and terminal bootheel-licker of the powerful Mike Duffy, because of course he did. “Mr. Duffy agreed to repay the expenses because it was the right thing to do. However, Mr. Duffy was unable to make a timely repayment. Mr. [Nigel] Wright therefore wrote a cheque from his personal account for the full amount owing so that Mr.Duffy could repay the outstanding amount,” Harper’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall apparently had the balls to tell the press. I mean, I’ve got a bunch of questions, but my main question is how on earth Senator and former primetime TV host Mike Duffy didn’t have $90,000 to slap into his chequing account, but civil servant Nigel Wright did?

5 B.C ELECTIONS [RELEVANT CLIP] B.C. Liberal leader Christy Clark is now the premier of a majority government in B.C., surprising the shit out of everyone, as the fact that she lost her own seat came as a given. For further analysis, check out the contrast between the URL and the headline on the National Post’s story, and also remember that “Oh yeah, the suburbs.”

6 AND NOW, 20 AMAZING QUOTES FROM GUY FIERI’S NEW MEMOIR “It was a lightning bolt of an idea in Flavortown that pranked the un-prankable mayor, Guy Fieri.”

1 THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSITY I had to send away my watch for repairs a short while back, and I just got it back a couple of days ago; one of the things that had changed, besides the fact that it now worked, was that the time was slightly out. This morning, when I put it on my wrist, I thought to myself that it might be a good idea to tune into CBC around noon and set my watch to their clock, since it’s nice to have a timepiece on you that’s totally accurate down to the second and instantly accessible. Then I went on the Internet and immediately set my watch to the correct atomic time simply by seeing that more bad news about mishandled spending has emerged in the sordid story of the University of Regina and its embattled, now-shuttered University-Industry Liason Office. Because this kind of news about this specific story has recently been reported with a startling regularity, you see.

2 STREAMAGEDDON! Netflix is going to lose about 2,000 videos, but it’s okay because apparently most of them are trash and they’re moving over to the bizarrely bad idea that is Warner Archive (“Yes, I’ll pay ten bucks a month for as much of the Best Of 77 Sunset Strip that I can watch!” -literally no human ever) and the money train may just keep rolling in unabated for Netflix. Can someone who genuinely cares about tech industry stuff maybe confirm or deny that pulling out of Netflix is sort of like record labels deciding to just sell their own proprietary music format from their own proprietary player and ditching iTunes? Because that’s sorta what it feels like. (And for a glimpse at what we may now be missing, while the Twitter search algorithm still lets us see the tweets, here’s music writer Ned Raggett livetweeting 1974 Joe Don Baker vehicle Golden Needles.)

3 SWEEPING IMMIGRATION REFORM IT IS! Unless you’re gay married, apparently.

4 A POUND OF CURE Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland – one of the best magazine writers going, no doubt – has an incredible piece up that is in theory about her cousin, a parricidal schizophrenic, but is in reality about the sorry state of mental health support systems in America. Of course, that’s America, and Canada’s different, right? And even if Canada were to make moves away from having strong mental health support, they wouldn’t be part of a long-term trend, right?

5 THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT BANGLADESH “The problem is the browns” -Jonathan Kay, basically. “There are problems in Bangladesh but the conditions global capitalism has either created or tacitly encouraged in the country are partially to blame, and more specifically the failure to date of organized labour to win better conditions for hazardous manufacturing jobs outside of the Global Northwest has created an economy where situations like this are to be expected” -Gawker’s Max Read, sorta. “How can we use this to sell more Gildan ads” -the Globe & Mail

6 PALATE CLEANSER Jason Collins, an NBA center and longtime free agent, came out of the closet recently in an article he wrote for the upcoming issue of Sports Illustrated. The Nation’s Dave Zirin – maybe the single most essential sportswriter working right now – explains why it matters: “More people will explore the parameters of the possible because Jason Collins chose to be a pioneer.”

