Arrogance

Where does this guy get off quoting himself in his own article? It's a little presumptious, and Pavlichenko suggested it might be unethical. It is clearly an article of shameless self-promotion. I am appalled. I will be writing to this fellow and informing him of my strong, vigourous, and hypocritical objections.

Heroes of the Unsung Kind

Want a glimpse into the life of a Canadian sniper in combat operations? This article, though long, is essential reading for those in the business and those interested in the business.

Living in a Fortress

(this post has been updated because it did not meet the quality assurance approval of Pavlichenko).

I have created a list of advantages and disadvantages to living in a fortress. I hope this list will guide those who have to decide in the future whether to live in a fortress. It is not for everyone, and this easy to use guide will help you make the decision.

Advantages:
People have lived there for hundreds of years. Can't be all bad.
Generally sited on high features to exploit terrain and dominate vital ground in a defensive position, the fortress offers breathtaking views of the surrounding landscape.
Tax collectors and collection agencies can't find you.
The fortress is very secure. Unless criminals figure out how to use grappling hooks, which clearly they won't.
The fortress consists of many dark alleys where all sorts of exciting things can happen.
You have a helipad. However, if you don't have access to a helicopter, this is irrelevant.
You can have a Sherman tank's barrel pointed directly at your apartment, just to keep you on your toes.
Repelling invasions by American barbarians with 19th century weapons and tactics would be quite easy.

Disadvantages:
You can no longer order ammunition for the cannons. Most people don't know how to operate them anyway.
Ordering pizza is quite an ordeal.
You can't "buzz" people in.
Not a single organization can put your address in their #&%$ database.
You live in a tourist attraction, which means that walking around naked in your room is a no-no.
Any damage you do is an act of heritage destruction.
Giving directions to your friends who are coming to visit is very difficult: Ok, when you enter the serpentine, turn right, then left, then left again... The thing was built to confuse people when they enter the place.
Most of the tunnels are no longer passable.

Anyone considering moving into a fortress should consider these factors and seek advice from fellow fortress dwellers.

My Newest Hero

It's official. I have found my American Idol.

This guy has been a full-time undergrad for 12 years. He has collected enough credits to graduate about 3 times and he has earned majors in education, communications, theatre, health and women's studies. The guy has been kicking back, living the life. I do not question his motives for studying Women's Studies... It is no wonder why he put off graduating with such fun courses to take.

Hopefully the next thing Johnny Lechner (yes, that is his real name: supposedly it has nothing to do with lechery) will do is begin a 12 year graduate degree. Then he will be my American Idol for life.

Ignorance is Policy

The proposal that Canada withdraw from one mission to start another one is very cute... All I ask is that parties propose foreign policies that rationally attach means to ends.

We need to stop being a country that wants to "participate" and start being a country that applies its influence in rational, strategic and "real" ways by using the tools (ie. money, people, and organisations) at our disposal. (Press releases are not real foreign policies).

This problem is not unique to the NDP. It is unique to a country that has never had a very well-developed concept of its own foreign policy, apart from "participating" in coalitions and making very well-intentioned diplomatic efforts.

A very good paradigm for foreign policy and defence policy was issued last year by the Martin government. If policy makers could frame their debates in terms of accomplishing our stated policy with the means at our disposal, we will have made a quantum leap in our strategic culture. Currently, as I mentioned to Pavlichenko, we do not have a strategic culture. We have a very strong moral culture that will vigourously defend human rights on the moral plane. However, when the time comes to pay and equip the forces necessary to enforce human rights in violent parts of the globe, the same moralizers are the ones ignoring defence policy and promoting new domestic spending priorities.

Officially Bilingual

The Concept of the Bilingual for the Unilingual Person:
Everything should be accessible to me in my language.

The Concept of the Bilingual for the Partially Bilingual:
I will use my second language if necessary, but not necessarily.

The Concept of the Bilingual for the Bilingual:
You use your langue maternelle when you want to, I'll use mine when I need to.

