MAJOR MUSLIM CLERIC DEFENDS ISRAEL

A Muslim Voice For Peace

I have written more than 5,000 columns but this one from May 5, 2002 in the Toronto Sun continues to be a favourite on the Internet because it came from the other side of the great war between Muslims, Jews and Christians. The names of the leaders have changed, and there would be changes in the figures - although refugee figures are often frozen cruelly - but the anguish and the blindness and the hypocrisy continues.

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Downstairs in the wine cellar of a trendy Yorkville restaurant is an unlikely setting for an Islamic scholar as he rips at Saudi Arabia for its destabilizing evil and condemns those who pretend the Koran justifies the slaughter by suicide bombers.

To further confound those Muslims who will never rest until they drive all Israelis into the sea, Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi points to passages from the Koran showing the land of Israel was given to the Jews.
For example, Palazzi, chief imam (cleric) of Italy's Muslim community, quotes the Koran (17:104, The Night Journey): "And thereafter We said to the Children of Israel: 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.'"

For this controversial cleric, who says his views are more traditional than the present "politicized" consensus of Mideast Islamism, world terrorism and the agonies in Israel can be blamed on the Wahhabis, once just a tribe of Bedouin nomads but now a primitive sect which rules Saudi Arabia through wealth and control of Islam's holiest sites.

He calls Saudi Arabia the "roguiest nation in the world." It isn't a word, but the knot of journalists at the table know what he means, that when you talk about rogue nations, three others of which belong to George W. Bush's "axis of evil," Saudi Arabia must be the leader as it has a foreign policy of using petro-wealth to spread terrorism via fundamentalism.

Those views are the reason Palazzi was busy last week from Montreal to Winnipeg, brought here from his professorial post in Rome by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research to speak to synagogues, to religious leaders and at the University of Toronto.

When we in the media kept pointing out how different his views were from those coming out of the Arab world, Palazzi reminded us there are Islamic voices speaking out for Israel in the non-Arab Muslim world, from Turkey to the republics of the former Soviet Union. He doesn't brandish his doctorate, by appointment of the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, or his studies at Italian and Egyptian universities, but points out many Koran interpreters are unordained and little educated; that one, for example, a charismatic Hamas leader, admits his title of "sheikh" is honourary.

Palazzi is a roly-poly 40-year-old whose commendable ecumenical beliefs are rooted in family. His father converted to Islam after marrying his Muslim mother, and he's married to a Catholic. There's nothing roly-poly about his rhetoric or logic, though. So much so, a colleague wonders whether he fears death threats from an Islamic world that finds it easy to kill infidels.

He has been "criticized, attacked, insulted, nothing more," he replies. Besides, he imagines the fundamentalist Muslims of Italy - who control more than 90% of the mosques despite their few numbers, thanks to the fact, he says, that they get all the money they need from the Saudis - talk to each other about leaving him alone because, "We can buy space in the media, we can buy politicians, so what do we care if someone is criticizing?"

He demolishes any religious excuse for suicide bombers.

"They (Muslim clerics) play with words to justify it. They are lying in order to please their governments. It is anti-Islamic because suicide is, by itself, anti-Islamic in principle."

Indeed, there are many moral people and faiths who would support his argument, which goes this way: "You are permitted to kill for three reasons in the name of Islam. When you are a soldier, part of an army, you can kill the soldiers of the enemy, not the civilian population. You can kill in self-defence, if all of a sudden someone is trying to kill you, you have a right to defend yourself by killing him. You can execute someone by order of a court for a capital commission. Apart from those three cases, there are no others in which someone is legitimized to kill in the name of Islam, or in which Islam permits killing."

But then a colleague asked about martyrdom, when a Palestinian feels his land is occupied and he has no hope and his children have no food or future. Palazzi said there is no moral difference between this man throwing himself under an armoured vehicle and blowing it up, or running into a pizzeria and blowing up 20 people eating dinner.

It would be wrong, the cleric said, even in the case of oppression where a regime denies religious freedom. Resistance can be organized against the military if religious freedom is denied, but where religion is respected (as in Israel) but there is other oppression, then Islamic law says you "have passions and bear that injustice or you have got to exile and settle in a land that has no oppression."

Palazzi is savagely cynical about the Saudi-American relationships. He says attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 made as much sense for the U.S. as attacking some other country than Japan after Pearl Harbor. The Americans "attacked the soldiers of terror but not the generals of terror," he said. "If they invaded any country, it should have been Saudi Arabia where they must feel invincible."

And going after Iraq is just the U.S. doing what the Saudis desire. Palazzi says Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization don't want a state because PLO leaders make more money now than they would running one. If it happens, he says, the Saudis would just say they had won the first stage of a war and Hamas should keep going.

His arguments spill out in a richer mix than the meal.

