I discovered OpenPolitics.ca while reading about the leader of Canada’s Green Party suing several web sites for defamation. I haven’t looked into it in detail yet, but it looks promising so far.

One of the first things I’ve investigated is their
Political Personality Quiz, which is very much like the one at Political Compass which I wrote about earlier, except that it has 6 axes instead of two. According to my results, I’m an “Anti-Nationalist”, which is a harsh-sounding term, but the writeup describes me pretty accurately. Further down they give an “alternate nickname” of “post-nationalist”, which I think is a better name: it implies that nationalism is a obsolete system rather than a bad one.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more from this site in the future.

I can’t say too much about this Dilbert Blog post or it would give away the ending. I’ll just give you a hook; you’ll have to read it for yourself.

Imagine you could make fuel out of poor people.

From the blog of Scott Adams, the guy who made it rich poking fun at the repression of free will.

Before the whining begins, allow me to answer the question so many of you have on your mind: Why do I continue to blog on this same worn-out topic of free will?

The real answer is that I have no choice.

Here’s your bit of meta for today:

I’ve come to rely on other people rather than RSS feeds to point out the really important stuff to me.

From I Need Smart RSS by Bruce Eckel

My aunt and Laura and I went to see The Yeomen of the Guard at the Pumphouse Theatre last night. For a small community-theatreish production, it was performed really well, and we all enjoyed it.

A bit of humor occurred during the intermission, when a member of the theatre group announced that the next production the group was doing was the play No Sex Please, We’re British… to which he embarrassingly added “and, uh, we’ll leave that one right there”.

I snickered. “No Sex Talk Please, We’re Canadian.”

Calgary, where I now live, is the cleaneset city in the world.

Well, at least out of the 215 surveyed. I know firsthand that there’s more smog in Calgary in the summer than there is in say Saskatoon (the city where I grew up). Obviously not ever city in the world could be included. Still, that’s pretty impressive.

Vancouver is the best overall city in Canada and tied for third in the world (with Vienna, behind Zurich and Geneva). Calgary came in at 24 worldwide behind the Canadian cities Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. I haven’t seen the actual report yet to analyze further; all the third-party reports I’ve seen quoted the winters as being negative factors in the Canadian cities’ ratings (and thus Vancouver’s high score).

The differences aren’t severe. With New York serving as the base of 100 points, Calgary scored 103.6, Toronto 105.4, and Zurich 108.1. Baghdad, the worst city, got 14.5… so what’s 8 points among friends?

Lastly, the linked article took an obligatory pot-shot at the USA:

Every Canadian city scored better than all the U.S. cities surveyed.

I generally don’t like America-bashing (especially by Canadians, for whom it’s more “me too!” than expressing valid grudges), but I figure that since I put up with years of “USA is the greatest country in the world rah rah!” I can relax that a little.

Have you ever noticed that, on TV and in the movies, characters who are not native English speakers tend to use their native language for really simple phrases (“nyet”, “si”, “merci”) and English for anything more complex… and in real life, it’s exactly the other way around?