The Concept of the Bilingual in the Fed Civil Service:
Let's all work in English to save time and effort, and work on maintaining our language classifications for the annual bilingual bonus.

The Concept of the Bilingual in the Army Officer Corps:
You must be bilingual. Unless you refuse to cooperate.

(Send all unilingual officers on up to eight months of full-time language training: Do not hold them accountable if they fail to achieve competency in their second language at the end of eight months.)

There are many concepts of the bilingual. Many of them are contradictory and incompatible. For example, see the difference between the concept of the bilingual to the unilingual and to the partially bilingual. What is lacking is the courage of leaders in the federal government to enforce career consequences on people who refuse to achieve competency in their second language after promising contractually to do so by taking a bilingual imperative job.

Many people take on unhealthy attitudes in this social project. Here is a list of unhealthy attitudes that must be eradicated.

1) I will not speak my second language unless I'm sure that it will come out sounding right.

2) Ceux qui crucifient le français devront faire l'objet de ridicule et sont mieux de ne pas essayer.

3) Convenience is king. If everyone speaks English in this group, and some are uncomfortable in French, we should speak English. Now you are forcing the harder working people to compensate for the people who didn't do their homework (I'm referring to working groups that have bilingual requirement of course).

4) I won't learn anything that I don't need to know. "Need to know" is a good principle for security clearances. It is a terrible attitude towards learning. Learning as an economic decision, a rational cost-benefit analysis, is a very depressing concept.

5) Everyone should be capable of doing what I can do. Not everyone has the same chances and resources in life.

6) How dare the government require me to speak a language that is written into my job description?

7) - 10) will be left blank, to be filled in by the readers. I'm sure I'll think of more in the future.

A ray of hope:
The next generation is one that will be more bilingual than ever. My impression is that the 20-30 crowd are by and large more bilingual and more open to working in their second language.

The Footnote Manifesto

A few years back, the Canadian Journal of Political Science changed its reference format from MLS to APA (that is to say: from footnotes to in-text references)

I have a footnote fetish. I love the footnote. The footnote allows academic texts to flow on three major levels:
1) The text,
2) The subtext and futher explanation of minor subleteties and unnecessary but enjoyable detail.
3) The reference to deeper analysis or evidence that supports or otherwise connects to the text.

The footnote allows the reader to evaluate, or not, the three levels in one glance on the same page. This cannot be said of the end-note.

The aesthetics of the footnote:
The footnote is like a little lamp switch, easily within reach, that can be flicked on to illuminate a dusty corner. It is unobtrusive, sitting idly and casually at the top right-hand corner of a word or sentence. Unlike a reference in parenthesis (Payton: 1999, 27), it can go unnoticed by the uninitiated and leaves the text virtually unscathed by its unassuming presence. Those heavy parentheses that block the ebb and flow of the argument are presumptious impositions give too much information and not enough information at the same time. Too much, because the reader cannot make the choice to look up the reference or not. Too little, because unlike the footnote, it does not allow for elaboration and explanation in a subtext that is peripheral yet delightful to the curious mind.

The Cowardly Footnote: The Endnote
Endnotes force the reader to do a lot of page turning for nothing; they put a futile barrier between the reader and the reference. Endnotes are cowardly footnotes, hiding at the end of the text in hope that they will not be found out and explored by enterprising scholars. Instead of acting as a subtext, like the plywood under a nice glossy hardwood floor, the endnote acts as a sort of academic basement, where you throw all the unwanted text all jumbled together in no particular logical arrangement.

Footnotes of the world, unite! The time has come to wage a vicious counterattack on the invasion of lesser references. The blight of endnotes and parenthetical references is a stylistic, aesthetic and academic affront to our hallowed academic values.

Long live the footnote.1

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1. This post was inspired by a incurable bout of insomnia. In attempting to read myself to sleep, I couldn't help but be intensely annoyed by the appearance of the APA reference method in the Canadian Journal of Political Science. What to do? Begin the footnote renaissance with a loving blogpost for my dearest form of referencing.

