John Moore's blog

That Book I Mentioned

A lot of people are calling and e-mailing to ask about the book I mentioned this morning. It's called Camp X and it was written by Eric Walters. It's the story of a couple of kids who stumble across Camp X, the spy facility where 500 spies were trained for deployment during the Second World War. The book was written for young readers so it's a great way to introduce kids to a Canadian tale that reads like an adventure book.

What is left of the camp is in decay because this country seems to spend more time and money apologizing for past horrors than it does trying to commemorate the good we have done in the world.

Why We Love Dogs

We put up two videos today about dogs. This one is a sequence I shot to show you what happens when someone says the word "squirrel" around Zack. As you can see, he loses his mind. Terriers are ratters, they are driven by instinct to hunt down vermin. Obviously when Zack thinks he might be in the presence of a critter, its like he has a disco ball in his head.

This video is a brilliant commercial shot at 1000 frames a second. It shows a half dozen dogs reacting to having a piece of kibble thrown into the air. You see the dogs tweak to the fact that something wonderful is coming their way, calculate what it's going to take to grab it, leaping into the air and snatching it and then savouring the best thing that has happened all day.....or at least in the last three minutes.

Before you send that hate mail.....

My column in the National Post today is about how tedious political natterers spun two different incidents of men going postal. You can read it here. The point was not actually to decide if the guy who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin and the army captain who wigged out at Fort Hood are terrorists but to sort through how the lunatic right had interpreted the two attacks. Apparently one was an example of the dire threat of Islamic terrorism from within while the other was either a "crazy guy" or a hero for the Tea Party crowd.

Some people are prone to over reaction. Readers assumed what I wanted to say and started sending in the hate mail. One man from Nova Scotia wrote to tell me that I had hit a new low (which when you are the house Troskyite at The National Post seems impossible) by using a mentally unstable man as a means or scoring political points. I wrote back asking if he had read the last paragraph of the column. He returned "Oh, sorry. Really busy this morning. I'll take another look".

So let me get this straight: without actually reading my column you fired off a testy e-mail telling me what an idiot I am.

It's a great illustration of the level of dialogue these days. People don't even wait to hear what someone is saying before they start marshaling their arguments not only to prove that they are wrong but also stupid.
 
That's not dialogue. It's not even debate. It's closed minded posturing and it leads to the kind of political silos where people don't even consider their opponent's argument or evidence before rejecting it. If that's the future of political discourse we're in some pretty big trouble.

Well That was Fun

In his departing monologue as he stepped away from The Tonite Show after only seven months Conan O'Brian made a plea for an end to cynicism. "It's my least favourite quality in a person," he said. For a guy whose whole background is in smartass, take-nothing-seriously comedy it was a charming moment of candour.

I thought of Conan a few times during the Olympic Games because I watched a nation go from glum to gleeful over the unfolding story in Vancouver. In a rare display of growing national abandon we fell for the players, their commitment, their youthful exuberance, their family stories, their ordinariness and their extraordinaryness. We threw away our customary cynicism and revelled in the accomplishments of our young athletes and as the games became a globally acknowledged success we experienced a tremendous collective pride in pulling the whole thing off.

It's been a great ride and if you're like me you find yourself wishing it wasn't over and hoping that what we felt as we willed our curlers, boarders, figure skaters, speed skaters and hockey players to excellence, we will feel again some day.

At the same time we don't need to get all carried away. The world obviously likes Canada and we're pretty fond of us too. If I can mention another gifted broadcaster, I remember watching Dan Rather as a guest on Larry King. Caller after caller heaped praise on him and Rather never responded with more than "Thank you".

Now that everybody knows what a great place this is we don't need to surrender our legendary humility.

Time to End the War on Family Day

Remember when Family Day brought us all together as Ontarians? Remember when whiny interest groups left things well enough alone? Are you nostalgic for 2009 when Family Day was about Families? It's time we did something about this.

Consider:

Dalton McGinty's Family Day Card this year did not feature a picture of a family. It didn't even mention the word "family". The Premier's card merely featured a circle and the words "All the best".

At the Juvenile court house on Jarvis Street the supervising judge has removed the annual family tree pointing out that a large number of the youths she sees don't have families and she didn't want them to feel left out.

Only Himself to Blame

Some will insist the media have claimed another scalp in the resignation of Adam Giambrone from the Toronto Mayors race but the young city counsellor has only himself to blame. Every candidate chooses a public personae. Ten days ago, knowing full well that a number of women and a string of incriminating text messages were out there, Giambrone chose not only to throw his hat into the race but to place his live in girlfriend on the stage in the role of loyal political wife. When the Star discovered that all was not as it seemed it presented the truth to Torontonians who were free to draw whatever conclusions they might. Obviously it matters to Torontonians because Giambrone was not capable of staying in the race.