Then I climb to the street from the wine cellar and walk by the patio tables under the budding trees, where weather is the only concern, not the fear of those who would kill you because they have been deluded into thinking it is a holy act.

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The second part of the column appeared May 12, 2002 under the headline:FINDING A HOME FOR THE PALESTINIANS. It dealt with the sheikh's argument that Israel isn't the only mideast country that should be considered as a home for the Palestinians. Surely we must pay attention to this argument as Gaza continues to be a running sore for the Israeli state.


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No wonder so many world leaders ignore the history of the bloodstained rocks of Israel and demand the Palestinians be given their own state. They don't want more coming to their country, as they proved again last week when it became so difficult to find a place to deport the 13 Palestinians from the birthplace of Jesus.

They were said to be militants, proven troublemakers. But there's nothing new about not wanting Palestinians in your backyard. For 50 years, thanks to their leaders, they have proven a troublesome, costly crowd with their home industry of terrorism.

Just ask Israel's neighbours, who are so insistent it give up vital defensive space because they don't want Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority in their cities and towns.

There's Lebanon, with 376,000 Palestinian refugees, Syria, with 383,000 such refugees, and Jordan, with 1.57 million refugees. In fact, in Jordan, the Palestinian state already exists that is the hot wish of the UN and now, George W. Bush. The population of Jordan is over 55% Palestinian, making things unstable for the supposedly purer Bedouin tribes.

The only reason it wasn't called the kingdom of Palestine when it emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, as some suggested, was to make it plain it was exempted from a Jewish home state.

It was the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan then. And Transjordan became just Jordan in 1949 after its Arab Legion seized the Jordan River's West Bank. The UN designated these biblical lands of Judea and Samaria as Arab lands, not giving them to Jordan or Israel (and Israel should have got them, not only because of their history but because Israel got less than 50% of the land it had been promised in the original British declaration). When Jordan formally annexed the West Bank, it was resented by Arab states as well as Israel.

I remind you of this history because when the UN insists Israel withdraw from "illegally occupied Palestinian territory," diplomats are making several mistakes as they kowtow to Arab oil. It is not an occupation and it is not illegal for Israelis to be there. It is disputed territory that Israel conquered in the Six Day War with Jordan, land the world had never recognized as being Jordanian after Jordan seized it against the UN's wishes.

Got that? I don't have enough space for all the language of the Geneva Convention showing that land taken in a defensive war may be kept until a treaty is worked out. Yet I quote the past for another reason, to justify the answer two weeks ago when Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the Muslim scholar and Italy's grand imam, was being interviewed here.

We asked about this demand for a Palestinian state. The sheikh argued there are already two Palestinian states, Israel and Jordan, and what the world is calling for is a new one on the Jordan's West Bank, one he's not confident the Palestinians really want because their leaders like Yasser Arafat are getting so rich from terrorism.

Palazzi doesn't think the Mideast agony would end with a new state. Surely, only the foolish clutching at straws think it would. Such a state, with or without Arafat, who once again is giving us doubletalk on stopping his suicide bombers, would have terrorism as its largest export, an offensively gross national product. And not just against Israel. What about the old Jordanian targets, especially the royal ones?

I doubt it is ever far from the mind of Jordan's King Abdullah, who met with George W. Bush after another suicide bomber had Ariel Sharon cut short his own talks with the president. After all, his great grandfather, the first King Abdullah, was assassinated by a Palestinian in 1951, a terrorist killed the prime minister in 1960, there was a civil war with the Palestinians in 1970, then in 1971 another PM was assassinated by Black September, a Palestinian guerrilla group, and his father was wounded by a Palestinian assassin in 1971. And there was unrest in between those lowlights.

King Abdullah and his country enjoy good relations with the West since such real peace emerged with Israel in the mid-1990s that Jordanian airliners could fly over the Holy Land and no longer have to go around. I was in Israel the day the king's father was at the controls of the first such flight.

I loved Amman and the great archeological treasures of Petra and Jerash on a visit in 1996, after a world media organization tried to meet in both Jerusalem and Amman but the Jordanian part failed. Old habits die hard, especially where the press isn't free. But I enjoyed the country and its great expanses. Plenty of room here, I thought, if a new Palestinian state was established on both sides of the Jordan River.

After all, Jordan has nearly five times the land Israel has, and its history intertwines with the Palestinians. The only reason the UN isn't hammering it like Israel to donate land to the Palestinians is that they're not the Jews or Christians that evil Saudi billionaires want to exterminate.

