Deep Philosophical Ethics Stuff

One of the best courses I ever took at university was Bioethics. It was an elective that had nothing to do with my major, but it looked interesting.  I was quite taken with the notion of “ethics” as something beyond a person’s morality or feelings – the idea that you could make decisions about the concepts right and wrong in certain situations based on a standard that it in place long before the situation arises.

Over the years I’ve taken other ethics courses. Ethics has become one of my favourite topics to read, think or talk about.  The most difficult thing to wrap your head around is defining ethics to yourself. The best way, I think, is to understand what ethics is not:

• Feelings: Following your feelings will not always lead you to do what’s right. Feelings, in fact, will often cause you to do things that are quite, quite wrong.
• Religion: Most religions set high ethical standards and can provide motivation for ethical behaviour, but ethics are not just religion and not the same as religious beliefs.
• The Law: Like feelings, the law does not always proscribe what is right. Apartheid was a law; slavery was a law.
• Social Acceptability: Most societies have an acceptable standard of practices that are ethical, but societies and aspects of society can become corrupted.
• Morality: It’s sometimes said that ethics is the philosophical study of morality. So, something may be ethically wrong, but not immoral by most people’s standards. Likewise, something you believe to be moral can be ethically wrong.

Ethics usually come in to play when there is a serious personal, business or other dilemma over which you have to make a decision. There was a good example on Criminal Minds the other day.

There episode concerned some nut who was sprinkling anthrax around in public places – parks, subways, malls, etc.. No one knew how or why or where he would strike next. People were dying. The FBI was frantically investigating but couldn’t warn the general public without causing massive panic. Those closely involved with the investigation were given a vaccine that might protect them if they came in contact with the anthrax, but that wasn’t even certain because the particular formula being sprinkled around was heretofore unknown.

The youngest FBI investigator, Jennifer,  has a young child who spends his day at home with the nanny. Jennifer wants to call the nanny to tell her to keep the son inside the house no matter. Jennifer’s  boss,  Aaron (ably portrayed by Thomas Gibson formerly of Dharma and Greg fame) tells her she can’t do that without arousing suspicion and potentially harming the investigation. After all, who wouldn’t panic a bit if an FBI person tells you not to take her child out of the house, but won’t tell you why?

So, throughout the entire episode the young mother is frantic. She is torn between making sure her child is safe and the greater good of society at large and the job to which she’s pledged her primary allegiance.

Using ethical standard what would you do in a similar situation?

The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics suggests there are 5 basic questions you can ask yourself to determine if you are living and making decisions within an ethical framework:

1. Did I practice any virtues today? Virtues are the good things we learn throughout our lives: integrity, trustworthiness, honesty, compassion, etc…
2. Did I do more good than harm today? Or did I try to? Consider the short term and long-term consequences of your actions.
3. Did I treat people with dignity and respect today? All human beings should be treated with dignity simply because they are human. People have moral rights, especially the fundamental right to be treated as free and equal human beings, not as things to be manipulated, controlled, or cast away. How did my actions today respect the moral rights and the dignified treatment to which every person is entitled?
4. Was I fair and just today? Did I treat each person the same unless there was some relevant moral reason to treat him or her differently? Justice requires that we be fair in the way we distribute benefits and burdens. Whom did I benefit and whom did I burden? How did I decide?
5. Was my community better because I was in it? Was I better because I was in my community? Consider your primary community, however you define it–neighborhood, apartment building, family, company, church, etc. Now ask yourself, Was I able to get beyond my own interests to make that community stronger? Was I able to draw on my community’s strengths to help me in my own process of becoming more human?

Hello? Is anyone still reading?

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 Disclaimer: Sorry. It’s been dark and gloomy and rainy for 3 days now. I tend to crawl up my own ass when I’m deprived of sunshine for too long.

Celebrity Freakshow

As you know, I don’t have cable, so I’m not really up on most of the celebrity doings; bit I hear “things”.

This week for instance, most of the blogworld has been talking about Jon and Kate and their trainwreck of a life (with Kate as engine driver, Jon as cabin boy and the passel of kids screaming as the wheels grind them into the tracks).

Coincidentally, today marks the 75^th anniversary of the birth of the Dionne quintuplets. Born near Callander Ontario Canada, they were the first quintuplets ever to survive infancy.

