Sambal

I suppose it should go on record that my wife and I walked out of Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers. We walked out at about two hours twenty minutes, by mutual consent. In our opinion, too much violence had been done to the story at that point for it to be possibly redeemed. As my wife puts it: “When my only reaction to every scene was to scoff, it was time to leave.”

BUT. Here’s a long post (some spoilers!) by a Tolkien fanboy which is all about how wonderful the movies are (hat tip: Lileks) And this guy is serious — and a serious fanboy, too. He speaks Elvish — at least one flavor. He can write runes. He memorized the pseudohistory of Numenor (the other mythical western island).

And he is totally wrong about Peter Jackson’s movies. They are a travesty of Tolkien’s vision.

Perhaps Jackson is successful in pleasing the “seriously hard-core fans”. Perhaps there is a certain kind of “incurable Tolkien purist” who is satisfied when the backdrop of a film is sufficiently near to his imaginings. But the movies fail to capture the essential moral character of Tolkien’s story — which is a Christian story set in a pre-Christian world — and therfore are nothing more than well-funded action flicks with a Tolkienesque setting.

If you understand why The Scouring of the Shire is the most essential subplot of the trilogy then I believe you will understand what I mean. (It’s hardly a subplot, actually; it would be more fair to call it the main plot.)

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time to go off on my analysis of Lord of the Rings right now because the baby is waking up. I will try to come back to this later. For the moment, think about Faramir.

I saw a strange news story linked at LGF about Sharia in Canada. WorldNetDaily writes:

Canadian judges soon will be enforcing Islamic law, or Sharia, in disputes between Muslims, possibly paving the way to one day administering criminal sentences, such as stoning women caught in adultery.

Pretty impressive, eh? Except that the Law Times article from which the WND article seems to be sourced is much less scary:

Syed explained that until recent changes in the law, Canadian Muslims have been excused from applying Shariah in their legal disputes.
Arbitration was not deemed to be practical because there was no way to enforce the decisions. Syed said the laws have recently changed with amendments to the Arbitration Act.
“Now, once an arbitrator decides cases, it is final and binding. The parties can go to the local secular Canadian court asking that it be enforced. The court has no discretion in the matter.
“So, the concession given by Shariah is no longer available to us because the impracticality has been removed. In settling civil disputes, there is no choice indeed but to have an arbitration board.”

The article is confusing because the same language is used to describe religious obligations as legal obligations; and in fact the issue is precisely about the difference between those obligations. I think I can summarize it like this: according to a particular interpretation of Islam, a Muslim living in a Muslim country is obliged to follow Sharia, but a Muslim in a non-Muslim country is only obliged to follow Sharia as closely as possible. So far so good.

In Canada, before recent changes to federal contract law, it was not possible to have truly binding arbitration. Therefore there was no means by which Muslims could use Sharia to resolve their disputes: if a Sharia arbitrator was asked to decide a case, the losing party was under no obligation to accept the decision.

Now, with the introduction of binding arbitration where the courts enforce the arbitrator’s decision, it is possible for a civil dispute between Muslims to be resolved under Sharia: the two parties sign a binding arbitration agreement to take the matter to the Sharia arbitrator (not truly a court — just an arbitrator), the arbitrator decides the case, and then the decision can be enforced (if necessary) by the normal police power of the state, including seizing property, garnishing wages, etc.

So under the interpration of Islam that obliges Muslims to live under Sharia as much as possible, since it is now possible for Muslims in Canada to settle civil disputes with other Muslims under Sharia, they must now do so.

Note that there is no legal recognition of Sharia by Canadian courts; this whole thing (including the overwrought lead-in about stoning) is merely a result of the new existence of binding arbitration as an option in Canada. Similarly there is no reason that you couldn’t choose to have your case resolved in the Court of Rock-Paper-Scissors, if such a thing existed and both parties agreed. It looks like WorldNetDaily is deliberately scaremongering.

(Predictably, Eugene Volokh is all over this, in fewer words and more sense.)

The important question is: is there a reasonable argument for a slippery slope from optional Sharia for civil cases between Muslims to mandatory Sharia in criminal cases? This is the question that WND ducks; they just assume the slippery slope and slide right to the end.

