The man couldn’t have been in the apartment for very long since he only stole a laptop cable and a Nintendo DSi. He also took my wife’s cigarettes on the way out but I’m not torn up about that one. The laptop was literally right there for the taking but luckily he didn’t reach for it.

This bastard had gained entry through a bedroom window that didn’t lock properly. He went into the children’s room and searched their underwear drawer for reasons unknown, moved a desk and knocked over a lamp. Considering how little damage he did and how little he stole he couldn’t have been here for longer than literally a minute.

The police dusted for fingerprints but determined he must have been wearing gloves and my wife didn’t get a look at his face because he was wearing a hoodie. I suppose he’s not only a reprobate but a well-prepared reprobate.

Look, here’s the thing. This is what bothers me more than losing possessions. It’s the laziness of theft. I’ve experienced extreme poverty. I’ve known what it’s like to have nothing and to work for minimum wage. Going out and stealing would have been easy. And also gutless.

I live in a 2-bedroom apartment and my kids share a room. I don’t have much money. We live mostly hand-to-mouth. I never owned a laptop until I went to school in 2010 and it was the cheapest money could buy. The Nintendo was a gift from my brother. Aside from that we have a few meager possessions. I drive a 15-year-old car. It’s obvious this is a lower class family home.

So why rob me? I mean, I don’t want anyone robbed but why would this degenerate scum rob from people who clearly have next to nothing? Because it’s easy? That must be it since my wife’s friend was similarly robbed by a mechanic she had used and who came back to her house while she was out to steal her laptop.

In the ancient times society used to disfigure thieves, even in Europe. At first they wouldn’t amputate limbs. They’d simply scar their faces as a warning to others. Seems fair to me. Let’s tattoo the faces of these people so the world will always know the dishonorable wretched bastards who walk among us preying on the poor.

I suspect the heat grows as you report for larger municipalities, like a Toronto or a Vancouver newspaper. And once you begin reporting provincially or federally, it’s got to be difficult to please all of the people all of the time. Eventually someone, somewhere is going to think your newspaper articles are written favouring one side.

Reporting in a community where you don’t live is pretty much the heart of journalism. You don’t really know the place as well as somebody who lives there. And that’s partly a good thing, since it allows you to stand back and look at things objectively. You don’t necessarily care if some gigantic event is going to change things for better or worse since it doesn’t affect you.

Similarly, journalism is about reporting on events and things that you only have a superficial understanding about. Today I might have to write about municipal taxes and tomorrow I might have to write about a musician touring through town.

I don’t own a house so I don’t really know much about municipal taxes, and there’s a high probability I’ve never listened to the music of the band, but with a little research and some interviews I can become an expert for a day. It’s enough to help people understand the basics and then leave them the prerogative to dig deeper.

This whole process works for me. Something is happening, I find out what it is, I ask experts what they think, I print the story. Nowhere in that process do I really need to worry about what I think, other than trying to evaluate where the balance of sides might exist in a dispute. For instance, a new commercial development will have supporters and opponents and it’s important to get both sides.

But if there’s one thing that I believe has affected me after one year in journalism, it is the attitude some people have with regards to what other people are allowed to do with their own property. It’s not that I’m “pro-development” so much as I feel the whole “NIMBY” attitude is frustrating to deal with. And what’s worse is that if you don’t share sympathy with the NIMBYists, then you get the sense that they feel you’re against them. When the truth is I don’t care.

For example, the municipality I report in receives a large number of development applications. Some of them are big developments that affect the whole community and I can understand why people have reservations and want to voice their opposition.

But many of them involve modest changes where the owner of some land wants to subdivide his property and build new homes. Other applications just ask for variances to their property to build another structure, like a secondary dwelling or a coach house in the back.

It irritates me when people actually believe they have the right to get upset about what somebody else does to their own house or property. I think it’s bad enough you need to get permits and pass environmental inspections to make changes to your own property, but when other people decide to butt in I just don’t get it.

What business is it of theirs? Why do homeowners have to worry about what other people think? Why do people care how many trees get cut down on a piece of land that doesn’t belong to them?

I think the concept of property rights and land ownership is now so weakened in Canada that we all honestly believe we have the right to block other people from doing whatever they want to do. And to make things worse, I often hear complaints about how a proposal will ruin the neighbourhood, when it sounds exactly like the one I’m living in.

