(CFN) Why Ontario MPP Jim McDonell Must Unequivocally Apologize

To be clear - no, I'm not saying the Holocaust is repeating itself right now.  I'd rather keep it that way.  We all have to speak out against ethnic violence in Europe, especially against Jews and Roma Siniti and for God's sake, stop using Godwin's law.

 

“Both sides become frustrated and less rational, and invariably the argument will include a Nazi or Adolf Hitler comparison. At that point, the discussion is over; the one using the analogy has lost, for the argument has become irrational.”

Let’s get this out of the way – Jim McDonell is a Conservative; I’m a Liberal. If you believe that all’s fair in war and politics, you now have sufficient justification to dismiss this piece as a partisan attack. Based on that assumption, you might also believe that McDonell did nothing wrong in invoking Godwin’s law in the Legislature. You could even go so far as to tell yourself I’m being unfair by bringing this up after the matter was settled; maybe I’m the one that should be reprimanded for being so callous.

 

My goal here is to prove why this really is a serious, non-partisan issue and make clear why it is so important McDonell offer a real apology for his comments.

 

Let’s start with the exact words McDonell used and have caused such a firestorm:

As one of my colleagues was saying, it’s 73 years ago today that Canada declared war on another tyrant, and that’s what we’re seeing here. The people of Nazi Germany didn’t know what was going on, and over my time here I find it hard to believe how hard it is to find out what’s going on and how easy it is for the government to hide things.

 

There are two ways you can interpret the SDSG MPP’s comments as offensive – one, he’s insulting our democracy by comparing our Premier to Hitler. Do you think it would be appropriate to compare, say, Stephen Harper to Osama bin Laden? Both ordered planes onto perceived enemy territory, right? No, that wouldn’t be appropriate – in fact, it would be irresponsible. It is likewise asinine to compare Harper to Hitler; I have taken a few people to task for doing just that. Hitler ordered the murder of millions of civilians and sparked a war that marks a low point in human history. Any analogy that invokes Hitler is like comparing an apple to an atom bomb.

 

But it’s the second level of offensiveness that is most egregious. In making a flippant comparison between Nazi Germany and Ontario – and doing so in the official record of the Ontario Legislature – McDonell is undermining the memory of the Holocaust. Worse, he’s doing so at a time when we really need to be reflecting on the lessons of World War II.

 

 

Canada On Top

How many US Presidents have referred to countries other than Canada as their "closest ally?"

 

Our neighbour to the south is a bit like Krusty the Clown - always focused on the next Danish.  This, in spite of our having their back repeatedly, both abroad and right here at home.  Except for 1812 - 1814, that is. 

 

Some people get all spiteful about this, but I actually don't mind.  It doesn't matter to me if they notice our subtle Canadian influence, 'cause we all know it's there.

 

Canadians are power brokers in Hollywood. 

 

Washington runs on Canadian products.

 

Ben Affleck caved to Canadian influence.

 

Captain Kirk ain't from Iowa - he's from Montreal.  Hell, even Hercules is Canadian.

 

Whether they recognize us or not, Canadians help pick the President.

 

Not only are we more open on the topic of sex than Americans - we have more of it. 

 

So, yeah, the US is welcome to make all the noise they want; it doesn't change the fact that we're always on top.

 

 

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

 

Five Surprises From Billionaire Paul Allen's Mind Map (Matthew Herper, Forbes)

What do we know?  That there's a lot we don't know.  It'll take a detailed map to sort it all out.

Today the cover of Nature, the prestigious scientific journal, is dedicated to a paper that outlines the first findings of the map of the human brain being created by the Allen Institute For Brain Science, the neuroscience Manhattan project being funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The new publication comes out of the Allen Institute’s effort to create a map of which genes are turned on and off in the human brain, a feat the Institute accomplished a half decade ago in the mouse. Already, the mouse map has become a standard tool for neuroscientists, and the hope is that the human brain atlas will be as well. (For more on the institute’s overall effort, see: Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain, from the current issue of Forbes magazine.)