COME SMELL MY SHRUNKEN HEAD

Collecting, Even Fingerprinting, The Ages

It's been 50 years between my visits to the Niagara Falls Museum. But its wonders have grown beyond the believe-it-or-not stuff, like two-headed sheep, thanks to the fascinating additions from the ages of everything from shrunken heads to, perhaps, a ghost.
And the collection has moved from the Falls to downtown Toronto, to a loft with expanses of wooden floors, freaks of nature and ethnological gems.
It may have all started in 1827 when this was Canada's first museum with curiosities like those that later dotted the CNE Midway and small tourist museums everywhere. But mixed in between war clubs and swords, and one of the first electric chairs, are costly relics that would be right at home in the great museums of Egypt and the Americas.
Hold a shrunken head in your hand like a grapefruit, smell its old leather scent, then close your eyes, and you can almost hear the war drums beating and the shrieks as warriors are cut down and triumphantly beheaded. The smell is a trifle disappointing because you expect smoke from cooking fires or even a trace of the hallucogenics that transported shadowy figures far beyond the Amazon.
It's all thanks to Billy Jamieson, a beguiling mix of collector, showman and enthusiastic salesman. He saved the museum as it disintegrated into leaky shabbiness, and in the process of financing its purchase sold mummies and coffins for $2 million U.S. to an Atlanta museum.
So Jamieson is remembered in the tight world of Egyptologists as the Canadian who sold the missing mummy of Ramesses 1. The pharaoh now rests in the famous mummy wing of the national museum in Cairo near the Nile. (The Carlos museum didn't feel it could keep one of the kings of Egypt.)
It's a great story about scholarly detective work and it was detailed in a NOVA show on PBS titled The Mummy Who Would Be King. Fascinating, but then Jamieson is rather fascinating himself.
(I have let him describe himself at the end of this blog in material extracted from his Internet site: www.jamiesontribalart.com which is one of his tools in generating interest in his hobby/business/passion. There's also www.niagaramuseum.com)
Walking around his museum/home and listening to him romp verbally from weirdness to displays that have other collectors sweating with envy is a unique experience. He merges an encyclopaedic knowledge with a grisly fascination for the really odd.
It happened for Mary and me because our son Mark was home from China for a visit. He had worked for eBay in Canada and noticed there was a listing for a great whale skeleton. He followed up and as a result a Reuters story appeared around the world about this Canadian who now owned the big whale skeleton that I had marveled at in 1954 while on a high school outing. As a result of the publicity, the skeleton was sold to a sheik for $200,000. (We're not talking about stamp collecting here.)
It was a cold snowy night when Mary, Mark and I visited the Falls collection with a small group, including a forensic constable from the Toronto police and students from a course he teaches. We were an attentive audience as Jamieson walked us through his collection after insisting we must give him our full attention. It was worth it. (The loft is often the setting for fund-raising, even book launches.)
Then the constable and students conducted a unique class project - seeing if they could get a finger print from a mummy that Jamieson still owns, The mummy's value was reduced by the ancient grave robbers that left it unwrapped after probing for treasure, but it's plain from its crossed arms that it is a high priest.
A rubber liquid was squirted around a finger - with a business card below in case it dripped - and then after it hardened, we all had a look. Yes, there was a print. No, the mummy was not damaged, although I kidded the forensic crew as they carefully pried away the mould that if the finger came too, I was going to tell the Sun.
Here I was holding a mummy's leg when normally you can't even touch. Indeed, for more than a decade, the mummy wing in the Egyptian museum was closed while scholars and bureaucrats argued whether it was appropriate to let tourists gawk at the bodies of your royalty.
You can tell from the fingerprinting anecdote that Jamieson is a happy throw-back to the good old days when museums were a lot of fun. Now education often drowns out entertainment.
Oh yes, you were wondering about that ghost. One of Jamieson's acquisition, along with the whale skeleton, the mummies and the two-headed sheep, was the baroque rear of a real hearse that looks like it was made for a Victorian horror movie.
Inside its glass windows you can see a large tropical fish tank. Which takes away some of its spookiness. Except there have been sightings of a ghost that perches above the skulls that line the hearse roof and presumably tries to communicate with the shrunken heads.
I've investigated several ghost houses and have heard two ghosts. So I volunteered to do a vigil with Jamieson to see if this ghost reappeared. I'm not sure the ghost would bother me as much as spending a night with more body bits than are in a small cemetery.
But if a great talker like Jamieson was keeping me company, the night would pass in a twinkling.

