I am still digesting the news, which I received while in Hungary, that Leonard Nimoy, aka. Mr. Spock, is no longer with us.
And now there is breaking news that Harrison Ford, aka. Han Solo, aka. Indiana Jones, crashed while flying solo in a vintage WW2 aircraft in California. The good news: according to the LA Fire Department, his injuries were moderate and he was alert as he was transported to hospital.
I wish him a speedy recovery.
Last month, something happened to me that may never happen again: I had not one but two papers accepted by Physical Review D in the same month, on two completely different topics.
The first was a paper I wrote with John Moffat, showing how well his scalar-tensor-vector gravity theory (STVG, also called MOG) fits an extended set of Milky Way rotational curve data out to a radius of nearly 200 kpc. In contrast, the archetypal modified gravity theory, MOND (Mordehai Milgrom’s MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) does not fare so well: as it predicts a flat rotation curve, its fit to the data is rather poor, although its advocates suggest that the fit might improve if we take into account the “external” gravitational field due to other galaxies.
The other paper, which I wrote together with an old friend and colleague, Eniko Madarassy, details a set of numerical simulations of self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates, which may form exotic stars or stellar cores. There has been some discussion in the literature concerning the stability of such objects. Our simulation shows that they are stable, which confirms my own finding, detailed in an earlier paper (which, curiously, was rejected by PRD), namely that the perceived instability arises from an inappropriate application of an approximation (the Thomas-Fermi approximation) used to provide a simplistic description of the condensate.
Oh, and we also had another paper accepted, not by Physical Review D, but by the International Journal of Modern Physics D, but still… it is about yet another topic, post-Galilean coordinate transformations and the analysis of the N-body problem in general relativity. Unlike the first two papers, this one was mostly the work of my co-author, Slava Turyshev, but I feel honored to have been able to contribute. It is a 48-page monster (in the rather efficient REVTeX style; who knows how many pages it will be in the style used by IJMPD) with over 400 equations.
All in all, a productive month insofar as my nonexistent second career as a theoretical physicist is concerned. Now I have to concentrate on my first job, the one that feeds the cats…
Notice to Web advertisers: If you stick a video on a Web page that starts with blaring noise in the middle of the night, the only thing you accomplish is that I close the bleeping page in a mad panic, and I make sure never to visit it again.
Moments ago, this is what happened when I visited a page on the Montreal Gazette’s Web site, trying to read an article, only to have a car commercial start without any interaction on my part, at maximum volume.
I don’t know what car was being advertised. I don’t even care. I just swore and scrambled to click the Close button.
This is unpleasant even during the day, insanely annoying late at night when you worry about waking up family members, for instance.
I hope that one day, the idiots who believe this form of advertising is appropriate will all have their eardrums pierced in a most painful manner by excessive noise.
It appears though that I am not alone: there is a study suggesting that such loud ads are bad for business.
As for me, against my better judgment, I just decided to install AdBlock Plus on Chrome. Let’s see if it works as advertised.
As I travel to the UAE frequently these days, it is obviously of interest to me when I read about an American facing a felony charge in that country for a Facebook post he made in the US.
It is true that the UAE is not a democratic country. There are no political freedoms there, and opposition activists are sometimes incarcerated. However, the country is by no means a police state. On the contrary, they are proud to have found ways to reconcile conservative Muslim traditions with a modern, fairly tolerant, open 21st century society. As a foreigner, unless you are in the habit of passing bad cheques or farting in elevators, you really have to go out of your way to offend before UAE authorities decide to throw the book at you.
This American may have done exactly that, by posting deeply offensive remarks, directly insulting his UAE employer and management. Such speech may be protected under the US constitution (or not; not even the First Amendment protects false accusations) but the UAE is not the US. The fact that he made the offensive Facebook posts while in the US is an interesting twist, but I don’t think it is sufficient to get the charges dropped.
Still, now that the case has attracted international attention, my suspicion is that he will not receive a jail sentence: his apology will be accepted and he will simply be deported from the country. (His frozen wages, which prompted his outburst in the first place, will probably remain frozen, however.)
Benjamin Netanyahu warned the United States, in his unusually (and rather inappropriately) partisan address to Congress, that Iran’s nuclear ambitions represent an existential threat to Israel.
How many times do you cry wolf before others stop taking you seriously?
Back in 1993 (!), Netanyahu told the world that Iran would develop a nuke by 1999. That, of course, was 16 years ago.
Just to be clear, I have no illusions nor delusions about the Iranian regime. It is a dangerous regime that supports unsavory causes, not to mention genuine terrorists, around the world. And they certainly threatened Israel in the past.
