Canadian Musings

This past week saw a man commit a most cowardly and selfish act, and the liberal media want to lionize him for it.

He was too cowardly to face the challenges life dealt his way, and took what appeared to him to be an easy way out. It is not courageous to end one's own life in any event, and certainly not in the manner which he chose.

We all have difficulties in life. And we all have death awaiting us. There is no way to know for certain that any "life-threatening" condition will be the cause of our demise: we could die of a heart attack, or in a motor vehicle accident long before other causes get to us.

If he wanted to be courageous, he could have dedicated his life to the science of his disease. Courageous are those who live their lives proudly in the face of adversity.

Those with courage, the true heroes, are those who live with any number of disabilities and contribute meaningfully to society.

Even a trivial glance at a dictionary (dictionary.com) shows courage to be "a quality of spirit that enables you to face danger of pain without showing fear." This man did not face danger or pain: he chose to avoid it instead. He showed the fear of his disease, and spoke of that fear as his motivation for his act.

This man was a coward.

There have been any number of cases where people have been on their deathbed and recovered to contribute much to the lives of others for years to come. What do this man's family have? They get to live with the guilt of this man's death for the rest of their lives.

This was not an act of courage.

The Governor General has been taking a lot of heat lately for her failure to attend the memorial service for Lois Hole in Alberta. Apparently the GG was scheduled to attend the inauguration of the new Prime Minister in the Ukraine on behalf of Canada. That event was rescheduled, but Ms. Clarkson chose to remain in Europe on vacation instead of tending to her vice-regal duties.

But it raises the question: although Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state for Canada, and the Governor General is her representative within Canada, what is the GG doing traveling abroad on behalf of Canada. After all, it is the Queen whom she represents, not Canadians. And surely the Queen is capable of choosing her own representatives in other countries. Just as surely Canadians are able to choose for themselves who should represent them abroad.

Whether it's a "trade mission" or a cultural tour, the Governor General has no international role, but only a domestic one. Such a shame she has forgotten that, and has her priorities completely backwards.

PolSpy (polspy.ca) have revived a site to which they apparently used to post in the past by the name of CausticSense (causticsense.ca). Reading through their archives they point out that Molson's have trademarked the term, "CANADIAN". (Citing Trademark registration number TMA490,244).

Which may be all fine and good, but there's no legal way for them to have done it, as the rules for trademarks clearly state, "You may not register a word that clearly designates the place of origin of the wares or services," further explaining that "Allowing you to use place names as part of your trade-mark would be to give you a monopoly on a geographical term and be unfair to others."

But the registration cites section 12(2) of the Trade-marks Act. Which makes the ludicrous claim that a trademark is registrable if it "has been so used in Canada by the applicant or his predecessor in title as to have become distinctive."

Which would itself seem fine, except that 12(2) only applies to trademarks not registerable under 12(1)(a) or (b). Namely, because it's somebody else's surname, or descriptive of the wares. That isn't the clause which would prevent its registration, and 12(2) does not apply and cannot be used as the rationale for registration.

The fact that this registration was opposed, but still granted, just goes to show how many violations of the law a good lawyer can buy for the big boys.

Correction: Nancy is kind enough to correct my error about just how PolSpy and CausticSense are related. Please refer to the comment for details.

Update: Some moron posted spam, forcing me to delete existing comments (since stupid blogger won't let me delete individual comments ... grrr.)

In the last few days there have been a few items to make one reflect on the nature of "proof" in today's society. Well, other than, say, a shot of a good 160-proof whiskey. That's just a fine way to aid the digestion of a good meal.

The Panel who were asked to look into the forged memo controversy at CBS had their report released to the public yesterday. They say they chose to not draw conclusions which they felt they could not prove. But if we look at the evidence which they present, some conclusions are proven but not claimed. For example, their document typography expert (Tytell) concludes that the documents are fakes. No evidence whatsoever is presented to support any claim that they are authentic. But the Panel specifically refused to conclude that they're fake.

As I was flipping through the dial the other day, CNN was airing a report on certain forensic testimony, including false conclusions about fingerprint evidence. It's often assumed that fingerprint matching is an exact science, but the evidence says that mistakes are not only relatively frequent for a science (perhaps a few percent wrong), but can occur in major cases. They gave an example of a U.S. lawyer who was named by the FBI as a "100%" match for a fingerprint found in connection with the bombings of trains in Madrid, Spain last March 11th. Which was all the more confusing, because European authorities matched the print to a Muslim extremist.

Evidence such as these are presented in legal contexts all the time to constitute proof of this or that. But is that the right word? A mathematical proof requires a logical conclusion of correctness which will stand for all time. This is clearly something less than that: there is still a margin for error. Perhaps the word "theorem" would be a better choice, as it represents a likelihood which has not yet been mathematically proven.

