Return to Hooverville

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 15 Comments

Like her colleague Douglas Porter, Sherry Cooper expresses her concern about the Prime Minister’s call for austerity.

“The misplaced belief that the road to economic prosperity is paved by near-term fiscal tightening, as espoused by our own Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron last week, shows we have learned nothing from Herbert Hoover’s response to the Great Depression,” Ms. Cooper said.

The hottest state—ever

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Erich Schlegel/Getty Images

Not since the infamous dust bowl days of the 1930s has a U.S. state been so hot and dry. More than 80 per cent of Texas is experiencing “exceptional” drought conditions, the highest category on the U.S. Drought Monitor Scale. By the end of August, only 18.6 cm of rain had reached the state this year, and the average temperature over the past three months was 30.4° C, the hottest ever for a U.S. state.

The drought has fuelled scores of wildfires, razing 3.7 million acres of land. In the particularly hard-hit county of Bastrop, more than 1,500 homes have been destroyed and two people killed, according to San Antonio’s KSAT news. Much of the state’s ranchland has also withered and died, forcing sheep and cattle herders to cull or sell off thousands of their animals. Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service has concluded that the drought has cost US$5.2 million in lost crops and livestock. Says Mayor John Jacobs of the town of Robert Lee, whose reservoirs are down to 0.5 per cent of their capacity: “We’re just hanging on, praying for rain.”

What’s the use of saving money?

By Jason Kirby and Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 38 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Steven Patterson and his family moved to Vancouver from Cambridge, Ont., in mid-2008, just as the financial crisis hit. After years of scrimping and saving to pay off their first mortgage, they had earned a tidy profit when they sold the Cambridge house and put the proceeds into GICs, where the money would be safe and easily accessible should they decide to buy another home in B.C. Three years later, Patterson, a 42-year-old IT manager, is still sitting on the sidelines, renting, while real estate prices march ever upward in a city where a three-bedroom bungalow covered in warped siding can fetch $1 million.

That might seem like a prudent move in an uncertain economy, but Patterson says his cautious approach has come at a steep price: all his money is steadily being eaten away by inflation, which the meagre interest income from his GICs can’t cover—particularly after the taxman takes a cut. Meanwhile, several of Patterson’s friends have taken advantage of those same low interest rates, loaded up on debt, and bought into Vancouver’s frothy housing market in recent years. And they have enjoyed a windfall—at least on paper—as the value of their homes continues to climb. As for Patterson, “I’m only a few thousand dollars ahead—minus inflation,” he says, clearly frustrated. “So actually, I’m way behind, and I don’t have a house.”

Welcome to the world of ultra-low interest rates, where profligacy is richly rewarded and saving is, well, for suckers. Those who’ve opted to be austere with their personal finances have found themselves on the losing end as governments and central bankers have worked to get people to borrow and spend in the wake of the global recession. While emergency interest rate cuts were to be expected after the financial crisis seized up lending markets, it’s been nearly four years since central banks started slashing rates to the lowest levels in history. For that matter, over the last 10-year period, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bank of Canada’s benchmark interest rate stayed above four per cent for just six quarters (in 2006 and 2007), while the average headline rate of inflation over that time was 2.1 per cent.

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That’s ‘professor’ uptight to you

By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 8 Comments

Photographs by Laura Mills

June Madeley is annoyed with the increasingly rude demands she gets from students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Ten years ago, it was common for them to see her during office hours when they had a question. “Now there’s an expectation that we’ll answer their emails immediately and meet them whenever there’s a good time for them.” And as surely as the leaves pile up on campus each October, the communications professor knows her inbox will soon fill with complaints about mid-terms scheduled for the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. “There are a lot of people who feel they can’t make the exam because of travel arrangements,” she says. “And others who think it’s unfair that they have to study that weekend.”

But when Madeley gets frustrated, she doesn’t fire off a snotty email to the student. She logs on to “That’s ‘Professor’ Uptight to You, Johnny,” a Facebook group with 297 members, all of them teaching at universities and colleges. The members-only site is a place where university educators can vent in the form of steaming emails they wish they could write to their students but can’t because that would be, well, rude. Madeley, who says she hasn’t posted yet, enjoys reading the rants from her colleagues. The site is run by Khrystyne Keane, a Connecticut-based editor for a non-profit group, who took over its administration as a favour to a professor friend. The logo—a unicorn standing under a rainbow—is a jab at students, some of whom feel they are every bit as special as the fabled one-horned horse and the multicoloured arc.

