This one takes the cake.

A new danger is threatening Alberta youth.

Work.

As a result of a recent exemption to the Employment Standards Code enacted by the Alberta government for the restaurant industry, children are now able to serve the same fast food they have been gorging on since Ray Kroc started slinging Big Mac’s from coast to coast 50 years ago.

Restaurant and Foodservices Industry can hire 12-14 year olds without permit, with conditions

Employers in the Restaurant and Foodservices Industry may now hire employees between the ages of 12 and 14 for their restaurants, without obtaining a permit, for certain designated duties subject to various conditions.

Consent of a parent or guardian must still be obtained before hiring an adolescent and the safety checklist must be completed, with safety requirements, restrictions and prohibitions regarding the activities adolescent employees may perform.

The employment of adolescents will be monitored in these industries to ensure compliance with the conditions of the approval.

Please note: This approval applies only to the employment of adolescents in the restaurant and food services industry.

Quite naturally, the Alberta Federation of Labour is gravely concerned about fostering any kind of work ethic among 12 year old Albertans:

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has created a new type of child labour in this province. 12-year olds can now serve you your Big Mac, or prepare your salad,” says [AFL president] Gil McGowan. “What’s next? Letting 10-year olds work on construction sites?”

Yes. There will be 10 year olds working on construction sites… (eyes roll)

Frankly, I could care less if it is 12 year old Suzie or her grandmother who asks me if I want fries with my Big Mac. If the same 12 year old can legally supervise someone’s children, then why aren’t they able to run a drive through window or buss a table for much more money?

Currently children aged 14 in Alberta are able to drive and have sex, so why is it suddenly a problem when they are able to work? While children are permitted to dodge motor vehicles traveling at 110km (double that if you’re on the Deerfoot), contract STD’s or get pregnant, heaven forbid they stand too close to a fryer:

The government is trying to say that the change is merely “procedural”, but its real impact could affect thousands of children between the ages of 12 and 14. It could expose them to workplace dangers from grills, fryers and slicing machines.

I’m actually quite surprised the AFL hasn’t jumped all over this. Naturally these young kids will need to be unionized to protect them from work force exploitation. Union indoctrination can then take place at an even earlier age, and once dues are taken care of, each child will still have enough money left for, say, a handful of Mojo’s.

Judging by the conduct of the past few generations of other people’s children in this country, perhaps it is time we started teaching our children that money is something that is worked for and earned, not thrown around and taken for granted.

Crossposted to Dispatches from the Western Alien Nation.

Anti-American Bigotry Redux

As Tom Cerber reported here, anti-American bigotry is alive and well in Toronto.

Sadly, this kind of thing in Central Canada is nothing new.

One of the excuses that anti-Americans will give you is that they don’t hate the American people — they just hate their government and its policies.

Well, remember this story? Like the Toronto Star story that Tom brought to our attention, this story proves that anti-Americanism is directed not at the U.S. government but at ordinary American people — in this case, against American children visiting Canada:

Canadians hurl abuse at U.S. hockey peewees

By INGRID PERITZ
Globe & Mail
Wednesday, April 2, 2003 – Page A1

During a four-day visit, boys travelling with their Massachusetts hockey team witnessed the burning of the Stars and Stripes and the booing of the U.S. national anthem. When travelling in their bus emblazoned with a red-white-and-blue “Coach USA” logo, they saw people on the street who extended their middle fingers or made other angry gestures.

On the ice, the Canadian players told their visiting counterparts that “the U.S. sucks” and dispensed other anti-American insults, the Americans said….

“They told us we sucked, gave us the finger and said ‘Down with the U.S.A.’ or ‘The U.S.A. sucks,” Mr. Nadeau said. At one point, a Canadian player made a disparaging remark about the United States “and the referee turned around and said, ‘I agree with you.’ “What stunned us was that the referee, who is supposed to be unbiased, is agreeing with the boys on the ice.”

Anti-American Torontonians

The Toronto Star, of all media outlets, reports on the high degree of anti-Americanism in Toronto. The story relates how a Mississipi reporter walked around Kensington Market soliciting opinions about the U.S. It wasn’t pretty.

The Star also interviewed the New York Times’s Canada correspondent (doesn’t get much more incestuous than that, eh?), who observed:

“I’ve seen some really appalling behaviour simply because I’m an American,” said New York-native Clifford Krauss, Canadian correspondent for The New York Times, who has lived in Toronto and travelled the country for several years.

Though he feels the attitude has improved a little since the November re-election of President George W. Bush and beginning of the war in Iraq, Krauss said he’s noticed this “waving a virtuous finger of superiority” is most pronounced in Ontario.

