kimmy

What "technology" are they supposed to share? Is Toyota supposed to hand over a complete set of blueprints for a Prius? I hope the industry pulls out. If Hugo wants to bring in the Chinese, Russians, and Belorussians, good for him. Venezuelans can look forward to a Chery in every driveway and a chicken in every pot, I guess. -k

Am I mistaken, or is natural gas almost entirely used in fleets of municipal vehicles? I'm sure the only place I've ever seen the LNG logo is on large vehicles owned by the city or the university, vehicles which it seems to me don't have much reason to leave the city anyway. Why would LNG fuel stops on the highway be needed? -k

Christians do get tortured in the Muslim world. Lots of other people get tortured in the Muslim world too. The Muslim world is, by and large, a piece of crap. -k

I think it's entirely possible that she was playing along. Or maybe not. -k

"I'm not interested in seeing it" and "I doubt it's any good" are two different things. There are lots of movies, shows, and actors that I personally have no interest in watching, despite widespread claims that they're "good". AW's disinterest in this clip wasn't an assumption about the quality, it's statement of her lack of interest in Palin. I don't see why this is such an issue for you. Good effort by Palin, but her delivery was more "press conference" than "beat poetry." She should have at least attempted to look like she was reading from the book. "The Shat" dominates the stage, as usual. -k

I also would like to wish all of my friends here a very kimmy Christmas. -k

I don't agree with the idea that women who opposed Palin were the same women who opposed Hilary. Some of Palin's harshest critics were Hilary's biggest supporters. When Palin applauded Hilary for making "18 million cracks in the glass ceiling" or something like that, Hilary supporters were outraged. "How DARE she compare herself to Hilary Clinton!" I think there was a sentiment that Palin was getting for free something that Hilary had worked her ass off for. Or worse, that Palin was just a cynical attempt to cash in on support that Hilary had built. I think a large number of people believed that Hilary Clinton was a woman who had enough merit to be President, and that the same people felt that Palin was a "token", an affirmative action pick, someone who was there because of politics, not merit. Conversely, there were women (conservatives and the elderly in large measure...) who disliked Hilary and thought Palin was terrific. Palin represents something closer to a traditional idea of a woman, for some people. Hilary is a dedicated career woman who had a child, Palin is a dedicated mother who pursued a career... or something along those lines. I also think that a lot of women who were indifferent initially found themselves wanting Palin to succeed when they saw the way the press went after her. All that aside, there is a kernel of truth in what you're saying. There are adages like "women are their own harshest critics" and "women are their own worst enemies", and I think there's some truth in it. I do recall seeing that Palin had much higher approval among men than among women. (I think that women who'd support a woman candidate sheerly for feminist reasons would probably be put off by Palin's pro-life believes and be voting Democrat, anyway.) I recall hearing about a study trying to figure out how people view male leaders vs female leaders, and finding that men tend to be more receptive to a male leader than a female one. Oddly, they found that women felt exactly the same. All things being equal, both men and women are more receptive to a male leader. Personally, I was hoping that Palin would be a good candidate... I clung to that hope even after it became apparent that she wasn't. Disappointing. I'd also hoped that Hilary would do well. I'd also hoped that Belinda.ca would do well. I find myself thinking that if Hilary couldn't do it, we probably won't see any other woman get as close for a very long time. Not in the US, and not in Canada either. -k

Is there such thing as a right-leaning comedy show at all? I'm sure many would suggest that Rush Dimbaugh qualifies, but I'm referring to intentional comedy. Out of curiosity, who? The only celebrities I can think of who are well-known for being conservative are... uh, Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper. Other than that, there's the 3rd most popular Baldwin brother... ... I can't really see The Nooge, Alice Cooper, and Bud Baldwin putting together some sort of political satire comedy revue. Anyway, SNL and the Daily Show and similar are not really out to advocate for a point of view, they're out there to provide funny satire of current events. Obama and the Democrats have been the target as well. I think Obama is just inherently less easy to make fun of than Dubya was. -k