It’s almost a denial of reality and acceptance of how the rest of the world lives. If people don’t want things to ever change maybe they should move to the great barrens of northern Canada. Then they’d have nobody to worry about, and nothing bad will ever happen to the surrounding landscape.

Yes, it’s a book igloo. Good for surviving in the harsh elements of a public library.

And it’s not even an episode of the Walking Dead

A baby, presumed stillborn, revives after 12 hours in a refrigerated morgue after the mother demands to see her one last time.

Well, it’s good to see we can agree on what’s important

Canada and Denmark have come to a deal that would split the contentious Hans Island, a barren piece of Arctic rock in the middle of nowhere in particular. The uninhabited island will be divided in half, presumably so that puffins can enjoy the benefits of universal health care.

No, I won’t be quiet, wanna fight about it?

You will soon be able to drink alcohol in B.C. movie theatres. Which based on my experience at hockey and baseball games should be roaring success. Nothing bad has ever come out of having alcohol at those venues.

“I don’t give quotes for fear of being misquoted,” he said.

As a writer, I can’t understand the point of plagiarizing anybody. Certainly, I’m no Gene Weingarten, but I enjoy writing in my own distinct style and using my own peculiar vocabulary. Although if you’re going to plagiarize anybody in the google era, you should at least make an attempt to jumble up the story a little bit.

Now this is a good advertisement

The CBC might want to take notes.

Yes, it’s yet another article about the Titanic

But it’s not just any article. It’s by Daniel Mendelsohn of the New Yorker, and the story is well-researched, well-crafted, and above all very compelling. By the by, does anyone recall singing this song at summer camp?

Irony of ironies, Gloria Stuart, the woman who played 100-year-old Rose Dawson in James Cameron’s epic Titanic in 1997, died in 2010 at the age of… 100. She was two years old when the Great Ship went down.

The day evil was defeated

It was 67 years ago today that the Nazi death camp Buchenwald near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion. The soldiers found 21,000 emaciated survivors:

“As we got close to the camp and saw what was inside… a terrible, terrible fear and horror entered our hearts. We thought, what is this? Where are we going? Why are we here? And as you got closer to the camp and started to enter the camp and saw these human skeletons walking around—old men, young men, boys, just skin and bone, we thought, what are we getting into? ”

—A Canadian airman’s recollection of his arrival at Buchenwald

All the news not fit to print, but works in a pinch when you’re out of toilet paper.

Lorena Bobbitt has some new competition

This puts new meaning to the term “got you by the balls.” Or perhaps it’s the old meaning after all.

Christians versus atheists: Round 3

First, Christians put up a sign in a park reading: “Jesus died for our sins.” The sign was soon attended by a second sign reading: “Nobody died for our sins. Jesus Christ is a myth.” Score: 1-1. And then the atheist sign disappeared altogether.

The power of music

This is a beautiful, sad, wonderful video about the way music can act to heal people, or at the very least to restore some part of our humanity. The good stuff is about four minutes in so don’t get sidetracked and put off by the slow start.

How many thoughtless and stupid people are there in the world?

The answer is a lot.

God bless artists

This video shows a time-lapsed movie of an artist creating a water colour drawing. It is a beautiful and rather moving image in its simultaneous simplicity and complexity. I could swear those eyes were real.

Like a trolling stone

I’m not sure if this is parody, but Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com has a list of the top 10 most overrated songs of all time. And it’s basically a who’s who list of songs that could probably be on anybody’s top 10 list, including such untouchable classics as Stairway to Heaven, London Calling, and Satisfaction (although honestly, the last one does get annoying after the first 10,000 plays).

But the blasphemy to say that Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone is “lazy and stupid” is profoundly ironic. A lazier, stupider comment could not be made of one of America’s most celebrated poets of the past 50 years. It isn’t Bob Dylan’s fault that Shapiro isn’t bright enough to appreciate lyrical genius.

This could have been Obama’s “My Pet Goat” moment

We interrupt this breaking news event of a terrorist attack to give you a presidential rendition of Where The Wild Things Are. And in the event you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth checking out Christopher Walken’s version.

If you like guns, you’ll love this

From theblaze.com, the six top newest guns Israel could avail themselves of should a war break out with Iran. Or, anybody else silly enough to mess with Israel.

What are the two most offensive sounds you can think of?

If you said bongos and bagpipes, you’re right. I think perhaps my ancestors left Scotland in the first place to get away from bagpipes. I can’t be sure, of course, but it’s a safe bet.