However, I do not believe that the Iranian regime is planning to nuke Israel. As a matter of fact, I suspect that they are aiming to remain a “threshold” nuclear power for the foreseeable future: that is, develop the technological foundations so that they are capable of producing nuclear weapons on short notice, use their nuclear program as a bargaining chip, but avoid building actual weapons.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s political stunt is probably causing more damage to Israel than anything the ayatollahs could dream up. By playing a divisive political game in Washington, Netanyahu risks losing the one thing Israel cannot afford to lose under any circumstances: bipartisan support in Washington. For this reason, it seems to me that Benjamin Netanyahu represents a greater existential threat to Israel than any Iranian nuke.
Five days ago, I was sitting on an Emirates Airlines flight from Dubai to Budapest.
Our flight took an unusual route. Normally (well, at least within my limited experience) such flights take a route north of Iraq, flying over Iranian airspace towards Turkey. Not this time: We flew across the Saudi desert instead, then turned north over the Sinai peninsula before entering Turkish airspace and turning northwest again. I was wondering about that kink in our trajectory: was it weather or perhaps some airspace over the Mediterranean was closed for military reasons?
As a service to business class customers, Emirates provides a limo service to the destination of your choice on arrival. I was wondering how I would find the limo pick-up location, but it was easier than I thought: the chauffeur was waiting for me at the customs exit, holding up a sign bearing my name. During the journey to my hotel, he told me about his son who wishes to become a particle physicist at CERN. So for a while, we were discussing the Higgs boson and teraelectronvolts, instead of more customary topics, like Hungarian politics.
I rented a car in Budapest, for my mother and I to take a short trip to southern Hungary, to visit my mother-in-law. As we had the car for a whole weekend, on Sunday we decided to take another small trip, this time to the north of Budapest, the small but historical city of Visegrád.
I used to live in Visegrád, from 1974 to 1977, mostly in this building:
At the time, this building served as a resort owned by the Hungarian Industrial Association. As a member of a crafts artisan cooperative, my mother was entitled to vacation in this place, which we did in the spring of 1974. This is how she came to meet my stepfather who at the time was the manager of this facility. To make a long story short, we lived in the manager’s apartment for several years, while my parents built a new house in the same town. I have fond memories of this place.
Today, it serves as a home for the elderly. It seems to be well taken care of. Much to my surprise, one of its terraces appears to have been converted into a chicken coop, complete with a rather loud rooster:
Other than these two excursions and a brief visit to a 91-year old friend who recently had a serious health crisis, I spent most of my time at my parents’ place, a small apartment on the Buda side, nearly filled by a giant dog and his favorite toy:
My parents are very fond of this animal. He is nice, but I remain committed to cats. They are quieter, smell nicer, and require a whole lot less maintenance.
And all too soon, I was on another airplane, flying “business class” on British Airways to London. I had to put “business class” in quotation marks, as there was ridiculously little legroom on this middle-aged A320:
At least, the middle seats were converted into an extra tray instead.
And the flight left Budapest nearly an hour late. The reason? The air crew arrived in Budapest late the previous night, and they had to have their mandatory rest. This presented a potentially serious problem for me: the possibility that I would miss my connecting flight, which, to make things worse, was purchased separately. I probably broke some records at Heathrow Airport as I managed to make it from the arrival gate in Terminal 3 to the Terminal 2 departure gate in only 32 minutes, which included a bus ride between terminals and going through security. I made it with about 10 minutes to spare. I checked and I was told that my suitcase made it, too.
I have to say, while I like both Air Canada and British Airways, their service doesn’t even come close to the quality of service I enjoyed on Emirates or Etihad. And I am not just referring to legroom or the age of the aircraft (the Emirates flight to Budapest was a really aged A330 and the seats, while a great deal more comfortable than these British Airways seats, were nonetheless a little cramped) but also the attentiveness of the staff on board.
Still, the flight was pleasant (except for some rather severe turbulence near the southern trip of Greenland), and some eight hours later, I was back in sunny snowy Ottawa. The land of deep freeze, where the Rideau Canal is breaking all kinds of records, having been open for well over 50 consecutive days already.
I am back from another round of globe-trotting. I spent a week in the UAE, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, followed by a very brief detour to Budapest to visit my parents.
On arrival to Dubai, we landed nearly an hour late. The reason: a massive sandstorm, which still blanketed the city the next day. Sandstorms can be just as scary and dangerous as snowstorms here in Ottawa: they can reduce visibility to near zero, and the sand can cover roadways in no time. In fact, sand is worse than snow in one respect: it does not melt away.
