Riding a bicycle to work is great for the environment but it’s also dangerous. Truth be told, a fair number of cyclists ride as though they’re in a fencing match with their four-wheeled rivals. They dart and dodge and weave in and out, sometimes going for the narrowest of paths to avoid being blocked or slowed down by motor vehicles.
A lot of cyclists, especially bike couriers, are their own worst enemies, alienating and sometimes infuriating drivers and pedestrians alike. I saw more than one bicycle courier down when I practised in Vancouver and there was always very little sympathy to be seen in the pedestrians who passed by.
A recent fatality has the Toronto Cyclists Union demanding blood. On Thursday a cyclist was killed after running into an open car door (presumably a parked car) and falling into the road where he was run over by a van. Police are deciding whether to charge the driver of the parked car with failing to take “due precautions.” I don’t think there’s a chance in hell of a conviction.
Here’s the problem. Absent a marked, bicycle lane, a cyclist weaving his way through the curb/parking lane is essentially “lane splitting.” The lane is already occupied – by the parked vehicle he strikes. The vehicle doesn’t strike the cyclist, it’s parked. The moving vehicle is the bicycle. Yes, sure, the car driver opened the door but the vehicle itself was stationary and the cyclist either wasn’t paying attention and didn’t see it in time or was going too fast to be able to stop in time.
A bicycle on a public road is just another vehicle. The rider is obliged to honour traffic lights, for example. Bicyclists have been charged and convicted for speeding. So, what gives them the right to indulge in lane splitting so they can illegally pass (on the curb side) slower motor vehicles? Nothing exempts them from the duty to take “due precautions” either.
I’ve been riding motorcycles for over 40-years and, from that perspective, the way bicyclists maneuver through city traffic seems nothing short of suicidal. I ride one of those really big, adventure touring bikes – a big, bright yellow machine with a big, not always bright me atop it. This isn’t a flimsy bicycle with a rider hunched over the handlebars. Even then I always have to maintain “conspicuity” which means positioning my motorcycle in the way required by the road and traffic conditions to make me as visible as possible to every other vehicle on the road, in front of me, beside me and behind me. If I’m going to survive I have to ride as though I was invisible to every other user of the road. The driver who’s going to kill you is the driver who doesn’t see you. Simple as that.
From the newspaper account it sounds as though the cyclist was 1) lane splitting, 2) passing in the curb lane, and 3) riding too fast for the conditions around him. I might be wrong about those facts but it sure sounds to me as though the cyclist was the author of his own misfortune.
In our overcrowded cities there are no miracle answers to the car versus cyclist problem save, perhaps, establishing a few bicycle lanes on secondary streets with strict laws forcing cyclists to use them. I know cyclists aren’t going to like this but those who insist on riding in congested, downtown traffic areas ought to have to go through some sort of training/licensing programme. Knowing how to ride a bicycle isn’t the same as knowing how to ride one safely. A cyclist who doesn’t know how to ride safely or won’t ride safely has no business mixing it up with pedestrians and vehicular traffic.
One of the greatest inventions of the Roman empire was concrete. When the empire collapsed the knowledge of concrete was lost for nearly two thousand years. Today our societies couldn’t function without it.
But what of the engineering behind Stonehenge or the great pyramids? Is that too just a matter of lost knowledge? Watch this guy, Wally, show how he can single-handedly build his own Stonehenge.
One of the best Canadian e-zines is Metaball.
In the March, 2008 edition, Metaball editor RK Finch presents a brilliant psychological dissection of Stephen Harper entitled “The Singular Face of Megalomania.” This is a “must read” for those of us who can’t quite put our finger on what truly lurks inside our Furious Leader:
http://metaball.ca/2008/ball_Mar-08/0308_01.html
Hard to believe but it’s happened again! Another severed right foot in a running shoe found washed up on the shore of an island in southern coastal BC. Four detached feet – right feet, clad in running shoes, washed up on local islands, and not a clue where they’re from. Police disclosed that the first two recovered were size 12. Details haven’t been released on the last pair.