Dredging the outhouse of news journalism

It’s bad enough that journalists feel the need to report on how much the mayor of Toronto says he weighs. But when the man pushing this contrivance of news doesn’t even show up to his regularly scheduled photo-op, you’d think the press in Toronto could find something else to write about. I said you’d think that. But you’d be wrong.

The blood-letting at the CBC begins

Gone are new 88 jobs, the cancellation of Connect, which airs on CBC News Network, and the radio show Dispatches, which will take effect in June, documentaries will be reduced and the South American and Africa bureaus will be closed.

Chances of the CBC making changes to programming and content that will cause viewers to tune in, thus driving up revenues, and enabling the Mother Corp to rehire these people and reopen closed foreign bureaus? Probably zero.

For those of you who work for the government, Happy Easter Monday. I hope you enjoyed your day off. For the rest of the world, belated Happy Easter Friday. For those of you who are devout Christians, I suppose the happy day was the Monday and not the Friday.

And now, following up on yesterday’s wildly popular and successful list of useless links and trivial information:

The Titanic has nothing on the MV Dona Paz

If you’ve read about or watched James Cameron’s sloppy lovefest about the Titanic, you might, quite wrongly, believe that it was history’s great maritime disaster. To quote George Costanza, the Titanic “eased into the water like an old man into a nice warm bath” in comparison to the 1987 maritime disaster in the Phillipines when the MV Dona Paz creamed into the MT Vector fuel tanker and created a rain of fiery death on the ocean.

Checklist of horror:

1. Ridiculous number of people perished.
2. Almost no survivors whatsoever.
3. Both ships caught on fire.
4. The ocean caught on fire.
5. There were no lifejackets.
6. No rescue came for 16 hours.
7. The ocean was known for man-eating sharks.
8. The disaster is believed to have killed 1,000 children under the age 4.

Canada’s F-35 fiasco is about par for the course

From the esteemed Matthew Fisher comes an op-ed about sole source fighter jet contracts and the reality of military procurements. The salient bit:

Let’s live in the real world. Unless Canada decides drastically to change its defence strategy and becomes pacifist and isolationist, we will continue, as we have done for a century, to commit ourselves to military alliances and partnerships to further our national interests. To be worthy allies and partners we have to be more than peacekeepers uttering platitudes — the bulwark of the Liberal defence strategy for years.

Basically, we need to spend the money to keep up with the Joneses. Or in this case, with our allies in NATO. Although I think the possibility of conflict with Russia or China in 20 years is remote, Fisher hits most of the nails on the head.

(via the esteemed Mark Collins)

And here you though 3 1/2″ floppy disks didn’t have a purpose in a modern world

The link.

An early candidate for mother of the year?

Texting and driving is darwinistic enough. This San Diego mother did it while driving with her baby in her lap and her kids in the back seat without seat belts on.

No n-word and f-word for this CNN reporter

The direct quote comes at 1:55.

As always, YouTube commenters live up to their reputation:

Let’s do this all over again in a few years

In the event that hell freezes over and the NDP are ever elected to federal government, Thomas Mulcair would like very much to restore the gun registry. I can foresee a series of taxpayer-wasting games of legislative pong here, with the Conservatives scrapping the registry and then every few years the Liberals and NDP bringing it right back again in the same way they’ve been doing with the Court Challenges Program.

The CBC is the great protector of American culture in Canada

An excerpt from a very lengthy piece entitled “Salvaging the Unsalvageable: The Inside Story of Richard Stursberg and CBC TV”:

The CBC seems never to have been comfortable with the idea that its television mandate should be to create and exhibit distinctively Canadian entertainment shows. At the height of its power and wealth, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, its prime-time schedule featured almost no Canadian drama or comedy. Instead, prime time was a mix of U.S. entertainment shows, with Canadian news, documentaries and public affairs filling up the schedule. This was surprising not simply because the CBC made little or no attempt to address English Canada’s greatest cultural challenge, but also because—even then—there was no shortage of Canadian news available elsewhere.

Do yourself a favour and read the entire piece.

(via Jesse Ferreras)

This is why the death penalty is a superb idea

You’ll have to take my word for it that if you have any lingering doubts that rapists should receive swift and permanent justice, download the podcast for The Moth from March 26 entitled “Barbara Wiener.” You’ll linger no longer.

Just a collection of links, pictures and esoterica.

