Winners: racists and the economically illiterate. Losers: everyone else.

economist.200

 

WINNERS

  • Racists, nativists and isolationists: There is a reason why Trump, Le Pen and their ilk favoured a “leave” vote: their prospects are always improved when people are divided and not united.   Last night, they won a decisive victory by demonizing immigrants, governments and “bankers” (cf., traditional code for The Jews).  Trump, in particular, has had his economic “vision” validated.
  • Scottish secessionists: As some of us predicted as the votes were still being tallied – because Scotland overwhelmingly voted to remain within the EU – a second Scottish independence vote is now inevitable.  It will likely succeed – not because Scots are “racists, nativists and isolationists,” of course, but because they know they must maintain trade and political links to greater Europe to succeed as a nation.  Scotland can’t let an isolated Britain pull them down into the economic muck. They won’t.
  • A united Irish: As I wrote when over there in January, Ireland has the strongest economy in the E.U. because it is part of the E.U.  The Kinsella-Cleary-Carr motherland will now move to build on that strength (which is good), and there will be a concurrent push to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic (which is potentially bad).  Bad, naturally, because it raises the spectre of a possible return of The Troubles.
  • Anti-traders: For those who can always be counted upon to rail against freer trade – the Sid Ryans and Maude Barlows and assorted solipsistic trade unionists – the “leave” victory provides a critical talking point.  To wit: “If a modern, successful nation like Britain can do it, why can’t we?”
  • The separatists: For the likes of the Parti Quebecois, this is a dream come true.  Their core argument – that new nations can be formed, that identity politics are okay – has been authenticated, paradoxically, by the very nation that they historically have used as a straw man to argue for secession.
  • Jason Kenney: Yes, Jason Kenney.  Me and plenty of others were shocked, last night, when the former federal cabinet minister tweeted triumphantly about the results.  I’m not joking, either: he did. Kenny, accordingly, is a disgrace.  He should now go back to Alberta to join the similarly-addled Wildrose Party, where he belongs.

THE LOSERS

  • The U.K. Conservatives and Labour: Cameron is gone, others will soon follow.  The vast majority of British MPs supported the remain side; all are now reflecting on their political viability as a result.  British politics is entering a period of chaos and inability, in which the voices of the aforementioned racists, nativists and isolationists will dominate.
  • Obama, Merkel, Trudeau, et al.  All took a chance, and weighed in on the Brexit referendum.  All expressed the view – properly, correctly – that a British withdrawal would hurt every one of us.  All are now going to enter a protracted period where trade agreements, political alliances and strategic military pacts will need to be re-assessed and possibly renegotiated.  It will be time-consuming and very difficult.
  • Hillary Clinton: Trump has been handed a stick, and he is not going to hesitate beating his opponent with it.  Brexit gives the putative Republican presidential nominee a perfect frame for his anti-trade, anti-immigrant, anti-Wall Street bumpersticker sloganeering.  I still believe Hillary will prevail in November.  But her task got a bit harder, last night.
  • You and me:  Markets around the world are plummeting.  Currencies (particularly, and unsurprisingly, the British one) are worth less than they did just 24 hours ago.  Investments – that is, your pension – will not be worth what they were.  Only God knows where it will lead – but, God knows, uncertainty is never good for national economies.  This is a disaster, for those of us who believe in unity, cooperation and tolerance.  Don’t believe me? Think I’m overstating things? Let me end with a comment I received from a triumphant “uRtheTyranny” [24.36.151.239] late last night: “Our jobs are shipped overseas with treasonous trade deals and then foreigners brought in by traitors to take the rest and then whites have to go to the end of the line with affirmative action. Then you fill our neighbourhoods with foreigners that hate us, rob us, rape us and kill us.  You keep demonizing us for trying to defend our people and culture. The people are resisting your Orwellian tyranny. The fire rises.”

Farewell, Stephen Harper, we barely knew ye

And so it ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

Unlike some folks, I don’t hate Stephen Harper.  All of my five reasons are personal.