RCMP attempted to interrogate the feet but found they weren’t responsive even when repeatedly tasered.
Responding to a critique by Castor Rouge of my critique of
Stephane Dion this morning, I had a flashback to 1974. I was one of many menial scribes conscripted to cover the federal election campaign that year.
It was the challenger, Tory Robert Stanfield, versus Pierre Trudeau with David Lewis batting for the NDP.
Canada was in a mess with runaway inflation. Bob Stanfield campaigned on a promise/threat of wage and price controls to stabilize the economy. Make no mistake, Stanfield was promoting a very unpopular idea. He scared the living hell out of a lot of people, particularly organized labour.
Pierre Trudeau pounced. He got up on stage and lambasted Stanfield, warning voters that, if the Tories formed the next government, they would wake up one day and “Zap, you’re frozen!” It was a shrewd bit of politicking and it worked. It stampeded the labour vote out of the NDP corral and into the Liberal camp. Trudeau won, Stanfield lost. David Lewis even lost his own seat.
Just a few months later, newly re-elected prime minister Pierre Trudeau introduced – why wage and price controls of course.
Bob Stanfield was a wonderful guy, honest and direct. However he looked like an undertaker and utterly lacked charisma. He went into that election advocating an unpopular policy, unpopular but necessary, that his rival was able to use to beat him senseless.
I think Stephane Dion is something of a latter-day Stanfield. He has no discernible charisma and he wants to champion an unpopular policy, one that can easily be used by his opponents to scare voters.
One in ten. It doesn’t make much difference what you’re trying to achieve, if you’re scoring 10% it almost always means you have a problem.
The carbon tax has a problem.
It’s not so much a problem with the merits of the idea itself or the political hurdles it poses. Its main problem is the guy who says he’ll stake all to make it happen – Stephane Dion.
The latest Toronto Star/Angus Reid poll shows that Dion isn’t the guy to sell a carbon tax to the Canadian public.
“Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion’s approval rating has sunk to its lowest level yet, with nine of 10 Canadians saying they disapprove or are not sure of his performance as the head of the party, according to the latest Toronto Star/Angus Reid opinion poll.
Not since former Liberal leader John Turner bottomed out with a 14 per cent approval rating shortly after losing the 1988 election have things been so bad for the head of Canada’s most successful political party. Just 10 per cent of those surveyed stand behind Dion’s leadership, the poll shows, compared to 32 per cent for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
What’s worse is that the number of people who said they were unsure about Dion’s performance has dropped from 46 per cent at the end of last summer to 30 per cent this month, meaning that Canadians are making up their minds about a leader who has had difficulties rallying his party behind him as well as communicating his party’s positions to potential voters.
“What’s really disheartening is it’s almost as if everyone’s made up their minds already,” said the polling firm’s Mario Canseco. “Those who actually have something to say about Dion are saying negative things.”
The online poll of 1,004 Canadians is considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times in 20.”
I know this news is going to upset loyal Dion supporters and there are plenty of you among Liberal bloggers. You support Dion, you stand by him faithfully and that’s all very nice. What you aren’t going to do is get him elected.
The Liberal Party brand is propping up Dion, not the other way around. Canadians’ dislike and distrust of Stephen Harper is propping up Dion.
The election may be won or lost on Dion’s leadership. Yet he’s intent on transforming it into a referendum on carbon taxes. With this pleasant, well-intentioned, intelligent but hapless character at the wheel, Dion may be dooming initiatives such as carbon taxes in a vain attempt to save his own political neck.
We’ll have another leader of the party but a loss on a de facto carbon tax referendum may just set back that initiative for years to come, if not permanently. Once the Canadian voters believe they have spoken, it’s going to be enormously difficult for another leader to get them to change their minds.
Dion’s legacy may be that of a failed leader who gambled on really bad odds and wound up dragging down the environmental initiative with him.
The carbon tax initiative is too important to be put to a referendum by a leader who can’t even sell himself.
The good news. Canadians are still waiting for the LPC to come up with a leader they can support. The party can retake the government – only not until it does some essential housekeeping.