The posts are all written to anonymous Janeys and Johnnies, but they share one trait: carefully crafted sarcasm. “Dear Johnny, I suspect that if you had spent as much time and effort on your last assignment as you did on the long flaming email you just sent me, this whole ‘conversation’ would never have happened,” reads one. “Dear Janey, I want to assure you that we didn’t do anything important in class. We just stared out the window for three hours in silence,” reads another.

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Call girls, graft and Italy’s paralysis

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 4 Comments

Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

On Sept. 19, Italy had its debt rating slashed by Standard & Poor’s. Three days earlier, the world had learned the country’s leader privately calls himself a “spare-time” prime minister.

The remark, along with several snippets of phone conversations that were never meant to leave Silvio Berlusconi’s inner circle, found its way into national and international headlines when wiretap transcripts tied to an ongoing investigation became public. The controversial excerpts featured the prime minister insulting Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, and boasting about sleeping with eight women in a single night. Most importantly, the tapes revealed that he may have been the object of blackmail by some close associates who used to supply him with prostitutes and aspiring starlets for his parties. The wiretaps also uncovered high-level corruption at Finmeccanica, a state-controlled defence and industry group. Though the inquiry has not lead to charges being laid against Berlusconi so far, it represents the fifth judicial proceeding the prime minister is embroiled in, on top of four court cases where he is defending himself against accusations including corruption, tax fraud and paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl.

The new scandals have come at a time when Berlusconi’s approval ratings were already plumbing unprecedented lows—at around 24 per cent, according to one newspaper poll—and no other political personality or party seems ready to supplant him at the helm. The Italian leadership is coming to resemble a headless chicken, just when the country must pull together to implement a $73-billion austerity package meant to reassure rattled investors that it won’t become insolvent on $2.6 trillion in public debt.

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A fellowship of geniuses, minus one

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Each fall a U.S. foundation bestows “genius grants” of a half-million bucks on a bunch of academics, artists and other accomplished individuals. But what’s puzzling about the 2011 crop of “geniuses” is that the prestigious field is completely devoid of me.

Frankly this comes as a shock. Why, just last week at the symphony a woman came up to me and said: “Do up your fly, genius.” It seemed the people were on board with my candidacy.

The so-called “genius awards” are presented by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a charity that features its benefactors’ middle initials—the monocle of name accessories—and therefore must have scads of cash. They are not to be confused with the “super genius awards” presented by the Wile E. Coyote Foundation.

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UPDATED: Baird at the UN: minority rights and the “Jewish state”

By John Geddes - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:09 AM - 15 Comments

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, Foreign Minister John Baird declared Canada’s unbending support for the rights of religious and other minority groups wherever they live.

Baird cited the plights of, among others, the Bahá’í in Iran, Christians in China, Buddhists and Muslims in Burma, gays and lesbians in Uganda. Standing up for minorities abroad who are not accorded full and equal rights—or, worse, are persecuted and oppressed—by the majority groups in their countries is also a preoccupation of Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

In light of this principled concern being put at the centre of Canadian foreign policy, it would be interesting to hear Baird or Kenney on the matter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize his country as a “Jewish state” as a precondition to any negotiations toward a peace deal.

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YouTube on TV

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 1 Comment

People have been debating the value of YouTube for years. Some predicted Google wasted billions on something that could never make money. If recent rumours are true, the naysayers may soon be eating their words. The search-engine behemoth has apparently stepped up its efforts to deliver an alternative to cable television. The company is competing against Amazon, Yahoo and Dish Network to acquire Hulu, the online video site owned by Walt Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal. Google’s initial offer far surpassed those of the other bidders, according to AllThingsD, a technology news website. This could be part of Google’s strategy for acquiring original video content to upload to YouTube, speculated Business Insider, a business blog, which also quoted two anonymous industry sources saying the tech giant is spending as much as $500 million shopping around for premium titles to boost its online video offering. Google also recently bought Motorola Mobility Holdings, which, among other things, makes cable set-top boxes, devices that allow users to access the Web via TV sets.

It’s all proof that the technology giant is gearing up to battle rivals like Netflix and Apple in the race to reinvent television. Its most formidable weapon, industry watchers agree, is YouTube’s unrivalled popularity.