Quality and Quantity of Life

Warning: This blogpost is a long and windy story about my life, which does not interest most of you and should not interest even more of you. However, family and acolytes may find the following self-indulgence interesting. Mature audiences are invited to read elsewhere.

I recently got the word that I had to move out of my place. Yes. Evicted. I could move one room over, but I've been increasingly dissatisfied with my living conditions and the amount of driving that I have to do. I decided to turn ammonia and nitrate into dynamite by getting a brand new place in an area that is closer to everything important in my life.

Like everything I do, the choice of an apartment was done on impulse and without looking at more than two places. Caveat emptor. The place is 1800 metres from the Université Laval, and 2400 metres from my training club. It is 22 km from work, but that is considerably less than the current distance and the distance is all highway. Location, location, location. It will take 16 minutes to drive to work when everyone is driving like angels, and a bit more in reality. The rest of my business is within walking and biking distance.

The time and energy saved by this move is, in theory, going to increase productivity and employee satisfaction in the L.T. Smash workshop. A lot less ridiculous traffic downtown. Way less mileage. No parking fees at the university. Way more creative cooking. The downside is the higher rent. But can you put a price on simplicity? I feel like if I can move into smaller and smaller apartments, with less and less stuff, I will have achieved an incredible feat. How many weeks can I happily live out of a suitcase? A lot.

I feel as though I have shifted my orbit, closing in around the essence of my life and cutting out some of the excess. Despite my drive to rid myself of non-essentials, I think we can agree that fridges and stoves are relatively essential in today's industrialized society. I managed to snag a fridge and a stove. I own a fridge and a stove now. I am officially grown-up. There should be a bar-mitzvah for the day a man gets his own fridge and stove. This would not actually be something that I could celebrate, but it would at least recognize the importance of the event.

So, heads-up Alberta and OPEC countries... You are getting less of my money in the third and fourth quarter of the 2006 and beyond. Take that. And that.

More to follow on this momentously mundane move. Yes, that is a threat.

What's wrong with everything, and how it should be fixed.... right now, by my political party.

Norman Spector:

Though politicians are in disrepute, half of Canadians don't have confidence in journalists either. It's therefore unclear who has more to lose in the confrontation between the Parliamentary Press Gallery and Stephen Harper, a freshly elected prime minister who appears to be connecting with Main Street. One need only peruse a few blogs on the left and the right to see what a pounding journalism is taking these days.

L.T.

I don't know whether this blog is on the left or right, I'll leave that for first-year poli sci students to determine since I don't care too much for false dichotomies. I'm only tempted to join no-pants parties, and I wouldn't join a party that would have me as a member. I do know that my most constipated posts have been regarding media commentary. Much of the commentary concerning the flag debate for example has been, according to Lysiane Gagnon, immature. I would go further and say that much of what passes for commentary in the national media is asinine juvenility. Hence, the rise of the oracle-blog and the contempt for traditional media.

What is discredited most in all this? It is the party structure that frames complex issues in black and what and tugs at our heart-strings to gain traction.

More Juvenility
Does anyone think it odd that the major debating point of the opposition parties with respect to Foreign Policy was that there should be a debate? First, that parliamentarians should need the permission of the government to debate something in THEIR OWN PARLIAMENT, something is seriously amiss (and this is a procedural problem in Parliament for the past 40 years). Second, the parties are so bereft ACTUAL foreign policy expertise, that their major debating point becomes procedural, arguing for more debates and votes. Yet perusing through their actual contribution to the debates, we realize that their contribution is minimal and displays an absolute disconnect between expert knowledge on the issue (ie. academic work and historical context) and the political class. Aside from a few senators, the foreign policy expertise in Parliament is stagnant. Shouldn't we demand a certain level of foreign policy learning at the political level? Shouldn't Canadians have a strategic culture like other grown-up countries, where certain politicians are actually able to make rational connections between what we say we like and what the Canadian government is actually able to do?

End of rant.