An experienced, great guy like Lang gets pushed aside for, um, no one in particular. Wonderful. Did someone say Bob’s pal Furious George was running this show? Surprise, surprise.
Meanwhile, coming down Coxwell from Son One’s hockey game last night, we observe more NDP signs than houses.
Not a Lib sign in sight, not anywhere.
Sigh.
From the New York Times:
I’ve written about how fabbo Twitter is before (for political parties). I’ve also written about how dangerous it can be (for media).
Here are my thoughts on the MSM and media, written in Tweet-style (that is, journalism with Tourettes):
Therefore, I’ve simply stopped following some of them. Life’s too short, etc.
What do you think?
Chris Levy, our brilliant criminal law professor at the University of Calgary, had just asked who among us favours the death penalty. My hand was one of them.
It was our first year of law school, 1984. The death penalty had been abolished by Parliament eight years earlier.
“Very well,” said Levy. “I will ask you again in your final year.”
It’s almost three decades later, and the subject of capital punishment is again with us. Last week, Angus Reid Public Opinion surveyed more than 1,000 Canadian adults about the subject in an online poll. We don’t know why they felt compelled to do so, but they did.
The results were surprising to some of us.
Sixty-three percent believe the death penalty is “sometimes appropriate.”
About a quarter of Canadians, however, believe capital punishment is never warranted.
The pollsters also found that 61% of Canadians say they support reinstating the death penalty for murder in Canada. A third of the respondents disagreed.
There were some unsurprising regional differences — westerners, being mainly conservatives, favour it; Quebecers, being mainly progressives, oppose it.
Asked why they disagree with the death penalty, 75% of opponents said they were concerned about “the possibility of wrongful convictions leading to executions.”
That is, making a mistake. When you execute the wrong person, there’s obviously no going back.
Me? As a liberal, I’ve (cravenly) avoided taking a public position for years. The hemispheres of my brain — like public opinion — are divided.
The right side of my brain, where scientists tell us emotion holds sway, feels this way: If someone killed someone I love, I’d want to kill them with my bare hands.If someone kills a child, with malice aforethought, I’d want to see them receive the same treatment.
That’s admittedly an emotional response to a very difficult question, but it’s no less valid for that. It’s a position held by other progressives I admire, such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
The left side of my brain, where reasoning purportedly dominates, holds a contrary view. For example, what we all learned in law school — more than anything else — was how imperfect our system is. When you study the law, you learn that it is in need of continual improvement, and that it is fundamentally flawed. It is flawed much like the human beings who created it.
When you study the law, you also learn — as 75% of Canadian dissenters apparently already know — wrongful convictions are common enough to concern every right-thinking person.
And, therefore, it’s irrational to impose death sentences in a legal system that everyone agrees is deficient.
That’s probably a position held by another progressive I admire, Jesus Christ — who, it should be noted, was the victim of a wrongful conviction himself.
It’s not, however, that progressives like me oppose ending another’s life in any circumstances.
Our view on war isn’t dissimilar. Waging war against an enemy, and killing its combatants, isn’t any sane person’s first preference.
But when we sometimes wage war — as we did, say, against Nazism — our cause is just and defensible. But make no mistake: There is still a moral failing, even when fighting fascism, the ideology of murder.
In most cases of capital punishment, you see, society is terminating the lives of those few found to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But in wars, we know — or should know — that we are, inadvertently or otherwise, killing innocents on a large scale (witness Dresden and Hiroshima). And we still do it.
Reason over passion, someone once said. It’s not the world we live in, but it’s the world we should aspire to.
Oh, in the final year of law school? Prof. Levy asked us again who favoured the death penalty.
No hands went up.
Zagat’s recent paean to the Burger Priest, where my kids and I generally go at least once a week, has prompted me to reflect on the gestalt of burger joints.
I am a greasy spoon aficionado. I do not like fancy restaurants. They are overpriced, pretentious, and the food often isn’t very good at all. The places I love are little holes-in-the-proverbial, like Shogun in Vancouver, Michael’s Pizza in Calgary, the Wagon Wheel in Winnipeg, Villa du Souvlaki in Montreal and, in Toronto, the Patrician Grill and the Burger Priest. They’re all family-run operations, they’re well-priced, they make great food, and they treat you nicely.
All of the hype around the Burger Priest worries me. For starters, I do not want to have to deal with yet more people jamming into the place, which (literally) has less standing room than the back of your average flatbed truck. I think, too, it will only exacerbate what many Beachers know to be the problems it already has: huge lineups, crap all over the sidewalk on Queen Street East, and nearby businesses (who are also mainly good folks) having to contend with obnoxious Burger Priest patrons.
This guy is doing well, which is great. So he should take the dough he makes – and, believe me, he makes plenty – and invest in a bigger friggin’ place, with more seating, some parking and a staff person who periodically cleans up out front.
That’s my expert burger dive review. I will now go back to what I do well, which is, er, not much.