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Inside Paul Allen's Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain Matthew HerperForbes Staff

Billionaire Paul Allen Is Finally Making A Little Money Off Of Charter Communications Nathan VardiForbes Staff

An animal’s genes are contained in its DNA, locked in the center of its cells; to access the genetic code, the DNA must be transcribed into a related chemical called RNA, which can take messages to the parts of the cell that make the chemicals that comprise most of the body. The Allen Institute’s atlases are measures of what RNA transcripts are in the cell – this is a bit like monitoring what information is being read off the body’s hard disk.

The Nature paper unveils data from the first two human brains completely analyzed by the Allen Institute, with a bit of analysis from a third. There are several surprises – and it’s not clear what they all mean. “At the moment we’re making descriptions,” says Ed Lein, a neuroscientist who is one of the paper’s co-authors. “A key role for the neuroscience community is to understand how these differences relate to the unique properties of the human brain. ”

1. Cells in the “thinking” part of the brain look a lot more similar than scientists had expected. The thinking we do, including the experience we have of being us, is generated in the cortex, the most well-developed part of the brain. You might expect, then, that the cortex would be accessing the DNA code in all sorts of different ways. But the Allen Institute researchers found remarkably little difference between one neuron in the cortex and the next. In terms of how they use their genetic hard drives, these cells are very much the same.
2. Your left brain and right brain are using your DNA in the same way. Another surprising difference: the left and right sides of the brain tend to have different functions. But on the level of gene expression that the atlas measures, these are again hard to detect. The two hemispheres of the brain look very much alike.
3. The differences that do exist are important. There’s not a lot of genetic variation in the landscape of the brain, but what there is is apparently important. The Allen Institute researchers found that they could accurately predict where a neuron would be in the cortex by what genes it was expressing. So these tiny differences apparently matter. One interesting distinction: the neurons involved in getting sensory impressions, like sight, sound, and touch, are similar to one another and different from the rest of the brain.
4. The differences are not where you’d expect. When we think of a brain cell (if we think about brain cells at all), we think of neurons, the spindly nerve cells that transmit signals to each other and make up the circuits of our brains and bodies. But there’s another type of cell in the brain, called a glial cell, that creates the sheaths that protect neurons and the matrices in which they sit. And there is more variation in what genes are expressed in the glia than in the regular neurons. That could mean they are more important than we thought, accounting for the differences between people – or it could mean that variation in glial cells doesn’t matter much, so there’s a lot of it.
5. We are not mice, or monkeys. One of the most important uses of the Allen Atlas will be to figure out how the human brain is different from the brains of the experimental animals scientists can test in their labs. Big drug companies such as Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer have been struggling to create new medicines for diseases like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, largely without success, and the difference between lab mice and people may be one key reason. In one tantalizing clue, the Allen Institute researchers point to differences in a gene called CALB1, which is used to move around calcium ions, which are key chemical messengers for the nervous system. In rhesus macaques and mice, this gene is expressed throughout the hippocampus, the brain region that plays a key role in the creation of memories. But in humans, CALB1 is expressed only in the dentate gyrus, pointing to a potential difference between the brains of these other mammals and ours. It’s not known what this difference means.

One important result of the lack of variation between cells and between different brains is that the Allen Atlas will be completed with just six brains, not the 10 researchers thought they would need when the project started in 2008. The institute is moving on, with a new $300 million investment from Allen, to try to do new experiments to create circuit diagrams of the mouse visual cortex and to understand all the cell types that exist in the human brain.

Allen himself, when I met him this summer at the Allen Institute in Seattle, is prepared for this to be a long, hard slog. He told me that the brain is “hideously complex” and that it’s going to take “decades and decades” of more research to understand. “We are talking about dozens and dozens of Nobel Prizes,” he said, “that have yet to be won to understand how the brain works.” (For more, see Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain.) 

Consumer Based Health

I've always been fascinated by the way we view our relationships with service providers. In my blissfully ignorant youth, when people referred to "their" real estate agent or "their" trainer, I assumed they had to be exceptionally wealthy to afford a retinue of specialized retainers like that.  Of course, we don't actually own our consultants and contractors.  Implying we do is simply a way of denoting status, the modern equivalent of long fingernails; we don't have to do the work, we have people for that.    It's not a notion that has ever sat comfortably with me.  Now that I'm actively out there consuming specialized services, I make a point of not propertizing (a neologism for you) those providers. I use a real estate agent; he's not mine. I see a physiotherapist - I don't own her.