I was taken to Abu Dhabi by car and during that trip, I saw the rarest of desert wonders: rain.
I was unable to book a room in the hotel of my choice in Abu Dhabi, as most hotels were full due to some defense exhibition. I did, however, find not a room, but a whole apartment at a very modest price in downtown Abu Dhabi, in a brand new apartment hotel called Bin Majid Hotel Apartments (second building from the left):
I had a one bedroom apartment, fully equipped, with a beautiful view of the sea:
Around the hotel, I befriended several cats. OK, maybe befriended is too strong a term, but one of them was certainly friendly for a while. It was a mostly white cat with a tabby tail; young, probably, but also rather small and skinny. When I saw this cat for the second time and let her (?) sniff my fingers, she would not stop following me. She rubbed against my leg, dropped on her side onto my shoes, and even when I picked her up and placed her back on a safe sidewalk, she continued to come after me. Only after I picked her up and put her onto a stone ledge did she take offense: she jumped off the ledge and disappeared under a parked car. I hope I did not offend her too deeply. I have not seen her afterwards. However, on my last morning in Abu Dhabi, I went looking for her and found instead another, equally tiny and skinny male cat: obviously an adult male, it was a tabby with a heavy limp and only one functioning eye. I felt heartbroken for these cats, although I have been assured that in the UAE, cats are generally not treated badly.
As always, the food in the UAE was both tasty and spectacular. One evening, a colleague took me to a restaurant recently opened by one of his friends. Here, we were treated with a spectacular feast:
Yum! My only regret is that I couldn’t eat it all. (Actually that’s not true: my other regret is that I came back heavier than I left, which is most unfortunate but not at all unusual when visiting the UAE.)
Then all too soon, it was time to leave. I boarded a direct flight from Dubai to Budapest, a recently introduced route by Emirates Airlines. After take-off, I enjoyed a spectacular view of downtown Dubai, dominated by the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, from my airplane window. Sadly, my attempts to take a picture were not very successful.
And just like that, this part of my journey under the desert sun, a few very busy workdays in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, was over.
Today, I successfully hacked one of my Rogers cable decoder boxes. No, not to do anything illegal, just to get composite video and demultiplexed stereo audio out of them, to make them more usable with the dual-tuner TV card that is in my desktop workstation.
This is the first time ever that I used the services of a custom printed circuit board manufacturer. My design worked on the first try. I am mighty proud of myself.
Vaccinations are not without risk, some say. Why should the evil government compel me to expose my child to a known risk, they ask. Why is it my problem if someone else’s child is not vaccinated, they argue.
Well… it boils down to simple math, really. Suppose that once infected, a person remains infectious for a period of time denoted by \(\delta t\). The virulence of the disease is measured by the number of people that a single patient can infect during this period of time. It is called the basic reproduction number, denoted by \(R_0\). If this number is greater than one, we have the potential for an epidemic.
So then, after some time \(t\) has elapsed, the number \(N(t)\) of people who are infectious at that moment \(N(t)=N_0R_0^{t/\delta t}\), if \(N_0\) was the number of infected people at \(t=0\). At least this will be the correct number during the early stages of the epidemic; later, infection rates slow down as a growing number of people will have already caught the disease and the survivors will have developed immunity to it.
But we are interested in the early stages indeed, because the idea is to prevent an epidemic in the first place. So this simple model is adequate.
Now what happens when you vaccinate people? Even if everyone gets vaccinated, vaccines are not 100% effective. If the efficiency of a vaccine is given by \(\epsilon\) (a number between 0 and 1, with 1 meaning 100% efficiency), the aforementioned formula is modified: \(N(t)=[(1-\epsilon)R_0]^{t/\delta t}\). If \((1-\epsilon)R_0<1\), we win: an epidemic is avoided.
But what happens when not everyone gets vaccinated? Some people obviously cannot be: very young babies, people with compromised immune systems, etc. Let’s say the vaccination rate is given by \(\rho\). Once again, the formula for \(N(t)\) needs to be revised: \(N(t)=[(1-\epsilon\rho)R_0]^{t/\delta t}\).
And this is where the problem lies: if \((1-\epsilon\rho)R_0>1\), the potential for an epidemic exists.
Take the case of measles, for which \(R_0=12…18\). Even if we take the lower limit of the given range, \(R_0=12\), it is one of the most virulent contagious diseases out there. The measles vaccine is supposedly 95% effective: \(\epsilon=0.95\). So then, \((1-\epsilon)R_0=0.6\), and we are good: in a fully vaccinated population, measles would disappear in short order. This is indeed what happened when measles vaccinations became common in much of the world starting in the 1970s.
