Canada: still adolescent, if slightly less "inferior"

By Susan Delacourt, Toronto Star, December 4, 2010
And the first person to call it (Canada's Inferiority Complex) a complex, it seems, was a Detroit-born, Ontario-raised man named Merrill Denison. This architect-turned-playwright was puzzled by Canada’s national temperament when he returned to Toronto in the 1920s to become art director at Hart House — then a theatre, now part of the University of Toronto.

In 1949, Denison gave an Empire Club speech at the Royal York, titled “That Inferiority Complex,” in which he somewhat abashedly acknowledged authorship of what was already then seen as a national “cliché.” He laid part of the blame on the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
“With some assistance from Mr. Freud I came up with one possible diagnosis — an inferiority complex, an intellectual timidity born of a false feeling of inadequacy or inability,” Denison said. “I expected that the impeachment would be promptly challenged and denied. I never expected that it would become part of the national folklore and live to become a tedious and shop-worn cliché. For my sins, I have been doing my best to combat it ever since.”
In 1987, I had the opportunity to deliver an address to the Canadian Club of North Bay. (At the time, my mother was president, and for the final meeting of her term, she 'could not find' an adequate speaker.)
My thesis, in May of that year, was that Canada lacked confidence in herself. As evidence I pointed to the absence of a "chair of future studies" in any Canadian college or university, to the political correctness that has become (even more in the last two decades) a kind of "theology" and an addiction to the words, "I'm sorry" when they are neither needed nor appropriate. When history matters more, and significantly more than the future, that is where the heart is, in the past. And when Canadians consider our past as more important than our future, we are hiding in the warm comfort of our Hudson's Bay Blankets as we curl up between the two monsters, (according to Irving Layton) of the Arctic and the U.S. Layton's view is that our geography betwen these two cold 'creatures' results in a literature of poetry and passion, and that may have been more accurate four or five decades ago.
Not paying attention to the American diplomatic notes that refer to our country as having an inferiority complex, as the Wikileaks 'dump' reveals, may appear to some to be a move forward into enhanced confidence. Our ability to laugh at ourselves certainly can be seen in that light.
However, our reputation as a country fixated on "forms" in our way of doing business, especially by those in U.S. corporations, is well deserved. We prefer a form, a paper form, to account for every transaction. We love paper trails, and we love the officers appointed to chase those paper trails, especially the Auditor General. She would be the archetype for Canada, a strong, stern, matronly "brain" who operates with dispassion as a watchguard for our public purse.
For a while, in the 70's and 80's, we thought Pierre Trudeau could be our "best expression" of our emerging confidence. For the last seven years, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador have considered Danny Williams their "best expression" of their formerly lost confidence, now among the have provinces of the federation...
The people of the prairies consider Tommy Douglas as their 'best expression' of their compassion, empathy and authentic care for one another, and the rest of our have been the beneficiaries of that care, through the National Health Act.
Certainly, Canada has a stable full of global heavy-weights in literature, theatre, science, architecture, medicine, even in law and broadcasting of whom we can all be proud, and whom we are invited to emulate.
Some Canadian athletes have conquered world podiums, in various sports, as have some Canadian businessmen and women.
However, when Canadian Don Cherry, in introducing  incoming mayor Rob Ford's new team at city hall in Toronto, by saying people are tired of the eggheads and the artsy crowd, I draw the line.
There are snobs among the aristocrats, and among the elite in every profession, every vocation and neighbourhood; and there are reverse snobs who are just as narrow-minded as their elites brothers and sisters in every profession, vocation and neighbourhood.
And Cherry does not speak for me when he says Canadians have grown tired of the eggheads and the artsy folks. We have not; we will not; and we reject Cherry's knee-jerk neo-conservatism as an expression of the best that is Canada.
Cherry is a successful "pitch-man" for hockey players, while he makes a substantial living criticising the coaches who prosecute the profession in his retirement. He is also a successful pitch-man for Cold-FX, and for a few other no-name products and services.
A Canadian whose accomplishments are worthy of national prominence, Cherry is not. Nevertheless, he gives vent to the reverse snobbery that can be found in every classroom, and every lecture hall and in every bar and lounge in the country. We are repeating the David v. Goliath story so often, it has lost its vibrancy.
At various times, we are all David and also Goliath, depending on many factors. We find it easier to own our "David" archetype than we do our Goliath archetype; nevertheless, we must own both.
We find it easier to own our Crosby archetype, (or Gretzky or Orr, or Yzerman) than our Tie Domi, or Bob Pronger, or Georges Laroque or Colton Orr...and Cherry gives vent to the resentment against the latter group, calling them "my kind of player"...And Cherry also gives voice to the critics of those in the Crosby camp by scratching his perfect public image occasionally.
Fighters are not afraid of the "mucky-mucks" as Cherry would describe them, nevertheless, there are a zillion different ways of approaching the excellence in others, than merely denigrating it...
And Cherry does no favours to Ford, nor to Toronto, nor to the country when he derides the eggheads and the artsy in 2010. He would probably dub them all "fairies" (and 'unmanly') in his bigoted language and attitude. He really ought to know better and to provide a better example of leadership, given the podium he enjoys and is paid so handsomely to cherish. And he is not going to either change or apologize for his venom against the kind of excellence he abhors and cannot or will not understand and appreciate.

