Skye Sepp points out to me that the Con­ser­v­a­tive bud­get is not as innocu­ous as I believed. I find his objec­tion entire­ly con­vinc­ing, and here­by change my mind. He focus­es on the “tax-free $5,000 account” pro­gram, which looks very attrac­tive on the sur­face. But, on clos­er exam­i­na­tion, it turns out to be a swin­dle, aimed at neu­tral­iz­ing the pro­gres­sive income tax sys­tem, so that the rich pay less while the poor and aver­age Cana­di­ans pay more. In the pro­gram, Indi­vid­u­als will be able to put only $5,000 a year into accounts to earn tax-free inter­est and/or cap­i­tal gains. In their first full year of oper­a­tion, this will cost the fed­er­al trea­sury only $50 mil­lion in lost tax rev­enue. That’s why it did­n’t leap out of the bud­get with glar­ing warn­ing lights. In fact, it looked rather warm and fuzzy. The small ini­tial sum makes it look like a mea­sure aimed at Cana­di­ans with mod­est sav­ings. The Con­ser­v­a­tives keep repeat­ing that it would “help some­one buy a car” — which is non­sense on the face of it, as you would have to have very large amounts in sav­ings for it to be use­ful for that. Read more »

Fidel Cas­tro with Chilean dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet, in 1977, cel­e­brat­ing the tri­umph of Pinochet’s tor­ture regime. Pinochet ulti­mate­ly faced a mild pun­ish­ment and repu­di­a­tion, but it looks like Cas­tro will get away with his atrocities.

Cas­tro with Sovi­et dic­ta­tor Niki­ta Khrushchev. Among oth­er crimes, Khrushchev mas­ter­mind­ed racist pogroms and orches­trat­ed planned famines.. Togeth­er, C and K near­ly brought the world to a nuclear holocaust.

Cas­tro with Ethiopi­an dic­ta­tor Mengis­tu Haile Mari­am. Cas­tro’s behind-the-scenes schem­ing brought Mari­am to pow­er, with Sovi­et sup­port. Cas­tro’s admi­ra­tion for Mengis­tu, who start­ed his reign with a blood­bath, was unbound­ed. In May of 1977 the Swedish gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the Save the Chil­dren Fund stat­ed that “1,000 chil­dren have been killed, and their bod­ies are left in the streets and are being eat­en by wild hye­nas … You can see the heaped-up bod­ies of mur­dered chil­dren, most of them aged eleven to thir­teen, lying in the gut­ter, as you dri­ve out of Addis Aba­ba.” [1] Cas­tro enthu­si­as­ticly applaud­ed the action. Mari­am sub­se­quent­ly under­took one of the cen­tu­ry’s larg­er geno­cides, in which many mil­lions died. Cas­tro’s sup­port for this geno­cide con­tin­ued until Mengis­tu’s fall.

Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­cis­co Fran­co. Fran­co and Cas­tro were life-long friends and mutu­al admir­ers. Cas­tro mod­eled his speak­ing style and swag­ger­ing man­ner­isms on Fran­co’s. Cas­tro’s “ide­ol­o­gy” was Span­ish Fas­cism (Falangism) until it sud­den­ly became Marx­ism… a “change” that is mean­ing­less, as it involved no change.

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I have lost all respect for Gen­er­al Rick Hilli­er, Canada’s Chief of Defense Staff (the high­est rank­ing mil­i­tary offi­cer in the coun­try). He may be very com­pe­tent in run­ning mil­i­tary oper­a­tions, but he can­not be trust­ed in the fun­da­men­tal area of prop­er pub­lic behav­iour for some­one in his post. He has done some­thing which is extreme­ly offen­sive to a free peo­ple in a demo­c­ra­t­ic nation. He has used his office to try to muz­zle demo­c­ra­t­ic debate in Cana­da about our role in Afghanistan. By claim­ing that our free demo­c­ra­t­ic debate “helps” the Tal­iban, he is demon­strat­ing that he, him­self, is infect­ed with the vilest ide­ol­o­gy of the Tal­iban. His “shut up, don’t think, and do what you’re told” atti­tude to the Cana­di­an peo­ple is pro­found­ly offen­sive. He should be removed from his post at once.

The rul­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty is rife with kind of Tal­iban-like men­tal­i­ty. We should be work­ing to get rid of them, too.

A read­er asked me why I assumed that late mesolith­ic and ear­ly neolith­ic peo­ples could under­take long riv­er and coastal journeys. 

Let me tell you about a lit­tle place in north­ern Cana­da called Peawanuck. I have writ­ten about it else­where, because it has sen­ti­men­tal impor­tance to me. It also has some impor­tance to the out­side world, because, since 2000 it has been the site of the Peawanuck Neu­tron Mon­i­tor. This is part of a glob­al net­work of neu­tron mon­i­tors strate­gi­cal­ly locat­ed to pro­vide pre­cise, real-time, 3‑dimensional mea­sure­ments of cos­mic ray angu­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion activ­i­ty. If your main inter­est is his­to­ry, you may not know why this is impor­tant, but trust me, it is. Oth­er mon­i­tors are locat­ed at the South Pole, Maw­son and McMur­do Sound sta­tions in Antarc­ti­ca; at Inu­vik, Fort Smith, Nain, and Goose Bay in Cana­da; at Thule in Green­land; on Sval­bard (the arc­tic island which appears in The Gold­en Com­pass); and Apati­ty in north­ern Rus­sia. These loca­tions share an obvi­ous char­ac­ter­is­tic: remote­ness. Read more »

For the last fif­teen years, I’ve been com­plain­ing to every­one I know about the pecu­liar absence of fish from his­tor­i­cal writ­ing and analy­sis. Go into any uni­ver­si­ty library, and you will find the stacks filled with mas­sive col­lec­tions of books and jour­nals about every con­ceiv­able aspect of farm­ing, ani­mal hus­bandry, and nomadism. Urban stud­ies from every region and era have been under­tak­en. Con­tro­ver­sies and debates about the pre­cise rela­tion­ships between all these activ­i­ties flash like sum­mer light­ning storms. But where is fish­ing? Try to even find his­tor­i­cal stud­ies of fish­ing and fish­ing com­mu­ni­ties in a uni­ver­si­ty library. One imme­di­ate­ly plum­mets from banks of shelv­ing units to a tiny clus­ter on a sin­gle dusty shelf. Very lit­tle of this is his­tor­i­cal in out­look. Read more »

Canada’s armed forces have been in Afghanistan since 2002, at a cost of 79 deaths (78 sol­diers and one diplo­mat), and a large, though very dif­fi­cult to assess mon­e­tary cost. Like most Cana­di­ans, I sup­port­ed send­ing troops to Afghanistan, feel­ing that the peo­ple of that long-suf­fer­ing land deserved to be defend­ed against fur­ther humil­i­a­tions. Most of the Afghan-Cana­di­ans I spoke to were sup­port­ive of the enter­prise. I knew per­fect­ly well that the ini­tial rea­son for our being there was a kind of indi­rect black­mail from Wash­ing­ton. Join­ing the NATO oper­a­tion in Afghanistan was prob­a­bly the only way that Paul Martin’s admin­is­tra­tion could get away with our refusal to par­tic­i­pate in the dis­as­trous war on Iraq. But I felt there was a chance that we could do some good there, as long as we man­aged to avoid oper­at­ing under the thumb of U.S. forces. Read more »