Here:

I received the long form questionnaire many years ago. I thought the questions were pretty personal – stuff about race, sexual orientation, income and so on. I wouldn’t have minded answering some of it,  I guess, were it not for the fact that governments generally stink at safeguarding peoples’ privacy. I mean, there’s only so many times that you can hear about health records being found in a dumpster, you know?

I received the form when John Manley was Minister of Industry, whenever that was. I recall letting him know about my census conscientious objector status. He said he thought a stint in jail would improve my character. I didn’t disagree.

Now, if the long-form census becomes a voluntary process, I suppose it’ll address the concerns of some people. But for me, I objected to, one, the nature of the questions and, two, all governments’ seeming inability to keep secret the answers we give. The fact that they threaten to take you to court for failing to go along with such a process obviously makes it worse.

Some Liberals have said I shouldn’t offer my opinion about this issue – a few have even said I should be kicked out of the party over it!  When they calm down, or get medicated (or both), I suggest they do a Google search. The sad tale is there for all to see: over the years, there have ministerial resignations, investigations by privacy commissioners, and many, many media stories about governments – of all stripes, at all levels – losing people’s private information.

For me, this isn’t some libertarian thing. When governments get serious about protecting our information, I’ll get serious about their demands that I provide very personal information. But in the digital age, their sloppiness has only gotten worse, not better.

But does this mean I think Tim’s team has handled it well?  Um, no. I think Clement et al. were throwing a bone to their neo-con and so-con base, but they didn’t expect the big blowback they’ve gotten from everyone else. They’ve politically mismanaged the file from start to finish.

But that doesn’t mean it’s an unhelpful debate. I think it’s good that we’re talking about this.

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Dear Internet:

Do puppies ever sleep? Ever?

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Warren

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Live from Kingston! Meet Roxy Roller Kinsella, my new gal. I shot this on the iPhone, sort-of sideways. You still get the full Roxy Effect, however.

Get ready for more Roxy At Arm’s Length, world!

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“In November, 1990, LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man, David Kirby — his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world — surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby’s passing (above), taken by a journalism grad student named Therese Frare, became the one photograph most identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen as many as 12 million people infected.”

My Dad was an immunologist before he became a bio-ethicist. When I was a kid, I remember him coming home to tell us about a frightening virus that didn’t really have a name yet. Some of the doctors at the hospital, he said, were perplexed by the profound toll it was taking on three “H” communities – Haitians, homosexuals and heroin users. I remember him saying it was the most formidable virus any of them had ever seen. “If it does what we think it is going to do,” he said, “it will kill millions of people.”

It did. Every year, now, it kills about two million people. Many more live with it.

When that photo appeared, I – like everyone else – thought it was extraordinary. I was appalled by Benetton’s use of it to sell sweaters – but, as the above link to Life makes clear, David Kirby’s parents felt it was the right thing to do. They’d know better than me.

Anyway. I don’t post this photo to mark some sad anniversary or anything else like that. I just put it here to remind myself that it is a terrible, terrible disease, and that it is still with us.

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Paradis stays in, Guergis stays out: Sound fair to you? Me neither. Link somewhere in here.

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Write your own caption!

I’m doing Canada AM, in a little bit, on the Helena Guergis mess – a mess entirely of the Harperite Team’s own making. She and her lawyer are going to do rather well, I’d say.

What’s your view?  Got any good lines for me to use on AM?  Caption for the photo above? Comments are open!

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RCMP ends Helena Guergis probe with no action taken: lawyer (Guergis-RCMP)

Source: The Canadian Press

Jul 21, 2010 16:00

OTTAWA – The lawyer for deposed cabinet minister Helena Guergis says the RCMP has given his client a clean bill of health.

Howard Rubel says an inspector with the Mounties has advised him that the police probe found “no substance” to any of the issues raised by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Rubel says the RCMP assured him that all concerns related to Guergis have been “resolved” and that there will be no further action.

Earlier this year, Guergis was booted from cabinet as minister for the status of women after allegations surrounding misuse of her office by her husband, ex-Tory MP Rahim Jaffer.

She was also kicked out of the Conservative caucus and made to sit as an independent backbencher.

Guergis denied any wrongdoing, saying Prime Minister Stephen Harper never made clear what allegations he had passed on to the Mounties.

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I spotted this the other day in the New York Times. When you think of it, it is astonishing:

“Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.

Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.“

The gamble that book retailers took – namely, slashing the cost of digital books, as well as the devices upon which we read them – has clearly paid off.  People are reading e-books in record numbers.  I’m one of them: as I wrote months ago, I now read more than ever before – and I’m doing all that reading on an eReader or an iPad.  (And yesterday, I bought my daughter a Kobo at Chapters for $150.)

All of this enthusiasm for books is not without its risks, however.  As with record stores, one can easily see a day when bookstores go the way of the do do bird. And, maybe, when book shelves become a thing for antique collectors – and even libraries start to close, too.

I’m personally torn about all this.  On the one hand, the loss of books you can hold in your hand has Orwelliam 1984-ish overtones: if books no longer exist, can’t history also be changed by revisionists, with a tap of a keyboard key?  On the other hand, as my former journalism prof Roger Bird once said to us (when asked about the death of certain words, and continual churning of language): “You can’t stop it.”

What do you think? More being books being read is a good thing.  But is it a good thing when the books are reduced to some bits of digitized data, imprisoned on a flickering screen, with no permanence?

Comments – digital comments – are open.

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Crisis now passed, I can reveal I spent all of last night on a chair in Emerg at KGH.  Watched the sun come up over the lake, afterwards, so things must have worked out okay.  Brought home a rock, which I’m going to paint.  Long story.

As I tore through the night along that goddamned highway – that infernal strip of asphalt – I heard this tune again on XM.  These guys are from Denmark or something.  Their name is a stinker, but the tune is a killer.  Certainly keeps you up, when you’re heading East at about 3:00 a.m.  Recommended.

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“Kinsella will be more confused than usual, methinks.”

Saw it. I liked the fact that the producers assumed that I possessed the intelligence to understand a very complex plot.

Unfortunately, they were wrong in this assumption.

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