Why hockey is the smartest game in the world

By Adam Gopnik - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

David E. Klutho/Sports Illustration

John Kenneth Galbraith, Martin Luther King Jr., Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margaret Atwood: the luminaries who have delivered the annual CBC Massey Lectures since 1961 are luminous indeed. They are an integral “part of the intellectual life of the nation,” in the words of CBC executive producer Bernie Lucht. This year’s speaker—“deeply honoured and deeply terrified” at being selected for the 50th anniversary—is Adam Gopnik, New Yorker staff writer, author and honorary Canadian. Born in Philadelphia, Gopnik lived in Montreal from the ages of 10 to 25, when he “experienced every significant thing that can happen to a human in those years, from falling in love to being rejected in love,” not to mention becoming a diehard Canadiens fan.

Gopnik’s topic is winter: “I wanted something Canadian but not narrowly Canadian, something that would bring in art, music and sport from across the world.” He offers an engaging account of the artists, composers, writers and intellectuals who invented the modern idea of winter, but the real passion lies in his sports lecture, especially when Gopnik discusses the only game that really matters in this country. His take on hockey describes how, in Montreal over a century ago, the French-Canadian demand for style and skill and the English-Canadian interest in playing rugby on ice saw the fusion of brutality and grace into a game of beauty.

This year’s lectures are scheduled for Montreal (Oct. 12), Halifax (Oct. 14), Edmonton (Oct. 21), Vancouver (Oct. 23) and Toronto (Oct. 26), and will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas Nov. 7 to 11. A book of Gopnik’s lectures will be published by House of Anansi Press. BRIAN BETHUNE

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Stephen Harper’s majority rules

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 22 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

In the early morning hours of May 3, with the ballots almost all counted, he basked in a Conservative majority. The Liberal Party of Canada, his nemesis, was in shambles. The Bloc Québécois was decimated. If the world seemed then to have tilted in Stephen Harper’s direction, his political situation has become only more advantageous since.

The NDP, though now the official Opposition, has lost its uniquely popular leader, removing Harper’s primary challenger from the House of Commons. What’s more, with Progressive Conservatives mounting serious challenges in Ontario and Manitoba, Harper might awake one day next month to find that every single province west of Quebec is led by a right-of-centre government—a resounding endorsement of the Prime Minister’s twin assertions that “Conservative values are Canadian values” and that “the Conservative party is Canada’s party.”

But if it is to be Stephen Harper’s world, what will Stephen Harper do with it? Perhaps only as much as he said he would do. “The challenge will be getting the balance right and not overreaching,” says Jim Armour, who once served as Harper’s director of communications. “If the Prime Minister goes too big or tries to go too fast, then he risks unifying the opposition and attracting the media’s attention. If, on the other hand, he continues with the ‘stick-to-the script,’ ‘no-surprises’ approach to governing that he’s taken for the past five years, then he’ll be fine. As with all things—even once-in-a-lifetime political opportunities—the key is moderation.”

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A tunnel to Alaska?

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

It’s that time of the year again, when Russia announces it will build a tunnel all the way to America across the Bering Strait. The ultimate public infrastructure project “is already under way,” an official from the Russian Ministry of Economic Development recently told a local English-language TV station.

In the last couple of months, reports that the Kremlin endorsed building a $90-billion transcontinental railway line linking Siberia to Alaska appeared everywhere from Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper to the U.S.’s Business Insider blog. According to a recent opinion piece in the London Times, “the Russians, Canadians and Americans seem confident that they can muster the political will, technical know-how and massive funds to complete the project.” Washington, however, knew nothing about it, according to the U.S. State Department, and Ottawa gave no comment.

That’s hardly surprising. The Bering Strait tunnel has been a pie-in-the-sky fixture of Russia’s public debate since 1905, when Czar Nicholas II first approved a blueprint for the project. After the Cold War, then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin vowed to build the tunnel to increase transportation links to the U.S., Russia’s new-found friend. This taste for megaprojects is a residue of “the penchant for gigantism that characterized the Soviet Union,” says Aurel Braun, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Soviet officials, he adds, loved to dazzle people with enormous public developments, such as reversing rivers, vast hydroelectric dams, or Magnitogorsk, the largest steel city in the world.

Now, as President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia’s top political duo, gear up for next year’s presidential election, talk of ambitious below-the-sea excavations to connect the world’s two largest continents has resurfaced. With the country drifting further and further away from democracy and the Russian public sliding into political apathy, Braun says, a newly authoritarian Moscow seems to be borrowing a page from Soviet Russia in an attempt to please the masses.