FROM THE JAMIESON WEB SITE
Ethnologist, musicologist, antique tribal art collector, dealer. Bill's interests evolve around the forgotten cultures and customs of the South Pacific, Indonesia, South America and North America. Also Bill's fieldwork among the Shuar of Ecuador and Peru helped him learn a great deal about that tribal group. His expertise has been drawn upon by National Geographic's documentary production unit for a series on headhunting, human sacrifice, and canabalism. He is also consulted by museums and researchers.
Because of his interest in disappearing Andean-Amazonian tribal rituals, he has financed and led five expeditions into Ecuador and Peru from 1995 to 2001, researching traditional naturopathic healings and related rituals. Focusing on the Shuar tribe, famous for their past custom of shrinking heads, Bill has amassed the most extensive Shuar library in existence, including a collection of shrunken human heads. Bill has also taken an interest in other cultures and collected early ethnographic material from the Native cultures of North America, South America, South Pacific, Dayak of Borneo, Naga of the Highlands of India and Batak of Sumatra.
IN 1998, Bill purchased Canada's oldest museum, the Niagara Falls Museum. Established in 1827, the museum held title to the name The Explorers Club in Canada. Bill donated the name to The Explorers Club in New York City. Nine Egyptian mummies that had been in the museum's collection since 1861 were sold to the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta.
Bill is also an antique tribal art dealer and he has set records at Sotheby's for sale in Polynesian material. He continues to find great material through traveling, chasing old collections and constant communication with other dealers. He wants to acquire great old North American Indian, Pre-Columbian, African, Oceanic and Indonesian Art, plus oddities and curiosites from around the world.

REHEATING A STEW OF BEEFS

Some Gripes Never Change

Readers used to envy me when I devoted a column to beefs and what bugged me about the careless service of modern times.
So when I vented on Jan. 8, 2009, in a blog titled DOES ANYONE CARE? IS THERE ANYONE THERE? I'm sure there was some envy about how a little publicity could erase some gripes out of daily life.
If only....
My newspapers now seem to be thrown further from the door. And TIME magazine, one of my favourite reads, hasn't appeared with my mail since I complained about not getting the watch for subscribing again.
My son Mark tried two more times to convert some Chinese money and deposit it into his Royal Bank account. He also tried at TD. Finally got RBC to take the money, on the fourth try, and then got a phone call of apology from the manager the next day. Nice, but he would have preferred to have been able to change the money on the first try.
My wife Mary and I have been banking near Royal York and Bloor for 46 years. The building and the name keep changing - from Eastern and Permanent through Canada Permanent to Canada Trust to TD-Canada Trust. We've got older, the tellers have got younger, the service has got worse.
I did two electronic transfers to ING from our joint TD chequing account in November, one to Mary's account, one to mine. For some strange reason, my ETF didn't go through and Mary's was taken from her separate chequing account, leaving her overdrawn by $3,500.
My wife seldom uses this account but had told them she wanted money automatically transferred from her savings account if need be. Apparently they haven't done this since 2002 and Canada Trust days, but no one told Mary that.
So TD honoured this ETF, because she had overdraft insurance, but then proceeded to charge Mary $150 in fees since then without ever telling her. And she had been in the bank at least eight times in the two months since. Temporarily, there was $30,000 in her savings account. If you wonder how she wouldn't notice, she doesn't use either the chequing or the savings account on a regular basis but uses the joint accounts with me.
So we descend on TD on a snowy day at the end of January to ask what is going on. And filling in temporarly at the info/reception desk is a large efficient man who handles our complaint and eliminates the extra fees. Later we found out he was the manager, Sean Donegan, and he was great.
Except...
Surely in the age of computers and ETFs and the fact that any bank can tell you, when you finally get to the head of the line, exactly what you have in that second in all your accounts, there is no need or excuse to be punishing a customer because someone made a mistake on an electronic transfer. Surely when the customer has ten times that money in a savings account a transfer can be automatically made to the chequing account, which, of course, they used to do. But they don't want to do that now because they make more money by not performing such a simple task.
A friend listened to my recitation of beefs in that Jan. 8 blog and just couldn't believe the part that dealt with the ordeal of trying to get my wife out of Mount Sinai hospital after her operation. He's on one of the boards at the Trillium health complex (and I'm also on a hospital board) and pointed out that there a volunteer would have delivered Mary to the side of my car without problem.
If only the downtown hospitals made it that easy. If only they had a reasonable excuse. But these days you often doesn't get an answer, that is if you get them to listen in the first place.

A GUIDE TO ONTARIO FISHING

How Red Tape Works As A Fishing Line

I wrote a blog titled FISHING FOR UNDERSTANDING AND BASS on Nov. 13, 2008 about my frustrations deciphering Ontario's fishing regulations.
I also complained about the blatant fishermen around my cottage who broke even the most obvious rules about fishing seasons and catch limits .... and just about everything else.
The following is a reply to my column on Jan. 28 by Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield, the able MPP for central Etobicoke, and her staff. In her political career, this minister has shown a wonderful ability to cut through the political BS of complicated subjects. So when she says she will keep an eye on this, it's not just rhetoric.


