Just updated my web server and it killed my website. Gee, thanks! But I'm back up now.

Also, the .org whois servers (keeps track of who owns what domain name) seem to have moved since the last time I checked. I'm using the GNU whois client jwhois, which allegedly handles recursive queries, but both the version of the jwhois.conf file distributed by my OS distributor (Trustix) and the latest GNU version (3.2.1) are hosed for .org domains.

Here's a patch that fixes it:

--- jwhois.conf Thu May  8 19:43:52 2003
+++ jwhois.conf.fixed   Thu May  8 19:43:46 2003
@@ -196,7 +196,7 @@
        "\\.no$" = "whois.norid.no";
        "\\.nu$" = "whois.nic.nu";
        "\\.nz$" = "whois.srs.net.nz";
-       "\\.org$" = "whois.publicinterestregistry.net";
+       "\\.org$" = "whois.pir.org";
        "\\.pe$" = "whois.nic.pe";
        "\\.pk$" = "pknic.net.pk";
        "\\.pl$" = "whois.dns.pl";
@@ -443,8 +443,8 @@
        "rwhois\\.exodus\\.net" {
                rwhois = true;
        }
-       "whois\\.publicinterestregistry.net\\.net" {
-               whois-redirect = ".*Whois Server: \\(.*\\)";
+       "whois\\.pir\\.org" {
+               whois-redirect = ".*Whois Server:\\(.*[A-Za-z]\\)";
        }
        ".*\\.internic\\.net" {
                #

I've been reading Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World by Karen Armstrong. The book wasn't recommended, but the author was on the strength of A History of God. Ms. Armstrong is a theologian, not a historian, and it shows.

On the first page of the text, she describes Pope Urban calling the first Crusade. Armstrong writes:

On November 25, 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade.... The Pope urged the knights to ... make common cause against these enemies of God. The Turks, he cried, are "an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth,which has neither directed its heart nor entrusted its spirit to God."¹

The only problem with this quote is that it's not the Pope speaking. As Armstrong admits on p.66, "We have no contemporary account of Urban's speech..."

The only thing that's saving her here is the endnote, where after citing the source of the quote (one "Robert the Monk"), she writes:

There are no exactly contemporary accounts of Urban's speech and these quotations come from works written shortly after the success of the Crusade and reflect a later view than Urban's, at a time when crusading ideology had developed.

But Armstrong represents on p.1 that this is a direct quote from Urban. I believe she does this to enhance the drama in the opening of the book. Certainly she does have an endnote which explains that the quote is not actually from Urban's speech. However, she does not forthrightly state this in the text. The casual reader could certainly be misled to believe
that these were Urban's words and thus form an opinion of Urban which would only be corrected if either
  a) the reader reads the endnote
  b) the line on p.66 causes the reader to double-check the quote on p.1 (as I did)

More to come -- this is a progressive book review, and I will add more as I progress through the book.

Daimian Penny writes:

[Newfoundland is] the only province with no jurisdiction over its most valuable natural resource, and that's a disgrace.

It is a disgrace. It's almost as if the federal government believes that the provinces are not responsible enough to control their own natural resources.

But this is precedented. In the 1973 oil shocks the government had already gotten started:

The National Oil Policy was introduced in 1961 to shelter Canada’s oil industry by establishing a market west of Quebec that would rely on oil from Western Canada. In March 1973, in the face of rapidly growing demand from the United States, the Government of Canada decided to control the export of Canadian oil and thereby ensure the domestic supply. By September, the government reinforced its control over the resource by freezing the domestic price of oil below the world price and by taxing exports of oil.

So relax, Damian -- you're not alone. No province has any jurisdiction over any of its natural resources, as Alberta well knows and Newfoundland is now learning. Just be happy that no-one's figured out how to run cars off of cod, or they'd be actively stealing them from you.