Category Archives: News and politics

The 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race just ended.  Twenty-four hours of very fast racing on an eight mile circuit that weaves around the Loire.  On par with the Monaco Grand Prix, Indy 500 and the Paris-Dakar Rally, Le Mans is one of those races that sit at the top of the mountain.  Just about everyone has at least heard about Le Mans. 

The top two winning endurance racers were from Audi:  They build remarkable racing machines and quite wonderful street cars.  Externally, the winners looked sleek, powerful:  Low-slung, fat-tired, voluptuously curved, purpose-built weapons designed to violate the laws of aerodynamics, velocity, gravity and common-sense.  They are racing cars.  Brutes.  These two from Audi were very different under the skin. 

They are powered by Diesel engines.  Turbo-Diesel racing cars that pulled close to 300 kilometers per hour on the Mulsanne straight.  Turbo-Diesel racing cars that would pull nearly 2 G of lateral force in corners.  Turbo-Diesel racing cars that run on oil, not gasoline, or alcohol, or exotic fuels created by mad scientists. 

Audi winning Le Mans overall, with a Diesel, is the moral equivalent of winning the Tour de France on a unicycle, while drunk.   Then, nailing the Triple Crown on three-legged Shetland pony, hoisting the Stanley Cup with a team of eleven-year olds, and winning the Masters playing with an aluminum softball bat, a sod shovel and a snooker cue.

In the rest of the world, the Diesel engine is the engine of choice for family cars.  The reason the rest of the planet likes Diesels is simple:  The fuel costs a lot less and the engines will last, almost forever, with the usual maintenance.  Fuel economy is much better than gasoline and the pulling ability (torque) of the Diesel is huge. 

In North America, we relegate the Diesel to trucks, transports and heavy equipment because of their pulling power and their fuel economy.  There are the occasional eco-oddballs who run their personal diesel car on a mixture of recycled safflower oil, rendered goat grease and cat urine.  Diesels will burn just about anything in a pinch.

The Audi TDI’s proved that you can have a blindingly fast, reliable and proven Diesel engine that will out-perform the world’s best endurance racers.  This is cool.

There are two drawbacks to the Diesel, to North American sensibilities.  One is the odd clopping sound they make.  We’re used to the bang-bang-bang of a gasoline engine.  There is the smoke that Diesels produce.  We’ve imbedded the image of a smoky truck or bus in our brains filling the air with choking clouds of foul-smelling soot. 

The next time you’re on a highway, look at the exhaust stacks of most tractor-trailer trucks.  Modern Diesels very rarely smoke, unless under a big load, like starting to move at the stoplight and then only for a moment.  With engine control computers, particulate traps and turbo-charging, the Diesel is quite clean, compared to a gasoline engine.  Diesels only smoke when there is something wrong with them, meaning someone is not doing the maintenance, or has modified the engine somehow.

Roll down the windows too.  You won’t hear the screaming of a cage of angry bears coming from the truck.  The noise you hear is from the tires or the airflow, not the engine, especially at cruising speeds on the highway.  I was passed by a truck last week on the 401 highway.  He was flogging the truck unmercifully, running more than 130 kms an hour with a full 53-foot load.  The loudest sound I heard through the open window on my car, was the rear set of tires whining on the pavement. 

You can buy a Diesel passenger car from some manufacturers here.  Notably, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen.  The Asian imports, who sell thousands of Diesels overseas, don’t send their full line of engine choices to North America.  Domestic manufacturers only make Diesels available on their truck lines. 

Why?  That is easy enough to answer.  Gas engines are cheaper to make.  Gasoline is dirt cheap here, by world standards.  The oil companies don’t like Diesel.

Modern fuels all start from crude oil feedstock.  Crude, depending on which one, is thick and dark like molasses or heavy brown corn syrup.  To fraction, or break down crude into component fluids, you boil it, under pressure, in a big tower called a cracking tower.  The higher up the tower you drain off the fluid, the different type of fuel you get.  I am truly simplifying here, but that is the process, more or less. 