Ontario is a vast province with thousands of lakes and rivers. Historically, fisheries were managed on a lake-by-lake basis which, over time, resulted in a complex set of regulations with thousands of exceptions. In order to reduce the complexity of regulations and make it easier for anglers to understand and follow the rules, the ministry announced a move towards a landscape management approach for recreational fishing. As part of this initiative, Ontario went from 37 fishing divisions to 20 fisheries management zones, removed hundreds of exceptions (30 per cent), provided better map products and redesigned the 2008-2009 Fishing Summary to make it more accessible and easy to understand. This is only the first step in an ongoing process.We will continue our efforts to improve the fishing regulations and we welcome your ideas and suggestions. Meanwhile, I have asked the Fish and Wildlife Heritage Commission to provide suggestions on further ways to reduce the complexity of the regulations and improve the fishing summary. Our challenge is to ensure that Ontario’s fisheries are sustainable while providing effective, clear and understandable regulations.
The confusion over bass seasons in the Trent River may have arisen because there is an exception which applies only on lower Trent River waters. The open season for bass in Fisheries Management Zone 17 is generally from the 4th Saturday in June to November 15th (including the Trent River at Burnt Point). However, on the Trent River in Sidney Township upstream from the first dam above Lake Ontario, the open season for bass extends to November 30th.
Our official fishing website, ontario.ca/fishing, provides general information on fishing in Ontario and an up-to-date fishing summary with a list of regulatory changes since the last printing. If you ever have questions or require clarification on specific fishing regulations, you can call our Natural Resources Information Centre, toll-free by phone at 1-800-667-1940, or by e-mail at mnr.nric.mnr@ontario.ca.
I appreciate your difficulties with large numbers of anglers fishing close to your cottage and the frustration of observing resource abuse. We strongly recommend that any member of the public who sees or suspects an act of resource abuse should safely note as much information as possible and call 1-877-TIPS-MNR (847-7667). The information provided may be used by conservation officers in their investigations. Alternatively, they may call CrimeStoppers for anonymous reporting (1-800-222-8477).
Generally, fines for ticketable sport fishing offences range upwards from $100 while for more serious repeat offenders the penalty can be as high as $500,000 and/or a term of imprisonment under the Fisheries Act depending on the nature of the offence.
I apologize for any delay in receiving a response from ministry staff. There are standards in place for responding to inquiries promptly and I trust that your case was an isolated incident.

CNN....ALL OBAMA... ALL THE TIME

The Curse Of The 24-Hour News Cycle

The tragic result of the way news sloshes over us, particularly from the U.S. media led by CNN, is that too many of us became bored with Barack Obama before he was sworn in as president.
That doesn't mean we're hostile. Hardly! I hope, for the sake of all of us, that he, and the people he has picked, succeed. But as someone who regularly reads American newspapers and watches a lot of American TV, it's become all too much.

From the monologues of Leno and Letterman to the comedy shows of Stewart and Colson to the endless interviews on CNN that have the usual suspects commenting endlessly on the president in between all the footage of what he has just done 30 seconds ago - even if it was just to drive somewhere - you start to long for a Barack break.