Something New

Fans of the old afternoon show will remember I enjoyed spending time with fiction and non fiction authors. I was picky because I knew they had to be famous enough or captivating enough to deserve a half hour of your time. I always enjoyed the conversations and the ideas that came out of them.

The morning show is a very different animal and since our mission is to get you up and get you out the door with the information you need to get your day on, we don't really have time to kick back for an indepth conversation.

We started doing something a few months ago which we want to make a bit more of a routine on the show. When I'm offered interviews with people I think you would like to hear from, I record them. We're placing these interviews in long form on the 10PM best of show as well as making them available on the website and for download at iTunes. In the morning I'll let you know if we have someone special coming up that night and play you a highlight from our conversation.

Obama Schools Washington's Children

Some people are so desperate to pronounce Barak Obama a failure they don't even notice when he hits the ball. Last Friday Obama went to Baltimore to speak to elected Republicans and knocked it out of the park. Following the speech he took questions for more than an hour. I'd encourage you to read the transcript or watch the video. One after the other Congresspeople ask what they think are archly clever questions. You can tell it's all for show because they think video of them appearing to make the President sweat will play well in the next election cycle. Except of course Obama doesn't sweat. 
 

The President chided those who misquoted him, corrected their facts and figures and pointedly told one legislator "That's great politics. It's just not true." When a Tennessee representative scolded him for rejecting out of hand all Republican ideas on health care he said "We've got to close the gap a little between rhetoric and reality." He dressed down a representative who quoted fictitious deficit figures. "That's factually untrue," said the President, "and you know it."

The rudest place on earth

Remember how the web was going to bring us all together? Thanks to the Internet we would engage in instant communication with people around the world promoting compassion and understanding. Oh and insults. Lots of insults. In one six hour period Monday I was called an A-hole, a jerk, a bastard, a dictator and a stooge for Stephen Harper (which must have made National Post readers spurt coffee out their noses). I was told I was a lousy actor (say got my residual cheque for The Day After Tomorrow in the mail yesterday), that I'm a hack writer working for a doomed newspaper and of course there were the usual taunts about how old media had better get used to being irrelevant because Twitter and Facebook are about to replace us all.

No Crow for Dinner

Well it looks like I wont be eating crow for dinner after all. Dan Cook went through the numbers for me city by city and three thousand people in Ottawa and Toronto, 300 in Montreal, 250 in Edmonton and 2000 in Vancouver doesn't really amount to much.

It's a numbers game. That's why politicians monitor e-mail, protests and phone calls. And three thousand people in the streets of Toronto just doesn't do the trick. Is it fair? yes as a matter of fact. I covered federalist and separatist rallies and protests for years in Montreal and you knew when people were fighting mad. That's when fifty to a hundred thousand hit the streets. When it was just another "We Hate Ottawa" or "God save Canada" gathering they would muster a few thousand and it didn't mean a thing.

Bring on the Rallies!

Saturday will be the big test for the Facebook brigade. Having amassed more than two hundred thousand button pushes, the anti prorogation activists now have to turn some bodies out onto the streets.

Let's be clear about something: I'm against prorogation and I have written about this Prime Minister's pettiness and King John tactics almost since the day he was elected. And yet people seem to think I'm some kind of Tory apologist. I've received all sorts of tart e-mails and even a taunting mention from Antonia Zerbisias in Friday's Star. I guess it's because I work for NewsTalk 1010 and The National Post that everyone assumes I'm a fire breathing right winger. That's a pretty out of touch impression of both outlets.

Death to Gays

My column today in the National Post deals with the contribution American Evangelicals have made to fostering hatred of homosexuals in Africa. RW Johnson also has a great column that breaks down a lot of the issues concerning gays and Africa.

The reaction to the two pieces has been interesting. For example Johnson points out that there is a great resentment in Africa over the west trying to import western acceptance of homosexuality since Afircans see it as incompatible with their culture. Some people seem to think this is fair game but I wonder how they would react to a professor in Afghanistan wagging his finger and telling the west to quit trying to import gender equality because it is incompatible with Islamic culture. I don't think you have to be a cultural imperialist to insist that the west is superior to the third world when it comes to the rights of the individual.

The Other Tories

New poll numbers suggest Canadians aren't happy about Stephen Harper's prorogation of parliament. You can find full coverage here but the quick details are that the Conservative lead over the Liberals has shrunk from 15% to 5% with the Tories now sitting at 33.1. Perhaps more importantly, of those who voted Conservative in the last election 46% disagree with Harper pressing the pause button on Parliament.


