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john_l_jarvis@hotmail.com; my PGP key
Mr. Pierre Poilievre, M.P.
Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
Dear Colleague:
Thank you for forwarding copies of recent letters from several of your constituents regarding possible amendments to the Copyright Act (the Act).
In my view, the Act must continue to be supportive of innovation and research while reflecting current technological and legal realities. To this end, a balance between adequate protection for copyright holders and reasonable access to copyrighted material is critical.
With this in mind, I am working closely with my colleague, the Honourable Bev Oda, Minister of Canadian Heritage, to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to copyright reform.
Please be assured that I am very mindful of the concerns expressed by your constituents, and will take these into consideration as we move forward.
Sincerely,
Maxime Bernier
c.c. The Honourable Bev Oda, P.C., M.P.
Labels: canada, copyright, political system
¶ 9:09:00 PM (0) commentsThe brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, similar to the neural machinery for learning language, according to Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser... Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others.
Labels: heinlein, psychology, science
¶ 8:40:00 PM (0) commentsDion said it was parliamentary tradition for MPs to follow party line on confidence votes such as budgets.
"A vote on the budget, like a vote on a throne speech, is a vote of confidence. You cannot vote against the caucus on it."
Labels: canada, political system
¶ 8:56:00 PM (0) commentsFear causes flaws in our perceptions, which leads to erroneous thinking and conclusions. For instance, a study conducted by the EPA found that the public's top environmentally related health concerns included radioactive waste, radiation from nuclear accidents, industrial pollution of waterways, and hazardous waste sites. Yet, when the EPA polled its own experts it got an entirely different list of concerns. Radioactive waste and radiation from nuclear accidents were not even ranked, and some of the public's lowest concerns, for example indoor air pollution, were ranked "high" by experts...
Labels: environment, psychology, science
¶ 10:07:00 PM (2) commentsMy concern has always been that before one can form an opinion, one needs facts--as wide a spectrum of facts as possible. I’ve found that mainstream media selects the facts to bring people to think and look in a certain way; and that was not only incomplete, but a disservice to the reader... I’ve tried to bring those facts which were selected out, and put them together in a coherent way...
[A] very recent example is Lebanon. The hue and cry in the western media... that Hezbollah is radical, that it’s a proxy for Syria and Iran, that it’s threatening Israel, threatening Lebanese democracy. The statements that I’ve heard out of the White House, from Ottawa and Paris constantly reiterate democracy, democracy. I thought, this is a totally artificial debate, which can have dangerous consequences, so I did a piece last week, called the “Democractic Deficit in Lebanon.” I just brought the facts to show that when you have a dictated arrangement--dictated by the US and Saudi Arabia--on the Tyre Agreement, where they have allotted 64 seats to Muslims, 64 seats to Christians on a sectarian basis and you haven’t had a census in the country for 75 years... [E]veryone who has done estimates based on the official figures has come to the conclusion that the Christians today are about 35 per cent of the population. Even the sectarian democracy that they’ve imposed does not reflect the true sectarian makeup of the society...
I wrote about Palestinian rights and Palestinian suffering at the same time as I wrote about South African [a]partheid, and the legitimate rights of the South African majority. I suppose the South African consulate in those days did call my editors once in a while, but since I could not be silenced on my facts, what the paper did was allow colleagues of mine to peddle the official line. So on one page--mostly in the business section--articles [there] were praising the [apartheid] system as a free economy and a bulwark against Communism and an outpost of the free world[, while] I was writing about the Freedom Charter... about exclusion, which was also part of the reality. So you had in the same paper... two views. And I appreciate that. I think newspapers in a free society should reflect the diversity of views.
Labels: bias, canada, journalism, middle east
¶ 11:58:00 AM (0) comments,
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