Ranting and Roaring

Canada sure get a constitution or something, with guaranteed rights and freedoms. You know, rather than one that says you can talk about stuff unless the government doesn’t like it and it isn’t popular with elites.

Seeking the Alien Shore:

The guy I was connected to sounded like I just woke him up. The first thing he does is ask me my number again. It’s not 1952 … surely the number can be passed along with my call, right? And for that matter, why not shell out for call display, you cheap bastards! This guy was sloooow. The first thing I said was I wanted to cancel my high-speed Internet service. There was a too-long pause. He then told me he would pull up my file. Again there was inappropriately long pause. I was tempted to ask if he was still there, but I got the feeling he was playing with me so I said nothing. I don’t know where I got this feeling, but it may be from the long periods of sensory deprivation while I waited for him. It was like he was doing something else, like trying to get to the next level in Tetris. We went back and forth with questions and answers, and with his long pauses, this took easily over five minutes. At the point where I expected him to tell me I was good to go, he instead said he could not complete my request and would pass me along to someone who could. Stunned, I mumble, “ummmm, okay.”

SCI FI Wire reports:

Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning animated film The Incredibles, told SCI FI Wire that he still is working out a story good enough to justify a sequel. “I have to come up with a story that is as good as or better than the original,” Bird said in an interview on June 22 while promoting his next Pixar movie, Ratatouille. “If I could come up with something like a Toy Story 2 with the same characters from Incredibles, then I would do it in a second.” Bird has been developing a new storyline for the superhero family introduced in 2004′s The Incredibles. “I have ideas,” he said. “I have a few bits and pieces, but I don’t have it all together.”

Fake Steve:

So I’m getting loads of mail in response to my post about Al Gore. People are telling me I’ve got the facts all wrong: the world temperature hasn’t gone up 1.5 degrees Celsius in six months, it’s .05 degrees Fahrenheit in sixty years; it’s not true that a piece of ice the size of Greenland broke off from Iceland, and it couldn’t possibly be true, since Greenland is roughly 100 times the size of Iceland. So fair enough. Maybe it was a piece of ice the size of Iceland that broke off from Greenland. Whatever. Listen. You can quibble all you want over tiny mistakes. You can keep calling for more studies, and you can sit around with your thumbs up your butts while the planet keeps getting hotter. Or you can put aside the details and keep your eyes on the big picture. Don’t you see what the skeptics are doing? The tiny details are what the oil companies and Republicans want people to focus on. They’ll just keep throwing these nitpicky things at us, trying to wear us out. Like Al told everyone this weekend at Barbra’s house, these guys are just going to keep looking for tiny mistakes and then trying to extrapolate from those tiny mistakes that the whole theory is wrong. But it’s not wrong. It’s right. Everyone with half a brain knows that it’s right. Anyway. To those of you who wrote in, I appreciate your criticism. But you’re wrong and Al is right.

Via Kathy, The Toronto Star has an article on people gaming the refugee / immigration process in Canada:

Karan Arora is offering immigration advice, and the young Punjabi woman across his desk seems nervous. Her visitor’s visa is about to run out, and she wants to stay. Arora, who works for a Mississauga company run by a registered immigration consultant, has a solution.

“Why are you worried?” he asks in Hindi. “Monaji, you don’t have any other option. If you claim refugee status, then at least you can breathe a sigh of relief. Then your other option is to go back. Once you claim refugee status, then if you find a guy, you can marry him and apply for a spousal case.”

“What will my refugee story be?” she asks.

“We’ll do that,” he says. “We’ll do it all. Some truth, some lies, we’ll mix everything. It will have to be done.”

Here’s a few minor suggestions: claimants for refugee status in Canada should have to make the claim within 48 hours of arriving in Canada (barring things such as major political changes within their home countries). This should be printed clearly on immigration documents, etc.. Failed refugee claimants should always be deported directly from the place they had their last hearing. 

People arriving in Canada via another Western country and making refugee claims should be deported to that country to make their claim there: they’re supposed to be claiming refuge, not venue shopping.

Planet Gore:

I must protest as unfair the headline writer’s recasting of the sentiments as “global warming, ‘just hysteria’?”. In truth, global warming is much, much more. It is a ready excuse for whatever afflicts or impedes you, an opportunity for the media to outdo past lows, a wonderful vehicle comfortably seating every exiled adherent of last century’s failed “inevitability”, and a very lucrative pony for rent-seeking business to ride to riches for making nothing. And it made a bunch of government weathermen briefly into rock stars no longer needing to beg for their annual appropriation of (taxpayer) debt-financed lucre, but whose area of interest actually now picks our pockets for the same amount we send, I submit, far more soberly, to the National Cancer Institute every year.