So, (and see if this sounds sort of  familiar), they were made wards of the King at four months old. They were put on display in a special hospital called “Quintland”and marketed as an amazing tourist attraction.

The Province of Ontario and the parents made a killing off these kids with everything from product endorsements to Hollywood movies. The kids, of course, grew to be totally fucked-up adults and eventually settled a law-suit against the Canadian government. They’ve also written warnings to several parents of multiple birth children about the long-term effects of exploiting your kids for fame and fortune.

In other Celebrity Freakshow news:

• Susan Boyle. Okay she can sing. But she’s not flavour-of-the-month because of any exceptional talent. She’s a star because she’s a frumpy, middle-aged woman and the world is amazed that she actually has something going for her. We’re at the point now where we can’t believe anyone who isn’t Hollywood glam could possibly have any talent. The audience and judges of Britain’s Got Talent all sniggered when Susan Boyle first got on the stage because she looked so old and worthless. And then, holy crap – she didn’t suck. Now we’re all excited by this bizarre phenomenon. I hope Susan Boyle is smart enough to understand exactly what’s going on and exactly how short the attention span of her current legions of fans is.
• Kanye West on the other hand just won’t go away. Here’s a guy whose mother was a university professor of English and whose dad was one of the first black photo-journalists and a former member of the Black Panthers – and offspring Kanye doesn’t seem to have two. IQ points to rub together. He’s bragged how he doesn’t read books and doesn’t “respect” books, BUT (are you sitting down) he’s written a book: Thank You And You’re Welcome.  Clicking the title will bring you to his blog where he very kindly has posted some sample pages of this 52-page blockbuster. Many of the pages are just blank; the others offer pithy blurbs on his philosophy of life, like:

Get use to getting used! To most people, the saying “to use someone,” carries a negative connotation. But, I don’t see it that way. To “mis”, “over”, or “ab” use someone is negative. To use is necessary. And if you can’t be used, then you’re useless.

• Mel Gibson. Braveheart. Dude — what the hell happened to you? You used to be so hot. You used to be so cool. Now you’re drunk and a racist. You ditched your wife and mother of your SEVEN kids and took up with some bimbo half your age, knocked her up and watched her dump your sorry ass. What do you pay in child support?
• Demi Moore. She’s freakishly attractive and firm for almost 50 and keeps claiming she’s had no surgical enhancements whatsoever. Okaaaay.  Let’s accept that she’s externally ageless. Internally, she’s going fast though. First, she married Ashton Kutcher, which in itself shows some sort of early-onset dementia. Now the two of them are the undisputed royalty of Twitter addicts everywhere. They post each and every second of their lives, complete with pictures. Here’s the latest – Demi at the dentist without her front tooth.

And, oh ya – she recently won a lawsuit against Australian Pacific Magazines for publishing unauthorized photos of her.

Clubs, Hearts and a Diamond

The Canadian seal hunt has been a hot debate topic for a long time. Seal hunters, of course maintain that the practice is vital to their livelihoods while animal rights groups say it’s just a senseless slaughter whose main point is to harvest baby seal pelts for the sake of fashion.

Aboriginals living in the Canadian arctic have been hunting seals for centuries and use them for food, lamp and cooking fuel and used the skins and pelts for clothing. The practice continues today for most of the same reasons. Seal meat is an important source of food for residents of small coastal communities.

Thel meat is also exported to Asia for animal feed; seal leather is exported all over the world as is seal oil which is high in Omega-3 fats. And we all know what a hot commodity Omega-3 fats are at the moment.

The hunt takes place mainly in northern Newfoundland and Labrador in an area where the jobless rate is in excess of 15%.  Approximately 6,000 people earn one-third of their income from sealing. The allowable catch quota for 2009 has been set at 280,000.

That sounds like a lot of seals. Especially when we think of the horrible images of the cute, big-eyed baby seals being clubbed to death with hakapiks.

 

Hakapiks are, in fact only used when sealers can’t use harpoons or when there are too many sealers in one area to safely use a rifle. A report in the Canadian Veterinary Journal found that 98% of seals taken in the hunt are killed in a humane manner.

Some of you may remember Sir Paul McCartney and the psycho bitch lovely woman who was then his wife strapping themselves to an ice floe to protect the seals.