It’s hard to construct such an argument. I will think about for a while and see what I come up with. Here’s what I have so far: it describes how non-Muslims could find themselves in Sharia court:

Starting with Sharia via binding arbitration between Muslims, we can easily extend to Sharia via binding arbitration between a Muslim and a non-Muslim in those cases where the Muslim gets to dictate the contract. It’s common for a contract to be dictated by the more powerful party in some circumstances: a e.g., by the landlord in a tenancy agreement, by the vendor for a software license — in such a circumstance if the vendor or landlord so chose, they could include a binding arbitration clause referring to the Sharia court. The odds are good that the consumer would not notice until actually pursuing a claim, which would then be conducted in the Sharia court. So non-Muslims can find themselves in the Sharia court merely as a result of buying certain services or products from Muslims.

Just a quick post - we still have a guest staying with us, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the computer.

It’s been wonderful having friends come to visit — especially with the new baby. Two extra pairs of hands to hold the baby makes everything better, and since we’re taking these weeks off, we have all the time in the world to just hang out and solve the world’s problems.

Last night, for example, we reformed Social Security, Medicare, and the income tax system in general.

Also last night we hooked up our friend’s DVD-playing laptop to the borrowed LCD projector and watched a couple of movies: very nice. There may be a DVD player in our future… no TV, just a DVD player. We’ll see.

Also I went for a run, after two weeks of no running, and it was fine, -7 temperatures and all. So life, at least at this moment, is going exceptionally well.

Baby blog at http://sindadel.com/kaija. It hasn’t been updated since last week, but that’s where the baby’s home page will be from now on.

A couple of college friends came over to visit us and the new baby, so blogging will continue to be light till the middle of next week — just in time for American Thanksgiving.

Woke up this morning to heavy (for Edmonton) snow: at least an inch had fallen all over when I went out to the car. Naturally traffic was horribly tied up, but in this one situation, Edmonton drivers do better than LA drivers. Although they’re still all over the road, Edmonton drivers do not get so enthralled by the sight of falling snow that they drive right off the road, as has been known to happen in the 405 pass by the new Getty Center.

Yes, and the “splittist agenda”? Comes right out of a commie press release:

Zhu Weidong, assistant director of the Institute of Taiwan Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US gesture has been played up by Chen to his self-interest.
“The election-minded Chen is cannily taking advantage of the US behaviour to campaign for his splittist agenda,” he said.

Wanna hear it again? Here it is from The Financial Times:

Chinese state media on Wednesday quoted Wang Zaixi, vice-minister of the cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office, as saying a referendum on constitutional reform would be “an extremely dangerous move”.
“If the Taiwan authorities collude with all splittist forces to openly engage in pro-independence activities and challenge the mainland and the one-China principle, the use of force may become unavoidable,” the official China Daily quoted Mr Wang as saying.

There’s something unique about Communist rhetoric that creates these bizarre neologisms. The “revanchist” Germans; the running-dog capitalists; the pig-dogs, etc. I don’t think the Nazis ever matched it (but perhaps I’m just not familiar enough with the oeuvre). The Islamists come close but they’re too repetitive: “freeze the blood in their veins, etc. etc.” — you’d think we’d be suffering some ill effects from all the ice cubes in our aortas, but apparently we infidel just keep toolin’ along.

Apparently I have nothing on the EU:

The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture. Abuse is said to be endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which still consumes almost half the

The baby has a weblog now, and I’ll be posting that link shortly, so it’s back to politics and complaining about the lack of good old American consumer products here in the barren wastes of Alberta.

I loved this quote from Mark Steyn’s latest column:

The fanatical Muslims despise America because it’s all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it’s controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it’s too imperialist.

Yup. And there are no Chili Lime Picante Corn Nuts here, either, though that may be remedied soon.

It’s precisely for this reason that I sent my parents the URL when I started this blog.

Apart from certain ex-girlfriends, I think my worst-case readership scenario already exists.

I am starting to believe that I personally provide a large fraction of Home Depot’s revenue stream. Whenever I’m in Home Depot to buy something simple (like sandpaper) I suddenly think of another small improvement or repair that I could carry out in five minutes. For example: caulking the crack in the fireplace wall. Or gluing the kitchen tabletop panel back down. Or replacing an ethernet wire with a plugin so we can use variable lengths of cable.