He is human, and should remain in areas with "greater density" areas with the rest of the humans. His extra home on Quadra Island is despoiling natural space that could be used for nesting by pygmy spotted owls. Indeed. The buttholes object to people commuting farther than a few blocks to get to work... and yet here he is, with a superfluous second residence whose only purpose is to be far away from where he works. You can't argue that humans must strive to live in "greater density" and then turn around and live in a spare house on Quadra Island so that you can get away from all that icky density. What a crappy role-model this douchebag turned out to be. -k

I had more or less pieced things together on my own by the time I spoke to my parents about it. I don't recall feeling any disappointment at all. I thought it was nice that they tried to maintain the illusion. I was, however, extremely disappointed to learn that Santa is actually just a drunk-driving fat-ass who promotes an unhealthy lifestyle. -k

"There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers. They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away." Indeed, Obama's victory was not a landslide, and depended on "the swing bloc" deciding "you know what? I'm sick of the way things have been going... I want to give the new guy a chance." Daley seems to be arguing that a lot of the swing voters are regretting the decision. However, the elections are 10 months away, and the presidential election is 34 months away. Voters being unhappy with where things are at is one thing, presenting an alternative is another (Canadian voters are familiar with this... Stephen Harper doesn't seem like a very appealing Prime Minister... until you compare him to the alternatives.) Right now, Obama is opposing a theoretical opponent whose only identifying characteristic is that he is not Obama. If the Republicans accidentally pick their own version of Michael Ignatieff to lead the party (or picture a right-wing version of John Kerry, or something equally disasterous) then that "swing bloc" could start swinging back the other way pretty quick. -k

I first saw her in Clueless, when I was just a kimlet. I last saw her in Sin City, which is probably the last thing most people saw her in. (Aside from her long-time role as the voice of Luanne on King Of The Hill, of course.) -k

She's someone who used up her 15 minutes (hence the mention in this thread.) She was involved in some successful projects once upon a time, but lately has been paying the bills with voice-acting work for cartoons and video games. So I guess by your standards that would make her "very bankable." -k

Is that like when Reed Richards opens a portal to the Negative Zone to battle with Blastaar? Or is it more like the Earth Prime where Lex Luthor is the world's only hero, and has to save the world from Superman and Wonder Woman and Aqua Man? Or is it more like when Rachel Summers traveled back through time to get the X-men to stop the assassination of Senator Kelly, resulting in a new reality with a different time-line from the future she lived in? One thing I've learned from Star Trek is that time travel is going to be exceedingly common in the future, so if changing the past results in metaverses popping up left and right, we're obviously going to have to be extremely cautious. You'd hate to get stuck in the wrong metaverse when you're travelling time. -k

B-list actress Brittany Murphy has died at age 32 of cardiac arrest. Murphy began appearing on TV series as a 15 year old and had a considerable list of credits before she was 20, most notably as one of Alicia Silverstone's pals in Clueless. In the early to middle part of this decade, she appeared to be on her way to being on her way to success, with prominent roles in a number of movies. But something changed, and her career has not been thriving for several years, amid reports of drug problems and anorexia. She was recently fired from one production, and was reportedly such a trainwreck at another that she couldn't remember her lines and lost consciousness at one point. In recent photographs, she looks like a shell of the adorable girl with the megawatt smile that she used to be. Fruity celebrity blogger Perez Hilton is saying what everybody else is thinking: "We, and those who knew Brittany personally, saw this coming. That does not make this any less horrible." "Lindsay Lohan and Courtney Love take note: that could have been YOU!" As with Tiger Woods and cocktail waitresses (allegedly), so with Brittany Murphy and hard drugs (allegedly). I wonder what was missing from her life that she needed to ruin herself with narcotics? -k

