My Facebook feed is full of links to a news article on “UnicornBooty.com” titled “Canadian Gov’t Dissolves Thousands of Same-Sex Marriages (Including Dan Savage’s)“. I am disappointed but not surprised how my progressive friends uncritically accept news that fits their worldview. At the very least, it would be nice to see them link to a Canadian news source with a bit more reputation than UnicornBooty – every major mainstream news source carried the story yesterday.

The actual issue is that two women who were married in Canada but live in the UK and the US applied for a divorce under Canada’s Divorce Act. Section 3 of the Act specifies that a Canadian province only has jurisdiction over a divorce if one of the spouses has lived there for a year. As Reddit commenters sagely explained, the purpose of this is to prevent hostile spouses from cherry-picking whichever jurisdiction’s laws will suit them better – the same way that corporations do for their legal disputes. This should be extended internationally to prevent, in particular, husbands from divorcing their wives in misogynist countries.

Presumably what actually happened in court was that a lawyer for the Department of Justice argued that Canada should not foot the bill for this couple’s legal dispute because it’s as if they weren’t married as far as any country’s divorce laws are concerned. I am disappointed but not surprised that every major mainstream news source in Canada uncritically accepted whatever their original source for this story was without reading the legislation or thinking about what actually happened.

The larger issue here is that getting married in another country can have unintended consequences and you really should talk to a lawyer first. This couple should have signed a prenuptial agreement that had some divorce mechanism specified. In order to protect Canada’s same-sex marriage tourism industry, the government have said they’re going to come up with some way to hold divorce proceedings for couples in this circumstance.

I also have a beef with the way that foreign commentators like Dan Savage criticise Canada when things like this happen. Dan: Your country wouldn’t even let you get married, and yet you choose to continue to live there; you chose to come here and get married without doing your due diligence; why does my country owe you anything?

The Victoria Police had a very quiet Halloween:

Before Halloween 2009, a number of municipalities in Greater Victoria banned fireworks: 2009 was definitely quieter than 2008. Having Halloween on Friday or Saturday compresses partying into one night: look at 2008, 2003 and 2009. (I went to bed early on Sunday and I swear I wasn’t causing trouble on Saturday, officer.) Is the combination of these two factors enough to explain the huge drop for 2010 or is this a sign of a larger trend? I find it ironic that children are doing less and less trick-or-treating as Halloween becomes increasingly safer.

The next time Halloween will be on a weekend is 2014: start planning your costume now.

Oh, noes. It looks like this blog front-ran the news again (emphasis added):

So: Does BCFS have any supplier/subsidiaries? Who owns them? How much are the directors and officers paid? Etc. That structure you’ve posted is so complicated that I guarantee it’s being abused (the fact that directors can appoint themselves seems designed for patronage).

In the oldmedia today:

BC Ferries head David Hahn is taking aim at a comptroller-general’s report that called him overpaid…

Alright, maybe not exactly front-running. Still, we intuited the existence of a scandal before it broke. What a shock: Excessively complicated governance structures are used to obscure allegedly abusive compensation practices*. Really, quite shocking. Can you tell how shocked I am?

Shocked.

:O

* I spit hot fire. Accusations are not guilt.

There’s only one question remaining about the father of the Balloon-boy-who-wasn’t. Clearly he’s completely insane, but is he criminally insane?

“We feel it’s incumbent on us as an agency to attempt to reinterview them and establish whether this is [an] actual event,” Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden said Friday.

And then Wittgenstein rotated along his subterranean bilateral axis. I love it when people struggle with terminology in a way that sounds philosophical. The Sheriff’s “was this an actual event” investigation reminds me of Rumsfeld’s unintentional poem, dubbed Happenings. Rumsfeld’s news briefs were avant-garde, a kind of ready-made, or “found”, poetry that I didn’t think could exist (they were, perhaps, an “unknown known” — punctuation mine):

Happenings

You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day,
That don’t happen.

It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t –
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone’s so eager to get the story,
Before, in fact, the story’s there,
That the world is constantly being fed,
Things that haven’t happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened –

It’s going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

The poor Sheriff is suddenly faced with an Epistemological problem for which he has received absolutely no training. Hopefully Rumsfeld’s poetry will help him wrestle with the absurdity of his duties:

“We believe, at this time, that it was a real event.”

This is a cool theory: Maher Arar is a US spook, associated with both the FBI and CIA. He was in Syria (or somewhere else?) on assignment and the torture was just a cover story. His wife, Monia Mazigh, ran for the NDP in order to get Arar undercover in left-wing anti-war organizations.

But was the whole point of Arar’s accusations against the RCMP and subsequent pay-out to get him in with the radical left? That strikes me as an overly-complicated plan. I guess I need to read the book to get the whole theory explained.

This is an underreported story that I’ll go ahead and attempt to scoop the mainstream media on: Two Japanese men in their 50s were detained by Italian authorities while crossing the border into Switzerland with US$134,000,000,000 in US Treasury Bonds hidden in the bottom of a suitcase.

Private-sector US Treasury Bond trades are done entirely electronically. It’s hard to believe, but central banks hold little pieces of paper worth a billion dollars each. Although the US claims that there aren’t enough such pieces of paper in the world for these to all be real.

This is stranger than fiction and of course there are all sorts of fun theories. If they’re all real, then no matter where they’re from, this is probably the end of the US$ as global reserve currency – which this blog keeps predicting over and over again.