And then you turn to all the stories in the Times and the Journal and U.S.A. Today and the onslaught begins again.
But, of course, they have to fill all that time and space with something. And it's not all that unusual for there not to be much new in the news. So what we've been getting is quantity, not quality.
Once I had the job of "follows" to the political coverage in the final edition. So then the next day's editions could start with some new angle on top of a recitation of what we had just printed. That was when I learned the dirty secret that turns grey the hair of the news bosses. Most news stories are about 97% old with some slim new angle produced in desperation so that some film could be used or a page could be readied for the press room. This hasn't changed just because there are all-news radio and TV stations, which regurgitate the same thing three times an hour in the middle of the night.
I think it is wonderful that Obama became president. He was by far the best candidate out of all that endless endless election stuff. I worry about some of his policies because for some reason I have always liked Republican policies more than Democratic ones, but I've liked the Democratic candidates more than the Republican ones. A strange split!
And it is great that an African-American with such a humble, confused start, has become the president. But since I was told that at least once a minute for the last three months, I now regard it as part of the Chinese water torture approach to American presidential politics. (As someone who thought John Diefenbaker championed a fundamental and refreshing approach when he crusaded to take the hyphen out of Canadianism, I dislike the idea of always saying you're a Polish-Canadian or a Ukrainian Canadians or an African-American. I'm glad there was hostility in the Maritimes about the attempt to have citizens identified as African Canadians there. Nope, we're Canadians or Americans without any divisive hyphens and those who always want to shove a hyphen in there are memorializing a bitter past.)
I kept quiet about the fact that the Barrack barage was turning me off just when we needed decisive and wise decisions from him to help solve a second Great Depression that will leave scars for generations. But then I confessed this at a lunch with two Canadians, one of them famous, who have served at the top levels of politics. And they agreed with me. And together we worried that there may be a backlash over this just when the American president will need stout support from everyone, not just the strategists who now bore us eternally on CNN, not just the throngs before him as he took the oath.
You see, I have written about politics for half a century . I know from my neighbours at home and the cottage, and from all the people who wonder what you do for a living when they're killing time in the sun in Florida or Cuba, that most people really don't care much about politics. We see that from election turnouts. We see that from the fact that pollsters will tell you that most people hang up when you try to talk to them about politics. When politicians knock on doors, only half of them open.
I have been at parties where I pretended I worked in an office because most people had already indicated rather graphically what they thought about politics and politicians. I have sat on the subway and watched most people skip past the political columns. I found in more than 5,000 columns that any time I wrote about fishing or family I got far more reaction and interest than anything I said about politics.
I remember 25 years ago, after I had been travelling in Russia or China and was starved for news, how avidly I devoured everything CNN had to say. Now you turn to such cable coverage and you find that we are now supposed to be interested in looking at helicopters or jets sitting on the runway before some simple trip by a president.
It's lazy journalism. Concentrating on a president even when he was just cutting brush on a pretend ranch is an easy way to fill space. It's hardly investigative journalism. And what we have discovered is that if the North America media had spent more time probing hedge funds and CEOs and huge corporate profits, we might have learned before it was too late that most of the business elite didn't have a clue as to what they were doing. It's simple to bash politicians, but much more difficult to follow the money and trace just how it is that the world now owes far more money than all the countries of the world have been making each year.
Just where has the money gone? If a bank, for example, loses $50 billion, the billions must have gone somewhere. So where?
If someone loses a million dollars in the stock market, other investors collect that million dollars. The million doesn't evaporate. It isn't dumped into an acid bath.
It turns out that if the American media had spent more time over the last years investigating the storm clouds over their economy rather than the endless shallow presidential coverage, there might have been a chance to prepare for this ugly technical reality that all their banks are broke. The economy has been a house of cards, and wet cards at that, and most of their business elite have been trying not to collapse the cards before they get all their bonuses out.
I have often written that the old days often weren't that good. Just look at all the great advances.
Why governments can just print all the money they want and to hell with inflation.
And before people got fussy, you didn't need a down payment to buy a home.
People are no longer stuck in jobs for life.
And the banking world hasn't been that complicated because no one knew what in heck was going on and that they were trading incomprehensible paper.
Oh yes, there have been huge increases from the good old days, particularly with our debt. Brother, can you spare a billion!

DOES ANYONE CARE? IS THERE ANYONE THERE?

THE REAL DANGER IS NOT THAT COMPUTERS WILL BEGIN TO THINK LIKE MEN, BUT THAT MEN WILL BEGIN TO THINK LIKE COMPUTERS....Sydney Harris

I wish I had a song about "my favourite things." You know, the cheery romp about raindrops and kittens. Instead, I have a list of goofs. The dumb things that happen eternally. Because it seems many people don't want to serve you in the first place. They just hope you go away.
It ranges from the trivial to the inconvenient to the upsetting. Why is it that so many around us can't go from A to C without missing B? Have computers desenitized the human race so that simple tasks and courtesies are beyond the capability of too many of the people and companies with which we must deal, who seem to figure that if they frustrate us enough, we will stop "bothering" them.
Lack of service has gone from an infection to a plague, from the TTC and RBC to Sears, the Star and the Post, from TD to Mount Sinai Hospital.

The petty crap starts for me each morning with what should be the day's simplest task, just opening the door and picking up the National Post and the Star from the porch.