Every animal rights group in the world has tried their best to get this practice banned. (Not the practice of celebrities taking up a cause they know nothing about — the practice of the seal hunt)

Just this month the European Union voted to impose a ban on all seal products.

This is all so interesting to me because I don’t see how harvesting seals is any different from farming and slaughtering cattle, chickens, pigs, lambs, etc. If cameras were as freely allowed inside slaughterhouses maybe Sir Paul and the wife du jour would be strapping themselves to meat hooks.

The federal government  keeps a close eye on the seal hunt. It’s not the free-for-all bloodfest we keep seeing in the media. There are only 3 types of seals allowed in the hunt: harp seals, hooded seals and grey seals. Most of the hunt is for harp seals. The cute, big-eyed white seals the animal rights groups always show are the newborn harp seals called “whitecoats”.

 

Aawwwww.

The killing of whitecoats has actually been banned in Canada since the mid-1980s. But I guess photos of adult harp seals wouldn’t garner as much sympathy.

Eewwwww.

As a vegetarian I am, of course, no fan of slaughtering any animal for food or any other purpose when there are so many other options available. But I’m even less of a fan of hypocrisy.

If we’re going deprive these sealers of a good part of their livelihood and source of food, then we should also impose a ban on all other animal products. Everywhere. Including the European Union.

I bring this topic up now because it’s sealing season up north, and also because of what our beautiful Governor General, Michaëlle Jean did yesterday.

She’s on a tour of the Canadian arctic regions and classy lady that she is, she joined in the native seal hunt. She got right in there and gutted a seal, then along with the other sealers pulled out the animal’s heart and ate a chunk of it. Raw. Then she daintly wiped her bloody hands on a tissue.

She wanted to show solidarity with the beleaguered sealers. She said,

It was absolutely delicious. These are ancient practices that are part of a way of life. If you can’t understand that, you’re completely missing the reality of life here.

Warm, raw seal heart apparantly tastes like sushi. The woman rocks.

Skewing Reality with Slogans

Okay, so The Sun – that beacon of all that’s good and worthy in journalism today, was recently inspired by this WWII UK inspirational poster unearthed from someone’s dusty, yet inspirational box of inspirational books. 

So, The Sun – the beacon of all that’s good and worthy in journalism today, decided to hold their own Inspirational Slogans Contest to help get Canadians through the current tough economic times that we didn’t even know we were having until they told us a few months ago. (Thank god for the media).

And really, what could be better than an inspirational slogan poster for turning our collective Canadian frowns upside down? Nothing, that’s what. There is really no other way to get through the current tough economic times than an inspirational slogan poster.

Hundreds of people agree. Because hundreds of people submitted their lame wonderful ideas for great slogans to help us all drag our miserable asses through the next few years and/or until everything will be bright and sunny again.  Here are the top 12 that were chosen from the glut of submissions:

• CAN-DO
• We’re in this together
• It’s going to be OK
• Strong and Free
• Don’t let today’s fear ruin tomorrow’s success.
• Be proud. Be Strong. Be tough. Be Canadian.
• Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.
• Canada. It’s ours. Do your part.
• Save and spend wisely.
• We didn’t start it, but we will see it through.
• We will succeed if you believe.
• Together we’re freakin’ awesome!!!

 Meh, I’m not inspired yet.

Some of these are hilarious though (It’s going to be okay…ha ha or We didn’t start it…priceless.) Anyway, I didn’t know about this contest until it was all over or else I would have submitted some of my own:

• Stop whining.
• When we’re down to our last Loonie, we’ll still have Celine. 
• We survived an international swine flu pandemic. We can survive anything.
• Spare some change? Yes we CANada!
• We’re nice. Nothing bad ever happens to nice people.
• Stop believing everything you read in the papers.
• Don’t worry. We’re not in this together.
• Old people stuff their mattresses full of money and we have a LOT of old people. And they can easily be overpowered.
• Today’s tough times are tomorrow’s good old days.
• In tough times, tough people last longer. But it hasn’t quite come to that yet.
• Beer. It’s the Canadian way.

Are you inspired yet?

Career Counselling

I’ve been with the government long enough that I could maybe, possibly retire in a few years with a partial pension. The idea is tempting, except that I still have a kid to put through university and I’d have to do it on a partial pension and then live on this partial pension forever, even when I’m old and decrepit.