“I think that the anti-Americanism is part of a regional character that fills a vacuum. The Canadian identity, which in some parts of Canada is quite strong, is not so strong here. I say with some trepidation, because it might sound very arrogant, but there are other places in Canada where the culture is richer and where people are more confident in their culture,” said Krauss. And, as he points out, the feeling is ingrained in the national psyche, even if what makes an American ugly to some Canadians changes through time (from isolationist in the early days of World War II to world’s cop today).

“It goes back to the American Revolution. It’s inbred â€??? the Loyalists coming up here, the fact that there was quite a bit of fighting going on between the United States and Canada,” Krauss said.

Krauss’s observations echo Barry Cooper and Lydia Miljan‘s thesis that CBC anti-Americanism reflects the “garrison” mentality of southern Ontario. According to Cooper and Miljan:

It is a story of exile (from the rebellious American colonies), of a covenant (to remain ever loyal to the Crown), and of a promised or merely hoped for return to a garden (of a transformed wilderness in the early days, and today of a society infused with “distinctive Canadian values� that renders Canadians morally superior to the United States).
…
Part of the problem of defining oneself as not being another is that the comparison invariably tends to look unfavorably on what you are comparing yourself to. Given the stark choices of garrison life, namely to fight or to betray, this is no surprise. The division takes a more gentle form as well so that, when Canadians claim they are better mannered, more tolerant, more egalitarian, and so on, they are also saying something about Americans.

In short, the “garrison” mentality is contentless. It’s defined simply by what it’s not.

How Torontonian.

UPDATE: Pictures say more than words over at Burkean Canuck.

If You Like “South Park,” You May Be a Conservative

According to a new book, the television program “South Park” is subversively conservative.

That’s the thesis of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias by Brian C. Anderson. He’s an analyst with the Manhattan Institute.

An article by Anderson on the same theme can be found here.

The book is published by the conservative imprint, Regnery Publishing. Here’s part of the book blurb from their site:

It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how conservativesâ€???and even iconoclasts who don’t consider themselves conservativeâ€???are overthrowing the liberal media and political correctness. From the bloggers who demolished Dan Rather, to the Swift Boat veterans who sank John Kerry, to the gleeful anti–political correctness of such comedic send-ups as South Park and Team America, the American media landscape has suffered an earthquake. Conservatives who have fretted about liberal media bias and losing the culture war should take heart, because a new generation of “South Park Conservatives” is changing everything. In South Park Conservatives, you’ll learn:
· How media bias in the 2004 Kerry/Bush race was so overwhelming as to make a mockery of “journalistic ethics”
· How liberal Hollywood has tried�??and failed�??to read conservatives out of the industry
· How right-of-center students are turning the tables on their left-wing profs at campuses across the nation
· How the liberal monopoly has been broken beyond all repair by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, FOX News, and the blogosphere
· How hysterical liberal accusations of conservative “bigotry” and “hate” have boomeranged against the Left
· How media and academic liberals�??seeing their monopoly on information and communication disappearing�??have embraced extremism and conspiracy-mongering As Brian C. Anderson demonstrates, the New York Times, the big networks, and the rest of the elite liberal media can no longer set the terms of the nation’s political and cultural debate. The liberal media’s monolithic power has cracked and broken�??and freedom and conservative ideas are breaking out all over.

National Citizens Coalition Blows Whistle on CBC’s Rick Mercer for Ties to Government

Gerry Nicholls, VP of the National Citizens Coalition, today pointed the finger at CBC comic, Rick Mercer, for partisanship in favor of the Liberal party.

Mercer is the CBC entertainer best known for “Talking to Americans,” in which he targets unsuspecting pedestrians with questions designed to highlight their ignorance. Funny stuff – even funnier when you know it’s a straight rip-off of Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking.” Maybe they should have called it “Trying to be like Americans.”

Apart from that, Mercer is known for using his CBC platform for political activism against Conservatives in a series of stunts, such as belittling Stockwell Day with a mocking petition during the 2000 election campaign. Apparently, partisan campaigning during elections is OK with the CBC, as long as it’s done under the cover of entertainment – and as long as the target is a Western Conservative leader.

Today in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Nicholls pointed to Mercer’s ties to the government as a motivation for his partisanship.

Here’s Nicholls’ letter:

There’s no question Rick Mercer is a funny guy, but he’s no political satirist. A true political satirist uses humour to ridicule all politicians equally, regardless of their party affiliation.

Mr. Mercer seems to reserve his special brand of mockery for those on the right of the political spectrum, whether it’s skewering Stockwell Day with an on-line petition to change his name or linking MP Jason Kenney’s namesake website to the Communist Party website.

Oddly, such comedic wit seems to desert him when it comes to going after the governing Liberal establishment.

