Report & Comment. (Monday, Aug. 2)

PRESSING CONCERNS

Is Canada prepared for the mental-health toll on returning Afghan vets? (Walrus)

No time to lose eradicating nukes before terrorists get them. (Valerie Wilson Plame, Newsweek)

The silent killer of the world's oceans: likely CO2-related decline of plankton. (Der Spiegel)

POLITICS (1)

Iggy boasts of his Canadian public-school education - at Upper Canada College? (Jane Taber, Norman Spector, Globe and Mail)

Why some Dems think they can hold the House in November mid-terms. (David Corn, Politics Daily)

Michael Moore, auteur provocateur. (AP)

Michael Moore is right, progressives must hold Obama's feet to the fire. (Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News)

Big Business, meanwhile, vilifies Obama as captive of, er, progressives. (Politics Daily)

ECONOMY

Homeless tide sure to rise in Canada. (Nick Falvo, Toronto Star)

That Obama saved Detroit is nothing short of a miracle. (E.J. Dionne Jr., New Republic)

Why Russia thinks America is cool, especially Silicon Valley. (New Republic)

Bernie Sanders vs. the new U.S. plutocracy. "The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families!" (The Nation)

BUSINESS

Steve Jobs: Genius and jerk. (David Olive, Toronto Star)

Don't blame Amazon for the death of independent booksellers. (New Republic)

The new, make-or-break Chev Volt is GM's $41,000 all-electric lemon. (Edward Niedermeyer, NYT) 

The new Chev Cruze is promising of a GM revival, but will the market give it a chance? (Detroit Free Press)

BUSINESS BEHAVING BADLY

WH says it warned Canada's Enbridge on safety ahead of disastrous Michigan oil spill. (Detroit Free Press)

U.S. Justice Dept. joins civil suit accusing software giant Oracle of fraud. (NYT)

BUSINESS TREATED BADLY

BlackBerry-equipped trader at the Dubai stock exchange. (AP)

U.A.E. and Saudi to ban BlackBerry text messaging. (NYT)

FURTHER AFIELD

 
With cruising speed of 195 mph, the 918 Spyder is yours for a rumored 400,000 pounds. The forthcoming Porsche boasts four driving modes: Eco, Hybrid, Sport and Race. In its most economical mode, the 918 emits less CO2 than a Toyota Prius. (Porsche handout)

We suspect Adrian O'Reilly of Pickering is one of the 2,000 pre-orderers who convinced Porsche to go ahead with production of the 918 Spyder. (photo gallery) (Daily Telegraph)

Inception explained in Web commentary roundup. (The Mark)

Why is everyone so obsessed with Inception? (David Thomson, New Republic)

Octopus seer accurately called all the German games in the World Cup, and Spain as the tournament winner. (Reuters)

Paul, the psychic octopus who accurately called World Cup outcomes, has become a marketing phenom. (Der Spiegel)

Winners of the 25 worst children's-book proposals. (#1: Daddy Has An Itch. Mommy Smells Like Fish. A Child's Rhyming Guide to STDs.) (slushpile hell)

Note: James Carville: "'Poli' is 'many', and 'tics' are small bloodsucking insects. So there you go."

 

 

Right message, wrong messenger.

In a National Post op-ed, convicted fraudster Conrad Black sounds off about the U.S. criminal justice system that put him behind bars. Part of this is sour grapes, obviously, but Black is correct that the U.S. incarcerates far more people than other industrialized nations. Last I read, quite recently, is that close to 4% of the U.S. adult population is behind bars. The impact is ineffectual, of course, so far as reducing crime rates go. The net effect, as Obama has said, is to the turn people with minor infractions sentence to relatively short terms is to "professionalize criminals." True, once you've been consigned to hellish conditions for even a two-year stint, you pick up every bad habit imaginable. You feel society has given up on you. There might be some regretable justification for that if it reduced crime rates or made even a dent in the so-called "war on drugs." But it has not done so, obviously, after decades of this failed policy.