1 THE IDITAROD IS LIFE Wowza. Grantland really knocked it out of the park. Maybe the most essential thing to read all week, Brian Phillips’ piece on the annual dogsled competition touches on, like, everything. Admirable for its sheer depth, if nothing else.

2 THING UNIVERSITY DID OKAY, UNIVERSITY GUY SAYS After Monday’s news that the U of R used endowment money to cover overspending in the faculty of engineering, U of R provost Tom Chase was sacrificed by the administration on the altar of defending what is currently coming across as a very bad decision. Gotta say I feel a bit bad for the dude, as he clearly drew the short straw and has to pretend that something wildly unpopular and – as the initial CBC article goes to great pains to make clear – obviously against both the spirit and intent of the donation was a fair and justified and totally normal move. Noticeably absent from the conversation: U of R Board of Governors chair Paul McLellan! If anyone can find me evidence that he and the BoG didn’t see and sign off on the “Project Discovery” report, I will buy them a beer and a shot at O’Hanlon’s sometime. I do not expect to have to buy anyone any alcohol.

3 A MISSION TO MARS? EVEN IF THAT WERE A MOVIE I’M SURE IT ENDS WELL FOR EVERYONE Dudes! I’m just as stoked on Mars as the next person, but a one-way ticket to Mars where you need no prior training in, like, being an astronaut? They’ll just catch you up? “Yes, we know that astronauts are some of the brightest scientists in their field, but hell, if the Ruskies could send a damn dog to die uselessly in space, we can send you to die uselessly on Mars, can’t we, you mouthbreather?” Think I’ll wait for the voyage that has a return flight, thanks.

4 ON TERROR One of the suspects in the attempted Via Rail bombing stood up and told the court that the charges against him were invalid because the Criminal Code was not created by God, which I mean, due process and all, but this does not bode well for the guy. In America, the Atlantic Wire flexed its aggregation muscle and compiled several articles to explain why it’s not so unusual that Tamerlan Tsarnev, a guy the FBI was “warned about,” managed to slip through the country’s anti-terror safety nets.

5 AT LEAST THEY’RE SAFE FOR NOW The Harper Government’s terrible, ideologically-driven bullshit fuckhead idea to close the Experimental Lakes Area research facilities in northern Ontario was dumb as shit and proved only that the Conservatives in the Harper Government – whose science minister is a guy who, at absolute best, has made the bold move of refusing to answer the tremendously contentious, up-in-the-air question, “Hey, is evolution actually a thing?” – hate science, and thinking, and being anything except ideologically rigid and incurious about the world outside of their own hideous skulls, unless the science in question has something to do with carbon capture, a program that is currently not in its “golden age”. Ontario, under Premier Kathleen Wynne, has stepped in to save the project and its forty years of data. Pretty good, especially since it will cost them only $600,000 a year and not the $2 million the Harper Government lied about it costing. We can say that now, right? That the Harper Government literally and willfully lies about stuff on a regular basis in order to mislead the public?

6 AT LEAST THERE’S GRIMES Who is a national treasure.

If I was an engineering student at the U of R, I’d be pissed. Today, the CBC published a piece detailing “Project Discovery” – the heinous Newspeak name for a review of overspending in the university’s Faculty of Engineering. Turns out research accounts managed by the dean were overspent by over a million bucks, and the university wound up using money specifically donated to fund a research chair to paper over administrative misspending.

“Who’s accountable for this?” [U of R Faculty Association chair Gary] Tompkins asked, noting it was a highly unusual move for a university. “And how could it go on for that many years? That’s the disturbing thing about it.”

The obvious answers are “Whoever read this report” and “Because nobody in the unversity’s administration has to really answer to anybody,” respectively.

Like I said, engineering students oughta be annoyed about this. They pay the third-highest tuition out of all students at the university, and a disproportionate number of international students are working towards engineering degrees at several times the cost of what a Canadian resident pays. On average, a couple hundred thousand dollars of that money per annum wound up being spent on “legal fees ‘for patent and intellectual property work.’”