Until then it’s just pissing into the wind.
Genetics and reproductive technology are front and centre in the British Parliament this week.
One bill will provide for the creation of “savior siblings.” It’s the creation of in vitro children intended to supply tissue for a sick older child. So, for example, little Jimmy could be manufactured to furnish a bone marrow transplant for big brother Johnny. It’s unclear what fate would await Jimmy should Johnny require a new heart or a fresh pair of lungs.
The other big deal is the creation of “cybrids.” These are blended human/animal embryos that will be permitted for research purposes only, at least for now. From the New York Times:
“The idea is to take an animal egg — say a cow egg — and remove its nucleus. This would remove most of the cow’s DNA from the egg. Human DNA would then be introduced, and the embryo would be allowed to begin to grow. (The introduction of human DNA would normally be done by putting an entire small cell, such as a skin cell, into the animal’s egg. On being zapped with electricity, the two cells readily fuse, and the nucleus of the skin cell then becomes the nucleus of the egg.) The new nucleus thus contains only human DNA. The technical term for this procedure is interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer, or interspecies cloning.
If the embryo were allowed to keep growing, and was then implanted into a woman, it would — presumably, and assuming nothing went wrong — grow into a baby. However, the aim is not to produce humans this way; under the new law, embryos will have to be destroyed at 14 days (the time that the embryo begins to differentiate into cells of different types). Rather, the aim is to collect stem cells from the embryos for use in medical research.”
Is this just a simple genetic experiment or the camel’s nose slipping under the tent? Right now, no one can say for sure.
Words kill.
That’s why we can be held accountable for our words when they do just that. Canadian law students are taught the case of the guy who yelled “fire” in a crowded movie theatre sending the audience stampeding for the exits where a number were crushed to death. Now the prankster hadn’t killed anyone himself, at least not directly, but he was convicted of their deaths.
The idea behind this is that we’re all deemed responsible for the likely consequences of our acts. You can’t say the guy in the movie theatre intended to kill those people. But here’s the question – did he know or ought he to have known that he would trigger a stampede that could lead to the deaths or injuries of the other moviegoers? Were those deaths foreseeable if he’d bothered to think it through?
You see, as a general rule, we’re all deemed in the eyes of the law to intend the logical consequences of our acts. If it’s not logical or if it’s not foreseeable you’re not held accountable. If you’re insane or an automaton, you have a defence. If it’s an outright fluke that you couldn’t have foreseen, you have a defence. However, if you have a functioning mind and cause plainly foreseeable harm, Bingo!
Which brings me to someone who I’ll assume, for the purposes of this discussion, has a functioning mind and isn’t insane, the National Post’s Lorne Gunter. This character is but one of several “journalists” at the paper who never pass up an opportunity to claim that the global warming theory is a scam. That’s plainly the policy of the newspaper itself. Indeed the Spot’s web page still links to no fewer than 40 denialist rants it published going back a year ago. One sided, never ending. Gotta be a reason for that, don’t you think?
It’s pretty obvious that there are a great many politicians, including our Furious Leader, who don’t like having to act on global warming. Oh they’ll call it the greatest threat to the nation, tuck it away and then go off in search of ways to defund the government – monkey business as usual. The only thing that will make these types do anything responsible is when public opinion leaves them no choice. And shaping that public opinion is the specialty of folks like the Grunter.
The National Spot and it’s clutch of pompous, ill-informed asses, is fighting a rearguard action. Eventually public opinion will reach a critical mass and no politician will survive who defies it. But, in the meantime, there are powerful groups who see a lot of money to be had in postponing that day for as long as possible. There’s a direct, financial value in every disbeliever these guys can create. That’s why the old RJ Reynolds “science” crowd has moved out of tobacco denialism and into global warming denialism. All you have to do is follow those who are following the money.
The best science available warns us that the longer we wait to deal with this, the worse it will be for us in the long run. Both remediation and adaptation become significantly more difficult, more harsh, and less effective the longer we put this off. And, of course, there are those – the poorest and most vulnerable in far-off lands – for whom these options will be foreclosed outright. Their option is but to die.
