Glenn Reynolds posts that Michael Moore is Panned in Canada:

“His journalism, in short, on the subject of Canada and Canadians, is nothing short of shoddy, manipulative and untrue. The same can be said for his journalism on his own country, and indeed on the terrible and complicated issue he purports to adjudicate.”

More accurately this should read Michael Moore gets panned by one newspaper in Canada, the National Post. - big deal.

Reading other Canadian newspapers the story is somewhat different:

Toronto Star
“A great documentary challenges social norms and demands reaction, and on that score Moore hits us right between the eyes.”

Edmonton Journal
“Michael Moore remains a welcome voice in the North American conversation, especially considering how stacked the deck has become. Even when he stumbles, he’s worth watching — and he’s standing pretty tall here.”

The Globe and Mail
“Moore’s documentary about gun control in the United States, won the Air Canada People’s Choice Award for most popular film of the Vancouver International Film Festival.”

There was one other negative review I could find, however, the reviewer’s offensive stereotyping of Americans borders on the racist:

The Gazette
“There will be an audience for a big fat proto-American slob who asks questions that are only tough in his own country. Everywhere else, he’s preaching to the converted.
It might only be me, sick to death of a country I love, but Bowling for Columbine feels as mean, ham-fisted and opportunistic as its subject. No one doubts the integrity of Moore’s mission, but I increasingly distrust his methodology.”

A new blog that should provide balance to War Blogging at first glance - seems to have a slight Libertarian bias.

- However, seems that the most excellent Max Sawicky is involved, so it must be OK!

No War Blog

After concerns raised by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), the New York Times changes its tune:

NYT October 30:
“drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers’, forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers.”

NYT October 27:
the “thousands” of demonstrators were “fewer people… than organizers had said they hoped for.”

Armed with a digital camera and inkjet printer, San Francisco artist Michael Koller is in the process of producing a unique photographic study.

He has taken thousands of sequential photographs of building elevantions along a 30 mile continuous route through San Francisco.

By editing these images to join up seamlessly he is producing one single continuous image.

Like many innovative art projects, this takes advantage of techniques that were previously unavailable. This is a project that would be almost impossible without digital cameras and imaging software.

seamless city - San Francisco - m.koller

The Epicentric/Vignette deal is interesting. Portals are about aggregation and CMS is about publishing. It links the portal and content management space and demonstrates that webservices will be a part of content management - no big surprise.

More interesting, however, is that this is the model that was innovated on a grass-roots level with hybrid RSS news aggregation and weblog publishing systems like Dave Winer’s Radio Userland.
Weblog publishing via standard XML based RPC API’s coupled with RSS aggregation are perhaps the template for all future enterprise content management systems.

On a secondary note, it is bad news for Plumtree, with Epicentric, their nearest rival, selling for $32M it proves that they will have to go way beyond the current portal space into EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) to validate their $70M market cap (already way below their peak of nearly $300M). To do this quickly will involve developing adapters into Enterprise apps. Much of this will require development that would be unnecessary if started later, as standardized SOAP API’s become more commonplace.

Vignette acquires Epicentric

I am an atheist - not an agnostic but a rabid, dogmatic, anti-believer. It is for this very reason that one of the newspapers that I regularly read, online, is the Christian Science Monitor.

In a country where money is tantamount to a religion, where corporations vote twice to fund both the GOP and the Democrats to ensure their interests are ‘marketed’ to the voters, the CSMonitor often provides a secular balance to the belief in free markets as the saviour of all.

The CSMonitor was founded by a Mary Baker Eddy in 1908 - before women had the vote. After being hounded by Joseph Pulitzer’s (who later endowed the Pulitzer prize) New York World as being unfit to manage her own affairs at 86, she decided to form a newspaper that would injur no ‘man’ and be a truly independent voice not controlled by “commercial and political monopolists.”

The anti-Pulitzer paper has now won 6 of the eponymous prizes.

The Christian Science Monitor

A couple of years ago I found myself in a large room in the National Gallery in London. The room was unusually empty except for a tall middle-aged man who was standing next to me, looking at the same painting. I was suddenly overcome with the smell of putrefying flesh and Sulphur as he broke the golden rule of farting (don’t break wind when there are less than three people in the room). I glanced round and it was none other than Charlton Heston, the star of ‘A Touch of Evil’, he blushed and promptly made a swift exit.

‘From my warm moist…’

So I finally went to see ‘Bowling for Columbine this weekend, and sure enough Heston himself appeared on the silver screen holding a rifle and bellowing ‘from my cold dead hands…’ - and a curious thing happened, I could have sworn I smelled putrefying flesh and Sulphur.