So, I’ve been looking into a post-retirement career and I need some suggestions. Here are the 3 top criteria:

• I’d want it to be totally different from what I do now – nothing in an office.
• Re-training needs to be relatively short and not too expensive.
• The job should be easily transportable, so I won’t be stuck in one city or even one country in order to do it.  (See Violetsky, I’m planning ahead)

Here are the only ideas I’ve managed to come up with so far:

Barber: I wouldn’t want to colour or perm or “style” hair, I just want to do basic haircuts and use that buzzy machine and maybe do a shave once in a while with a nice lethal straight razor. The clientele would be easy-to-please old men, little boys and maybe a few lesbians. The only downside to this option is that around here you can’t just train to be a barber anymore, you have to take the whole freakin’ hairstylist course. And it costs a lot. And I don’t want to spend months at Beauty School with gum-chewing teenagers with bad skin and big, over-processed hair.

Personal Trainer:  The course is manageably short and affordable. There’s a lot of demand, especially among the older set and rock stars. I enjoy nagging people about their health and fitness. The only downside I can see is that I’d get really pissed off with clients like Oprah who sneak off and snarf down an entire fried chicken and basket of biscuits as soon as your back is turned which ends up making you look like the worst personal trainer in the world.

Psychic Counsellor – Seriously. It’s a real profession. It’s kind of the poor man’s shrink. Oh, you still pay through the nose for advice, but only through one nostril. And the beauty of the job is that there are no years of medical school or counselling training to go through. People give you money and complain about their lives and you pull some pithywords of advice out of your ass and they go away happy. Just saying you’re psychic, gives you great legitimacy among certain groups of people. The drawback to this one is that I’d have to learn to be psychic in a few different languages if I want to travel with it.

Dog Groomer: The learning curve is manageable. The job is transportable and there’s plenty of demand and money to be made at it. The clientele is adorable. Drawbacks include the owners, getting bitten, and smelling like dog all the time.

So, as you can see, I need help. Any and all opinions, ideas, suggestions are welcome. I’m also open to general mockery. Thank you.

Water Water Everywhere

Sometime around mid-afternoon yesterday, someone ran their car into a fire hydrant in our neighbourhood. Not only was the fire hydrant wrenched from its mooring, flooding the street, but the pipe leading to the hydrant was yanked and twisted to such an extent that it buckled a good chunk of the street.

I don’t know how this happened. Middle of the day, residential area, bright yellow fire hydrant well out of the way of the usual traffic. Something like that can’t be good for your car. I assume no one was killed or seriously injured or there would have been some media hysteria about it – no doubt calling for the immediate ban of fire hydrants across the country.

Anyway, the important part of this story  is that the neighbourhood was without water for a good 12 hours yesterday.

Including me.

Now, I have a pretty small carbon footprint. I believe it’s around .7, meaning if everyone lived like me we’d only need point seven earths to sustain us. However, I will confess to being a water hog. My carbon footprint would probably only be .1 or something if it weren’t for my massive consumption of water.

I wash my hands about 500 times a day; brush my teeth 5 or 6 times a day; usually have 2 showers every day (though I only shower with warm, not hot, water). I wash the hell out of our fruits and vegetables. I do dishes twice a day (though by hand). I rinse everything thoroughly even when not instructed to. And I drink lots of water.

I love water.

So, it was a really tough evening yesterday. They rigged up a community watering hole via a big hose tied to a tree. People lined up with buckets to fetch water. I got to meet a lot of neighbours, but everyone was really cranky. I tried to lead a short class on how to carry buckets of water on your head to lend some primitive authenticity to the process, but our heads were all too pointy.

It’s amazing how dependant we are on water. We really can’t do much of anything without it. I survived 10 days without electricity after Hurricane Juan with a good part of my mind still intact, but I was seriously on the edge last night without water. (Let’s not even talk about the kid whining that she had to have heated up soup from the freezer for supper instead of the usual “real” supper  she’s come to expect).

• One in 5 people in the world has no access to safe drinking water.
• Each person in North America uses 1,280,000 litres of water per year.
• Europe: 694,000
• Asia – 535,000
• South America – 311,000
• Africa – 186,000

So anyway the City of Ottawa guys were there until almost 2:00 am – jackhammering; digging a really big hole with their yellow hole digger thingy; and shouting a lot. I must give them credit for working their asses off to get the problem fixed as quickly as possible. In the whole 12 hours they were there I only noticed complete inactivity around suppertime for about 20 minutes while they wolfed down some grub.