As a former reporter I don’t like the idea of journalists being censored or censured for what they write but I’m becoming less convinced of absolute freedom of the press. It seems to me that press freedom, like all freedoms, has to come with some responsibilities. These people are influential. They are opinion makers. We need them to represent every view and yet there must be some line in the sand. A journalist can’t walk into a theatre and yell “fire” and then claim press freedom as his defence.
Of course Gunter and those of his ilk will never be on the hook for their perfidy. Who will ever be able to calibrate the amount of damage they will have caused when, at last, even they can no longer get away with this nonsense? Who will ever be able to attach names of the dead to a particular article that he wrote? Better yet, by the time the hens do come home to roost, this clown will be long gone and a generation that’s never heard of him will be living with the consequences he and his have bequeathed to them.
Words kill. Maybe not here, maybe not today, but there and there and over there and very soon.
For more on Lorne Gunter, Terry Corcoran and the rest of the National Post’s clown car journalists, do a search on desmogblog.com
He was a Neo-Con man’s man, Bush’s first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
Like all the other Neo-Cons who were infiltrated into the Bush administration by Dick Cheney, Rummie wasted no time in implementing plans to revolutionize the way America killed people in other countries.
Rumsfeld’s vision caught the imagination of some leading lights. England’s pre-eminant military historian, Sandhurst lecturer and newspaper columnist, John Keegan, practically swooned over Rumsfeld in a piece of grotesque flattery he wrote for Vanity Fair. Later, as the war in Afghanistan blurred into Iraq, Keegan boldly assured readers of the Telegraph that all was well, America would prevail – quickly and handily.
It was the US Army in particular that Rumsfeld set out to transform from a lumbering, conventional warfighting machine into more of a light brigade, special operations force capable of deploying rapidly and conducting hit and run warfare, often covertly. It was a bold and radical move entirely in keeping with the Neo-Cons who are now seen as a gang of failed revolutionaries, their grand experiment in tatters.
I thought I detected a glint of Rumsfeld’s Brave New World army in a story (May 15) that recently emerged from Afghanistan about a US special forces and intelligence operatives conducting covert raids on Afghan villages resulting in the deaths of innocent civilians. It sounded eerily like the targeted assassination operation the Americans ran in Vietnam known as the Phoenix Program. Now, less than a week after that report came out, the Pentagon is moving to shut down the special forces’ authority to carry out secret counterterrorism missions on its own around the world. From the Washington Post:
“The decision culminates four years of misgivings within the military that the command, with its expertise in commando missions and unconventional war, would use its broader mandate too aggressively, by carrying out operations that had not been reviewed or approved by the regional commanders.
Roger D. Carstens, a 20-year veteran of Special Operations missions who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington policy institute, said the Special Operations Command finally “came to the conclusion that its role is not to be that of a global Lone Ranger who shows up at the last second to dispatch the bad guys.”
“That just can’t be done,” Mr. Carstens said, “or rather it should not be done.”
The change is the latest rejection of initiatives that Mr. Rumsfeld set forth during almost six years as defense secretary, before stepping down in 2006. His successor, Robert M. Gates, has increased the size of the ground forces, a move Mr. Rumsfeld resisted; signed off on a plan to keep more troops in Europe than Mr. Rumsfeld had envisioned; and called for future budgets to focus on the weapons needed to fight insurgents and terrorists today, rather than on investments in next-generation technology advocated by Mr. Rumsfeld.”
Mr. Rumsfeld outlined his views in 2004 by advocating what was known as a new Unified Command Plan, one that would have shifted the center of gravity within the military. It declared that the Special Operations Command “leads, plans, synchronizes, and as directed, executes global operations against terrorist networks.” He stressed that his reorganization was intended to permit the command to send out its own small teams to capture or kill terrorists.“
Here is a sampling of the clips now being released that ought to be enough to bury John McSame for all time.
The Mound of Sound 