Michael Moore.com

So I couldn’t get a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times yesterday - which nearly ruined my weekend.
[Justine: "You failed to mention that your way of getting the paper yesterday morning was to stay in bed and hope that your girlfriend was going to find one in her non-white-yuppie neighborhood."]

Scanning through the San Francisco Chronicle, the article about the peace march in San Francisco listed a turnout of 40,000 - fairly big. But then the article lists the turnout in other cities round the world - 8000 in Berlin and 300 in Tokyo. Now these numbers would technically constitute a disaster for protest organizers - two countries, the only ones listed being coincidentally ones that the US has been to war against, could only muster a handful of protesters. So why mention these two cities? There were other marches this weekend - three times as many people protested in Sweden as in Japan and the US has never been to war with Sweden. Still, this omission is no big deal - 1000 people in Stockholm, so what.

In Sweden as in Berlin and Tokyo, winter is setting in and it’s hardly the marching season - freezing cold weather is traditionally a very effective way to dampen civil activism. Looking back a few weeks to the last days of summer and the picture is very different. At the beginning of October 1.5 million people took to the streets in Italy to protest war and in the same month, in London, 150,00 people attended one march. And these figures are conservative, they are the police figures which tend to be lower than the organizers’ estimates which are often more than double.

I don’t believe in conspiracies, so this is no gripe at a hidden agenda, just a quibble with poor journalism that serves neither portion of the political spectrum.

Guardian - UK Rally

UPI - Italian Rally

Christopher Hitchens lauds the American people’s patriotism and restraint after 9/11:

“He [Hitchens] was, however, slightly disturbed by Gornick’s suggestion that the increase in patriotic displays over the last 18 months was nothing more than collective insecurity masquerading as civic engagement. “In my day, Vivian,” he said, “we called it ’solidarity.’” Hitchens added–rather calmly, for a change–that none of the looting, pillaging, and persecution predicted after 9/11 occurred because people were acutely aware of the danger of turning into something completely antipodean to American values.”

Coming from the UK where the Victorian’s famously created the idea that children should be ’seen and not heard’, an American value that I particularly admire is the celebration of childhood. A large portion of American culture celebrates childhood. As such, the Washington snipers’ threat last week that no children were safe, produced an instinctive reaction of revulsion.

So two people have been arrested over the sniper attacks, and one of them is a 17 year old minor. Someone not yet deemed to have the responsibility to vote or drink but who could be held ultimately responsible for their own actions and be sentenced to death if tried in Virginia.

BBC - “US authorities plan to seek the death penalty against the two suspects in the Washington sniper killings.”

The execution of minors, children, is only legally sanctioned in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the US and - Iraq.

Robert Bryce wrote in Salon that “During his tenure as governor of Texas, Bush has overseen far more executions than any other governor in modern American history. During his tenure, 112 men and one woman have been executed. That’s nearly 20 percent of the 600 people who have been executed in the United States since 1976. Two of the men executed during Bush’s tenure — Joseph Cannon and Robert Carter, both of whom were executed in 1998 — were 17 at the time of their crimes.”

The US’s policy on capital punishment has often produced anger abroad, prompting Jack Lang, the former French Education minister to call George W Bush a “murderer.”

In 1999 the high court asked Solicitor General Seth Waxman - the Justice Department’s second-ranking law officer - to explain why the United States is not bound by the international civil rights treaty, which states: “Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age and shall not be carried out on pregnant women.”

“In 1992, the U.S. did ratify the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, but only after inserting a codicil disavowing the provision that banned the execution of minors. And the U.S. signed the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which also bans capital punishment for persons younger than 18 at the time of crime, but the Senate never ratified it.”

Every country but the United States and Somalia also has ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which bans the juvenile death penalty.

According to Victor L. Streib, dean of Ohio Northern University’s Law School.
“We may be in violation of international law,” he said. “But I wouldn’t expect to see U.N. troops in Virginia anytime soon.”

“The day before the first bombing run on Bhagdad during the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi TV showed a mass of Iraqi soldiers marching beneath the huge crossed swords of the Victory Arch, to the theme music from ‘Star Wars’.”"

Samir Al-Khalil’s book, The Monument, deals with the subject of monuments built by Saddam in modern day Baghdad.

Some of the details of these monuments are a perfect study in monstrosity. Take, for example, the above mentioned celebratory arch constructed in honour of the victory in the war with Iran.

“The triumphal arch is shaped as two pairs of crossed swords, made from the guns of dead Iraqi soldiers that were melted and recast as the 24-ton blades of the swords. Captured Iranian helmets are in a net held between the swords. And surrounding the base of the arms are another 5,000 Iranian helmets taken from the battle field. The fists that hold the swords aloft are replicas of Saddam Hussein