Playing safe

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 0 Comments

The English national rugby team kicked off its World Cup campaign in unconvincing fashion last month, limping to a win over underdogs Argentina in Dunedin, N.Z. The Englishmen struggled for points and played from behind for much of the match. But outside the stadium, where tens of thousands of travelling English fans gathered, scoring was not expected to be a problem.

Prostitution is legal in New Zealand, and brothels there reportedly doubled their condom orders ahead of the six-week Rugby World Cup. “Whenever I hear an English accent,” madame Mary Brennan told Agence France-Presse, “I know there’ll be some good business there.” The English are not the only fans in town. Brennan says she’s had bookings from South Africa, Ireland and even Canada.

As for the players themselves, the English, at least, aren’t averse to a little bad behaviour. Members of the team were photographed at a dwarf-themed pub night ahead of a pool match with Georgia. Management assured the public that, contrary to reports, no midgets were thrown. Captain Mike Tindall, meanwhile, who recently married the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips, was said to be “just friends” with a mystery blond he was spotted with at the bar.

‘It’s irresponsible the way they throw these words around’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 7 Comments

Dick Cheney does not appreciate the tone adopted by the likes of Don Davies.

“Now we have a lot of people running around using language like ‘torture.’ I heard one of your members of Parliament saying we used it on hundreds of people at Guantanamo. Not true,” said Mr. Cheney, who became a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration, particularly over the war on Iraq, during his eight years as vice-president.

“We did not use torture. … We did what we absolutely needed to do. We had an obligation to gather intelligence to ensure that we didn’t get struck again, and I think it worked,” he said, noting that Mr. Mohammed, in particular, produced a “gold mine” of information “after he’d been through the process.”

The utility of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a matter of some debate. So far as the hunt for Osama bin Laden, for instance, John McCain has said that torturing Mr. Mohammed actually produced false and misleading information.

Calling all geishas

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:35 AM - 0 Comments

Sankei/Getty Images

Shimoda wants more geishas. Three decades ago, the seaside tourist resort had 200 working in its tea houses. Now only five part-time professionals remain. Worried that the traditional art was in peril, the Japanese city, located around 130 km southwest of Tokyo, is spending around $70,000 worth of government employment subsidies to recruit and train three new geishas. They want to bolster tourism as well as ensure the centuries-old skills are passed down to another generation. “I am grateful for the support,” Tsuyako Kashiwaya, a spokesperson for the city’s geisha management office, told Asahi.com. “I hope the project will contribute to Shimoda’s revitalization.”

The successful applicants will be paid around $400 a week for six months to sing epic songs and learn classic dances, how to play musical instruments, and the delicate art of conversation. Tourists will even be allowed to observe the five-day-a-week lessons, which will take place in a historic building. After all the lessons are complete the geishas will perform regional dances and songs at cultural events. Asahi.com reports that a local favourite is Tojin Okichi (Okichi, mistress of a foreigner).

Orange ribbons for Jack

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:26 PM - 4 Comments

Last week MPs sported orange ribbons to remember Jack Layton.

Liberal leader Bob Rae.

Liberal MP Mark Eyking (left) and NDP MP Megan Leslie.

Three more months

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 8:38 PM - 6 Comments

With the Conservatives and Liberals voting in favour, the House approved a three-month extension of the military mission in Libya tonight by a vote of 189 to 98.

Canada does not just “go along” in order to “get along”

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 6:24 PM - 16 Comments

The prepared text of John Baird’s speech to the United Nations this evening.

Nearly sixty-six years ago, in 1946, one of my predecessors was privileged to represent Canada at the First Session of the United Nations General Assembly.

It is an honour to follow in those footsteps, and to renew Canada’s commitment to the Founding Principles of the United Nations.

•       Maintaining international peace and security;
•       preventing and removing threats to peace;
•       suppressing acts of aggression;
•       respecting the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples;
•       strengthening universal peace; and
•       promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.

This chamber symbolizes the promise of humankind and what we can accomplish by working together to uphold those Founding Principles.

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The Commons: Tony Clement’s one-man sit-in

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 6:10 PM - 20 Comments

The Scene. The Hill was alive this day with the vigour of public protest. On the lawn, several hundred lay siege to the barricades, anxious with objections to a continental oil pipeline. Inside the House, Tony Clement kept vigil on his seat, resolutely unwilling to remove his posterior from it in defiance of the opposition’s tyranny.