It's this last that got me thinking about how we view health care.  I was in for physiotherapy today and got to talking with the kinesiologist treating me  about how the brain adapts to pain.  A funny little thing, this: we pattern things like posture and physical response to the programming our noggins have created to adapt to injury, even after the original source of pain is gone. If you spend long periods hunching over a computer terminal and find yourself hunching the rest of the time, too, it's that behavioural patterning at play.  Left unabated, it can change the curvature of your spine and cause all sorts of spin-off problems.

The kinesiologist and I also talked about the sorts of exercises and activities people can do to reset these posture programs over time - a key part of the injury recovery process. The challenge is, one visit a week to "your" physiotherapist isn't going to do that. Significant changes in behaviour come from regular, consistent practice - something you can only pay someone to do to you regularly enough to have long-term impact if you are rich as thieves.  For the rest of us, we have to internalize our own care through exercise regimens, etc.

A big challenge this kinesiologist faces is getting this message through to her clients.  If they don't make the time to do their exercises at home, they will not get better.  She can give an initial push and serve as a stop-gap, but a full return to health involves active patient participation.  The problem is, everyone is too busy with work, kids or the commute and far too stressed out to worry about their own health. Besides, they can pay someone to do that (like their physiotherapist) or pay for a product like ibuprofen to fill the gap.  That's how we solve problems in our society - by buying the solutions.

How often do we view our family doctor as just another service provider, like our accountant or our real estate agent?  Have we hired them to make sure we stay in good working order, like a car mechanic?  The capitalist theory suggests that if there's sufficient demand, supply will emerge to match; we are specializing our skills to an increasing degree to be competitive and besides, we define success as having the ability to pay others to do the stuff we don't want to.   When was the last time you made your own furniture?  Do you grow your own produce?  Heck, do you even know where those things come from?  The further up the food chain we are, the more stuff we can have and the less general work we need to do.

This, naturally, got me thinking about Mitt Romney. We've all seen or read the quote:

"All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

Romney is a pro-free market capitalist who is a big fan of consumer culture. In his mind, everyone should have the responsibility to work hard and by hook or crook, find profitability. When they do, they'll be able to pay for more stuff and expand the economy.  They'll also be able to afford not to do things, like serve in the military.

Whatever the Romneys of the world try to tell themselves, we are working hard.  At the lower end of the economic spectrum there are countless folk holding down two or more jobs, trying to make ends meet and save up for their kids' education. In the middle you have folk busting their butts to garner recognition and earn the next raise or promotion. Even at the top you have executives putting in 12 hours a day to keep their operations afloat. Heck, I even see homeless beggars in position starting at the crack of dawn.  It's a very scant percentage of people who can afford not to work at all.

We work hard at what we do - we expect others to work hard at what they do. But what happens when those interests collide? What about when the service we are paying for is the maintenance of our own personal health?

Healthcare is a huge industry. Everything from pills to acupuncture and even health promotion services like spin or yoga classes generate a lot of revenue. Public health services are also a multi-billion dollar industry. In fact, public health care cost the Ontario taxpayer $49 billion in 2011.  But are we getting better?  Whether we thinks we're victims or players, how healthy is our reliance on outsourcing health - and, like bad posture, is this pattern-forming behaviour?

We live in a consumer/producer based society. Every aspect of our life, even parenting, has been affixed with a dollar value and is offered on the market by someone as a for-profit service.  Maybe you think this is a good thing.  Me, I make a point of getting in my exercises so I can heal myself.  for me, independence isn't about holding ownership over the labour of others; it's about gaining the ability to be master of my own fate.

 

Will This Be Jason Kenney's MS St. Louis?

According to the Canada Border Services Agency, Hungarians — the bulk of whom are said to be Roma — are the top users of the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Pilot Program which kicked off in the Greater Toronto Area on June 29.

 

 

But Roma Community Centre executive director Gina Csanyi-Robah likened the program to a “bribe” and said many people are “misinformed” about it, as information doesn’t seem to be available in Hungarian.

 

 

I really, really hope I'm wrong about this.  I hope that somewhere, ten years down the road, somebody will poke me in the ribs and say "remember when you were fretting about ethnic persecution in Hungary turning into a repeat of genocide?  Boy, did you screw that up!"