Of course the Big Hole and resultant Big Pile of Dirt brought out the construction site groupies – old guys in trucker hats – standing around gazing down into the Big Hole and swapping stories of other Big Holes they’ve been part of. I checked with them every once in a while to see when they thought the water would be back on. They were pretty accurate.

I’ll tell ya what though – if you’re a middle-aged or elderly chickie looking to attract a gruff old guy with an infinite knowledge of sideline construction, get yourself a Big Hole (shut up) and/or a Big Pile of Dirt.

Meanwhile, I had to go to bed feeling grubby and without having had my evening salad. Can you imagine? Combined with the intensely noisy digging activity, sleep was pretty much impossible. But then, in the wee hours of the morning, in my half-dozed state, the world outside my window got quiet again. I peeked out. Everyone was gone. I ran to the bathroom, had a quick shower, flushed the toilets, changed the sheets and tried to sleep for a couple of hours.

That didn’t work out, so I got up to blog about it.

I still can’t figure out how someone could run into a fire hydrant.

Whatcha Gonna Do?

When did we all start hating cops so much? Any time a member of the local, regional or national police allegedly sets a foot wrong, the media is all over it and citizens start screaming for blood.

Okay, we expect cops to be above reproach. We need them to be in order to feel safe. But they’re still human and they screw up. So why are we so eager always to think the worst of them rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt?

The current issue in Ottawa involves a  cop allegedly “beating up” on a taxi driver for no apparent reason The story the cabbie, his cabbie witnesses and the media are telling is that an SUV started following the cabbie down the highway, very closely, trying but failing to overtake him. The SUV followed the cabbie to the airport where a guy got out of the SUV and either pushed the cabbie to the ground or twisted his arm causing the cabbie to sustain some broken bones in his arm. At some point the SUV guy flashed his badge or ID or something saying he was a cop. Paramedics and other police officers arrived. Paramedics took the cabbie away and the police officers took the other off-duty SUV cop away.

The outrage over this alleged incident has leant itself to bold headlines in the media for over a week. The same story is told over and over with quotes from the cabbie and his friends and photos of the cabbie with his arm in a cast.

Letters to the editor shake their heads at yet another example of blatant police brutality. Bloggers vilify the Ottawa police for their corruption. Facebookers tsk-tsk vehemently over out-of-control cops. There are allegations of racism involved from the cabbies’ viewpoints.  Ottawa cabbies everywhere fear for their lives.

Of course, there were other witnesses to this incident at the airport, but their account is usually buried in one sentence at the bottom of every third or fourth article. Other witnesses say the cabbies swarmed the cop when he got to the airport; that the cabbies began the altercation; that the cop flashed his badge to get them to back off; that the cop was injured as well.

If the situation had been reversed and the cabbie had pushed the cop, it would:

1. Not been much of a story; or,
2. If it had made it to the papers,  it would have been slanted in favour of the cabbie anyway; or,
3. If the story had been told favouring the cop as blatantly as this story is being told in favour of the cabbie, we’d have all the civil liberties people yelling about injustice, prejudicial reporting, innocent until proven guilty, etc., etc.

I don’t know what happened, but there’s an inquiry underway to find out. The cop’s record is clean – in fact, he has two letters of commendation on his file. I know that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s an angel. And I know cops in general aren’t really Andy of Mayberry, but I also don’t believe they all spend all their free time chasing down random citizens to beat up.

I probably mentioned before that I’ve had a couple of jobs where I’ve had to connect with police on a regular basis. From what I saw, for the most part they’re just regular people with a really tough job. Lots of people think of them as doing nothing all day except harassing the homeless, responding to calls from old people who hear noises in their cellars and eating donuts.

And maybe they do have days like that, but a lot of their time is also spent doing stuff most of us wouldn’t have the stomach or cojones to do for one day, let alone day after day, year after year.

And maybe some of them don’t handle that stress so well after a while and maybe some of them are just assholes to begin with[1], but in my experience nobody in the police business wants someone like that on the force. If this cop in the story, is actually hunting down people in his spare time so he can give them a good pounding, then I’m pretty sure Ottawa police is going to find a way to remove him permanently from active service. Of course, if he’s exonerated, we’ll probably never hear about it because that’s not sensational news and it’ll just look like a big cover-up to those awaiting a verdict.