Oh no, I have to dress for winter and go out in the cold and fish them out from the corner behind the door. Every day! At least they're not always wet.
That puts me in just the wrong mood for what should be simple tasks like banking, shopping and enduring telephone queues and call centres. Too often I feel I need an interpreter, but then you have to find a clerk first, or have someone answer instead of a record.
Stephen Leacock, who at the time was one of the world's most famous writers, wrote a classic yarn about the poor guy trying to open a bank account. Filled with embarrassment! If only Leacock, the economist and humourist, had to deal with the modern bank. He would have sunk the lot on his fictional Mariposa Belle.
I think of Leacock every time the Royal or TD treat me like a retarded criminal because they seem to have a general policy of trying to discourage us from even going to a teller.
I try to deposit cheques into my son's RBC account because he is often away in China. Even when it is my cheque written on the TD just across the street, it's an awkward and lengthy process. If I didn't have a Royal Visa card, I'm sure they would refuse to take the money even though I have lived down the street from this Kingsway branch for 45 years.
I thought TD outdid itself when I deposited $5,000 in cheques into my account which temporarily was very flush and it all went smoothly...until I asked for $50 in cash. Then they wanted to see identification.
My son tried to deposit Chinese money into his Royal account and they waltzed him around for two days before refusing to do it. If only they knew. This was the same son who a week before in China had had trouble at an ATM at 5 a.m. and got so frustrated, he punched the machine and was rewarded with a six-stitch gash. Leacock would probably have wiped out the ATM with a shotgun.
My wife was due at Mount Sinai for an operation and the weather was so stormy, we figured the TTC was a better bet than car or cab. I produced $10 at the Royal York subway station and asked for tickets. He said they only had tokens. Of course, tickets are only sold for students and seniors. I said I didn't realize I had to point out my grey hair. He argued I had said the wrong thing. When he continued to be rude and didn't produce the tickets, I swore. He shoved the money back. So my wife and I went through the turnstile without paying. Quite a victory for the TTC! No money, and two irate passengers.
Downtown was a disaster that day but at least we got there. And 24 hours after the operation on delicate parts, Mary was kicked out because the hospital didn't have enough staff to keep the wing open. When I tried to collect her, it was one of the worst experiences I have ever had at a hospital. The path for the wheelchair was through a construction site. A slippery difficult gauntlet. I finally figured out enough of the obstacle course to drive the wrong way through the emergency entrance and collect her at a side door. The construction has been there for months, but obviously it hasn't made any impression on the management. I have been a member of a hospital board for many years and would move to fire the official responsible if such an obstacle course happened for even a week at our hospital.
Oh yes, the staff seemed sympathetic, when they stopped talking to each other long enough to talk to me, but not one offered help.
Everyone has a horror story about service calls. You know, you have to wait all day for some bored guy to show up at 4 p.m.
Mary called Sears to have the dryer serviced. I drove home to find the service vehicle parked across my driveway when it could have been parked legally within a few feet. I asked the serviceman why he parked there, he got snippy and stormed out without doing the work. I phoned Sears and got a call centre located on the moon, I believe, judging from the spaced-out logic, and demanded another service call and an explanation. After all, the service contract cost $160 annually. The centre said their vehicles weren't allowed to park on the street. I said he was parked on the street, and also across my driveway, blocking me. They repeated and I repeated. That was six months ago. Sears hasn't been back, and there has been no apology, just determination by me that Sears will never see me again.
These call centres are quite a piece of work. They remind me of the brilliant Royal Canadian Air Farce skit featuring a call centre in India that was handling burglar alarms and orders for pizza and hookers all at the same time.
Phoned Time the other day to ask why I didn't get the watch that came with magazine renewals. Turned out the "system" was down and I should call again in two weeks. This is the same magazine that cancelled my subscription half-way through its 2007 run and returned some money to a person who said she had bought it for me as a gift. Nope, I paid for it, don't know the woman, and have no idea how this scam works. If someone figures it out, please call Time and tell them, that is if you can get them to answer the phone.
Then there are the seven times I called Bell when my cottage phone didn't work. Took only a month. Seemed Bell couldn't get me on the phone to tell me when they were coming, then when they did reach me by cell phone and book a date, they arrived on another day when I was in the city.
And that's my latest list of not-so-favourite things. For the last two months. No need to depress you even more.
With all the unemployed, and the number's skyrocketing daily, you would think they could hire enough people to put the service back into the service industry. Some days you would like to talk to some friendly soul and not a computer telling you that your wait time will be 10 minutes in order to book the serviceman who may or may not show up.

This blog was updated on Feb. 1, 2009 in a column titled Reheating A Stew Of Old Beefs.

TAXING FOR THE FUTURE WHILE LIVING IN THE PAST

UNFAIR, UNREALISTIC, INACCURATE.....

Three ways of describing municipal assessment in Ontario today. And if you want to disagree, say because you work for the Municipal Property Assessment Corp., be warned that one of those words is from Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Indeed, there is such an aura of stupidity, arrogance and sloppy arithmetic about MPAC and how it has screwed up, again, that I didn't feel it necessary to bellow.After all, even the premier doesn't think the latest barrage of numbers from MPAC are realistic. Of course, ever since the provincial ombudsman, Andre Marin, ripped to shreds how MPAC flopped at its task in 2006, MPAC has no defenders, other than a few profs who want to explain in Dick-and-Jane fashion how market-value assessment works.
So I was gentler than usual in a blog about the latest calculations from MPAC. And I conceded their task isn't simple. But observers like Penny Caldwell, the editor of Cottage Life, seemed to wonder about my restraint in a blog she writes.But I believe in the old lawyers' maxim. If you have a strong case, state it calmly. If you have a weak case, shout.
It's possible Ms. Caldwell has nerves scraped by all the incidents reported to her from cottage country about inane assessments. Yet I figure this time our case is so substantial, there is no need to bellow that these assessors may set a record as the stupidest bureaucrats on Planet Earth.
After nearly 6,000 columns and several thousand editorials, I am used to turning up the rhetoric. But when this fog of unreality hangs over an issue, let them stew in their own miscalculations.
In a blog, I said the assessment on my cottage on the Trent River has gone up 300% since Jan. 1, 2005, even though the only improvements made came after the MPAC deadline of Jan. 1, 2008, for the next round of tax increases.