So I buy the supplies I need for that. Then I come home, put the bag of supplies on a shelf in the basement, next to 1,000 identical bags each containing a small quantity of home improvement supplies. I take the sandpaper (or whatever it was I went to Home Depot to buy in the first place) and use a 3″ by 3″ square to sand the one thing in the house that needs sanding. And then I repeat the whole process a week later.

Yesterday I decided to actually execute a few of these projects. In the process, I learned several valuable things about caulk:

1. Caulk guns are so cheap because they are in fact disposable.
2. When, on the tube of caulk, it says “break seal”, they mean with the seal-breaking tool built into the caulk gun which is about 6 inches long. They do not mean with a 1″ finishing nail. That will not work.
3. If you rachet the caulk gun 5-10 times and no caulk is coming out the tip, but caulk is coming out the back and getting onto your hands, perhaps you have failed to break the seal.
4. It’s hard to wash caulk off your hands. Wear latex gloves when caulking, especially when caulking with nasty exterior-capable caulk which outgasses ammonia.

That was about it from the Caulking project. I am pleased to report that the draft coming from the crack between the masonry wall and the wood wall is greatly reduced. I have now discovered that the primary source of the draft was the crack between the concrete/asbestos tile floor and the masonry wall. This crack is too big to caulk (I know: I tried), so I will have to jam some weatherstripping into it before caulking. And buy another tube of caulk. And perhaps another caulk gun — though I think I got enough of the caulk off the moving parts.

And then there was the project that I was actually buying parts for — repairing the humidifier duct. There are two furnaces in our house, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. The upstairs furnace has a humidifier, controlled by a humidistat, and it routes hot dry air through the humidifier before blowing it upstairs. Unfortunately the duct between the humidifier and the main vent is an old vinyl piece of crap, and therefore it fell off sometime during the summer.

Several months ago, I went to Home Depot to buy a replacement duct. 4″ vinyl duct, 20 feet long. Great. Thanks. That and these clamps, caulk, caulk gun.

I brought it home. Too small.

Thursday I went to Home Depot to exchange the 4″ duct for a 5″ duct. 5″ aluminum duct, 10 feet long. Probably long enough. Thanks. That and this caulk, these boxes, these ethernet jacks. Thanks.

This morning I got up early to go replace the duct, while my wife and our daughter slept upstairs. Then I started reading back articles of instapundit. Bad idea: after an hour of that, my wife called me upstairs: “Are you done with the duct yet?”

No.

“The baby hasn’t slept the entire time. You take her and let me get some sleep.”

So we went downstairs, the baby, me, and my 5″ duct. You know what happens next, right?

Too small.

Apparently that’s a 6″ duct. But that’s OK — that’s what duct tape is for.

Included in the package of forms the midwife left us, between the vital statistics registration (”Registration of Live or Still Birth” — how cheerful!) and a birth announcement form for the local homebirth wacko magazine, was a funny packet labeled “Canada Child Tax Benefit”.

Apparently if you have a child, the government sends you a “baby bonus” of about $100 per month. They’ll even direct deposit it into your bank account.

I was like, Mr. Jaw, meet Mr. Floor. Whoah, Socialism.

As far as I can tell, this is not a means-tested benefit. (There are additional supplemental benefits, beyond the basic one, that you can get if your income is sufficiently low.) All that is required is for the child and (at least) one of the parents to be Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and for the family to reside in Canada.

By my estimate, there are about 7 million people in Canada under age 18. (I’m not paying $3 to StatsCan for a detailed breakdown, so I added all 0-14’s to 3/5 of the 15-19’s — a three-fifths compromise (!).) So the whole program is in the small-number billions of dollars — say 5 billion dollars to maybe 15 billion depending on how many people qualify for the supplemental benefit.

I can’t find out how much money Canada spends on social programs from the incredibly bad budget site but I estimated it at about 140 billion (based on this site which notes that an 11.5% increase in “program spending” is 14.3 billion). So maybe 5-10 percent of all social spending is this ridiculous benefit.

I don’t understand the reasoning behind this at all. If the government wants to give $100/child/month to people who pay no taxes, well, do that and call it welfare — don’t pretend it’s some sort of a “tax benefit”. Conversely, if this is supposed to be a benefit for people who pay taxes, why can’t they just give me a deduction on my friggin’ taxes? Why do I have to register for this ridiculous direct-deposit scheme?

Of course I registered for it. But it felt dirty.