Look at a cup of gasoline:  Sort of a watery feel and very aromatic, meaning it vaporizes quickly.  Pour out a cup of Diesel oil and it just sits there like tan coloured, thin, corn syrup and doesn’t smell much, meaning it isn’t as volatile as gasoline.

Then, as a comparison, pour out a cup of Coleman stove fuel, which is naptha, or white gas.  It is clear like water, light to the feel and seems to evaporate before your eyes.  Naptha is drained off almost at the top of the cracking tower.

Bunker Oil, which is even darker and nastier than Diesel, is for ship engines and big generators.  It is only about one step removed from the crude oil that comes out of the ground, with the obvious rocks, gravel and small animals filtered out.

Here’s the Rule of Thumb:  The thicker and darker the petroleum product, the less work it takes to refine, which means the less it costs to make, which means the less you can mark it up. This means the less profit you can make on the product. 

We now have two big industries, oil and automotive, who have, shall we call it, a vested interest in keeping North America away from Diesel power for their passenger cars, as long as they can keep dancing. 

The Philly Inquirer is a legit paper, unrelated to the National Enquirer, so this story has what could be called ‘truthiness’ to it.  Dan Rather is leaving at the end of the month after 44 years of working for the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Dan Rather is 74 and has been doing the news thing for longer than some of us have been alive.  The fact that he’s actually survived this long in television, is testament to something either creepy or very good.  Creepy, in that like Mike Wallace, there might be an oil portrait of Dan in an attic that is aging at an incredible rate. 

The reason Rather is heading somewhere else is slightly complex.  First was Memogate, the story on Dubya’s questionable National Guard service in the 70’s.  Seems someone didn’t do the fact checking and got caught in a complete fabrication.  As Rather was the Managing Editor, meaning the one at the top of the heap, it was up to him to double and triple check that there was more than one source for the allegations.  He didn’t and his ass went into the blades.  This does happen to reporters. 

It would seem that after that fiasco and his very public apology, the suits at CBS didn’t want him around anymore.  Rather was ‘older’ and didn’t appeal to the modern, hip audience that CBS wanted to attract.  Dan was benched.

The first time most people saw or heard of Dan Rather was as a reporter at the CBS affiliate in Dallas, Texas, on November 22^nd, 1963.  Yes, Dan goes back to the Kennedy assassination.  He covered the war in Vietnam, was instrumental in breaking the Watergate story wide open on television and was known as a reporter who would go anywhere, anytime, to get the story.  He would call a spade, a spade, or a thief, a thief, to their face and dare the subject to speak back. 

Richard Nixon called Rather a ‘cocksucker’ on the Watergate tapes.  Nixon also thought Henry Kissinger was a nice guy, so we can discount Nixon’s dislike of Dan Rather, as delusionary brain wobbling.  Rather was almost as good as Mike Wallace at the door-buster piece.  He’s storm in with a camera crew, jam the microphone under someone’s face and fire away, just letting film (or tape) roll, to show the subject squirm like a bug on a hotplate. 

Dan Rather interviewed kings, queens and heads of state, sometimes blowing rainbows up their ass, sometimes kicking ass and taking names.  His reporting from the Gulf Wars I and II, were solid, real, pieces of actual reporting, something sadly lacking in today’s pseudo-journalistic cloud of fear, uncertainty and doubt.  Even Walter Cronkite respected Dan Rather.  But CBS didn’t.

This is the bad part.  Look around the dial for actual reporters next week, preferably reporters who are under 40 years of age.

Anderson Cooper?  Please don’t make me laugh, my lips are chapped.  You can see the wires that hold him upright and move his mouth.  If Jim Henson had ever designed a reporter, then that’s what came out of the workshop. 

John Roberts?  I remember JR at City-TV doing “The New Music” on a set the size of my bedroom, playing videos from Dire Straits.  He’s got all the journalistic credibility of Billy Mays for OxyClean.