Thomas Mulcair’s first question was actually quite simple enough.

“Mr. Speaker, earlier this year the Prime Minister released an important document entitled ‘Accountable Government: A Guide for Ministers and Ministers of State,’ ” the NDP deputy reviewed. “Could the Prime Minister tell us if it is within the guidelines for a minister to run government funding out of his constituency office? Is it within the guidelines to have inaccurate and incomplete information provided to the Auditor General? Also, is it within the guidelines to have ministers interfere in spending reviews?”

Mr. Mulcair was just wondering these things, mind you. He was not necessarily referring to the latest news concerning Tony Clement’s handling of the G8 Legacy Fund, he was just speaking in the theoretical.

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The case for changing the mission in Libya

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 3:33 PM - 3 Comments

The following is NDP defence critic Jack Harris’ speech to the House on the motion to extend the military mission in Libya.

Mr. Speaker, this is an important debate today for many reasons. It is the third debate on this issue of Canada’s mission in Libya. We had resolutions in this House on March 17 and June 14, each extending that mission for three months. We are now faced with the government seeking to continue the military mission for a further three months.

The reason this debate is so important is that it is really about the future of Canada’s role internationally, to what extent it will see itself as a military power, primarily, or whether it will continue the well-respected role that it had and was known for in providing a very different type of image and action on the world stage.

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The case for staying engaged in Libya

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:37 PM - 1 Comment

The House of Commons is presently debating an extension to the mission in Libya. The following is Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s opening speech to the House.

Mr. Speaker, let me begin by saying how proud I am to rise in support of this comprehensive motion laid out the House. I am especially proud of the tremendous role that our men and women in uniform have played over the past six months in protecting the Libyan people from the brutal dictatorship of Gadhafi and his henchmen.

I am truly pleased and honoured to speak to the proud contribution that Canada has made, writ large in creating a new Libya, one free of tyranny and dictatorship, one that finally, after four decades, will reflect the needs and aspirations of the Libyan people.

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In defence of partisanship

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 23 Comments

iPolitics publishes an excerpt from Democratizing the Constitution.

There are several reasons why the House performs its critical functions so poorly, but partisan politics in the House is not one of them. Partisanship is to robust democratic politics what competition is to an open economic marketplace. Partisanship flows from the fundamental democratic right to have one’s own political views, to organize politically with others of similar views, and, most important, to stand in opposition to others, whether these others are in power or not, and in the majority or not. This is why the opposition to the government in the British parliamentary system is called the “Loyal Opposition.” In opposing the government, it is not committing sedition, treason, or subversion against the state. On the contrary, it is performing a crucial democratic function. The opposition is recognized as legitimate in its criticism of the government.

So much for the ‘People of Einstein’ myth

By Emma Teitel - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 19 Comments

wokka/Flickr

There’s an inside Yiddish expression used by Jews to describe other Jews behaving badly in the public sphere: “shanda for the goyim” — shanda meaning “shame” and goyim denoting “gentiles” (non-Jews). The phrase is most commonly employed by Semitic seniors, when the modern media informs them that Jews can in fact be lechers (Dominique Strauss-Kahn), alcoholics (Amy Winehouse); unsuspecting nudes (Scarlett Johansson); and now, thanks to one 22-year-old Toronto Jewish girl, dangerously obtuse.

The woman in question—with whom I share at least one mutual Facebook friend (I am also a 22-year-old Jewish girl and it’s very possible we crossed paths, maybe at B’nai Brith summer camp, or perhaps in the annual United Synagogue Youth Limousine Sukka Hop)—is a York University senior named Sarah Grunfeld, who last week made shanda-esque headlines when she put her social science professor’s career in jeopardy over an anti-Semitic remark that turned out to be—well—not. The statement “All Jews should be sterilized,” Professor Cameron Johnston explained in the introductory lecture to his class, was an example of an invalid and dangerous opinion; his point was that in academia especially, opinions must be reasonably qualified. Grunfeld failed to catch that qualifier, though, perhaps because before the prof had a chance to offer it, she had stormed out of class and enlisted the on-campus Israel-advocacy group, Hasbara (Hebrew for “Explanation”), to call for his immediate resignation.