Tom Flanagan V. Julian Assange....Dec. 3/2010

By Leslie Ciarula Taylor, Toronto Star, December 3, 2010
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking from an undisclosed spot thought to be in Britain, said Friday that (Canadian Prime Minister) Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff “should be charged with incitement to commit murder” for saying Assange should be assassinated.

Assange answered questions through the website of the British newspaper The Guardian.
Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary professor and former Harper adviser, apologized on Wednesday for his remark.
“I never seriously intended to advocate or propose the assassination of Mr. Assange. But I do think that what he’s doing is very malicious and harmful to diplomacy and endangering people’s lives, and I think it should be stopped.”
Earlier, Flanagan had said, “I think Assange should be assassinated” and U.S. President Barack Obama “should put out a contract” on him.
“It is correct that Mr. Flanagan and the others seriously making these statements should be charged with incitement to commit murder,” Assange said in answer to a question about Flanagan.
Dear Reader:
Clearly, Mr. Flanagan, who teaches political science at the University of Calgary, and who once served as the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, has uttered words he would like to have back. He has apologized.
However, whether the CBC might consider removing him from the "Power Panel" on the "Power and Politics" program with Evan Solomon each afternoon between five and seven in the evening is a question that we can only hope the producers of the show are considering, actively,
It is this kind of rhetoric that has been following President Obama since he threw his hat into the ring as a presidential candidate in 2007. And the people flinging words like these at Mr. Obama are not on the public media, nor are they, generally, carrying the kind of academic credentials that Mr. Flanagan presumably holds.
Vitriol, in the heat of a moment is both available, and also needing restraint no matter the socio-economic class of the speaker, and no matter the political clout of the speaker.
And the violence that characterizes the political rhetoric, both in Washington, and we might like to remember, by Mr. Flanagan's former employer, the Prime Minister himself, especially with his character assassination of Stephane Dion, for which this writer has never, and likely never will forgive him, is inexcuseable, reprehensible and completely unacceptable.
Let's hope that the intemperance of the remarks, even with the apology, will reflect on the kind of absolute, black-and-white thinking that often characterizes this prime minister's approach especially to Liberal party candidates, policy and history. These remarks by Flanagan are indicative of the kind of brutality that accompanies the Prime Minister's brutality in his exercise of power, in the most honoured office in the land.

As income shifts, so too does power

By Joe Friesen, Globe and Mail, December 1, 2010
(Ms. Yalnizyan is the chief researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and this story is based on a recent report she prepared for the CCPA on income distribution in Canada.)
Ms. Yalnizyan said the major trend she identifies is that the wealthiest Canadians are increasing their share of income at a historic pace. Looking back over the past 90 years, income is now concentrated in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1920s, she said. In the past decade, almost a third of income growth has gone to the richest 1 per cent, she added.