Because this excuse works so well with the wife

I really thought the Conservatives were going to find a deep hole on this one, hide inside for a while and scuttle the F-35 fiasco where nobody could find it. But instead you’ve got defence minister Peter MacKay coming on television in order to make some ridiculous claim that the $10 billion discrepancy between the government figures and the auditor general is “a different interpretation” of accounting.

Oy vey. This is pretty shoddy excuse-making, Peter. If this were an excuse-making competition and I were one of the judges, I’d give that swan dive a four out of 10. I’m not sure how many hours it took to come up with that one, but I’d fire your joke writer. Look, if you knew the actual costs for years and kept telling Canadians a different number, you can call it “a different interpretation” all you want. Us regular folks call it a “bait and switch.”

Ridiculously stupid people are everywhere on the Internet

I don’t know how or why Internet meming started, but it’s reached epic proportions. These days all it takes to get some stupid meme going is to find a random picture without knowing the identity of the person, the context of the photograph, or anything at all about the subject matter, and then make a joke about it using lettering on the photo.

The latest craze is some guy who was snapped looking casual while running a 10k race. Dubbed “ridiculously photogenic guy” there’s now a Facebook fan page, literally hundreds of thousands of meme jokes, and women everywhere wondering if this fellow is single. You know what this indicates to me? We need a violent, bloody, third world war, because we clearly have far too much time on our hands. Any of these bozos still camped out in New York City whining about the one per cent and the 99 per cent need only to look at Internet meming to realize that, if anything, life is too damned relaxing.

I call this “little brother feeling left out so he acts up syndrome”

I’m not quite sure why atheists feel the need to harass Christians on holidays with self-righteous nonsense. And I write this as an atheist. If you don’t believe in God, good for you. Then stop caring about it and let everybody who does believe in God do their thing in peace. Unless they’re crucifying you, it’s not really harming anybody, is it? If you think something is silly, ignoring it is a far stronger statement than validating it by setting yourself at odds with it.

Sadly, the blogs still lead the media in investigative reporting

Racist shooters go on killing rampage of black people in Oklahoma, reports the CBC. No possible motive is mentioned in the article, but according to the Blaze, this incident might very well be an American History X version of retribution by a man whose father was killed.

Hubris, thy name is Apple

Rejoice, for every snobby Mac user who, when you told them you had a computer virus, showed no sympathy and instead told you to go and buy a $3,000 Apple product instead.

Eye colour: Not sure

I was doing a self-portrait with my camera and when I increased the light I realized my eyes aren’t just brown like I’d always assumed. Looks like when the genetics fairy was handing out colours he hid my father’s green eyes in there somewhere too.

Personally, I think eyes are pretty awesome.

Hooooo boy.

It’s times like this that I wish my former blogmate Mark Collins was still here because while the F-35 fiasco is well above my pay grade, he’s been dubious of the entire procurement since day one. And while I have to admit that I don’t know enough about fifth generation fighter jet technology to produce more than a few crudely drawn words on a cocktail napkin, it doesn’t take much expertise to realize the defence department just stepped into a Jurassic Park-sized deposit of dino waste.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s rather confusing. I mean, the NDP are asking for defence minister Peter MacKay to resign for not knowing what he should have known, unless in fact he did know, which is much worse, though he claims he absolutely didn’t. Or as one Macleans magazine pundit put it, if a massive abuse of procedure and accountability falls in the forest, but no one is named, blamed and shamed as the culprit, did it ever really happen?

Clearly, somebody, somewhere in the government is due to take a very short walk off a long pier. Do you fire the military commanders who clearly did everything they possibly could to acquire the F-35s without undergoing proper procurement procedures and then fabricating a list of things they needed in a fighter jet so that the list dovetailed nicely with the specs for the F-35?

Or do you fire the people in the defence department who didn’t tell their superiors about the impending mountain of aforementioned dino doo doo about to fall on their heads? Or do you expect the defence minister to accept Thomas Mulcair’s suggestion that the loonie stops at the minister’s desk, and offer his resignation so that Stephen Harper can shuffle him some place else?

Or do you turf Julian Fantino, the man who is currently backing away from the spotlight as quickly and unsubtly as a man wearing orange at a St.Patty’s Day parade? Please don’t look at me, I just work here. One gets the sense, however, as one reads through older news articles quoting Fantino, that the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, and the language of the minister for military procurement had been evolving from certainty about the necessity of F-35s to one very much ambiguous that they might be jets at all, and not flying ponies or something.