The faculty has strong ties to the Canadian resource industry, and touts its innovation and competitive program; it’s a shame that all of that has come at the cost of a research chair position.

ADDENDUM: How hard has the U of R’s outgoing VP of external relations, Barb Pollock, checked out of her position? Look at her barely even try to respond to the CBC:

CBC News asked a spokeswoman for the university to describe the nature of the overspending.

“Oh I don’t know. I don’t know. That was three years ago,” [Pollock] said. “I didn’t look into that. It would be research related.”

I was wondering why Pollock – who’s worked at the university for more than a decade and has overall been pretty good at the external relations gig – had tendered her resignation so suddenly. My guess now is that she saw the writing on the wall – over the next several months, with students, faculty, and the provincial media all tightening their scrutiny of the university’s spending, whoever has to deal with the press is in a deeply unenviable position.

1 DEFINITELY A GREAT USE OF MONEY Leaving aside the question of whether or not their figure is actually accurate – I can find evidence in the budget books of about a 20% increase in post-secondary funding between 2007 and 2009, and it should be noted that one of those budgets was under the previous government, but my memory was right and PSE funding fell sharply after the tuition freeze expired, sooooo – it’s pretty funny that the government blew $200,000 of what appears to be taxpayer money on signs advertising, uh, how good they are at spending money on universities? Maybe that money could have gone to the universities, guys, this is just a suggestion.

2 DOG DAY AFTERNOON Oh, and the Regina police are still conducting a review of that depressing dog shooting scenario from last month. Maybe the recent New York Times piece on the role portable video cameras play in the application of police force has something to do with this, maybe not.

3 MAYBE DON’T BE UNIVERSALLY REVILED AND THIS WON’T HAPPEN, PT. I Everyone is sharing the eloquent Russell Brand piece about Margaret Thatcher, and they should, because it’s good. I grew up in the ’90s and not the ’80s, though, so I’ve got to admit that I don’t really know what it was like to live in the Iron Lady’s long, truculent shadow. It doesn’t seem like it was very pleasant,* though, especially considering that Britain and its people are still living through the consequences of how she ran her national economy. (*except for posh people)

4 MAYBE DON’T BE UNIVERSALLY REVILED AND THIS WON’T HAPPEN, PT. II Senate GOP leader and Turtle Club president Mitch McConnell was secretly recorded, along with his team, coming up with ways to discredit actress Ashley Judd during that brief period where she might have maybe considered running for Senate in her home state of Kentucky, with the emphasis being on her struggles with depression and her religious beliefs (such as “knowing things about St. Francis of Assisi). Then Mother Jones published the recording. It’s a nasty bit of business coming from a guy whose incumbency is perplexing on account of how many people just hate his guts, but what might wind up putting McConnell in real hot water is the way the tape implicates his taxpayer-funded legislative assistants in the anti-Judd research, which is a hell of illegal concept. Meanwhile, McConnell is likely to find that the first amendment holds. (Side note: McConnell reps have called the taping “Nixonian” in the same breath as they decry the way “leftists” will stoop to anything. Everybody remember famous Democrat president Richard Nixon???)

5 I ALSO TRUST THE OPINIONS OF AGGREGATED YAHOOS Not sure how I feel about the CBC’s RateMyHospital thing. Guys, remember when RateMyProf had a “hotness” criterion? Remember ever reading Urbanspoon or Yelp or anything and thinking to yourself, “God, these people sound like such assholes”? Hospital visits are emotionally fraught experiences, more so than being in a particular university course or eating a meal at an ethnic restaurant where the food isn’t identical to that a different restaurant trading in the same ethnic food, thus confounding your expectations. So people reviewing their hospital experience may have a difficult time being sufficiently dispassionate about it. Hospitals and the healthcare system are also nightmare tangles of bureaucracy, huge and frightening webs that catch money in all of the oddest places, and these kinds of surveys will only ever evaluate the front-end experience (you could even think of them as “standardized,” perhaps) and tell us pretty much nothing about the organization of capital and power in places that aren’t the nurse’s reception desk in a given ward. But hey, maybe naming & shaming particularly shit hospitals will motivate some change in the way they deliver services, who knows, I’m not a doctor.