 

 

"We need to roll back these hundreds of thousands of Roma outlaws. We must show zero tolerance towards Roma crime and parasitism," Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona told a rally of several hundred people in Heroes' Square in central Budapest.

 

 

The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.  Democracy in Hungary isn't what it once was.  The EU has made some critical noise, but there aren't any teeth behind the criticism.  As Hungarians grapple with the same economic same challenges being faced across Europe, there's an increased focus on placing the blame on minority groups like Jews and Sinti-Roma.  It all sounds familiar.  At Why Should I Care last night, Barbara Falk (a professor at DND) talked about how the Raoul Wallenberg monument had been desicrated with pig's blood.  During a recent trip to Budapest, she wondered if that was what Berlin felt like in 1933.  She's not the only one thinking that.

Here's another repeat of history; using all kinds of excuses about cutting costs and focusing on legitimate refugee claims, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is finding ways to send Sinti-Roma in Canada back to Hungary.  His messaging on this file sounds eerily familiar to that of a predecessor of his, Frederick Charles Blair.  Blair is remembered by history not for filtering out fake refugees or for saving Canada money, but for shutting out Jews trying to flee the Holocaust. 

 

 

It's all well and good for Kenney to make positive noise about funding and support and doing what's best for Canada, now, but history will judge him on the consequences of his actions.  How is this program being communicated to all, but especially to Hungarian refugee claimants?  Are we living up to our end of the bargain?  What is Canada doing to closely monitor what's happening in politics and on the ground in Hungary?  Have we learned anything from past mistakes?

 

 

Again - I really hope I'm wrong.  I fear that I'm not.  It would be better for everyone if Jason Kenney comes to his senses and we never have to find out.

God IS Great

 

Ahmed Shams, a 22-year-old arts student who works with the two, said the group cried out “God is great” in celebration after discovering he wasn’t dead. “We were happy to see him alive. The youth tried to rescue him. But there was no security, no ambulances, nothing to help,” he said.

 

 

The story of how a group of Libyans rushed Ambassador Christopher Stevens to hospital isn't one that will get told as widely as it should.  Already, there are those looking to poke holes in this act of humanity, because, well, it humanizes those more easily viewed as Other. 

 

 

That's sad, because within this story of empathy and altruism lies the true heart of Islam and a principle common to every major religion:

 

 

No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.

 

 

Put it another way: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 

 

People are people, no matter where we come from.  Individually, we are all capable of the same deeds.  Together, we can move mountains.  It's a lesson we're going to keep being taught until finally, we internalize it.  That's the moment we will truly know greatness.

Spielberg Politics: Risk Doesn't Sell, But Vision Does

 

 

Taking risks is hard, of course, because fewer and fewer teenagers are getting off that damned couch.

 

 

And without new ideas, where is there to go?

 

 

Cloud Atlas is just a movie - a sprawling, narratively complex film that tries to get us, the potential audience, thinking about the bigger, broader themes that connect us as human beings.  It tries to make us break outside the bonds of our usual perspectives.  That kind of storytelling doesn't come cheap.  Make no mistake - new ideas do cost money, because they break entirely new ground. 

 

 

The Fountain, a film that challenged us to rethink what we prioritize in life and how we view death, tanked.  On the other hand Avatar, which changed the way we view film and immersed us in the breathtakingly complex world of Pandora, wrapped a ground-breaking vision around a familiar story we've seen in everything from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai.  In so doing, it struck the right chords of visually new yet narratively familiar; with a solid marketing campaign, these details helped propel James Cameron's alien epic to the position of highest grossing film ever.

 

 

Films don't come cheap and the people who fund them do so with one goal in mind - profit.  So, Avatar gets a sequel.

 

 

In that way, film making is a lot like politics.  Politics is also about coming out on top.  Doing politics is not a cheap affair and in a survival-of-the-fittest game of escalation, the cost just keeps going up.  Advertising, polling, producing materials, holding conventions, recording phone calls, oppositions research and now, finding ways to bring the conversation to the online places where the people congregate costs millions of bucks.  These activities are the political equivalents to putting out trailers, going on the talk shows and putting billboards on street corners.  The end goal in both cases is the same; get the potential end-user off the couch and out to the theatre/polling station.  If all goes well, you can keep mining the well with sequel after sequel.

