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Garth Turner's MPtv

There is one less Conservative MP in the Canadian House of Commons today. Garth Turner has been kicked out of his party because he expressed a little too well his views on climate change on his blog. So that’s the news reported by the media. Pretty good reason to go see his website in my opinion. So I did, and was really surprised by what I found.

On the front page, standing before his first weblog entry is a video of him explaining the events from his point of view, a video recorded a couple of hours before. Just below I found the weblog entry explaining the same thing in text form. After that there is a section saying he represents the voters of the Halton electoral constituency, west of Toronto, followed by a section devoted to web accessibility. Web accessibility!? Wow! I never thought I’d see that explained on an MP website one day. Impressing.

By searching a little deeper on the site, I found a section called MPtv Webcasts, from which came the video on the front page. By going there — videos are always fun! — I see a list of previous videos, and in the list the video from yesterday: “Interview with Elizabeth May, Leader of Green Party”. That interview was truly interesting.

I’m both surprised and impressed when I see what Garth has accomplished with his website. He is reporting on things that happens in Ottawa to the citizens he represents and to everyone else, not only his views but also those of others MPs, parties, and citizens. And, until today, he did all this under the nose of the most control-freak party in Ottawa.

Bravo Garth! I can only dream of seeing my own MP doing all this. And good luck as an independent.

Command-Shift-D Adventure

Today I was writing a message in Mac OS X’s Mail application. Then, like I always do these days, I put my mouse pointer over a word and hit the key sequence for Mac OS X’s built-in English dictionary: Command-Shift-D… Oops! I meant Command-Control-D… But too late, before having realized what I did, the message window disappeared.

It took me one or two seconds to grasp what was happening. The little activity indicator icon was spinning near the Sent Messages mailbox: the email was being sent! So I used the fastest method at my disposal to stop the operation and unplugged the ethernet cable on the side of my laptop. But in the end, against the computer, I was too slow and the message was already sent.

Well, that message to the Markdown discussion list was not particularly important, but I would still prefer if this sort of thing could not happen as easily. So I went to the keyboard and mouse system preference panel and customized that menu shortcut. Beside Mail’s Send menu item you can now read Control-Option-Shift-Command-D.

That makes me feel better.

Winning against guerilla warfare?

Sometime you happen find an article which fits pretty well with your opinion about a subject. Today, Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Sun, gives his own thoughts about the guerilla our soliders is fighting in Afganistan. Here are some excerpts.

Doesn’t anyone remember the Vietnam War’s fruitless search and destroy missions and inflated body counts? Don’t NATO commanders know their every move is telegraphed in advance to Taliban forces? Don’t they see what’s going on now in Iraq?

Did Canadian officers making such fanciful claims really believe Taliban’s veteran guerillas would be stupid enough to sit still and be destroyed by US air power?

Now, Canadian-led NATO forces are crowing about having finally occupied Panjewi. ‘Taliban has fled!’ they proudly announced. Don’t they understand that guerilla forces don’t hang on to fixed positions? Occupying ground is meaningless in guerilla warfare.

If something has to be learned from Vietnam War, and also from the war on Lebanon by Israël some months ago, it’s that it is very difficult to fight against warriors hiding on their own soil.

It’s even more difficult if the local population is on the side of the guerilla. So I ask, have we done enough to get the population on our side, and did it work? I think the answer to both of these questions is no. And because of that, I think our chances of a military victory against the Taliban are rather tiny.

What the west calls ‘Taliban’ is actually a growing coalition of veteran Taliban fighters led by Mullah Dadullah, other clans of Pashtun tribal warriors, and nationalist resistance forces led by Jalalladin Hakkani and former prime minister, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, whom the CIA has repeatedly tried to assassinate.

That’s something I was suspecting for some time: if the “Taliban” regained in force, it means that more people joined their fight against the occupants. But it’s better for NATO to say they are only fighting the Taliban and pretend there is no other insurgency groups involved.

The UN’s anti-narcotic agency reports Afghanistan now supplies 92% of the world’s heroin. Production has surged 40% last year alone. Who is responsible? The US and NATO. They now own narco-state Afghanistan.

[…]

Washington and NATO can’t keep pretending this is someone else’s problem. Drug money fuels the Afghan economy and keeps local warlords loyal to the US-installed Kabul regime.

So in other words, we are protecting narco-traficants in order to better fight the insurgents and the terrorists. Am I the only one who thinks this is absurd?

If I summarize, we are fighting the Taliban and other insurgency groups, have little support from the population, and need assistance from narco-traficants warlords in order to just hold our positions (because only a small part of Afgan territory is “under control”). I think the NDP is pretty wise to recommend immediate withdrawal of our troops.

On a side note: although it clearly doesn’t gives us a general portrait, there is a nice photography on our National Defence website showing Canadian soliders in the middle of a cannabis field in Afganistan. (via Dominion Weblog)

Who Stopped the Wayback Machine?

This story began when I visited the archive for my website from The Internet Archive. To my great surprise, I found out that the archive does not contain anything newer than March 2005. Since this correspond roughly to my last redesign, which changed the root page for a redirect, I first thought that it could be the cause.

But today, I look the archive for other websites and I can’t find anything archived beyond spring 2005. No archive beyond April 2005 for Apple or Microsoft, Google or Yahoo, Slashdot or Ubuntu, the CBC or the BBC.

So what’s happening? Maybe the answer is in their FAQ, which states:

Right now there is a 6-12 month lag between the date a site is crawled and the date it appears in the Wayback Machine.

Except that now we are at September; that would make 17 months, 5 months beyond 12.