Even an exact DNA match makes me laugh: while it presents a high probability, how can you prove that it isn't a twin, or a clone? The numbers typically cited, such as one-in-ten-million (or whatever), are not based on a study of ten million individual random samples, but is a statistical extrapolation based on probably a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand samples.

But, in the extreme, if I simply watch someone sign a piece of paper, I cannot proceed to prove that they signed it. You'll just have to trust me, I guess.

Canada has confirmed their contribution of the third North American case of Mad Cow disease. (Two native cases, one exported to the U.S. to cost their industry billions.)

Good thing it was an old cow, or else the Canadians would have to deal with the simple fact that they can't manage their herd, despite the billions of dollars their government's incompetence has cost the cattle industry.

Google, on their "GMail" welcome splash page, did a recap of various highlights from 2004, including their April Fools announcement of a lunar base. I'm flipping through it, laughing my head off, but the thought keeps going through my mind: in a gravity-reduced environment, how quickly can you type out code before the energy from your typing starts to lift you out of your chair and you start getting typos?

Sad, isn't it?

Today's news (hat-tip Bourque) includes a note that the Ontario Lieberal government have plans to see the so-called minimum wage in Ontario increased by a whopping 13.9% ($.50/hr).

Why don't they get it over with and simply jack up the minimum wage to $50/hr? Or $100/hr? Do they not have even the most basic comprehension of economics to see why their approach to this issue is completely incompetent and extremely damaging? All of the problems with raising minimum wage to $100/hr are there with this increase, but in a smaller amount. It is no less incompetent a move.

Ontario's Labour Minister is quoted as saying, "We need a mechanism to make sure that the most vulnerable are not the last in line, but first in line." Except that the most vulnerable are those who will be most damaged by this.

It increases costs to businesses, and therefore increases prices. It's not the people making the money who suffer from the increase, but those such as myself who are currently unemployed who are made to suffer the most.

If the minimum wage is too low for a given job, then the workers should ask for a raise. If they're worth it, the business should give them a raise. If they're not worth it, they should find a job to which they can apply themselves to add enough value to earn that raise. It sucks, but not nearly as much as the disparity being created by artificially raised floors in the labour market.

This government must be voted out at the earliest possible opportunity.

A mere week ago, a major earthquake unleased a devastating tsunami across southeast Asia, killing about 150,000 people. Personally, I can't even begin to fathom what that means.

A year ago, an earthquake in Bam, Iraq killed somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 people.

But this part of the world has a high population density. My little mind can't quite grasp how all of this fits together: if we lost about 1/6th of the population of Ottawa in one instant, it's a lot of people. But that's also highly localized, compared to all of SEAsia.

I could go on about trying to get the right perspective on the scope of this disaster, which is huge but somehow not the end of humanity. I'd rather do what most of us do best: focus on myself instead, and on how these world events relate to my own life.

Not that it changes my life significantly. But some have been changed more, questioning the tenets of their faith. Which I find terribly unfortunate. Because faith is not some sort of "immunity idol" against the ills of this world. The fact that disasters occur should remind us of God's presence, not make us question whether he's absent.

After all, disasters will occur, and will impact believers and nonbelievers alike. And that's true no matter how broad the disaster is: it can impact half the world, or just ourselves. It's true for cancer and tsunamis.

It's been said that nothing is sure in life except death and taxes. We don't know when, or how, so we must always be ready.

It's too bad that so many have created this strange notion that if they "have faith," they should be protected from disaster. That the fact they're still impacted suggests to them that God is absent, when nothing is further from the truth. I do hope and pray that they learn better, before it's too late. They certainly won't get such education in today's public schools, and unfortunately even many churches have forgotten how much learning there is to do.

Kelvin (and others, too): what I find most useful to put on my USB flash drive is my "password safe". It's an application written by Bruce Schneier, available here, to keep all your various and sundry passwords safe, but handy. When you open the application, you enter a passPhrase (something memorable to only yourself, maybe an old quotation) to gain access to all your userids and passwords.

By having it on my flashdrive, I can carry it with me like other keys, and have my passwords handy whenever I may need them.

My PGP key (well, really, my GPG key) is on the flashdrive, too, for any emergency signing I might want to do. Not that it's ever come up.

Got my second comment (of all time - woo hoo!) earlier today, from Kelvin. Seems he's got it goin' on, and also that it's high time for me to update my blogroll. It's not like I (or, as far as the stats show, anyone) read this blog, but it's good to keep things tidy and current. For now, I've put a few of the blogs which I haven't been reading as much lately into a "Deprecated" section. In another month or so I'll probably just drop them completely, or start reading them again and move 'em back up. Time will tell.

Here's hoping for all the continued well-considered thoughts from Kelvin on his new blog.

It's a new year. Let's start messing it up all over again, shall we?