But now, let us think about \(\rho\). The math is easy: If \(\rho<0.965\) (that is, if more than 3.5% of the population are unvaccinated), \((1-\epsilon\rho)R_0>1\). Herd immunity is lost: the disease spreads.
And lest we forget, measles is a very deadly disease. Parents who play Russian roulette with their children on the basis of unsubstantiated fears concerning the vaccine’s effectiveness and side effects forget that often the only reason their child survives the infection is because they have access to first-world health care… the same health care that would have prevented the illness in the first place, if not for the parents’ arrogant stupidity.
These parents should be reminded that in poorer parts of the world, their counterparts often risk their lives to get their children vaccinated. Like parents in Somalia who, defying a ban on polio vaccination by al-Shabaab, smuggle their children to government-controlled areas to get the life-saving vaccine. Obviously these Somali parents are a lot smarter, a lot wiser than first-world anti-vaxxers, be it new age parents who prefer “happy thoughts” (or whatever) over medically approved methods, or nutty right-wingers who distrust the government on everything.
In short, if your political or religious views, or your scientific illiteracy compel you to be as stupid as a doorknob, please find a way to express your stupidity without endangering the health and lives of others.
Canadian liberals, rejoice: The network often dubbed “Fox News North” is no more. Reportedly, Sun News Network will stop broadcasting as early as 5 AM Eastern time this (Friday) morning.
I am certainly no fan of right-wing ideological propaganda and hatemongering, so it’s not like I will personally miss Sun News. But I still don’t cherish the idea that it was forced to close, after the CRTC denied it a license that would have granted the network a more lucrative spot on the cable dial. A core concept in a democracy is that even voices we despise can be heard. And if your views are based on real values, surely they would not be shaken by the fact that there was a news channel out there that occasionally challenged them.
To be sure, Sun News wasn’t exactly high quality television, but still… I don’t think their demise will make Canada a better place. Not to mention the 200+ jobs that are lost as a result.
As the fighting in Ukraine intensifies, we often hear Russia’s complaint: that the West, gloating over its “victory” at the end of the Cold War, is encircling Russia and is imposing its will upon the country.
But then the other day, I was reading another piece of news about a planned G7 meeting and it hit me. Imposing its will? Nonsense. The West welcomed Russia. It accepted Russia as a full-fledged member of the international community. It even made Russia a member of the G8, for crying out loud.
But this was not good enough for Mr. Putin’s Russia. Being a member of the international community means accepting its rules (even when you are the United States of America, much to the chagrin of that country’s politicians, especially its conservative lawmakers.)
There was also a deep-seated suspicion that if the West gains from this relationship, Russia must be losing something. As George W. Bush remarked recently, for Mr. Putin politics is a zero-sum game. A very tangible something appeared to be the loss of control over the “near abroad”, especially former Soviet member states. The state of the Baltic countries may be a fait accompli, but a line has to be drawn somewhere… and it appears it has, and it now includes Ukraine.
After all, Mr. Putin declared more than once in the past that he viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest political disaster of the 20th century. If you are the strongman of a nuclear superpower and thus have the means to do something about it, what would you do about the greatest political disaster? Try to undo it, no?
So in the second decade of the 21st century, Mr. Putin embarked on a decidedly 19th century style pursuit, as he is trying to bend Ukraine to his will. It’s not an open war just yet (Russia claims it’s not involved; if freedom-loving Russian soldiers spend their leave in Ukraine, that’s nobody’s business) but it’s getting close, especially as the West ponders providing arms to the government in Kyiv.
And very rapidly, we find ourselves in a geopolitical situation that is just as scary, if not scarier, than the worst moments of the Cold War. Mr. Putin enjoys tremendous support at home thanks to his nationalistic agenda, which sadly resonates all too well in those parts of the world. Abroad, he reminded us that he commands the strike capability of a nuclear superpower, so it is a very bad idea to mess with him. And the nationalist beast is a hungry one, which requires constant feeding. What next, after Ukraine? Another attempt at a “hybrid war” (of destabilization, irregular troops), this time in NATO’s Baltic member states? What if this provokes a decisive NATO response, in accordance with the NATO charter? Mushroom clouds over battlefields, followed by mushroom clouds over cities?