Torontonians are also furious about their latest jumps in assessment, one of the two factors in determining your municipal taxes. (Councils set the other factor, the mill rate.)

And in the city, I've been hit again. But miraculously it was only a 27% increase. Of course my neighbour's house sold for $50,000 less than the asking price - and that was before the real estate market blew apart in this recession/depression - but the assessor once again ignored such pertinent info.

Up in cottage country around Burnt Point (where the Trent River curves south of Havelock) my neighbours are up in arms about increases far smaller than my cottage's 300%.

When the key people in the North Seymour Ratepayers Association get together to talk about what's happening with two massive developments that would ruin our area, they are furious about 55% and 60% increases.

The irony, of course, is that in columns for the Toronto Sun, and in pontifications on various TV and radio shows, I have predicted for several years that a slump in real estate was coming.

That was the "bust" part of the best-selling book by David Foot of U. of T. And cottage country faced huge problems in gasoline costs and cottage taxes. The spectre of pervasive unemployment hung over everything. This depression/recession didn't hit out of the blue. For several years if you went to the annual financial meetings of companies like the giant Fairfax insurance conglomerate, run by Prem Watsa, Watsa warned you that the perfect storm was going to hit the world economy.

It arrived right on schedule, but I don't think even Watsa realized just how many dumb jerks there were who could waste a billion dollars as if it was used gum.
Yet MPAC, plus more senior over-paid bureaucrats, didn't prepare for it. So major budgets were incapable of dealing with the emergenices. And all the assessment calculations for the coming years have been rendered meaningless because of the collapse of the real estate markets. We are supposed to pay taxes for years based on calculations that no longer make sense. Profs and politicians may argue that it really doesn't matter what the new market-value calculations are as long as everyone is treated the same. But, of course, they aren't all being treated the same when you have the assessments for some properties set below what the properties just sold for on the open market, and then there are all the properties where the assessment is higher than the taxpayers just paid.
What madness is this! When assessments are set too low on your property, your neighbours are screwed. When the assessments are too high, you're being screwed.
Where cottage assessments differ from those in the city is in the added value placed on water frontage. Yet around my cottage, and indeed in many stretches of shoreline in southern Ontario, there are now so many weeds due to zebra mussels, it's difficult to swim and some cottages have been up for sale for years. The carefree days when you couid romp or work in the water without water shoes and gloves is now just a memory. It's a regular battle against the snarls of weeds, and one you face with the active opposition of governments. There are gauntlets of permits, and if you do finally get permission to use a herbicide, it costs more than Channel No. 5.
Of course, cottagers hardly are given municipal services to match those routinely provided within even villages. The nearest real public road is 1.6 km from my cottage. The municipality sort of looks after another kilometre, leaving the vital final link up to us. We have, of course, no sewers, potable water, street lights and garbage collection, and, as we've found out during city strikes, don't even think of putting a child into the local schools.
Yet councils really don't appreciate all the revenue they get from their seasonal residents. Cottage taxes are useful to pay for improvements to infrastructure that benefit year-round residents most. But heaven help you if you have the gall to protest some local's scheme. Then you hear all about the NIMBYs who don't care about local jobs.
A councillor wrote the Sun after my column about this saying that I didn't have the right to criticize when I hadn't lived there year-round for years. The Trent Hills mayor mouthed similar malarkey after many cottagers had the audacity to show up to complain about a massive local development.
I proposed twenty years ago that Queen's Park stop this nonsense where cottagers were good only to be plucked as if they were chickens rather than golden geese. I said a royal commission should examine the fairness of cottage taxation and determine if they were paying more than their share, The commission could have been headed by someone like Frank Miller, a former premier and treasurer who owned two resorts. After all many hearings into taxation have produced some startling findings, such as the one chaired by Willis Blair, a prime-rib Tory and former senior councillor, who found in the late 1970s that there were thousands of properties in Ontario that paid no municipal taxes at all, due to corruption or stupidity.
Now that we face years of taxes based on unreal assessments, but the one man who could stop this does nothing but say he as premier hopes that councils will be gentle when they rape their taxpayers. And we're certainly not going to be aided by councillors like Toronto's budget chief, Shelley Carroll, who points out that homeowners don't pay that much towards the cost of services. (Of course, the way Toronto's council has sold out to the unions, the cost of those services has become obscenely bloated.)
When McGuinty asks councils to be reasonable, it's like putting a big steak in front of a pit bull and expecting it not to gobble it up if you ask nicely. Taxpayers will be lucky if their arms aren't chawed off.
The sad thing about all this is that it's only going to get worst. These MPAC estimates for what our properties are worth now for taxation purposes will seem like the cruelest joke ever perpetrated on the residents of Ontario who are no stranger to the jests of the clowns in government.