The big picture shows that after the Second World War, Canadian society distributed income in an increasingly level fashion. From 1946 to 1977, she writes, the income share of the richest 1 per cent fell from 14 per cent to 7.7 per cent. That trend was reversed over the past 30 years, as the top 1 per cent regained its 14-per-cent share of Canadian income. Over that time, the richest 0.1 per cent almost tripled their income share and the richest 0.01 per cent increased their share fivefold.
With this kind of empirical evidence based on solid research, there is no reason for the leaders of the opposition parties NOT to bring the government down, if for no other reason that to restore the country to a more equitable distribution of income.
This dramatic shift, which the democrats have been pointing out with some vigour south of the border for a few years, needs to have an army of committed generals (metaphorically speaking) dedicated to a public awareness campaign that would make all the other "issue" campaigns look like a pimple on an elephant by comparison. This collaborative and co-ordinated campaign would be not so much in righteous anger but rather in rational argument about the loss of opportunity, the loss of incentives, the loss of aspiration and hope among the large majority of the Canadian people, not to mention the increase in complete hopelessness and the rising costs of that dynamic in social services directly attributable to the daily costs of governments doing their business.
The nature of the society that most of us grew up in has changed, and it does not take a degree in economics from the London School of Economics to recognize the broad and serious implications of this drift.
If the drift continues unabated, and the coffers of the wealthy continue to grow at rates exceeding the speed of light, and the gap between the incomes at the top and those at the bottom (because there will be no 'middle') then what we are currently witnessing in the proverbial 'third world' will be taking place right here on the streets of our own towns and villages.
The polite apathy, and the repectful disengagement and the trust that the rich and powerful have placed in the compliance of the 'masses' with whatever the governments-and-business "boardrooms" decide is waiting for a reasonable, rational and articulate, but collaborative leadership to waken that apathy and that respect and turn it into the kind of political force, not about the single issues like raising the retirement age (that is bringing the people into the streets in France, for example) but rather about the whole glacial "melt" of a set of values and princples that served us very well for decades and that has been lost to greed and to manipulation and to the many implications of powerlessness.
And one of the many attitudinal shifts is that those "leading" our institutions have what might easily be called a "divine right" of power and leadership in a closed inner sanctum that is not penetrated by the voices of the people, to leven the bread of their discussions and to level the playing field...and that renders them even more sterile in their perceptions of the righteousness of their various minimal, do-not-rock-the-boat approaches to their responsibilities.
We may have replaced the former monarchy with a self-designated monarchy of the top .001% of the population and they will seek to serve themselves at our expense if we let them!
The guilded age of the 1920's, and the depression led to places we do not wish to go to again....including military conflicts...we need to take political action, as a citizenry before that happens again, becuase this time the weapons will not be so miniscule.

Science continues to amaze

Dennis Overbye, New York Times, December 2, 2010
Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.
The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic
Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”

And then there is this from David Suzuki's, The Nature of Things, December 2, 2010, on CBC
The earth has two North poles, the geographic and the magnetic. The magnetic pole is the one that attracts the needles of our compasses. It’s always moving, but could it be about to flip? What will be the impact? Paleomagnetism has taught us that the magnetic pole flips regularly, going from north to south and vice versa, once every 250,000 years on average. However, the last inversion occurred 780,000 years ago! Are we on the eve of such a major event?

When North Goes South follows Canadian geophysicist Larry Newitt and French geologist Jean-Jacques Orgeval as they meet astronauts, marine biologists, paleo and archeomagneticians, in an attempt to understand, measure and explain the consequences of a pole inversion



And a little earlier this week, we learned that scientists were working on extending the length of life in animals, through research on the theromes at the end of chromosomes...
What's next, in a world seemingly fixated on Wikileaks, Twitter, Facebook and debts, deficits and wars?