Shep Smith?  He’s got a good last name, but he works for FOXNews for heaven’s sake, which means he has as much to do with journalism, as I do with Economic policy in the Czech Republic. 

The rest of the heads are just that, talking heads.  I’m including Katie Couric, who might have journalistic chops, but has no hardcore reporter background that I can find.  She’s a superlative interviewer and will do much to make CBS Evening News vaguely watchable, but not quite enough for journalism.

TV reporters, to my standard are:  Cronkite, Rather, Peter Jennings, Matthew Halton, Adrienne Clarkson in her fifth estate days, Marty Seemungel, who broke the first Somalian famine stories internationally, Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace and occasionally Lou Dobbs. 

The rest are meat puppets.  For some of the current crop of ‘reporters’, if the prompter said “Oooga Booga Bweedelah Bweedelah…I wet my pants…We’re being attacked by spiny blue hedgehogs…Mommy didn’t love me…”, then that is what would come out of their mouths, with the appropriate intonation and mock-seriousness.  Preferrably the reporter will have one hand to their earpiece to give statements of mindless nonsense the correct gravitas.

New Orleans has decided to go ahead with some much needed repairs to their city proper.  The levee system is under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers and rebuilding there has been running as fast as possible since the water was drained.  It is the other parts of New Orleans that are now up for fixing. 

Ray Nagin has been reelected handily, with a reasonable plurality.  Now the local government is going ahead with demolition of areas that are too far gone.  The city is calling in sweaty guys with heavy equipment and bad socialization skills to destroy everything left standing and cart away the rubble.

This is extreme, but with whole neighbourhoods rendered uninhabitable, restoration is not practical in many circumstances.  Pull it down and start over is heartbreaking, but does make sense.  There is too much damage to fix. 

For their first trick, the New Orleans city government and the federal Housing and Urban Development agency will bulldoze three or four big public housing projects.  Everyone has to leave now, take what few possessions they have and go someplace else. 

The replacement housing will take at least two years to build.  It will be ‘mixed use’ housing.  Mixed use means of 500 units, two might be allocated to poor folks, but only if they scream.  The rest will be gentrified, near-downtown, elegant housing for those who can afford the tab.

There are, as best I can tell, no plans to flatten whole swaths of the middle class and wealthy areas.  The well-off can afford to contribute to political campaigns, which means they might turn off the money if we forcibly relocate them and drive an eleven-ton Catepillar D-6 over the mouldy, smelly, overgrown, decrepit remains of their housing.

Scratch that; the well-off don’t have housing, they have homes.  Poor people have housing, which isn’t nearly as important as destroying someone’s home.  Since these are poor people being uprooted and Ray has his job back for a few years, the authorities can screw them over with impunity, which is exactly what they are going to do. 

In two years time, when the housing is ready for occupancy, the seven or eight thousand people who have been shoveled off, will have resettled in another city, or be so bereft of any kind of resources to protest, that things will just naturally progress without much fuss. 

Years ago in Ottawa, around 1960, we had an area near the Supreme Court, called LeBreton Flats.  It was a poor, rundown, blue collar neighbourhood.  The National Capital Commission owned the land and decided that a slum, housing four or five thousand people near the Parliament, was not a good thing for any number of reasons.  Primarily aesthetic but also because, well, Ottawa doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have poor people that you can see.  The NCC decided to raze it all.

The NCC promised to build new houses for the people they were going to displace and to their credit the NCC did.  A couple of hundred truly ugly townhouses went up to replace the nearly two thousand they were tearing down.  Notice the numbers weren’t the same?  Well, I guess some of the people here will just have to, oh, move somewhere else, preferably far, far, away.

