ian andrew bell

If I had a category on my blog called “cautionary tales for bachelors”, this would be the headliner story. It informs the wisdom of an increasingly common practise, whereby when you meet some reasonably attractive yet complex member of the opposite sex, you’re tempted to Google her name and/or look her up in Wikipedia.

According to Valleywag it seems that Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, has entangled himself where so many have been entangled before: in the gaze of the just slightly right-of-Hitler Rachel Marsden. While few of us were paying attention, Marsden happens to have vaulted her career from falsely accusing SFU’s swim coach of harassment after allegedly stalking him for months to a brief but uninspiring career at Fox News.

How the man smart enough to give us the crowd-sourced encyclopedia of everything was dumb enough to become caught in this web is beyond me.

Note to Jimmy: dude, you’re the starchild of Silicon Valley’s tech culture — lots of smart, good-looking women will probably sleep with you, I’m sure of it. There’s no need to dip into the looney bin.

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There’s a hole you could drive a truck through in U.S. economic development  and immigration policy, which represents a substantial competitive advantage for Canada in furthering its own economic development and the growth of its knowledge-based industries.  We are presently in a unique position to exploit that gap in understanding to our own long-term benefit, and give rise to a substantial economic shift benefiting the Canadian technology industry (among others).

Case in point:  Recently, Microsoft announced they would build a research and development centre in Vancouver, and in turn use that operation to recruit and nurture smart people from around the world who were being prevented from entering the US due to immigration hassles.  Microsoft said it as plainly as they needed to:  they had effectively tapped out the supply of smart software people trickling out of U.S. universities, and thanks to increasing costs and constrains imposed by the U.S. INS,  it was just too difficult to fill that void with educated foreigners ; both  which circumstances put U.S. -based tech companies at a pretty significant disadvantage. Read More

File this under the “insufficiently-developed sense of their own irony” category .. from the intrepid U.S. State Department, a handy guide for identifying misinformation and propaganda, and a clue into their establishment of a so-called “counter-misinformation team” sometime in 2005. Try to contain your laughter. The publication essentially blacklists a number of prominent internet sites as consistent sources of misinformation.

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Okay, maybe you didn’t hear it here first, but El Reg reported yesterday that someone among a crowd of “well-wishers” in Albania stole George Bush’s wristwatch as he glad-handed the throngs. Apparently embarrassed Secret Service agents can now bid for the watch on eBay. I’m just happy to be able to gloat. Watch the video and play “Where’s Waldo” with the kids at home.

** note: no one named Waldo is known to be responsible for this deplorable act of wrist-terrorism.

Anyone who was on my old FOIB list knows that I was an outspoken opponent of America’s two excursions in Iraq. Bill Moyers recently produced a documentary called “Buying the War” which should be mandatory viewing for hawks and doves alike. In it, Moyers exposes a complicity in the American Press that vectors into boosterism. In particular he discusses CNN chief Walter Isaacson’s memo instructing his reporters to balance negative news from Afghanistan with reminders of 9/11, so that the viewing public saw these in context of the fear and loathing inspired by September 11th:

“You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.”

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