From the Dept. of National Pretensions

One of Canada's foremost national pretensions is that while we lack military heft and hard power, we are nonetheless regarded by other nations as central player in the world of peacekeeping.

Mmmm . . . Nope.

Woundgate

Did he bleed, and when did he bleed it? U.S. electoral politics is a strange thing indeed. Former presidential candidate Bobby Dole publicly doubts the quality and quantity of blood shed by John Kerry decades ago. The weird part is that a little while later Dole admitted that he actually kind of likes Kerry:

"There's respect there," Dole said Monady. "We were in the Senate together. But we're talking about the presidential race, and I tweaked him a little on the Purple Hearts."

So, there you have it folks. Dole doesn't actually have a problem with JFK '04. It's just that, you know, he wants him to lose the election. Our question is this: if you're telling everyone that the only reason you're going after the guy from the other party is because he happens to be the guy from the other party, then why bother going after him in the first place?

Land Without Math

Scientists discover tribe w/o any language for math. Tribe members are consequentially unable to perform the most simplistic arithmetic. The implication is that language preceds reason, rather than the other way around:

Prof. Gordon said the findings are perhaps the strongest evidence for a once largely discredited linguistic theory.

More than 60 years ago, amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that learning a specific language determined the nature and content of how you think.

That theory fell into intellectual disrepute after linguist Noam Chomsky's notions of a universal human grammar and Harvard University professor Steven Pinker's idea of a universal language instinct became widely accepted.

"The question is, is there any case where not having words for something doesn't allow you to think about it?" Prof. Gordon asked about the Piraha and the Whorfian thesis. "I think this is a case for just that."

From the Dept. of Stimulating Quotables

"Give me three lines from anyone and I will hang him".

- Joseph Fouche

Bobby Fischer Saga Continues

In this episode, Bobby applies for refugee status in Japan, gets married to avoid deportation, starts a blog and finds help from a Canadian who has clearly has not read this and who claims Fischer "has shown no signs of being unbalanced or mentally unstable at all".

Mistakes were made

Yassir Arafat has admitted that he may have made some mistakes lately. He didn't say exactly what those mistakes were, leaving us to speculate. Was it the billions of dollars he stole from his own people? Was it his support of vicious suicide bombers? It's tough to be hard on the guy; after all, who among us hasn't made honest mistakes like these?. Still, one can't help but think that, now more than ever, it's time for the ol' terrorist to hang up the kaffiyah.

School Ties

There's been some doings lately at the University of Toronto, the fertile soil from whose grand old professional faculties the Clapham Omnibus hath sprung. President Bobby Birgeneau, the superstar expat the school wooed, with much fanfare, from MIT a couple of years back recently accepted the top job at Berkely. This was a tremendous blow to the momentum of a school that has had a pretty good run over the last decade or so, but it looks like the powers that be are prepared to make the best of it. The governing council responded on Monday by naming a rather august interim president: newly retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci. Justice Iacobucci, or Iac Daddy as he's known around here, has been an extremely influential fixture on the Canadian jurisprudential scene for the last decade or so (he was on the high court for 13 years, but took a few years to get warmed up) and his moderate, consensus-building approach to some serious, fabric-of-society type issues has made him a favorite of the Clapham Omnibus. We also dig the fact that he was a law & economics scholar before being elevated to the bench and, just as importantly, is reputed to be a Blue Jays fan.

Also over at the ol' U, Toronto Life Magazine (For those of you stateside, think New York Magazine , but written by the staff of one of those free magazines you get on airlines.)did an interesting, if a little fawning, Profile of Roger Martin, the Dean of U of T's Business School.

Why is the Omnibus troubling our readers with all this? well, for one thing, it's our blog and we never promised it was gonna be good. But more importantly, if you're interested in the whole "how is Canada going to compete in the information based global economy" debate, which the Lord Chief Justice Carbunkle is, then U of T, the Country's biggest University, is worth paying attention to as, among many other things, a bellwether for how the country is doing in what Birgeneau himself called "the global brain redistribution". Both Birgeneau and Martin were considered big scores for the University and the Country, albeit Birgeneau considerably more so. Both of them did a good job,although in this case Martin's impact was far more noticeable. Birgeneau took off when a better job came along. Martin seems committed to finishing what he started (i.e. turning Rotman, the once floundering business school, into one of the worlds' top ten). Is there a lesson in all this? probably not. As with most things around the Omnibus, it's true here that you win some, you lose some.

Berman and Liberalism

The argument over the war in Iraq has become so tired, so butchered and distorted that it is almost impossible to articulate a resonable, fresh and insightful position. Any attempt to justify the war on anti-totalitarian terms inevitably meets with an assertion that Bush is himself a fascist to rival Il Duce and that the US and Israel are simply bastions of free market fundamentalism and militarism.

This line of argument is so blind, so historically and philosphically vacuous, that any rational response is likely to fall on deaf ears. No doubt the Bush administrations deceptions and falsifications have discredited the most ardent of liberals who ventured to peer through the veil of the Left's moral certainty/blindness and emerge with the notion that maybe there were issues at play which might outweigh concerns over american hegemony.

Still, consider this.

Welcome to the first blog of the rest of your life

The usual practice in these situations, we think, is too lay down an opening post explaining the blog's purpose, hopes, dreams and fears. How terribly un-Clapham-Omnibus-like. When you sit down next to someone on the subway, the first thing they'll say to you is usually "You're sitting on my jacket" or "Do you really have to sit here? there's a dozen empty seats on this car and I don't like the look of that pet ferret", not "Hi. My name is Terence Bringburger. I'm a 42 year old attorney from Sackville, New Brunswick, where I have a solo practice dealing mostly with Federal Dry Dock Subsidies Act issues. My wife is by profession a choreographer of medieval-themed dinner theatre and by passion a chronicler of geographic and temporal trends in scatological euphemisms. We have two children, one of whom is disappointingly dim-witted and the other obsessed with unionizing the local street bandits. We used to dream of one day retiring to a nice cottage in a small town, but eventually realized that anything smaller than Sackville would require an electron microscope to locate. We now hope to one day quit our jobs and run an on-line bed and breakfast."

So, here's the deal. This post explains nothing. We may post something soon about what this blog is interested in. Or we may just start posting stuff. If you've got any brains, and we're
already starting to doubt that you do, you'll figure out what's going on here soon enough.

Welcome to the Clapham Omnibus, Sucker.

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