The bad news is the Auditor-General’s report puts a giant cannon-sized hole in the F-35 procurement and its budget. The bad news is that the procurement appears to be manipulated to ensure a sole-sourced, untendered contract with Lockheed Martin which has or has not been signed, depending on which part of the government you ask at a certain part of the day.

The bad news is that the defence minister and the procurement minister had no idea about any of this, depending on which part of their mouths you believe when they’re speaking. The bad news is that the defence department itself told the House of Commons that cost data provided by US authorities had been validated by US experts and partner countries, which was not accurate at the time.

Ok, that’s all the bad news. Well, probably not, but it’s probably enough for now. On to the not-so-bad news. The Conservative government, while deservingly drowning in its own arrogance for shouting down those who suggested the whole deal was rotten from the start, is not really complicit in this scandal so much as it is woefully negligent. At the very least they seem to be taking some responsibility now, have frozen spending on the program, spanked the defence department, and handed oversight over to a committee of deputy ministers.

Is it at all ironic that the man whom was hired as part of transparency and accountability legislation brought in by the Conservative government was the one who foreshadowed all of this long ago by saying the government’s numbers on this contract were wrong? And does it make it even more ironic that this same man who estimated the costs were nearly $10 billion greater than the government was saying gets by on a departmental budget of $1.8 million? Perhaps the feds should cut Kevin Page’s budget to $49 and give him coupons to Tim Hortons so he won’t cause so much trouble in the future.

The only actual good news I can pull from all this is that the money for these jets hasn’t yet been wasted, which saves Harper his Airbus A320 moment in power. Which is sort of like finding a wooden plank to float on after stepping off the Titanic. And as Harper is to Rose, who will play the role of Jack, slipping quietly into the deep blue sea?

In like a lion, out like a lamb.

That’s how I would describe the 2012 federal budget announced March 29 to the great anticipation of many, because this is the first time a majority government has delivered a budget since 2003.

continue reading…

I’ll gladly entertain discussion after you’ve read the article.

Liberal Member of Parliament Justin Trudeau (L) and Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau fight during their charity boxing match in Ottawa March 31, 2012. REUTERS/Chris Wattie.

Well, my first foray back into the world of blogging about federal politics didn’t go so well the other day, as my piece about Justin Trudeau’s three round love tap with Senator Patrick Brazeau was resoundingly disliked by both Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals, because I dared decry the dauphin his due, and Conservatives because I questioned whether Patrick’s black belt had been dipped in the wrong colour dye.

Indeed, one fellow who commented on my blog suggested both his three-year-old son and Brazeau would maul me in the ring, should my courage ever approach a level whereby I would be willing to test myself against both a politician and a toddler. And while I suggest the fellow might be correct about his son, I’m still not going to give poor Patrick a break here. And anyway, being beaten by a three-year-old would not be some kind of great feat, as my own children can attest in victories of both a physical, but more definitely a psychological nature.

I also received fan mail from Liberals, who suggested I doth protest greatly or something, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and that Justin was every bit the champion of his father. One even demanded I email him a picture of myself, so that he could ascertain to what extent my physical appearance might be responsible for the obvious intellectual deficit that God Himself had saddled me with at birth.

But it didn’t end there. No, friends and frenemies, I also received a very terse letter from the “Sun News Network” about referring to their TV channel as “Sun TV” when they very clearly are not just “Sun TV”, but the “Sun News Network.” And although the word “Sun” and the medium on which they deliver their message is pretty much a colloquial commonality on Twitter, I suppose you’d get the same sort of angry reaction if you referred to Wayne Gretzky as “The Great Juan.” And I have now watched the full broadcast, thanks for asking.

I digress. Clearly, I was not clear enough that I did not view this gladiatorial debacle as the touchstone for our generation, a sort of 2012 version of my father’s 1972 Summit Series, or in any way, shape, or form, an indictment or validation of the grit and character of either fighter. I mean, if we were to adjudicate the character of men based on amateur boxing matches of a real or fictitious nature, then Sylvester Stallone would the President of the United States (which given the present state of affairs might not be such a bad idea).