6 OKAY NOW GO READ SOMEONE ELSE’S WORDS I haven’t read The Interestings yet but it sounds, well, interesting, and Meg Wolitzer is smart, and I like fiction and writing and people talking about those things, and so this interview pretty much runs its fingers along my intellectual pleasure centres the way Jerry Lee Lewis used to drag his across a piano’s keys. Or something.

1 MASSIVE BANK COMPLAINS ABOUT LOST OIL COMPANY REVENUES I feel like I’ve been saying this for years, which is especially depressing because I’m only 24, but maybe this is why it’s a really, really bad idea to try and hinge your entire economy and most of your government policy on the withdrawal and sale of resources that fluctuate wildly in price, availability, and social acceptability? Like, if the construction of a single pipeline in a foreign nation is a make-or-break deal for your budget, then holy shit, maybe it’s time you learned the word “foresight.”

2 FLORIDA: WHERE “WHAT IS THIS WATER STUFF?” IS AN ACTUAL QUESTION Remember how Orson Welles caused mass panic with his War of the Worlds radio programme? This is sort of like that, if Orson Welles was a morning DJ, and if instead of people being confused by the presentation of a fictional program on a relatively new medium of mass communication they were upset by science words and forgot that it was April Fool’s Day.

3 MIXED MARTIAL CON ARTIST A Saskatoon man won MMA bouts while on worker’s compensation.

4 BEFORE YOU GET THE WRONG IDEA This NPR piece on America’s disability claims crisis has been around for a little over a week, but man, is it ever worth reading. (Also, layout dork alert: NPR really, really gets how to make a webpage read like a particularly excellent magazine.)

5 EVRAZ PLACE WORKERS MIGHT STRIKE Unfortunately, we don’t really know much more than that. I’m just wondering aloud here, but do you think that when daily papers cover potential strike action, is there any kind of obligation to actually provide context for each party’s claims, or is it just enough to say “here’s the union, here’s the bosses, here’s someone affected by the strike, cool, job done”? And we wonder why private unions’ stock has fallen so much in the last few decades.

6 CHRIS WARE IS NOW ON TUMBLR Goodbye to your productivity today, especially if your name is Stephen Whitworth.

1 MEANWHILE, IN AMERICA Not looking like a good day for the Defense of Marriage Act.

2 MEANWHILE, IN CANADA Our Supreme Court, having already recognized “the gays” as alive persons, is recommending Canada take a good, hard look at its prohibitively expensive, protracted, antagonistic family law system.

3 MEANWHILE, ON SASKATCHEWAN RESERVES A new report suggests Saskatchewan First Nation reserve schools receive about half the funding from the federal government as off-reserve schools receive from the province.

4 MEANWHILE, IN PARLIAMENT Saskatchewan Conservative MPs are grumpy that they might lose their goofy-ass riding boundaries, because that is obviously such a pressing concern for this province that it justifies being basically the first time some of our province’s MPs have even really bothered speaking to the press. All of the province’s Tory MPs are doing a very good job today, advancing the interests of all people in Saskatchewan

5 MEANWHILE, IN GERMANY The developer tearing down a chunk of the Berlin Wall to put up luxury high-rise condos settled on a compromise between his investment group and the protesters who wanted to preserve this artefact of relatively recent history, and that compromise is “wait a couple of weeks and then keep tearing down the wall to build expensive apartments for the wealthy.”

6 MEANWHILE, IN NORTH KOREA “North Korea has cut a military hotline with South Korea, breaking the last direct communication link between the two countries at a time of heightened military tensions,” so maybe everything above will very soon be moot.