Canada's left has been hoping for a long time that President Obama would give Prime Minister Harper a punishment that their impotent little selves have been unable to. They have such emotional investment in the idea that Mr Harper is an evil man and that some champion-- Mr Obama perhaps-- will smite him on their behalf. They are seeking any evidence to suggest that such a thing may be happening. -k

I too had no idea who Noelle Nikpour is, and had to Google for her. The first thing that greeted me was a picture of her dressed in a tube top and booty-shorts which she was peeling down. I'd think that one good rule of thumb for women who aspire to be taken seriously in fields of politics and business would be: keep your clothes on. However... I have no idea what the contents of this segment were. Can anyone illuminate the subject? I know that Comedy Central is rather protective of their content, so it might be difficult to find online. I haven't watched The Daily Show regularly for a long time (darned day job...) but Samantha Bee always made me laugh. edit: here it is. http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/best-of/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart--holiday-edition/clip247508#clip247508 Funny. Samantha Bee is priceless. "Woman, go take your pills!" -k

A discussion of who has it "easier" needs, I suppose, a discussion of what "easier" actually means. I'm not sure if that's very productive. There's lots of different metrics one could look at, and they often conflict, as we've seen. I'm not sure about "easier", but I doubt that future generations will have "more". I think obvious realities and basic math preclude the possibility. I think that claiming a stake of a decreasing supply of consumables that more people than ever are vying for is going to be an increasingly difficult burden. I think that the public debt is going to prevent the levels of government from providing the kinds of service that have been taken for granted in the past, or from providing the kind of guarantees that currently exist. I think the economic cost of current ideas about the environment are going to have far-reaching impact. I think that globalization is going to increase prosperity for the majority of people on earth... but not necessarily for us in North America. None of these things give me much optimism about what the next few decades are going to be like. If traditional economic ideas about progress are going to be the measuring stick, then I don't think the future is going to be very bright. But as you say there are other measures of "better" and "easier". People may have to alter their objectives and expectations. -k

It's not *their* business to look after Tiger's moral compass. That's Tiger's responsibility, nobody else's. I just did a little surfing and found that one of these women recently received a $100,000 "gift" from some other "sugar daddy"... it sounds like she's entirely clear what her business is in. Another of them is a popular porn-star... if Tiger really did hook up with her, I doubt it was because he had any illusions that she was in it for love. I recently saw a terrific feature on Andre Agassi on "60 Minutes". Andre Agassi is one of the most successful tennis players ever... and Andre Agassi HATES tennis. His father was an immigrant who had the idea that if his son became a tennis champion, it would be his family's ticket to the good life. And it happened. It had made Andre miserable but he never quit because he felt such pressure from his father and a sense of duty to his family. His tennis career brought them more than they could have ever dreamed of, but Andre himself found his life so unfulfilling that he was depressed and experimented with drugs because he didn't know how to fill the emptiness he felt. Things have worked out pretty well for Agassi, though. He met and married Steffi Graf, a kindred spirit (he hated tennis, she hated being famous, they're both much happier now.) And he's used his immense wealth for what sounds like some wonderful philanthropic causes. He got rich young, and figured things out later on in life. I don't know if it's easier or harder for someone to figure things out once they get rich... or maybe it just doesn't make a difference, and rich and famous people just figure things out (or fail to do so) in much more public ways than the rest of us. -k