But some writers and columnists went farther than I did in interpreting the meaning of this boxing match. My fellow Afghan war tourist Andrew Potter suggested that the two fighters “demonstrated more courage, sportsmanship, mutual respect and yes, honour, than most of their colleagues will in their entire careers in Parliament.” Which I suppose just goes to show that when you set the bar in ankle-deep water, nobody should be surprised when it turns out those people can swim. Or to put it another way, hyperbole hath no bedfellow so great as the managing editor for the Ottawa Citizen.

Even Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star took the opportunity to one-up Potter’s upsucking, opining that the sort of leadership demonstrated inside the ring has reawakened his contention for the Liberal leadership. How did he do this? Why, by proving that “a wealthy socialist dilettante who had once tried to paddle a canoe to Cuba” can best a man in a boxing ring, a thing that truly has never been done by anybody in the history of the world, excepting Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps a few thousand other people who I’m sure aren’t important.

But look, I do admire the courage it takes to get into a boxing ring for a gruelling six minutes with heavy 16 ounce gloves drenched in sweat and wearing nothing to protect one’s face but two inches of absorbent padding. I’ve never done it myself and to be honest I’m unsure I ever will. But then, I don’t think the prospect of my getting the stuffing knocked out of me would generate very much money for charity except in pity, nor would the Sun News Network have a vested interest in broadcasting my hubris unless I were hired by the CBC tomorrow.

Sufficed to say, for those people who were hurt by my comments about Justin, I’m certain he’ll find a way to carry on despite those remarks at four times the annual income of the average Canadian and who will be eligible for an MPs pension in about two years time, which is 40 years earlier than I’m ever likely to retire. And as for Patrick Brazeau, he too is likely consoled by his 38-year job security in the Canadian Senate, which is about 38 years longer than most Canadians enjoy.

Nevertheless, and at the risk of now flogging the rotting equine corpse, I do agree with Potter on one thing. It took “an honest-to-goodness fist fight” to raise the level of civility in Ottawa from passive aggressive swearing and sarcastic Twitter updates to settling the issue as our forebears used to, which is likely where the expression “beating the sense into him” comes from.

My house during Earth Hour.

Earth Hour happened last night for the fifth year in a row, allowing people who don’t otherwise think much about energy consumption to make a symbolic gesture of penance. I choose the word penance deliberately, since the act is arguably as meaningless, and done primarily to ease one’s own conscience.

It isn’t that I oppose conservation, energy efficiency and awareness about finite resources. But Earth Hour is none of those things. Like most movements generated by “slacktivists”, nothing about Earth Hour does something beneficial for either the environment or the realities of finite energy.

Nor does my extra consumption of energy during that hour make any real difference on anybody or anything. My gesture of defiance was equally meaningless, since an extra hour of high energy usage won’t make any long-term difference in terms of consumption or affordability. In essence, my meaningless act was simply the symbolic flipping off of the other side for offering up such a trite activity as somehow being relevant or important in any way.

Every year we go through this charade and every year it’s just as stupid. We all turn off our lights and huddle in the dark and I suppose the point is to think about how collectively we could reduce our environmental impact if we did this on a semi-regular basis. But we never will.

See, I can get behind an idea that actually has a plan. For instance, I wouldn’t support the symbolic deployment of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan for one hour because it’s not relevant to the struggle. Nothing can be accomplished in an hour, whether it’s supposed to inspire people or not.

What’s more, I get the sense people partake in Earth Hour not because they wish to engage in a meaningful self-analysis of man’s impact on the environment and their own personal effect on the world. Instead they’re merely following, lemming-like, with whatever happens to be the pop culture flavour of the week. In the 90′s it was AIDS, today it’s the Earth, next decade it’ll probably be something else.

Look, if people were really interested in saving the environment, they’d close the borders, enact a one-child policy, and argue against economic stimulus so that the economy can contract to a point where “sustainability” actually means something. But they aren’t interested. They just want to make the appearance of caring because not caring means you’re either a climate change denier, pro tar sands developer, or other assorted nonsense.

Sustainability. There’s a word I’ll never quite understand. It appears the environmentalists are quite confused when it comes to what that means, since they want people to work for a goal that has never really been defined. Even if you conserve energy, or bike to work, or eat within the so called 100-mile diet, it’s all offset by population increase. There’s really no evidence that anything we do now or in the future can offset the inevitable resource crunch.

At the heart of environmentalist philosophy is the realization that advanced civilizations aren’t compatible since we produce far more than can be regenerated, which is why I think we undergo these little symbolic gestures. It alleviates whatever the environmental equivalent is for white liberal guilt.