The NCC then sat on the land for nearly thirty years, mowing the grass once a week and letting the occasional festival trample the lawn.  When Pope John Paul II visited Ottawa in the 80’s, they put the temporary stage on LeBreton Flats.  A couple of years ago they built the Canadian War Museum on a piece of the Flats.  There is a bus transitway that bisects the area and that is about it.  No housing.  No businesses.  No apartments.  No greengrocers.  No pubs.  No shoe stores.  Nothing was put back. 

The people who used to live there?  A lucky few got to move into the 1960’s vintage ready-made planned community next door.  If you look at the history of the Flats, the replacement housing they originally hoped to build, and got agreement to, was quite nice for its time.

What was actually built, due to unforeseen budget constraints that magically appeared, was a well-planned, readymade concrete ghetto.  The rest of the people who used to live in LeBreton Flats?  They scattered to the winds.

Will New Orleans try the same thing?  In a years’ time, when all the poor folks who used to live there are scattered all over the southern US, New Orleans will have to ‘study’ the land.  Then do an ‘environmental assessment’ and an ‘economic analysis’, followed by ‘public consultations’. 

I can even write the last chapter on public housing in New Orleans, specifically the areas that are going to be torn down.  Ready?  The city does not want to interfere with free enterprise.  We need the tax base to support our rebuilding process.  The land use must be market driven.  The magical government code word is, market driven, meaning bend over and grab your ankles.

The undertext to the people who used to live there?  Don’t come back.

The US General Accounting Office has conducted its first audit of the Federal Emergency Management Agency disbursements from Hurricane Katrina.  Their findings have included some fascinating accounting, um, feats. 

As you might remember, a few days after the wall to wall coverage of Katrina, FEMA was handing out debit cards, preloaded with cash, to the disaster victims.  The ostensible idea was sound:  Here’s some cash to cover immediate needs, since you’ve lost everything.  It would seem that ‘immediate needs’ for people are different. 

Champagne for one need.  Dom Perignon bought at a Hooters in San Antonio, to be specific.  For God’s sake, man, not at a Hooters.  They have no idea what temperature to serve it at and I sincerely doubt that they have the correct flutes for the proper enjoyment.  Then again, considering it was at Hooters, I also sincerely doubt it was a proper vintage year (1999) or was accompanied by a proper serving of Sevrugia Caviar.  Peasants!

There was some appreciation of the cinematic arts with the FEMA money.  Specifically, copies of that major film work, “Girls Gone Wild Part XIV”  It is important to recognize the cinematic oeuvre of the director, Snoop Dogg, that despite the scope of the disaster that Snoop Doggs’ standing as an auteur and cineaste must still be controversial and forward looking.  Or, they just wanted to see drunk college girls showing their tits.

The New Orleans Saints NFL club was also the recipient of season ticket holders preferring to use federal funds, instead of their own money, for five seats.

Naturally, the legal profession was represented well in the disclosures.  Divorce lawyer Mark Lipkin said he didn’t remember anyone using a FEMA debit card to pay legal fees, but the General Accounting Office had the paper.  Someone paid off $1,000 worth of their bill with FEMA bucks. 

There were the usual finagles.  Someone took off to Hawaii and billed FEMA for accommodation.  Another person went to Punta Cana in Puerto Rico on the federal dime.  Enterprising federal inmates managed to get their hands on the FEMA money too, usually listing a graveyard or a post office box as their destroyed dwelling, pleading for assistance.

It is not surprising that there were fiddles with the FEMA money.  Even the best-run program of funding has a percentage of skim or shrinkage in it:  That is just the way life is.  My only complaint was the sheer mundane tedium of the fraud.  Holiday trips, titty videos. booze and season tickets to a fourth rate football team? 

I want to see the kind of fraud that would make the General Accounting Office stand up and applaud your audacity, your verve and your relentless, single-minded devotion to milking the FEMA tit as dry as Phoenix in August. 

Remember, your audience is Congress and the Senate, where accepting free flights to exotic destinations and briefcases of cash from lobbyists and political action committees is considered part of their divine right of Kings.  Anyone can steal a few thousand bucks, but it takes a real patriot to steal millions.