Last year, we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the start of the War to End All Wars. Maybe we (along with Mr. Putin and his supporters) ought to be reminded that the next world war will likely be the war to end all wars, albeit for the wrong reasons: it will end all wars not because we lose the appetite for bloodshed, but because nobody is left alive to fight.
Or worse yet, maybe this war will be won by our machines.
Anyone with a time machine, please let me know if my wife, our cats and I can get a free ride back to the 1960s…
I have some half-baked ideas about the foundations of quantum physics (okay, who doesn’t.) When I say half-baked, I don’t mean that they are stupid (I sure hope not!) I simply mean I am not 100% sure about them, and there is more to learn.
But, I am allowed to have opinions. So when I came across this informal 2013 poll among (mostly) quantum physicists, I decided to answer the questions myself.
a. The randomness is only apparent: 9%
b. There is a hidden determinism: 0%
c. The randomness is irreducible: 48%
d. Randomness is a fundamental concept in nature: 64%
(“Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß [der Alte] nicht würfelt.”)
a. Yes, in all cases: 3%
b. Yes, in some cases: 52%
c. No: 48%
d. I’m undecided: 9%
(Note that the question does not say that “well-defined” is a synonym for “in an eigenstate”.)
a. Is correct: 0%
b. Is wrong: 64%
c. Will ultimately turn out to be correct: 6%
d. Will ultimately turn out to be wrong: 12%
e. We’ll have to wait and see: 12%
(Einstein’s views are dated, but I feel that he may nonetheless be vindicated because his reasons for holding those views would turn out to be valid. But, we’ll have to wait and see.)
a. Is correct: 21%
b. Is wrong: 27%
c. Will ultimately turn out to be correct: 9%
d. Will ultimately turn out to be wrong: 3%
e. We’ll have to wait and see: 30%
(If I said “wait and see” on Einstein’s views, how could I possibly answer this question differently?)
a. A pseudoproblem: 27%
b. Solved by decoherence: 15%
c. Solved/will be solved in another way: 39%
d. A severe difficulty threatening quantum mechanics: 24%
e. None of the above: 27%
(Of course it’s a pseudoproblem. It vanishes the moment you look at the whole world as a quantum world.)
a. Local realism is untenable: 64%
b. Action-at-a-distance in the physical world: 12%
c. Some notion of nonlocality: 36%
d. Unperformed measurements have no results: 52%
e. Let’s not jump the gun—let’s take the loopholes more seriously: 6%
(I don’t like how the phrase “local realism” is essentially conflated with classical eigenstates. Why is a quantum state not real?)
a. It’s a breath of fresh air for quantum foundations: 76%
b. It’s useful for applications but of no relevance to quantum foundations: 6%
c. It’s neither useful nor fundamentally relevant: 6%
d. We’ll need to wait and see: 27%
(I wish there was another option: e. A fad. Then again, it does have some practical utility, so b is my answer.)
a. Within 10 years: 9%
d. In 10 to 25 years: 42%
c. In 25 to 50 years: 30%
d. In 50 to 100 years: 0%
e. Never: 15%
(The threshold theorem supposedly tells us what it takes to avoid decoherence. What I think it tells us is the limits of quantum error correction and why decoherence is unavoidable.)
a. Epistemic/informational: 27%
b. Ontic: 24%
c. A mix of epistemic and ontic: 33%
d. Purely statistical (e.g., ensemble interpretation): 3%
e. Other: 12%
(Big words look-up time, but yes, ontic it is. I may have remembered the meaning of “ontological”, but I nonetheless would have looked up both, just to be sure that I actually understand how these terms are used in the quantum physics context.)
a. Is a complex (quantum) system: 39%
b. Should play no fundamental role whatsoever: 21%
c. Plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism but plays no distinguished physical role: 55%
d. Plays a distinguished physical role (e.g., wave-function collapse by consciousness): 6%
(Of course the observer is a complex quantum system. I am surprised that some people still believe this new age quantum consciousness bull.)
a. Give useful insights and have superseded/will supersede the interpretation program: 15%
b. Give useful insights, but we still need interpretation: 45%
c. Cannot solve the problems of quantum foundations: 30%
d. Will lead to a new theory deeper than quantum mechanics: 27%
e. Don’t know: 12%
(OK, I had to look up the papers, as I had no recollection of the word “reconstruction” used in this context. As it turns out, I’ve seen papers in the past on this topic and they left me unimpressed. My feeling is that even as they purport to talk about quantum theory, what they actually talk about are (some of) its interpretations. And all too often, people who do this leave QFT completely out of the picture, even though it is a much more fundamental theory than single particle quantum mechanics!)