International chatter without collaborative decisions

By Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, December 2, 2010
The most comprehensive leaks (from Wikileaks) are about Iran, and they confirm the standard American narrative: Iran is terrible and its nukes pose “an existentialist threat” to Israel and to “moderate” Arab states.

Saudi King Abdullah Saudi wants the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake.” Similar opinions are held by (the pro-American) leaders of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt.
Abdullah has bowed to American pressure to promise China a guaranteed source of energy if Beijing would join in pressuring Iran.
One UAE leader says, “Iran is establishing ‘emirates’ across the Muslim world, including south Lebanon and Gaza, sleeper ‘emirates’ in Kuwait, Bahrain and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and the mother of all ‘emirates’ in southern Iraq, and now in Yemen.”
Abu Dhabi’s crown prince says “Ahmadinejad is Hitler” and that if air strikes won’t do the job in Iran, ground troops should be sent in.
Gary Sick, Iran expert at Columbia University, writes:
“The dirty little secret that no war hawk wants to admit is that you can’t eliminate Iran’s nuclear capacity simply by bombing. To really wipe out the capability, you’d have to go in on the ground — just as the United States had to do with Iraq. The difference would be that you’d have to field perhaps a million soldiers . . . Conscription anyone?”
In light of this "dirty little secret" how can anyone really think that the U.S. would even contemplate another ground war against Iran? And Iran's best thinkers and planners must already know this.
And if Israel thinks it can "cut the head off the snake" with its bombing of Iran, perhaps this might also be a sleight of mind.
The more the politicians talk, and the more people actually listen to their rhetoric, the more likely we will all be seduced into thinking that there really are answers, political answers, military answers, collaborative answers to the domestic and international problems we all face, when just perhaps, we might be wrong in that seduction.

• If no one really knows or is prepared to act to reign in Korea, including China, and
• if no one is really prepared to force Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, or is really prepared to send in 1 million soldiers on the ground, and
• if Iran really is 'Hitler' establishing emirates across the Muslim world 
• if China, India and America are really not prepared to sign onto a climate change and global warming reduction treaty, and
• if the hungry of the world continue to starve while the rest of us continue to eat more, and more healthy food and
• if the American congress refuses to approve the START treaty, and that sets off another nuclear arms race and
• if....

Then, is it true that we can hope for only micro-movements on any or all of the pressing problems because there is no collective and collaborative will or mechanism for the achievement of mutually beneficial and mutually agreed, and mutually monitored decisions to bring the world community back from its several brinks?
And then, are we forced into a position where we have to trust that no spark will be set off that will ignite more than we expected and more than we are collectively capable of extinguishing?
Our collective cultural mind-set seems to be set on the day-to-day necessities of life, and, if the numbers are correct and likely to be repeated in our low voter turnout, then is it democracy that might be experiencing its own atrophy?
Rogue states and even more rogue leaders of those states do not wish to negotiate except perhaps to make deals with their rogue counterparts, any more than Republican leadership does not wish to negotiate with the U.S. President. And so a kind of stalemate fossilizes the process of healthy governance, within the U.S. and potentially at the U.N. and other collaborative groups of nations.
And the political chatter carries on to feed the appetites of those political junkies, who, even though we may be interested are increasingly rendered impotent to make a difference in this ironic "glacial" political climate, at the same time we make concrete plans for a rise in sea levels of from 5-15 feet as a potential result of that same global warming and climate change that we are doing very little to prevent.
And we thought Alice in Wonderland was topsy-turvy? It has nothing on the real topsy-turvy!