So do I take Wednesday's column all back? Not yet. Canadians love to grouse about things. Joining Facebook pages and answering telephone polsters does not amount to political action. How many people have actially DONE something?

Tory Tory Tory

So at last we know. John Tory will not run for Mayor of Toronto. Had the 2003 campaign run another two days he probably would have BEEN our mayor for the last six years. Now we'll never know what might have been. Or will we?

It's a loss for the city but not an indictment of Toronto or of the political process as some would have it. I can't read John's mind but I can only imagine that after seven years of campaigning for one job or another -sometimes undermined by the very people he sought to lead- he wasn't interested in spending ten months in the kind of relentless 6AM to 11PM campaigning, strategizing and gamesmanship a wide open campaign requires. But that's democracy. Just because it's hard to elect a good man doesn't mean the process is broken. People always seem to think the process is corrupt or broken or that the voters are merely just too stupid when their guy doesn't win.

Back to work....except in Ottawa

It takes a few days to get back into the swing of things  but we had a great time with this morning's show (Wednesday) thanks to a lot of news and some great audio (ranging from the PM to Ricky Gervais. Not sure who was funnier).

I wont waste a lot of ink on the PM. He is true to form. My column today in the National Post (here) examines Harper's motives and the fact that he has developed a fine sense of what he can do because Canadians simply don't care. Rick Mercer has a far more idealist and trenchant take which you can find at the Globe and Mail. It's one of those columns you read and think "I wish I had written that". If you don't have enough time to read the whole thing Rick muses on what we would think of the deaths of 138 Canadian men and women in Afghanistan if Hamid Kharzi treated his own parliament with the same contempt our Prime Minister does.

The Last Climate Change Collumn...and hey...Chicago is one hell of a city.

I signed off on climate change columns with this offering Monday at The National Post. What's the point? Climate change denial is very loud but very isolated. Despite radically differing agendas of the 192 countries at Copenhagen you don't see anyone but the usual suspects (Fred Singer, Lord Monckton et al) paying any attention to "climategate" or "the other side of the story".

The column has prompted a slew of e-mails and comments and even a commentary by my colleague Kelly McParland. The comments and e-mails are what I expected which is precisely why I have signed off on the issue. Who the hell cares? The denier impact on the real world debate is zero.

My favourite sentiment (aside from "shut the f*ck up") is the notion that the deniers are somehow not being given their due. It's no coincidence that this sentiment is at the heart of evolution denial. Even Lysiane Gagnon in this column in The Globe and Mail employs the false logic that the truth must lie somewhere between climate science and warming denial. So do we broker a deal between flat earthers and science out of a sense of fairness? Is the earth oval?

But as I wrote: "good bye and thanks for all the fish". I'm done with it. And barring some major (we're talking earth shattering) development I have promised my editors there will be no more climate change columns.

Spent the weekend in Chicago with a bunch of old radio friends. I'm jealous of Jim Richards who got to enjoy the historic celebration of Second City which you heard about on the show this morning but I couldn't make it fit with my friend's fiftieth birthday celebration which drew a dozen pals to the windy city. This was like the meal out of the movie Big Night; one for the ages. Saturday night in celebration of Maureen's 50th we found ourselves using a freight elevator to reach an oddball private dining room and kitchen that reminded me of a lot of loft spaces friends live in back in Montreal. We enjoyed a four hour Mexican meal prepared for  us by a master chef. It was one of those meals you never forget.

Sunday I did the Fraser Crane thing. As you probably know I'm a huge Frank Lloyd Wright fan. Chicago is known as the FLW lab because so many of his houses are preserved there. So early morning Sunday we trucked past the Bears game to south Chicago to see the Robie House. Yeah, I know. Total geek stuff. But I also like steam engines.

Porter now flies to Chicago and if you can manage it, it's worth a visit. Chicago combines the best of Montreal, Toronto and New York. The people are friendly and stylish in an understated way. And the architecture is some of the best in North America.

Guess Harper is a Sucker Like the Rest of Them

I see that our PM has decided to go to Copenhagen after all.

Let's unpack this:

A guy who called Kyoto a "socialist scheme" and who won an election against a guy running on a green platform is going to a climate change conference.

So a conservative PM with nothing to gain electorally from acknowledging climate change is not only doing so but taking valuable time out of his agenda to address it.

Guess that puts "climategate" in perspective.