a. Consistent histories: 0%
b. Copenhagen: 42%
c. De Broglie–Bohm: 0%
d. Everett (many worlds and/or many minds): 18%
e. Information-based/information-theoretical: 24%
f. Modal interpretation: 0%
g. Objective collapse (e.g., GRW, Penrose): 9%
h. Quantum Bayesianism: 6%
i. Relational quantum mechanics: 6%
j. Statistical (ensemble) interpretation: 0%
k. Transactional interpretation: 0%
l. Other: 12%
m. I have no preferred interpretation 12%
(OK, this is the big one: which camp is yours! And the poll authors themselves admit that it was a mistake to leave out n. Shut up and calculate. I am disturbed by the number of people who opted for Everett. Information-based interpretations seem to be the fad nowadays. I am surprised by the complete lack of support for the transactional interpretation, and also by the low level of support for Penrose. I put myself in the Other category, because my half-baked ideas don’t precisely fit into any of these boxes.)
a. Never: 33%
b. Once: 21%
c. Several times: 21%
d. I have no preferred interpretation: 21%
(I am not George W. Bush. I don’t “stay the course”. I change my mind when I learn new things.)
a. A lot: 58%
b. A little: 27%
c. Not at all: 15%
(I put my mark on a. because that’s the way it is today. If you asked me how it should be, I’d have answered c.)
a. Are in principle possible: 67%
b. Will eventually be realized experimentally: 36%
c. Are in principle impossible: 12%
d. Are impossible due to a collapse theory: 6%
(Of course it’s a. Quantum physics is not about size, it’s about the number of independent degrees of freedom.)
a. Probably yes: 48%
b. Probably no: 15%
c. Who knows: 24%
d. I’ll organize one no matter what: 12%
(Probably yes but do I really care?)
OK, now that I answered these poll questions myself, does that make me smart? I don’t feel any smarter.
Dear Mr. Harper:
There was a time when I thought I would be a lifetime (Progressive) Conservative voter. I did not abandon my political principles even when most voters fled the once mighty PC party, reducing its representation to a mere two seats in Parliament.
How times have changed.
Let me tell you why I am not going to vote for you or your Party this year, and why I hope that you will be defeated in the upcoming election.
No, I am not going to say anything nasty. I do not subscribe to the idea that those who think differently about politics must be declared enemies of the public. Let us leave American-style political hatemongering and demonization to, well, Americans.
I am hoping that you will be defeated because I strongly disagree with your policies. I believe I can disagree with you even as I respect you, both as a person and as a politician (not to mention, as a fellow cat lover.)
I disagree with your economic policies. Balancing the budget is a good idea… during good economic times. When the economy is in a rut, especially now when Canada is suffering more than it should from the impact of falling oil prices, government’s top priority should be re-igniting the economy and the creation of jobs. Not balancing budgets, especially not at a time when interest rates are at a historic low, and the debt-to-GDP ratio of the country is healthy.
I disagree with your response to security challenges. No, I do not underestimate the jihadi threat even to a peaceful country like Canada. But even as you proclaim that the jihadis are enemies of freedom, it’s your policies that represent a direct attack on our freedoms. You want to curtail our freedom of speech, when said speech amounts, in someone’s opinion, to “promoting terrorism”. You want to censor the Internet when it comes to content that is seen terrorist propaganda. You want to grant enhanced powers to agencies that already engage in alarmingly intrusive activities when it comes to our privacy. Yet the material impact of these measures is dubious. You also championed a regime of two-tier citizenship. So your response, which may either by misguided or (if done for the reasons of election-year politics) cynically calculating, amounts to a greater threat to our freedoms and basic rights than jihadi terrorism.
I disagree with your populism, especially when it comes to science. I once (long before you became Prime Minister) wrote a concerned letter to the Chief Statistician, expressing my alarm about the extent to which private details may be revealed in personally identifiable form in the Long Form Census. But even I did not expect you to abolish this essential data-gathering tool. By doing so, you caused irreparable damage to Canada’s statistical data collection. Your populism trumped reason in other areas, too: federal scientists in Canada are muzzled like they have never been before. Your ban on travel from Ebola countries was done contrary to the best scientific advice.
I also disagree with your policy on crime. I am sure this “tough on crime” agenda earns political brownie points in important constituencies, but hey, you can do better than that. You can be better than that. Canada does not need a tough-on-crime policy when crime rates have been consistently falling for the past several decades. We need to have fewer people in prison, not more. Archaic punishments like solitary confinement should be abolished, if possible.