 

 

Call it the capitalist model of democracy; sellers must tailor products they know consumers will want and then work hard to convince end-users the product isn't a want, it's a need.  Movie marketers will tell us their latest product is "the must-see movie of the year" or "if you see just one movie this year, make it this one;" political operators replicate this leitmotif  by telling us that a vote for the other guys will lead to "a thousand years of darkness" or that only a vote for them is a vote for a secure tomorrow.

 

 

In short - traditional marketing tries to paint a picture of the risk lying in not buying into their product.

 In general, people don't like risk - they like stability.  Even when they stand upon a burning platform, they will wait until the ground gives way beneath them before taking a leap of faith into untested waters.  Unless, that is, someone charismatic enough with a vision that transcends stability and embraces something bolder steps into the light.

Steven Spielberg is one of the most bankable directors in the history of film.  His movies consistently bring us fun stories, likable characters and all the action, scares and humour we could ask for.  As a filmmaker, Spielberg has also made some incredible contributions to the medium of cinema - Jurassic Park broke ground with its use of computer animation.  The film that really kick-started his career, Jaws, became the world's first blockbuster.  Yet, Spielberg almost gave up on Jaws because he felt it was just too big of a risk.  It was his belief not necessarily in himself, but in his vision that kept him going.  Perhaps that anecdote hints at his greatest contribution - a sense of wonder, but also a belief that no matter how bad things seem, there's always a chance they'll turn out better. 

One of the most iconic moments in cinematic history is an image of a boy and an alien riding a bicycle through the sky, silhouetted by the moon.  It's pure magic.  But consider; we're looking at a child, at height, wholly caught in the clutches of an extra-terrestrial force.  In its essence, ET is any parent's nightmare; in the hands of another director, ET could have been a story more akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Same holds true for Jurassic Park; the novel on which the movie was based is a visceral experience.  James Cameron, that other highly bankable director, has recently discussed how close he came to getting the rights for the book and how his take would have been decidedly darker.

Spielberg himself has discussed what he considers to be his master image; the heavily back-lit door of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It's a beautifully juxtaposed scene; whereas traditional popcorn fare like Independence Day or Mars Attacks relies on the idea of the unknown (as represented by aliens in big ships) as something dark, sinister and malevolent, Spielberg infuses The Undiscovered Country with light, embedding the unknown with hope.  That's his big trick, the secret ingredient to the Spielberg success.  Spielberg movies unquestionably cost a pretty penny, but they always turn a profit; more than that, they generally inspire us to think that just maybe, tomorrow won't turn out so bad after all.  He is consistently ranked as one of the most successful film makers in the history of movies.

 

 

The Bearded One's next movie is, appropriately enough for the times, a political one - a biopic of the 16th President of the United States.  I don't think it's a coincidence that Spielberg's Lincoln focuses on a man successfully leading his country through constitutional, military and moral crises.  That was a dark time in history, the future of the United States looked pretty grim.  None could have predicted then what America would have become today.  Certainly, there were those who felt being part of a Union presented too much of a threat to their traditional way of life and stood fast against such a risk.

 

 

Lincoln never wavered from his steely determination and steadfast belief in a risky idea - that a strong society must be a just society and that a united whole was more than the sum of its parts.  A polarizing figure in his time (and the first US President to be assassinated), Lincoln is now ranked consistently as one of the best Presidents the United States ever had.  It's hard to imagine what would have become of America if the risk averse had won the day.

 

 

On both sides of the border there are, once again, conversations about Constitutions, the military and what has become of our moral fabric.  Financial times are tight and nobody wants to bet on risky ventures.  In fact, the most common political theme today is that stability can only be maintained if we shut our doors to external risks or by fighting against those who might challenge our status quo.  There are always those willing to die to stop change, for they view change as death itself.  If there is to be a brave new world, it's these folk that will have the hardest time living in it.

 

 

An uncertain future is rapidly drawing nearer; the stability one generation previous took for granted isn't waiting for those teenagers huddled on today's couches, nor for the unborn millions to come.   We have plenty of leaders casting themselves as the least risky guides through the shadows of tomorrow.  Perhaps what we really need is a vision of the future our youth can aspire to be part of.  Whoever can inspire us with their ability to light the way forward might just be the kind of leader we'd be willing to take a risk on.