Word of Johnston’s so-called racism exploded virally online by way of what National Post columnist Jonathan Kay has dubbed the “Bubbie-net” (Jewish grandparents frantically emailing their kin with fresh findings of alleged anti-Semitism); at the same time widely-respected Canadian Jewish civil rights association, B’nai Brith (Children of the Covenant), leaped in with equal gusto to champion Grunfeld’s claim. Then came the big reveal: Ms. Grunfeld had made a mistake. Not only was professor Johnston not an anti-Semite, he was a Jew. To borrow a more accessible Yiddish phrase, political correctness at York University had effectively schtupped itself. Not to mention Sarah Grunfeld.

The maligned university student has since “qualified” her accusations against Johnston with claims twice as ludicrous as the original. “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’,” she told the Toronto Star recently, “still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

A lot of Canadian Jews are embarrassed and ashamed by this kind of doublespeak, and so was I, until I re-examined the root of my disquiet. There’s a reason why this particular shanda—and not, let’s say, Woody Allen’s marriage to his adopted daughter, or Garth Drabinsky’s defrauding of his shareholders, or The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart’s changing his name from John Stewart Liebowitz—ignites such fierce indignation in the Jewish community: Because Grunfeld doesn’t simply make us look bad (like the guys above); she makes us look stupid, and in doing so debunks the cultural stereotypes of intellectual superiority that we sometimes not-so-secretly enjoy.

Jewish American author Michael Chabon explored the seductiveness of this stereotype to Jews themselves in the New York Times last year in considering the calibre of the discussion following Israel’s botched raid of the Gaza bound Turkish flotilla, Mavi Marmara, in which nine activists died at the hands of Jewish soldiers (a debacle Diaspora Jews had trouble reconciling with our supposed “cultural” cleverness):

“I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over—God love them—any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.”

Sarah Grunfeld—God love her—is one such counterexample. But we’d be wrong to let our gaze skip right over her, because there’s another, more disturbing lesson to be drawn from the Grunfeld affair and it’s this: as Jews, we hold the moral high ground to call out anti-Semitism. That’s why, in part, Grunfeld’s accusation had the legs it did, and why, perhaps, it got the backing from the Jewish infrastructure organizations such as B’nai Brith, which still hasn’t distanced itself from Grunfeld or denounced her fallacious claim, but has instead published her unapologetic letter blasting Professor Johnston for a sin he didn’t commit, with a logic even more addled than before. And there lies the biggest shanda of all: Grunfeld’s false allegations and the group’s uninformed decision to support her are bad mistakes, but both parties’ inability to own up to those mistakes renders them inexcusable. Because when we cry wolf —especially on one of our own—serious apologies are in order.

But it’s doubtful that apologies of any kind will be made, and B’nai Brith will continue sniffing out anti-Semitism where there may not be any, all the while undermining cases where there is. If anything good does come from this debacle, however, it’s that our enemies and unsolicited friends (Glenn Beck comes to mind) may think twice before attributing all things grave and glorious to the “People of Einstein.” Because if public representatives of the Jewish faith continue to make exceedingly stupid mistakes, then the various calumnies the conspiracy theorists like to heap on all of us—the blood libel, the plague, AIDS, the Iraq War, and our obvious plans to take over everything from Saturday night TV to the World Bank—start to ring kind of hollow. After all, with Sarah Grunfeld leading the way, for what exactly can they blame us?

Gold stocks set for biggest 3-day drop in 28 years

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 2 Comments

Gold is set to make its sharpest three-day fall in nearly 30 years as global investors shed off commodity stocks in favour of hoarding cash amidst the increasing probability of a Greek sovereign debt default and continuing economic uncertainty in the eurozone. Over the last three days of trading, the value of gold has dropped nearly 10 per cent, taking its largest hit over three days since February 1983. Other commodities, such as platinum and silver, have taken hits in recent trading as investors look to hoard cash—a sign of decreasing economic confidence. Over the weekend, European officials sought ways to restore order in the eurozone economy. Among the largest points of contention are whether member countries should put forward money to bail out European banks and countries struggling to curb public debt.

The Globe and Mail

Canadian air clean, but not Mauritius clean

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 1 Comment

Another Monday, another reason to be jealous of the Mauritians. A new study by the World Health Organization has revealed that Canadians breath some pretty clean air, but not as clean as the lucky citizens of Mauritius and Estonia. Canada tied for third in the survey with Australia. Despite Canada’s high scores, the WHO still estimates that some 2,400 Canadians die from air-polution related illness every year.

Postmedia News