Climate Change Denial Terriers

Much as my dog becomes a bit tiresome after the first three squirrels he spots in the back yard, climate change deniers become tedious after a while. My in box is always overflowing with rabid missives about how some oddball interpretation of the latest data proves once and for all that the entire global community has been hoodwinked by a cabal of clever scientists who like conferences, free coffee and souvenir briefcases more than they like science. 

Lately there's been a flurry, not surprising given that big coal and big oil have been pouring a fortune into creating subterfuge as we approach Copenhagen. The most recent frantic development is the hacking of e-mails between climatologists. I've received no small number of e-mails on this all of them musing about how the mainstream media will conspire to ignore the story. I guess that's how it ended up on the front page of the New York Times and was featured in every single paper I read yesterday.

Sarah Palin We Hardly Knew Ye

A whole new and somewhat refreshing Sarah Palin was revealed on Oprah Winfrey Monday. In the place of the wily woman constantly in search of a hook to hang code talking Republican talking points on was an intelligent and self aware individual ready to address some of the very real questions about her campaign and her family.

Palin was frank in her assessment of the shortcomings of the campaign conceding that even if she had been allowed to run things the way she wanted they might just as easily have lost. She even gave a credible (although she's had a year to think about it) explanation for why when asked what papers and magazines she reads she had flightily said "all of them". She was generous to Levi, the father of her grandchild, writing off his current media overexposure to his greedy handlers and rightly describing his current activities as "porn" (which given that he's posing for Playgirl is hardly an exaggeration).

In the past Palin has mostly winked to the wiggy right. Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote this past weekend that  "Palin is a delusional fantasist, existing in a world of her own imagination, asserting fact after fact that are demonstrably untrue, and unable to adjust to the actual reality after it has been demonstrated beyond any empirical doubt.  An astonishingly inept know-nothing, camouflaged by incessant victimology."

He's not wrong. A fact checking of her book (not an opinion, a fact checking) found it rife with improvisations and out and out fibs and of course she resorted to the usual tactic of dismissing that fact checking as a partisan liberal media attack. But on Oprah she showed a degree of balance and perspective that suggests she knows she needs to moderate her victim approach in order to appeal to a population beyond the 20% hard right base that already adores her.

Palin is an impressive woman (I have never maintained otherwise). The real question is whether she is presidential material. The fact is being a good mom, a moral woman, the half term administrator of a state with the population of Kingston and a neato lady doesn't necessarily qualify a person to be leader of the free world. I'll still take someone who knows the difference between Suni and Shia over a congenial person who can field dress a moose and has gone to her kids hockey games.

Telemarketers Make You Work for Them

One thing I learned hosting a fishing show years ago on The Outdoor Network (something I do promise to explain later in this blog entry) is that when you go angling you need good bait and you need to fish in the right spot. The same is true of Internet fishing.

It's easy to be fooled by Internet scams. My heart skipped a beat when I received an e-mail recently informing me that my bank account was frozen due to irregular activity. I was offered a hot link to the bank website in order to provide information to re-activate my account. I almost did. And then I realized that any other time I had experienced difficulties at the bank they phoned me. But it was a clever ruse. The hotlink connected to an exact replica of my bank'w website (with a few spelling mistakes). I was prompted to provide my account number and my pass word. Bingo! Had I followed the prompt I would have provided a scam artist with everything he needed to empty my account.

Last Word on Suzanne Somers and Doggie Goes to the Vet

Okay, I swear, the topics are unrelated.

I have a posting in the Full Comment section of the National Post today that essentially synthesizes my last two columns from the print edition, one on climate change and one on Suzanne Somers and her whack theories about cancer. You can read it here:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/05/john-moore-the-conspirators-dilemma.aspx

There's an interesting crossover between the two columns. Both involved me meeting and debating very determined women. Ann McElhenney directed a documentary questioning climate change. Suzanne Somers wrote a book about how conventional cancer treatment is a fraud. Both can talk a good talk so long as the person they are engaging doesn't know their stuff. McElhinney benefits from being a fast talker and an extremely intelligent woman notwithstanding the fact that many of the things she says are provably false (like the current denier number one talking point that warming stopped ten years ago. Check here to see how that is little more than a math trick

Back to the Blogosphere

A month into the new job and I finally figured out how to log into the new website in order to start blogging again. So here we are.

Firstly, thanks to everyone who has written in to say they're enjoying the new morning show. It's a work in progress but it's a great team and I think we're on the right track. Our objective is to get you up and out the door with the information you need to arrive where you're going. From the latest news to the late night jokes, sports, entertainment, the most recent viral video and of course should Balloon Boy get a new hat, we'll be there.