I think the police we have is all we have standing between us and the bad guys, so maybe we need more of a citizen/police partnership where things are a little more transparent on their end and a little more supportive on our end.

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[1] The closest I’ve ever come in my life to being raped was by a cop. It was just pure dumb luck that I was able to escape from the situation. So I know very well there are some puffed-up macho whackos on the force. I’m just not going to tar them all with the same brush because of this one guy; or even because of a few other guys like him.

Unethical Blogging

Jazz, over at Haphazard Life  posted a most interesting story on Tuesday. You can read the full sorry tale over at her blog, but the gist of it was that a corporation set up a cycling blog pretending to be 3 friends who are avid cyclists.

It was a great blog by all accounts with an associated Facebook page that had thousands of “friends”. Unfortunately it was all a shill to promote some sort of bicycle.

Many moons ago when I started my very first blog, it was as one of the Halifax Chronicle Herald’s online community blogs. There were about half a dozen of us blogging about various aspects of the different communities in which we lived within Halifax.

One day the Herald added a new blogger who called himself Direct from Afghanistan. He presented himself as a local boy who’d gone overseas to soldier and was missing Halifax and the people back home, so this was his way of keeping in touch.

He posted wonderful, glossy photos of smiling Afghanistani children, beautiful scenery and fun times among the troops. He told heartfelt stories of the good works he and his peers were doing over there and the gratitude and joy with which the locals were embracing our soldiers.

Of course, the people of Halifax ate this up with a spoon. As the only province in Canada that still designates November 11^th as a statutory holiday for all, they are especially devoted to and supportive of the military. Most Nova Scotians have family or close friends in the military. So, of course this blog was very well received. They all wanted to hear that their loved ones were safe and happy in this paradise.

Some of his fellow bloggers, however, couldn’t help but raise our eyebrows over all this. Not only was the photography and writing a little too polished, especially for a humble soldier, but we were also finding his Utopian vision of the whole Afghanistan thing a little hard to swallow. Not to mention that we found it very odd that he would even be allowed to blog about his mission.

So we did a little digging and found out that our hometown soldier boy blogger was actually a Public Affairs officer with DND. He’d never lived in Halifax, but had lived somewhere in Nova Scotia when he was a kid.

We brought this information to the attention of the online editor of the newspaper, but she seemed disinclined to do anything about it since he was getting them lots of online hits. So we outed him in our blogs. This caused a bit of a mess. Some people were outraged. Some people didn’t care – they wanted to keep hearing good news. Lots of angry comments all around. Amidst all the controversy the Public Affairs guy just slunk off and was never heard from again.

This sort of stealth/viral marketing is not unheard of in the world of Public Relations. PR firms often set up fake grassroots organizations/groups and/or blogs to garner support for a corporate cause or to sell a product or idea. They know that all the advertising in the world isn’t going to woo the masses as cheaply or easily as a solid grassroots group can. Grassroots organizations have been proven to affect the most significant levels of change in society.

It’s a highly unethical practice however, called “astroturfing” (for obvious reasons). I find it personally reprehensible because it sets out to dupe well-meaning people while at the same time robbing legitimate grassroots groups of their power.

Blogs that astroturf are nicknamed, “Flogs”. Working Families for Wal-Mart was a famous example. The blog pretended to be by a small group of Wal-Mart employees supporting the company in the wake of union negotiations. Of course the blog was actually written by a PR firm hired by Wal-Mart.

Judging by the comments on Jazz’ blog, this stuff doesn’t seem to bother people too much – it’s just another example of the overall bamboozling we experience every day – but for some reason this stuff bugs me a lot.

It abuses, exploits, manipulates and ultimately destroys one of the things that is best about humans – their willingness to help, support and take on a cause because it’s important to another fellow human being.

Funiculi! Funicula!

I posted Funiculi! Funicula! as my Facebook status the other day because I woke up with the song in my head. Then Linsey posted a video of Andrea Bocelli singing it, which was wonderful. What made it even more wonderful was that that video linked to this one.   I can’t get enough of it.  I defy anyone not to be uplifted by this little clip. (Turn down the volume if you’re at work, it’s quite loud.)

Altogether now:

Jammo! Jammo!  Jammo, jammo jà!

Jammo! Jammo!  Jammo, jammo jà!