I believe that public school education has been suffering due to budgetary constraints. You disagree, and have provided information that suggest that at least in Ontario funding has increased considerably. I don't think either of us is interested in going school-by-school and seeing whether they still have a full-time librarian, the music program was cancelled, and so-on. So why is it important if funding matches inflation rates? It's not a direct measure, but it can help us guestimate whether funding is keeping up with costs. Of course, costs depend on some degree on the number of students as well, so it's not a complete picture. Another reason I keep mentioning inflation is to keep some perspective that we're talking about long spans of time here and the value of dollars is not constant. If someone tells me that tuition cost him $1200 in 1991, and I know that my tuition cost me $5400 in 2006, I need to keep in mind that I can't just say my tuition cost me 4.5 times more. I can use this handy tool... http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/inflation_calc.html ...and discover that in real terms, it's actually just 3.5 times as much. Value. Things like class size and accessibility of instructors are commonly used metrics when quality of education is studied. Things like multiple-choice exams are sometimes pointed to as indicators of lower-quality education. Students today pay a lot more money, and they receive a product that (according to the educators quoted in the article) is just not as good. To me, that just doesn't jive with the claim some people here have been making, the claim that young people today have things so much better than their parents. Not necessarily. Less affordable doesn't necessarily mean less degrees if loans are available. We can still get the things our parents did... if we're willing to borrow heavily enough. Not that I'm aware of. However, the question isn't of "needs to" or "should". What portion of the price of education should be picked up by society as a whole and what portion should be picked up by each individual student is a complicated question, and I have no intention of getting into it here. What we've been discussing is the premise that young people today have been the recipients of unprecedented generosity. And that might be accurate if you view the world in terms of iPods and cell-phones and expensive clothes. But I don't think it's a complete picture if one factors in things like public investment in education. If young people today have things so good, how come going to university costs so much more than it did? How come a place to live is so much more expensive when they leave home? How about other things? I understand that Canada's finance ministers are meeting in Whitehorse this week to figure out the future of Canada's pension system. Any bets on whether my generation is going to have better pensions than yours? I know what I'm anticipating... -k

I don't think figures for one school board prove a point in general. Without knowing anything about the region you're in, how do I know if those increases cover enrollment increases? The increases shown in the 1990s don't even appear to cover inflation. The article does praise the McGuinty government for increasing funding a few years ago, and this appears to be shown in your figures. Figures for one school board don't convince me of anything. I'll spend some time later today looking for more comprehensive figures on education funding. I think they'll show the effects of balancing the budget in the 1990s. Improving technology? Yes, I had classes where thousands of students cram into an auditorium to watch the professor on a movie theatre screen, and you download assignments from the course website, and an army of teaching-assistants grade assignments, and exams are all multiple-choice. That doesn't actually support the idea that they're getting more for their increasing tuition fees. It kind of supports the view that they're getting less. No, that would be the test if I was claiming that post-secondary education was less accessible. What I'm claiming is that it's more expensive, and the test of that would be comparing graduate debt loads. Young people can still have all of the things their parents did... provided they're willing to borrow deeply enough. Where does that leave the idea is that young people today have more than their parents? Tuition has increased far out of proportion to inflation. The graph on this page includes an adjusted-dollars line for the University of Toronto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition (The rate of increase relative to inflation doesn't appear that steep until one realizes that the dollars scale is logarithmic, not linear.) At U of T at least, tuition has never been more expensive in real dollars than it is right now, and was never more affordable in real dollars than it was in 1980. That's just the University of Toronto, but I'm skeptical that other public universities in Ontario fared better, or that other provinces were much different from Ontario in that respect. -k

I think this opinion piece presents the argument I'm making (in regard to what "slaying the deficit monster" has done for education since the mid 1990s, which is pretty damning to the whole premise that "kids today have everything handed to them.") http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.11-policy-who-killed-canadas-education-advantage/ The editorial does focus more on post-secondary education, and does focus primarily on Ontario, but I suspect the same trends are probably similar across the country, and to K-12 school to some degree. None of this is to say that education isn't attainable. But if your son had attended school 15 years earlier, his loans would probably be a fraction of what they are right now. So I'm having a hard time buying into the idea that young people today are given so much more than their parents were. To me, it seems like the boomers had frugal parents but entered the workforce in an era of unparalleled prosperity... while today young people may have wealthy parents, but will face challenges that their parents generally speaking didn't have to confront. I mean, I've heard a number of times that this may be the first generation in North American history that is less prosperous than its parents, and I don't think it's just Gen-Y whiners who are speculating on that point. I think a lot of things point to it, from the burden of public debt to picking up the tab for environmental concerns to increased costs of fuel and housing. -k