I could go on about other topics, including the sad state of the CBC, the future of Canada Post and the demise of home mail delivery, the Experimental Lakes, the closure of our embassy in Tehran, your ridiculous anti-prostitution bill, and more. Instead, let me just repeat a question well known from a past US election campaign: Are we better off than we were nine years ago, when you first came to power?
I say no. While Canada’s economy weathered the storm of the financial crisis, that was largely a result of the policies of preceding governments. Since then, Canada’s economy never fully recovered and is lagging badly behind that of the United States. Our country is smaller-minded, pettier than it was nine years ago. Our international reputation is damaged.
In short, Mr. Harper, I believe that despite your best intentions, you have been steering the country in the wrong direction. It is time to go. We have given you ample opportunity to show us what you can do, and you have not lived up to our expectations. It is time to give an opportunity to someone else, before your misguided governance results in more damage.
However, if and when that happens, I will say goodbye by thanking you for your service, and I will hope others will do the same. Hate has no place in politics, and one of the best things Canada can do to improve its reputation is to show that it is possible, even in this 21st century, to be civil in politics.
I am so done with tribalism. So frigging done.
In recent days, weeks, months, I had many arguments with friends and acquaintances.
Some assured me that they did not have a racist bone in their body, but that this or that minority (typically characterized by a darker skin color) is nonetheless inherently evil and should be dealt with accordingly.
Others were doing their darnedest best to convince me why their religion is less f**ked up than other people’s religion (the other religion being, usually but not exclusively, Islam.)
And repeatedly, they argued that the solution to war is more war; that the solution to violence is more violence; and that the answer to hate is more hate.
Is this really the second decade of the 21st century? Nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, have we still learned nothing from history?
Sometimes, I am ashamed to be a member of the species that calls itself homo sapiens. I wonder if I should perhaps just give up and stick exclusively to cats when I pick my future friends.
Tonight I came across yet another cartoon questioning what some see as Western hypocrisy, manifested in our response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre vs. the lack of a strong response to the massacre of civilians by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
But it’s not hypocrisy. Part of it is pragmatism, part of it is something much worse.
The pragmatism part is this: When people kill each other in gruesome ways in a far-off country, we feel sorry, we sympathize, but that’s it. It does not threaten us, does not threaten our values, and other than (perhaps) donating to our favorite charity, we don’t really want much to be done about it either, as we don’t like either body bags coming home with soldiers inside, or paying taxes for expensive toys to be dropped on other people’s heads on another continent (and if we did that, we’d be blamed anyway.)
In contrast, when people from a foreign country, or people acting on behalf of a foreign power come to a Western city and go on to commit a politically motivated act of murderous terrorism, it is a direct attack on us. Our lives and our values. So yes, we respond en masse. We don’t expect people in India, China, or for that matter, Nigeria to carry signs with “je suis Charlie”, because it’s not their problem; it’s ours.
But there is another problem. Both those praising and those questioning the response to Charlie Hebdo often speak of the “world”. But what is this “world” of which they speak? A few million people marched on the streets of Western Europe, with a population of some 400 million. New organizations in North America, broadcasting to another 400 million people or so, made a big deal of this event. But… 800 million people is not the world. It’s barely more than 10% of the world.
Was there any media outrage over Charlie Hebdo in China? Any large protests for the freedom of the press in India? Or any mass demonstrations elsewhere in Asia (population: 4.4 billion)? What about Africa (population, 1.1 billion)?
Not that I’d expect them to be outraged. The attack clearly was not targeting them: it was targeting the West, and one of the West’s core values. Of course we are upset. But “we” are not the world. We are only a small part of it, and just because we have bigger guns and louder media outlets does not change this fact. All who are critical (or, for that matter, supportive) of the Charlie Hebdo reaction are well advised to keep this in mind.
I am listening to Fareed Zakaria’s interview with former CIA director Leon Panetta.
I just heard Panetta utter the sentence, “But we also have to work with the moderate Arab countries as well. Countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, others that maintain a good intelligence, Egypt.”
WTF? Saudi Arabia? Moderate? Are we talking about the same murderous thugs who think that beheading a woman on a public street is legitimate “justice”? The same Saudi Arabia that already carried out 10 executions in 2015?
And don’t even get me started on el-Sisi’s thinly veiled military dictatorship, which has kept Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy in jail for the crime of, well, being a journalist, as an example of “moderation”…
Beagle 2 has been found.
Beagle 2 was the British lander component of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission. It was supposed to land on Mars on Christmas Day, 2003; however, no radio signal was ever received from the spacecraft. Beagle 2 was considered lost, its fate unknown.