Funiculì, Funiculà!

(Loosely translated as, Let’s go, Let’s go. Let’s go on, go on. Let’s go, Let’s go. Let’s go on, go on – the funiculi, funicula…)

I just love how enthusiastic the audience is over what is essentially opera. I love the kids singing their hearts out. I love the bald, gravelly-voiced guy. I love Pavarotti.  And I love the wacky juxtaposition of the crazy-haired chick & gravelly-voiced guy (Danes singing Italian) and Pavarotti.

The song was ritten by an Italian journalist and set to music by Italian composer Luigi Denza in 1880. It was composed to commemorate the opening of the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius. Unfortunately, the funiculi/funicula  was wiped out by the eruption of 1944.

What’s a funicular railway, you ask?

The forerunner of the modern-day ski-lift!

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On a completely unrelated topic, our bloggy friend, the Deep Friar’s sister has lost her dog. He could be anywhere in Kanata/Ottawa. So if you see this lovely Nova Scotia Duck Toller let the Friar know or call the numbers on this kijiji link. The dog’s name is Tipper.

GO HOME, TIPPER!

See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me.

Canadian Air Transport Security Authority is looking into buying seven “Whole Body Imaging” (WBI) scanners for major airports across the country after what they consider to have been a successful pilot project at Kelowna airport in BC recently.

The US already has these devices in full operation at 19 airports. (including Baltimore, Phoenix Sky Harbour, Tulsa International, Los Angeles, Denver, Alburquerque, NY Kennedy, Dallas, Las Vegas, Miami, Baltimore-Washington International, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Reagan National near Washington)

As you may or may not know, these scanners do a 360 degree scan of the individual, allowing officers to see through the clothes of the scannee with images clearly detailing stuff like genitalia and/or whether or not a woman has breast implants. (Oh, and also guns, knives and bottles of shampoo.)

Reporter Jim Spellman of CNN tried out the technology in Baltimore:

My face was blurred out but the rest of my body was clear as day. She (the officer) rotated the black and white 3-D image so I could see every contour of my body, including my private parts. I could see sweat under my arms, the rivets in my jeans and a pack of gum in my back pocket.

Authorities reassure us that:

•  Faces will be blurred so you are not identifiable;
• No images will be stored in any database (or collected for a YouTube Hottest Travellers montage);
• There will be officers manning the walk-in scanner who will see the passengers but not the naked images, and there will be other, completely different officers manning the surveillance centre who will see the images, but not the passengers.

All of the above assurances come with a cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die guarantee.

The point of these scanners is, of course, to catch people smuggling terrorist weapons onboard that can’t be spotted by the usual metal detectors. Items like ceramic guns or plastic explosives taped to their johnsons.

So far they’ve never caught anyone with anything except a few genital warts.

Privacy groups all over the world are freaking out. Last year when the European Union proposed installing these puppies in airports across the country the German government laid down its outraged hammy fist and said “Nein!” A spokesman for the interior ministry said:

 I can tell you in all clarity that we will not take part in this nonsense!

Other European countries went along with the testing period, but most sent the scanners back.

Many passengers who have already been scanned have no idea to what degree they are being revealed by the scanner.

In response to concerns raised by our privacy commissioner, Canada is saying that once the scanners are in place passengers would have the option of being scanned or being patted down as per usual.

Isn’t that sweet?  How long do you suppose that would last when they figure out they can do away with all those security guards and have us just stroll through the Stripmaster 2000?

Okay, I know we have very little privacy these days anyway and the world is a dangerous place so the government needs to look out for us and these scanners are all very businesslike and anonymous, etc., etc…

BUT, this seems like a disproportionally extreme response to a problem that may or may not exist and if so, with a very tiny percentage of travellers. And, as long as there are human beings manning these things there is a huge potential for all sorts of zany antics.

I already hate every single thing about the whole process of air travel. And when criminals caught in the act of committing heinous crimes are afforded more rights to privacy than air travellers, I’m thinking it’s time to find less invasive ways of getting around.

 

 

 

 

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On a completely unrelated topic, our bloggy friend, the Deep Friar’s sister has lost her dog. He could be anywhere in Kanata/Ottawa. So if you see this lovely Nova Scotia Duck Toller let the Friar know or call the numbers on this kijiji link. The dog’s name is Tipper.