Black leaves a federal court in Chicago on July 24. (CP) 

Alas, the unapologetic Black is not the one to be credibly making this case. The man remains utterly unrepentent about his anti-social conduct. I don't believe the evidence presented at trial justified a conviction. Indeed, that's my feeling about "criminals" from the same era, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski and so on. They were moral cripples, to be sure, but also incapable of perpetrating the crimes with which they were tried and convicted. They didn't know their way around a balance sheet, or the ins and outs of setting up offshore tax havens. For those decidedly illegal machinations, they relied on masterminds, in almost all cases their chief financial officers, characters like Andy Fastow at Enron. And they wisely or inadvertently kept themselves ignorant of what exactly the Fastows were up to. They just happily raked in the ill-gotten proceeds. "Plausible deniability," a concept dating from Watergate in which Gordon Liddy and others kept Nixon in the dark, was operative here too.

Just the same, these tycoons are a disgrace to their families, their industries and countries, and to capitalism. The widespread distrust in America, especially, of big business traces to, in its most recent iteration, the moral vacacy of this lot. We were prepared to believe the worst of Lehman Brothers and the rest of Wall Street because so recently, less than a decade earlier, we'd endured the white-collar crime wave of the early 2000s at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia and, a little later, Black's Hollinger group.

In journalism, you can write things that are not accurate, but they are true. You can get some names and dates wrong, but the fact of the matter is true - veterans at Walter Reed were horribly treated, even if the initial reports got some minor facts wrong.

In business, you can be on the right side of the law, but still be manifestly guilty of chronic, large-scale anti-social behavior. Which is to say I can't weep too heavily over Black's internment at the Coleman Federal Correction Institute in Orlando, because of his near life-long abuse of investors. The fact he continues not to recognize a scintilla of his career-long disregard of others' legitimate ownership rights as fellow investors in service to his self-aggrandizement is the mark of a morally and intellectually impoverished man. There's no law against that, nor should there be.

But it is ample cause for ostracizing such people, and paying scant heed to what they have to say in their self defence. In such cases, contrition is a pre-condition to taking seriously a felon's protestations of unfair treatment by the law.

I was to have written about the latest turn in the Black saga when Life intervened and a "crisis" nursing-home bed opened up for my mom, on which we had 48 hours to act. What would I have said about Black, whose story hasn't changed in its essentials since he stole and sold exam results to fellow students prior to being expelled from private school through to his harsh rendezvous with U.S. justice in 2007, had I not had to abruptly down tools?

I would have written, probably, that we already have expended far too much ink and pixels on this story. Robert Caro has committed most of his adult life to understand and explaining the life of LBJ. And just so. Johnson brought about Medicare and Medicaid and a well-intentioned if poorly executed "War on Poverty," and also committed his country to an unwinable confict in Southeast Asia that from the get-go was not in America's national interests. His is a fascinating story of human nature. The man was a bundle of conflicting emotions and motives. And he was president during one of the most tumultuous times in modern U.S. history, to which the current neo-con movement can be traced as a counter-reaction. It's a man and a period in American history that deserves the decades of examination that an historian of Caro's skill has devoted himself.

In contrast, Conrad Black is an all-too-ordinary fellow. Like a cheap fragrance, he tells his enitre story on first encounter. Why he continues to fascinate so many Canadians - inciting both their anger toward him and, to a lesser degree, their sense that he is wronged man - says far more about us than him. So let us have no more books by or about Black. If there's a volume still to be written, it's about this curious, enduring interest we have in a person of such slender accomplishment, neither a Dreyfus-like victim of injustice nor a Clyde Barrow of manifest malevolence. Just a simple sod who holds fewer lessons about life than I can glean from a study of my wing chair.

Why I love Toronto. (Pt. MCM XXIII)

 
Caribana celebrants in downtown Toronto yesterday. (Toronto Star) Not to take a thing away from the delightful costumes above, but these are a mere hint at the apparel extravaganza that comes later in the festival. When it comes to people-watching in the world's most multicultural city, it doesn't get better than this. And it's free of charge to celebrate with these folks who've come from all over the Western Hemisphere. Just tote your lawn chair and park yourself on the sidewalk of the parade route.

We're in the midst of Caribana, the world's largest annual celebration of Caribbean culture, going stronger than ever after several decades. Yesterday's crowd is estimated at between 1 million and 1.1 million. The three-day event includes a spectacular parade in the downtown core, and a competition to determine the best costumes. In many cases, participants spend months devising their costumes. I wouldn't want to be a judge, unless I could pick at least 20 first-place winners.

Sure beats the recent G-20 confab, and infinitely more important to our city.