Catherine Ashton, high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy, recently stated that the EU called for “deep democracy” in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt as they liberated themselves from dictators. She emphasi…
Continue readingAuthor: Bill Longstaff
Petraeus’s imaginary Taliban
In Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, his protagonist Chichikov seeks to purchase serfs who have died but are still registered against their owners as taxable assets. By relieving the owners of the tax burden, Chichikov obtains ownership of the dead ser…
Continue readingOn trashing the long form census—Stats Can on my tail
Shortly before the Canada Post lockout, Statistics Canada mailed me a copy of the 2011 National Household Survey, formerly known as the long form census, to dutifully fill out. I promptly trashed it.But Stats Can was not finished with me. Yesterday, wi…
Continue readingPakistanis really don’t like the U.S. They really don’t
That the United States is unpopular in Pakistan is common knowledge. But just how unpopular is surprising. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, 73 per cent of Pakistanis hold an unfavourable opinion of the U.S., 68 per cent have little or no …
Continue readingImpeaching Ahmadinejad
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, has a problem. He wholeheartedly supported incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 presidential election, and now it turns out the flaky Ahmadinejad is being a bad boy. Allies of the president and his chi…
Continue readingAmericans tire of war spending
Americans have for some time seemed to have an insatiable appetite for military spending. Defence was the sacred cow of their federal budget. Now it seems they are losing that appetite for at least one form of military expense—waging war.The Afghan w…
Continue readingWhy the dolphins are smarter than us—recently revealed
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, animal advocate and a very funny man, once observed that, “Man always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so o…
Continue readingSports—tribalism in full cry
The now infamous Vancouver hockey riot has done a pretty good job of smearing the city’s reputation around the globe. Shocking as it was, it wasn’t entirely surprising. Rioting seems to be part and parcel of professional team sports. The reason, of cou…
Continue readingTime to end growth?
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Canada’s economic prospects are looking good. In its latest global forecast of economic activity, this year we will have the highest GDP growth in the G7 except for Germany. We are, it appears, doing …
Continue reading"Saudi women, start your engines!"
I admit I was motivated to write this post by the above heading. I couldn’t resist it, so I plagiarized it. Apparently it first appeared as a Twitter message on the main site women2Drive. As flippant as it sounds, it sends a serious message.It reminds …
Continue readingA dynamic Turkey steps up
Congratulations to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) for their victory in the Turkish election last Sunday. Erdogan led his party to their third straight win with a majority of seats and almost 50 per cent …
Continue readingCBC contributes much more than dollars
A study released Wednesday by international consultants Deloitte and Touche reports that CBC/Radio-Canada contributed $3.7 billion to the Canadian economy in 2010. This contrasts to its annual parliamentary allocation of $1.1 billion and overall expen…
Continue readingStephen Harper’s moral relativism
In Stephen Harper’s speech to the recent Conservative convention, referring to foreign policy, he announced that the Conservatives moral stance would be clear. “Moral ambiguity, moral equivalence are not options,” he stated, “they are dangerous illusio…
Continue readingGood news—Gates says NATO faces dismal future
U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates is not amused by the lack of military esprit de corp among America’s NATO allies. “The blunt reality,” he lectured, “is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American b…
Continue readingPeru chooses social democracy over capitalist "democracy"
Some events of note in South America’s last five years:
In Bolivia, President Evo Morales presided over the ratification of a new social democratic constitution and was re-elected as president with 64 per cent of the vote.
In Ecuador, President Ra…
Now here’s a death penalty I can support
Former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, now secretary of Homeland Security for the U.S. government, is a staunch supporter of the death penalty. This is not a position I would normally agree with. However, when Ms. Napolitano refers to the Arizona Wo…
Continue readingU.S. follows lead of Taliban Jack
Googling the history of our Afghanistan adventure the other day, I encountered a snide Vancouver Sun article written in 2008 mocking “Taliban Jack” for his position on the war, sarcastically summarizing his views as, “Bring in the UN, facilitate disc…
Continue readingWar on drugs busted
Reports criticizing the War on Drugs are manifold but few carry the cachet of the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Issued this month, the report commissioners are a uniquely prestigious group that include the former presidents of Brazil,…
Continue readingWill the Conservative majority placate the West?
The West has in the past had a number of grievances against Ottawa, some legitimate, some not so much. The sense of grievance is strongest in Alberta for various reasons not the least of which was Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program of 1980. One b…
Continue readingDon’t mess with my vote, Jack
With 59 of their 103 seats in Quebec, we could expect the NDP to pay close attention to Quebec’s concerns. That would, of course, be appropriate. But what I wouldn’t have expected them to do is propose eroding the democratic rights of the rest of us in…
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