The innocent victims of Hurricane Katrina showed no spunk, no imagination and no skill.  That is just un-American.  Show some fire, some gumption and some sense of style!  Be a real patriot and bill FEMA for millions of dollars.  Haliburton does.  Blackwater Security does.  Bechtel does.  They never wind up in front of the General Accounting Office, looking at 10 to 20 years for federal fraud.  But I bet the poor mook who bought a six pack with his FEMA cash gets 10 years in the can for his $4 fiddle.

When I get up in the morning, usually around 0600, one of the things I do is turn on the TV to catch some planet-wide news.  As the coffee brews I watch three or four channels:  CNN, The Weather Network, City-TV and CBC NewsWorld, also known as WallyWorld.  Over ten or fifteen minutes I get brought up to speed on the usual global nightmares as well as the local hidousness.  The coffee finishes, I get into the shower and the day begins.

We’ll use this construct as a way to explain how the various media outlets cover things.  Here’s the mythical story:  India blows up.  One big, smoking hole exists where 1 billion people used to live.  No reason, it just went foom, overnight. 

CNN, the Ted Network.  News hors d’ourvres.  Nothing too deep and everything with an American bent.  There might be 30 seconds of coverage.  “India is a smoking hole, one billion dead, but now, Miles O’Brien with live coverage of a man in Indiana with a cashew-shaped melanoma”.

City-TV is relentlessly local.  If India blew up, they’d do a live shot from an Indian restaurant downtown and have an Indo-Canadian youth league hockey team on as guests.  “How does it feel to take the ice as an Indo-Canadian kid knowing your whole country has been blown to bits?”

The Weather Network is what is called wheel programming tv.  Every few seconds the wheel advances and they cover whatever nonsense is indicated on the wheel.  “It is eight minutes after the hour and now we’ll show you the pollen forecast for Newfoundland and Nunavut.  Next, India blows up, then your local golf forecast.”

 FoxNews, unfortunately, we get up here:  “Karl Rove is a free man after the liberal Democrats realized that he was completely innocent.  Hear that Liberal Tax and Spend whiners?  Completely Innocent!  And a billion brown people blew up overseas somewhere.  Next Ann Coulter and more of her brilliant insights into the real reason the Democrats want to force your daughter to have an abortion…”

BBC World Service would do a creditable job, with live shots from the edge of the smoking hole, world reaction from leaders everywhere, including some you never knew existed, like the Prime Minister of Madagascar.  For the record, it is Jacques Sylla. 

Local commercial TV, aside from City-TV would be along the lines of “On Oprah, Women Who Fake Orgasms, on Dr. Phil, Men Who Fake Bowel Movements.  Then, Action News at Six with a fascinating story on the potential shortage of sari cloth and taxi drivers in the GTA since India blew up.”

My favourite, however, is CBC NewsWorld, or as it is known, WallyWorld.  The original aim was to have a 24-hour news operation for Canada, along the lines of the BBC World Service.  With budget cutbacks and the sheer lack of anything happening in Canada most of the time, WallyWorld is left to fill a 24 hour gaping news maw, fill being the operative word. 

This morning, with the NHL playoffs winding down, WallyWorld took eleven minutes to interview the guy who runs the concessions in the RBC Center in Durham, North Carolina.  Deeply probing questions flew like wheat stalks at harvest time:  “Which of the wigs is the most popular among the fans?  The red ones ma’am.  They seem to really like the rainbow ones too.  Do you sell many Edmonton Oilers’ shirts?  Not really ma’am.  May I please try on your most popular fan wig?  Sure.  Thank you.  Now back to the studio…”

Some mornings I just want to watch radio.

Note for our American readers:  RBC is the Royal Bank of Canada.  TD-Waterhouse Center is the Toronto Dominion Bank.  The other one you see down in the US are BMO and CIBC.  BMO is Bank of Montreal.  CIBC is the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.  We own your arena names.