And to misappropriate another of Churchill's famous lines: If a woman is not self-absorbed at 26, she has no heart... if she is still self-absorbed at 36, she has no ... wait, what was the question? Well, if I accomplished nothing else today, at least I bilked August out of $5. She's not really a character, August. She's mostly just a plot device. Like Curly's Wife in Of Mice And Men was sort of a character, but mostly just a plot device. She provides the background for Carl. The montage at the start, showing them growing old together, is a beautiful piece of film-making, but it's there to introduce you to Carl, not to Ellie. The background with Ellie tells us what Carl is *really* hoping to find in Paradise Falls (and it's not giant goofy birds or Charles Muntz.) The opening portion of the movie... from the very start, up to the part where the house achieves lift-off, was wonderful, IMO. They could have made it a short film and ended it right at the part where the house takes off, and that would have been just fine with me. But they didn't. The rest of the film, while to me not as enchanting as the could-have-been short film that opens it up, is an enjoyable action adventure starring one of the most unique heroes I've ever seen in a movie. And the part near the end, where Carl find's Ellie's adventure scrapbook and finds that she's filled the pages, for me that was waterworks, a genuine 5-kleenex moment. All EddieMurphayyyyy added to Shrek was schtick. Shrek was at its best when Mike Myers was being Shrek, and it came closest to going off the rails when Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy were doing schtick together. Asner doesn't do schtick in Up, and the movie is much the better for it. I gather the kids loved Dug the Dog; I didn't watch it with kids, but I loved Dug. Far more than that obnoxious donkey, for sure. Yeah, well Oleg HATES Quentin Tarantino! -k

I don't think anybody has suggested that artistic merit can be measured by box-office receipts (or record sales, or TV ratings.) If artistic merit were measurable by ticket sales, Michael Bay would be the new Francis Ford Coppola. He isn't. He's just a very very rich idiot. Still, you seemed to think box-office receipts were meaningful when you thought they supported your opinion of Tarantino... now, they're apparently much less so. Please don't; not on my account anyway. You've already decided you hate it; actually watching the movie isn't going to change your mind. I can't imagine how you read my comments about that movie closely enough to become interested in the movie, yet somehow didn't clue in that it was about costumed heroes. At face value, cartoon superheroes is a patently absurd concept. If this ridiculous concept didn't connect with people somehow, it wouldn't have taken off in the first place, and if it didn't continue to do so, it would have died off long ago. So the fact that this absurd genre has survived for at least 70 years (and might be more popular than ever) must mean something... it must say something about the audience that keeps it going. The Watchmen (the comic book series) made an effort to contemplate the genre itself and explore what the genre's continued existence might say about us. The Watchmen (the movie) made an ambitious if flawed attempt to bring the legendary comic book series to the screen. A movie about comic book superheroes is no more ridiculous than a movie about chess, a movie about other movies, a movie about a flying nun, a movie about a 50 foot tall gorilla, or a movie about a magical kingdom over a rainbow. But that's a whole 'nother thread. Many of his movies have violent scenes in them... however, I suspect if violence were the only draw, people would find movies with less of the talkie bits. You liken a movie to a porno because you assume there's a nude scene in it? I don't believe there's any nudity at all, though there is a 1.3 second sex scene, as a personal assistant (Julie Dreyfus) is momentarily shown providing ...uh, personal assistance... to the obnoxious director of the movie-within-the-movie. Is it really your position that a 1.3 second sex-scene makes a movie "fancy porno", or are you speaking figuratively? If one were to assume Tarantino's motivation were to create a documentary, then Inglourious Basterds would undoubtedly rank as a failure of colossal proportions. -k

Sometimes, an agnostic is just an atheist who got sick of arguing. -k