Hung out with Against Me after our boy’s graduation
Which made it more perfect.
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.
Thanks, but I already live my life according to this little maxim
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.
It wasn’t the medium, per McLuhan, it was the message
Doesn’t anyone get that? No? Here, take a quiz:
[polldaddy poll=9450826]
It isn’t whether your paid is online or on TV or on whatever, boys and girls. It’s what you say, and how you say it.
Duh.
When you fire your campaign manager mid-campaign
It’s never usually good.
I was there on the national Liberal campaign in 1984 when John Turner did it to Bill Lee, and replaced him with Keith Davey. Senator Davey should have been the head guy from the start. By the time John brought him in, it was too late.
In August 2015, around the time of the Eve Adams/assorted other messes, there was a persistent and credible rumour that a “cottage coup” was underway, and that unnamed forces were pushing to have Gerald Butts and Katie Telford replaced by David Herle et al. Trudeau would have none of it, apparently, and wisely stuck with the campaign management who brought him to the dance, and was thereby vaulted from third place to first. Good decision.
Now Donald Trump has jettisoned this creepy Corey person, the one who manhandles females reporters.
Trump, who is a pathological liar as much as he is a racist, can spin it however he wants. He has fired his campaign manager because his campaign is in trouble. Big trouble.
He has alienated women. He has alienated Latinos. He has alienated African-Americans. He has alienated the disabled. He has alienated every large constituency he needed to be competitive, in fact. Barring a terrorist October Surprise, the short-fingered vulgarian is going down, hard.
When you dump your campaign manager mid-campaign, then, it means usually just one thing.
It means you’re going to lose.
Donald Trump, the conservative-killer
This is so awesome. Keep at it, you fatuous douchebag!
Best father-son song of all time
Always makes me think of mine, gone 12 years now. Life goes fast, men. Grab it.
Trudeau’s first Parliamentary session
It was bumpy.
They’re a new government, and they often looked like it. C-14, in particular, was not their finest hour. At different points, it was:
- The elbowgate thing, which planted a seed of doubt about Justin Trudeau
- The Motion Six thing, which made them look a bit autocratic
- The hasty withdrawal of Motion Six thing, which simultaneously made them look a bit weak
- The Senate standoff thing, which reminded everyone what an utter disgrace the aptly-named Red Chamber is
- The inability to meet the Supreme Court deadline thing, which was a stupid deadline anyway
And so on. C-14 aside, Trudeau performed well on the international stage, there were no ministerial scandals, the honeymoon proved durable. Not bad.
The Opposition? Neither party has a permanent leader, but that’s okay. Revealingly, perhaps, the Tories adapted quickly to their new role, while the Dippers (revealingly) are trapped in their usual existential debate without end. Plus ca change, etc.
What do you think, Dear Reader? What were the highlights and the lowlights?