  1. When my Dad was dying, he phoned me and my Mom to talk about fathers.  He did this despite the fact that Yours Truly had ripped him, on TV and radio and in newspapers, for years.  He was kind to my Mom, and I never forgot that.
  2. On the aforementioned TV and newspaper and radio and newspaper platforms, I predicted – as did others – that, with a Parliamentary majority, he would make abortion and gay marriage illegal, he would constitutionalize property rights, and he would send us into illegal wars alongside Republican presidents.  He did none of those things.
  3. Unlike some Liberals I will not name, he was always respectful towards my political father, Jean Chretien, even when Chretien ran him down a bit.  He told me he admired Chretien’s commitment to Canada, and his discipline, and his fiscal probity.  And it showed.
  4. Even though I was a dirty rotten Liberal, he twice hired me to be a Ministerial Special Representative on aboriginal files.  (He did likewise with Chretien’s nephew Raymond, too.)  Under his watch, spending on aboriginal programs grew, dramatically.  I discovered he wasn’t what some of his detractors said he was, at least in respect of those things.
  5. I thought he might wreck the place.  He didn’t wreck the place.

In light of all those things, why did he still lose? Two reasons.  One, he didn’t heed the Ten Year Rule – he thought he could defy The Rule, and beat the new kid.  Two, he didn’t ever show, publicly, how some of us had seen him to be in private.

Anyway, fare thee well, Stephen Harper and family.  They deserve now what they never got in Ottawa – privacy, quiet and no more bullshit.

 


Lucida Sans Unicode, the final frontier 

How weird am I? This weird: the most interesting thing I’ve read in weeks is an analysis of the fonts used in Blade RunnerStory here.

The subtitle reads WORLD WIDE COMPUTER LINKUP PLANNED, in what looks like Optima Bold. While the idea of a World Wide Computer Linkup might seem passé as we approach 2019, it was still very much unusual in 1982 when Blade Runner was released. Indeed, it wasn’t until March 1982 that the US Department of Defense, creators of pre-Internet network ARPANET, declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking, pretty much kick-starting what we know as the modern-day Internet of 2016.


The graduate


He doesn’t quite look like this, tonight, as he graduates from high school – honour roll, Ontario scholar, all that. Got an offer and scholarship from every single university he applied to. Is going to  some place called McGill, which you may have heard of. 

I don’t care about the awards and all that. I care that he has worked hard, and that he has learned, and that he is a highly ethical and thoughtful young man. 

He still supports Bernie Sanders, but nobody’s perfect. 

Permit his old man to say, however, that he is very proud of him, and will miss him terribly when he leaves for Montreal. 

Time goes fast, Mom and Dad. Seize it. 


The Truth is irrelevant

Quote from a fascinating Washington Post piece on Trump’s Muslim-hating strategy:

He said it doesn’t matter that [the Trump pig’s blood story] isn’t true.

“It’s not about that,” he said. “Look, it’s an analogy.”

The now-departed Corey Lewandowski said that, but I don’t think his firing changes the, ahem, truth of what he said: to Trump, and guys like him, The Truth is completely subjective.  It’s a construct.  It’s a theory.

That’s appalling, of course.  It’s cynical. It’s Orwellian and all that. The Truth should always be The Truth, right? Right. But, in modern politics, whether something is true or not is basically immaterial.

Social media has contributed to truth becoming situational, as has the mainstream media’s 24/7 data smog.  There is so much bullshit out there, we’ve come to accept that bullshit is a constant.  Have you (like I was, just last week, with a story about a former Maple Leafs star) been sucked in by an Internet hoax?  Of course you have. Everyone has.  Lies have become the lingua franca of the Internet.

In every political campaign, the media publish these “reality check” things, and politicos will quietly laugh and shake their heads. “Whose reality?” they say.  “Whose truth?”

A party is for the GST, then isn’t.  For free trade, then not anymore.  Against calling the Islamic State a state, until they do.  It’s not genocide, one day, and it is, the next.  To succeed in most political parties, you have to have an innate ability to ascertain (a) what the collective truth is at any given moment, and (b) pivot towards the changed truth in an instant, without breaking into a sweat.  All while keeping a straight face.  In political parties, this skill is highly prized.

Donald Trump’s core audience know he tells them lies.  They don’t care.  They want what he says to be true.  They don’t care as much about what The Truth presently is.

I spoke to Tony Schwartz about this, for my books Kicking Ass and The War Room.  He was the genius who came up with the ‘Daisy’ ad, about which I named the company I started. Schwartz called all of this internalized truth stuff “the responsive chord.”  He even wrote a book with that title.  To sell someone something, he told me – a candidate, an idea, whatever – you need to figure out what someone’s truth is, and “surface” it.

That’s what winning campaigns do.  They don’t try and tell The Truth.  They try and figure out, instead, what Your Truth is, and then  “surface” it.  They embrace Your Truth, not The Truth.