But now, it has been found. Beagle 2, together with its parachute and rear cover, have been spotted by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, which itself has been orbiting Mars since March 10, 2006.
Imagine: a spacecraft orbiting another planet was able to spot an object barely more than a square meter in size, on that planet’s surface.
We may not yet have humans walking on Mars, but nonetheless, we live in amazing times. Now if only we somehow managed to stop murdering and hating each other, I might even begin to believe that there is hope for us yet…
I have enormous respect for the current pope, Pope Francis. This does not mean that I don’t disagree with him from time to time.
Reportedly, Pope Francis said that although free speech is an important right, there are limits: “Every religion has its dignity. I cannot mock a religion that respects human life and the human person.”
I am certainly not into mocking other people’s religion gratuitously. What’s the point? To prove that I am ever so smart that I don’t believe in their imaginary friends? To make them feel bad?
However, I absolutely claim the right to mock. Just as I am willing to risk life and limb, if it ever comes to that, to defend other people’s right to their faith, I demand the right to ridicule said faith. And I expect nothing less from my more religious friends: they can mock my lack of faith all they want, but they should be willing to risk life and limb, if it comes to that, to defend my right to mock them. These are the core values of our Western liberal democracies, and there is no room for compromise, not even in the name of tolerance or political correctness.
In any case… if your faith is strong, pure and genuine, surely some crass attempts to mock it will be ineffectual. Just as my genuine respect for Pope Francis is not diminished by the digital art of Italian artist Cristina Guggeri.
And just in case anyone thinks Guggeri was after Pope Francis in particular, that is not the case: she is an equal opportunity offender, she also portrayed Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama, among others, on the can.
Some commentators, like Mehdi Hasan of the Huffington Post, accuse the world (in Mehdi’s words “free speech fundamentalists” in particular) of hypocrisy: we are defending Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish Mohammed cartoons, yet the same Charlie Hebdo fired a well-known cartoonist seven years ago for drawing a supposedly anti-Semitic cartoon.
Well, but here is the rub: he was fired. Not murdered. Moreover, after he was fired, he filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit and he won. And the editor (a close friend of former French president Sarkozy, who was the target of Siné’s supposedly anti-Semitic cartoons) lost his job.
Had Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist or two for drawing anti-Islamic cartoons, nobody would have cared a damn other than the cartoonists themselves and their close circle of supporters or fans. It’s not like Charlie Hebdo is a household name outside of France. Had some offended Muslims chosen to sue Charlie Hebdo in court accusing them of hate speech, they may have won; or they may have lost; but our core values would not have been threatened either way.
The reason why we are upset is because members of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial staff (not to mention police officers, a maintenance worker, and last but not least, some Jewish shoppers halfway across town) were murdered in what was a direct, openly declared attack on one of our fundamental values: the right to freedom of expression, even when said expression offends someone else’s beliefs.
Meanwhile, I continue to be astonished by the cowardice of many Western media organizations when it comes to publishing tomorrow’s Charlie Hebdo cover. CNN at least were honest about it: Jeff Zucker basically said that they’re too afraid to do so.
And speaking of hypocrisy, I just came across the illustrated transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s rant concerning CNN’s decision. A well illustrated transcript; it even has a stock image of some child on a sled. But, predictably, no Hebdo cover. To see the actual cover, you have to follow a link to another news organization’s Web site.
Congrats, Rush, for showing us just what a brave and proudly courageous American you really are.
In response to the Paris attacks, many supposedly responsible American politicians point at the US visa waiver regime as a potential threat to American security. “We cannot let these Europeans enter the country with no scrutiny,” they scream at the top of their lungs to an ignorant electorate that has been taught to see terrorist shadows everywhere.
Meanwhile, talking heads on American TV also talk about how dangerous Europe has become, because of its open internal borders. I wonder if they would also advocate shutting down interstate borders within the United States. After all, there is no such thing as too much safety! And while they are at it, perhaps they can also institute random police identity checks, a mandatory national ID card system, and perhaps mandate that everyone must have a permanent address and a place of work.
Oh wait, this has already been tried before. It was called communism.
And just in case anyone had the impression that followers of Mohammed are the only ones who can go berserk, here is the front page of an ultra-orthodox Israeli newspaper, showing the row of world leaders marching in Paris on Sunday:
There is only one problem: they photoshopped out all the women. After all, an ultra-Orthodox Jew cannot maintain his sanity if he happened to see the face of a middle-aged female politician like Angela Merkel!
This world is frighteningly full of idiots.