Now Something Something Time Something Juxtapose

Kate must get tired of having her catchy titles ripped off, so I’ve used it in a rather more covert way that I think still gets the subliminal message across. And if it doesn’t, I’m not surprised. It’s late and I just drank a cup of Sleepy Time Tea.

The juxtapositioning begins!

Tourists, travellers may soon be fingerprinted

OTTAWA – Tourists and business travellers who require visas to enter Canada will be among those who will be fingerprinted under the next phase of the government’s biometric program, officials said yesterday.

“The intention is to capture everybody,” Deputy Immigration Minister Richard Fadden told a parliamentary committee.

“The idea is to increase our capacity to know who is in Canada at a particular point in time.”

That means any short-term visitor who needs a visa to enter Canada will have to submit fingerprints, which will be kept in a government database. The measure will also apply to anyone applying for a work or study permit, regardless of whether they need a visa to visit Canada, such as Americans and Europeans.

Tour operators and travel boards promoting the ’staycation’ this summer

TORONTO — Canadians may be trying on Stetsons instead of swimsuits during this sluggish summer travel season and opting to visit the Calgary Stampede or other attractions closer to home rather than flying to beaches abroad, tourism experts predict.

The tourism industry is setting its sights on budget-cautious Canadians by focusing campaigns on local tourism and promoting the so-called “staycation.”

“It’s very much speaking to the whole concept of staying at home and discovering a part of Canada that you don’t know about and discovering something within Canada that you didn’t know existed,” said Michele McKenzie, president and CEO of the Canadian Tourism Commission.

The Crown corporation recently launched a campaign showcasing the country’s “vibrant cities” and “tropic-like waters,” asking locals to share their secret summer getaways.

The Canadian tourism industry has been hit hard by the global economic crisis, with tour operators reporting their travel business down 15 per cent this year.

I understand the need, the desire for national security. But fingerprinting tourists and visitors? Is this the part where we spend millions on a new “biometric” database [stay tuned for that cost overrun coming to a department near you], followed up by the millions in “stimulus” funds for the hard-hit tourism industry? I mean, can’t we just catch the bad guys without scanning everyone’s fingerprints and sending them off with a “thank you for not bombing us”?

I see this is as a method of bottom-trawling fishing, where you heave a giant net into the water and keep moving until you fill the thing with the fish you want. The sharks, the dolphins, and whales all get caught up too, but hey, there’s more where that came from, right?

Now, before anyone says that this is all just a means of targeting certain “trouble” nations, or only those nations that require visas, a little skepticism is in order. Read that line above again:

“The intention is to capture everybody,” Deputy Immigration Minister Richard Fadden told a parliamentary committee.

In a more detailed article in the Globe and Mail, Richard Fadden said that the use of biometric data will be phased in over time, “starting” with countries considered to pose a higher risk to security. Eventually CSIS would like to get biometric information for all visitors, regardless of travel restrictions, which means the government [and others around the world] will soon be pushing these biometric data cards on everyone.

I call this the slippery slope of “national security”. It starts with national ID cards, moves to biometric data, includes RFID chips, and before you know it you’re looking at your “ministry” approved in-home security camera wondering how a guy named Eric Arthur Blair could have got it right sixty years ago.

I’d Like A Global Warming Burger. Heavy On The Baloney.

Actually, there’s no such thing as a global warming burger [or there might be, in some obscure part of the world, quite possibly in a vegan tofu shop where they synthesize burgers and name them ironically after our destruction of the planet], but a Burger King franchisee in the United States is in some hot water over a sign that reads:

GLOBAL
WARMING
IS BALONEY
DRIVE THRU OPEN 24 HOURS

Now, a person with a reasonable sense of humour might see that sign, chuckle softly to themselves, and move along. Even an unreasonable person might agree that that there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the simplicity of the juxtaposition. It may even be too blatant a joke for some people to really understand it. Perhaps like the elusive eyeball lint, one doesn’t quite see it unless it’s literally dancing across a movie screen in a dark theatre. But I digress:

What is amusing about the above “sign” is that the environmental movement, and in particular the global warming crowd, have quite literally made it socially unacceptable to drive your vehicle in situations not deemed absolutely imperative. This sort of “peer pressure” is exerted as a natural force through the mainstream popularization of “going green” as being some kind of zeitgeist for the techno generation [ironic, since we have never been closer to being cyborgs with our little iPhones and Blackberries].

So when a local Burger King, not exactly the brand you think of when you imagine virgin rainforests reaching out across Gaia, decides to put up a subversive sign which mocks not only global warming alarmism, but encourages you to sit in your idling car as you inch forward to receive that amazon-depleting burger, it deserves a good laugh.

Of course, Burger King headquarters didn’t quite see it that way, what with marketing and image control, and responsibility to the environment, and a thousand other reasons why the corporation wouldn’t want to be against the mainstream [although I have little doubt that Burger King would be in favour of whatever the mainstream happens to be, and a point in my favour is all the drive-thrus they built way back when sitting in an idling car wasn't an act of immorality].

As for the franchisee, a Memphis-based company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, MIC’s marketing president, John McNelis said:

“The [restaurant] management team can put the message up there if they want to. It is private property and here in the US we do have some rights. Notwithstanding a franchise agreement, I could load a Brinks vehicle with [rights] I’ve got so many of them. By the time the Burger King lawyers work out how to make that stick we’d be in the year 2020.

“Burger King can bluster all they want about what they can tell the franchisee to do, but we have free-speech rights in this country so I don’t think there’s any concerns.”

Perhaps by the year 2020 people will finally know whether global warming is “baloney” or not, and the Burger King lawyers won’t have to spend 11 years in court for naught.

Why Can’t Canada Buy A Mighty Military? Like Norway, For Instance

All we are sayyyyyyying…. is give the military industrial complex a channnnnnnnnnce.

Kidding aside, the economist produced the above graph. I rip it off with full disclosure as to it’s source in the above link. According to the short blurb, global military spending rose 4% last year to $1.46 trillion [still not even close to an Obama budget, eh?]. The graph is based on spending as a portion of population, and in Israel it’s $2,300 USD per person [and money damned well spent one might add]. But some of the names on the list are a little odd. Norway spends around $1,200 per person, and Denmark [building up for that fight with Canada for Hans Island] spends around $800 per person. Even the pot-smoking, red-light district toking Netherlands spends more than Canada does.

For our population of 33,212,696 [give or take a few recent babies], we spend a paltry $16,061,762,400 on defence, which means that every man, woman, and hippie spends $483.60 on our military. Compare that to the Health department that eats up $5,170 per capita. That’s 13.5% of our GDP!

Mark Collins also found this amusing back in 2006.