God exists.  To me, that’s true.  To you, maybe, it isn’t.  What matters isn’t who is right or who is wrong.  What matters is figuring out what someone’s truth is, and selling it back to them.

Sad, but true.

 

 


In this week’s Hill Times: stop letting evil/crazy people get guns, for starters

Could Orlando have happened here?

Well, we’ve got our share of Islamic terrorists here, of course: the attack on Parliament Hill, and several other attacks in the past decade, have made that clear enough.

We’ve had no shortage of hate crimes, too: l’Ecole Polytechnique was indisputably one against women, and minority communities are still regularly subjected to violent hate – for their faith, their skin colour, their sexual orientation.

We almost certainly have the same percentage of untreated mentally ill people, too – and, as the recently-concluded University of Calgary mass-murder trial showed, a minority of them sometimes commit horrific acts of violence.

So, if Orlando was inspired by al-Qaeda or ISIS, we haven’t been immune to any of that.  Same goes for hate crimes, and mental illness that spirals downward into killing.  Canadians have experienced all of those things, too.

But there is one critical difference.  Here, unlike down there, we do not make it easy for Islamic extremists, or haters, or the mentally ill, to get guns.  Here in Canada, unlike in the United States, we have not elevated gun ownership to a state religion.

The statistics grimly bear this out.  One that was pinging around Twitter, in the wake of Orlando, was this: “Canada has had eight mass shooting in 20 years.  America has had seven since last Monday.” I don’t know if that is scrupulously accurate, but it sounds about right.

Orlando’s causality, then, could have been Islamic terror, or hate crime, or mental illness.  But its methodology was the shocking ubiquity – and the easy accessibility – of guns in the United States of America.

Right about now, of course, some gun nut loser is moving their lips, reading what I’ve written, and is readying to deploy the usual barrage of bullshit statistics favoured by that terrorist group, the NRA.  Sitting in their jammies in their mother’s basement – with their small penises, and their big guns – the gun fetishists will argue it’s all about mens rea, not actus reus. They always do.

But they’re wrong, of course.  Just ask my friend Anthony Aleksik. Anthony took to Facebook, this week, to point out – methodically, factually – how the Orlando killer (who I refuse to name) could not have murdered 49 innocents here as easily as he did there.

Here’s an edited summary of what Anthony wrote:

“1. Before applying for a Restricted Possession and Acquisition License (RPAL), [the killer] would have had to have attended a two-day course, at a cost of around $150-$250.

2. [The killer] would have then had to send in an application and $80 to the Canadian Firearms Program, administered by the RCMP in New Brunswick. His ex-wife would have had to have signed off on it – and he would have needed two other signatures of people who have known him for more than two years. Extensive background checks and reference calls by the RCMP would have raised red flags.

3. In the event he did pass the application process, around a month (or two, in some provinces) after applying, he would have gotten his RPAL in the mail.  Twenty-eight days is the legislated minimum waiting period.

4. He could then have walked into a gun store and purchased a Sig Sauer MCX (an AR-15 variant) and a Glock 17 [as the killer did]. First, though, the guns would have to be registered, which can take from between one and 15 days.  A membership with a gun range would be required, too, as target shooting is a legal reason to own a restricted firearm in Canada. Collecting is also a legal reason, but you’d better own a museum, belong to a historical society, have a few published papers, and possess a reputation in the collecting and historical community.

5.  So now he owns the guns – with trigger locks on, and locked in cases in the trunk of his car. If he drives anywhere other than between his home and the range, he’s breaking the law.  And not breaking-the-speed-limit-type of breaking the law, either.  Five-years-in prison-breaking-the-law. Each movement of the guns outside this home-and-range route would require a separate Authorization to Transport (ATT). “

And so on, and so on.  You get the point.

Unlike me, Anthony is a conservative type who opposes stricter gun laws.  But, like me, he’s an Albertan and a gun owner.

As someone who has been through the gun course, and filled out the forms and whatnot, I can also testify to the fact that the Orlando mass-murderer would have been stopped, here, at any number of other steps in the process.  The requirement that his ex-wife – who told the media he was violent and beat her – agreed to the purchase of guns.  The disclosure of mental illness.  The background check that is truly comprehensive. The waiting periods that go on for months.

In Canada, like in the U.S., we have homicidal Islamic extremists.  We have sadistic hate criminals.  We have people who are mentally ill and violent.  We sadly have all that, just like in the States.

But here, unlike there, we don’t make it easy for any of those individuals to get guns.

And that is the main reason why Orlando couldn’t so easily happen here.  And hasn’t.