But then, Mr. Mercer is part of that establishment. His TV show airs on the government-run network and he is also the government’s paid pitchman for the Kyoto-inspired “one-tonne challenge.”

In fact, Mr. Mercer is so cozy with government, maybe it’s time he just officially declared himself to be what he really is: the court jester of the Liberal Party.

Terrorist as Pirate: The Legal Case

Writing in Legal Affairs, Douglas R. Burgess, Jr., makes the case of treating terrorists as pirates, in terms of international law. He observes that the UN’s position against the US was weak in the aftermath of 9/11 because international law currently lacks a working definition of terrorist. However, Burgess argues that international law has a long-standing category of “pirate,” and he provides a short history of piracy and draws comparisons with modern-day terrorists.

Central to the parallel is the view that pirates and terrorists work outside the system of international states, in order to work against that system:

DANIEL DEFOE, THE GREAT CHRONICLER OF PIRACY’S GOLDEN AGE in his General History of the Pyrates, described his subjects as stateless persons “at war with all the world,” a definition that may connect contemporary terrorism to piracy even more than state sponsorship does. The legacy of the Elizabethan era was a diaspora of unemployed, malcontent mariners throughout the Atlantic colonies. By the late 17th century, they began to coalesce into small pirate bands, seize vessels at anchorages or on the high seas, and wage their own private wars.

The myth of the romantic buccaneer, perpetuated by such diverse artists as Robert Louis Stevenson and Johnny Depp, must be set aside. The pirates of the so-called golden age, as historian Hugh Rankin described them, were “a sorry lot of human trash.” Coming from the lowest tier of the English merchant navy, they struck indiscriminately in ferocious revenge against the societies that they felt had condemned them. Often these disenchanted sailors cast their piratical careers in revolutionary terms. The 18th-century English legal scholar William Blackstone defined a pirate as someone who has “reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature by declaring war against all mankind,” while another account tells of one Edward Low, common seaman, who “took a small vessel, [hoisted] a Black Flag, and declared War against all the World.” Pirates gave their ships names that reflected this dark purpose: Defiance, Vengeance, New York’s Revenge, and even New York Revenge’s Revenge.

Perhaps the most telling statement of the pirates’ motives comes from a pirate named Black Sam Bellamy. To a captured merchant captain, he boasted, “I am a free prince, and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a 100 sail of ships and an army of 100,000 men in the field.”

This was more than bravado. Historian Marcus Rediker has suggested that it indicates a new “pirate democracy” that drew its revolutionary principles from its perceived war against civilization and cast itself as civilization’s antithesis.

And so he concludes:

Terrorists, like pirates, must be given their proper status in law: hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.

The philosophical background of his thesis can be found stated most clearly in Lee Harris’s Civilization and Its Enemies, in which Harris explains how rule of law moves away from the gang.

CBC “Inside Media” Producer is Head of Media Union with Website Attacking Private Broadcasters

If there’s one area in which you’d think the CBC would at least try to be unbiased, it would be in the coverage of it’s own profession.

Well, you’d be wrong. The CBC program that covers the media business is produced by the head of a major media labour union. Under his leadership, his union has spent more than $50,000 to create and maintain a website solely to attack private broadcasters.

Of course, the CBC doesn’t’ tell you anything like that in the program’s promotional materials, but here’s how to connect the dots:

The CBC has exactly one program on its schedule devoted to covering the media business. It’s called “Inside Media.”

The Executive Producer of “Inside Media” is Arnold Amber.

Arnold Amber is also the head of TNG Canada, which is short for The National Guild of Canadian Media, Manufacturing, Professional & Service Workers. It includes the Canadian Media Guild, the union to which most CBC employees belong.

TNG Canada spent $50,000 in 2004 just to create a website called Your Media, which gives this as its masthead slogan:

The authoritative web site on cross-media ownership, convergence and concentration.

Now, you know that by “convergence and concentration,” they don’t mean the government funded monopoly called the CBC.

No, “Your Media” is strictly an attack site aimed at the private media sector. It’s especially hostile to CanWest, to which it devotes a separate section. And of course, there’s another special section attacking Conrad Black. But there are other sections, like one entitled “Emperors and Empires,” that keep a suspicious eye on the private sector media in general.

The website is directly tied to Arnold Amber. When it was launched, he was the sole contact person identified in the press release.

So let’s hear the CBC’s supporters explain this one away. How obvious can bias be? How can anyone deny that the CBC has deep, systemic biases when it can’t even cover it’s own craft without such obvious partiality? If the CBC’s coverage of the media business is so obviously slanted, how biased must the rest of it’s news coverage be?

The CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices says the following about situations like this:

Credibility is dependent not only on qualities such as accuracy and fairness in reporting and presentation, but also upon avoidance by both the organization and its journalists of associations or contacts which could reasonably give rise to perceptions of partiality. Any situation which could cause reasonable apprehension that a journalist or the organization is biased or under the influence of any pressure group, whether ideological, political, financial, social or cultural, must be avoided.

If you object to this obvious violation of the CBC’s own policies, contact the CBC Ombudsman. If enough people do so, he will be forced to conduct an investigation.

Flypaper Strategy Working: Evidence

Impearls links several reports indicating that the “Flypaper” strategy is working.

David Warren first articulated this strategy for the public. It’s the notion that having the Americans in Iraq would draw jihadis from around the world to blow themselves up in Iraq instead of in New York, Paris, etc.

Impearls concludes:

It’s also worth observing how the suicide bombers we hear about every day in the news from Iraq are actually arriving from abroad. From the reports I’ve seen, essentially none of the fanatics willing to blow themselves up taking many Iraqis along with them are Iraqis themselves. So much for the idea that it’s primarily the Iraqis who hate Americans and the Coalition and want us out; rather it’s radical Islamofascist foreigners from around the world who are desperate to prevent Iraqis from taking destiny in their own hands to establish a modern, decent democratic society in the heart of the Muslim world.

But, as Thomas Friedman speculated a while back, what happens if the Flypaper strategy works too well. That is, what happens if Iraq settles down and the US leaves? Will that risk the security of the West because then the jihadis will no longer be distracted by the Iraqi theater?

And consider the moral dimension of remaining in Iraq. Consistent with the logic of Flypaper, it’s in the West’s interest to keep things at a slow boil in Iraq. So long as things don’t get too violent there, the West can keep the flypaper there as a means to draw jihadis away from attacking Western targets. However, this also means that Iraqi civilians take the brunt of the attacks. Not exactly the humanitarian impulse the West had in mind in liberating Iraq.

UPDATE: Belmont Club explains just how well the flies are sticking to the paper.

New Crime Fighting Superhero!

In the spirit of “Batman Begins” and Henry Morgentaler’s argument that abortion cuts crime rates, I present you with Steve Sailer’s idea for the new postmodern super-hero:

“I can see it now: The Aborter ©. By day, he’s a mild mannered abortion clinic doctor by day, helping rid the world of unwanted babies… By night, he’s on par with The Punisher, [ridding the world of unwanted people whose mothers were too selfish or religion-warped to have them aborted as fetuses]… He also has sonar vision (don’t ask how that happened, you don’t want to know!) that can also detect “bad seeds”, while they’re in the womb!”

He could punch holes in the top of unwanted people’s skulls and vacuum out their brains.

Evangelicals in Iraq

The Washington Post reports on new Evangelical churches in Iraq that have sprouted up since the US invasion. While helped out by mostly American Evangelicals, their increasing numbers are due to conversions away from Catholic and Orthodox denominations. They are not converting Muslims, though the article implies they’re trying (though their evidence rests on statements made by the Catholic bishop who worries – perhaps with good reason – about Christian/Muslim relations).

Even so, Evangelicals number “perhaps a few thousand,” compared to the 800,000 or so Christians in Iraq. However, they’re prospering because its converts regard the traditional churches as moribund, perhaps due to years spent laboring under Saddam Hussein.

Or perhaps another explanation. While the article notes the use of videos, guitars, and happy hymns – everything you’d find in a metropolitan Dallas megachurch – the real focus for these people seems to be their personal relationship with Jesus. That’s likely what they’re finding in the Evangelical churches, and not in the other Christian ones.

The history of the last 2 centuries would look a lot different without these kinds of movements – think of the various Great Awakenings in the US. Think of the rise of Evangelicals and Pentechostals in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (as detailed in Philip Jenkins’s book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity). Indeed, Olivier Roy argues in Globalized Islam that the “neo-fundamentalists” are in fact very modern, by, for example, speaking the language of the modern self. The word “I” shows up more than any other word in the last will and testament of Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker.

Iraqi Evangelicals represent an important aspect of modernity in Iraq. Whether their numbers will grow is open to question. Given the unlikelihood of Muslims converting to Christianity, I doubt they’ll have much direct impact on their community. However, their indirect impact will be more important. Will their individualized religious experience and expression rub on other Iraqi Christians and indeed on Muslims? Will Iraqi Catholics start looking and talking more like Protestants in their demand for greater lay authority, based on their equal sharing of the Holy Ghost? Will Shi’ite Muslims challenge the authority of their clerics (and not just back rogues like Moqtada al-Sadr).

These reflections are extremely speculative, but I think they suggest the kinds of questions Westerners need to consider when contemplating the future of Iraq and perhaps the rest of the Middle East. Only time will tell.

« Previous Page — Next Page »