Reflections on the dark nights

Sometimes it really does become clear that the world is moving so quickly that people are losing their 'touch' with the reality that is the whole self, in a human community, and a kind of engagement with the broader issues facing all of us.
There was a time when the celebrated adage used to be, "I am a human BEING not a human DOING."
And that meant that celebration of time in reflection of an inner variety trumped time reflecting on extrinsic reality. How one felt, believed, ruminated, and even dreamed seemed to matter, not to the occasional one but to more than the occasional one. Attempting to connect the dots, in one's own life, meant noting how those dots connected with the dots in others' lives. And pursuing those dots meant discerning a kind of personal time line, and summation of the kind of experience that one had had, with a view to making some sense of that experience.
And that pursuit meant asking tough questions about how one might have faced different situations differently with the benefit of new growth and the detachment that comes from decades apart from the original experience. And while noting the differences, one had the benefit of two different dramas, two different narratives, one then, and one now.
While within a troublesome patch, we all, each one of us, reverted to a kind of survival mode. We tried to eat enough to stay alive, when there might not have been money or prospects to sustain a more wholesome existence. When there was only oatmeal and chicken noodle soup in the larder, and the cockroaches were running out from the kitchen cupboards faster than we could kill them, and the phone was silent and the mornings turned into afternoons and evenings, and the only thought that seemed to be able to surface in our minds ran something like, "Where will I park the car and what will I write if I attempt to end this life today?"
And when thoughts like those clustered in both our bodies and our minds and we merely wakened long enough to have a cup of tea, and then return to a horizontal place, where we could try to read, only to find those words blurring into our hourly question and the process stretched over four months....and every time a muscle moved in the direction of "doing" something about that damn question, only the bedcovers could wrap themselves around the shoulders and then some fitful sleep would take over...until the next round of facing the same question.....
And then, after those horrible dark months, the question seemed to move slightly in the direction of 'Do I choose, instead, to live?' and 'Do I want life itself, for itself, on its own merits?' and those questions seemed to provoke the occasional walk around a single block, without a single encounter with another human being.
The significance of the change in the nature of the question seemed to be that a choice to live, even when there seemed to be no external purpose, or external stimulation, or external motivation to do something, to accomplish something in some organizational, or corporate or educational or political situation or manner, had its own intrinsic value and justified one's being alive over doing some measureable or even commendable action.
And there was a glimmer of light on the horizon of one's attitude; the gloom was giving way to something a little lighter and a little less ominous, a little less foreboding.
And if such a time is like those times that some writers have called 'the dark night of the soul' in their spiritual stories, and if such a time is given to one so that one can know, without doubt, that even at the bottom of the 'pit' of one's hopelessness and one's meaninglessness, there is still something that nudges even the most despondent out of the abyss, then one has to emerge into a world different from that one entered four or five months previous. If that former world was detailed in appointments, assignments, accomplishments and phone calls and extrinsic performance of one's responsibilties, this new world is detailed very differently by a different sense of breathing, and looking at the sky and the clouds and the sunlight, and listening to the birds and even feeding the birds. And there are fewer appointments and fewer accomplishments that formerly were needed to justify one's acceptance of one's duty, and they are regarded as things on the 'to do' list without the kind of military command that seemed attached to those same things formerly.
What did God have to do with any of this, except perhaps to serve the questions and the attitudes and the old and new perceptions and attitudes and sense of being? And what is the purpose of such pain, if not to waken the spirit to the depth of its profundity, and that profundity is and can never be anything we have created, generated or contributed; that profundity is merely a quality of our gift of life, from whereever that gift comes from and returns to.
And while one never wishes such darkness on another as certainly no one ever wished it to be a part of this life journey, it is that long dark night that stays with us when all the questions of one's search for purpose and identity and justification in an extrinsic sense fall away into an oblivion too deep to penetrate or to recall, leaving only the desire for clean air, clean water, adequate sustenance and a partner to share those simple gifts...in order to speak for those who cannot speak on their own behalf, for those same gifts.
And that darkness can only be a prelude to another dawn, and perhaps a different kind of darkness..like that of drawing down from the hurly-burly that is life at the peak. And that drawing down can be another of those times to reflect on the "what-might-have-been's" if we had made different choices and to befriend both the choices made and the 'road not taken'...and to accept both as gifts to be thankful for.

WikiLeaks: "stateless news organization" or "Piggy-like super-ego"?

By  Olivia Lang, BBC website, July 27, 2010
As the Wikileaks website says itself, "with technological advances - the internet, and cryptography - the risks of conveying important information can be lowered".

The site, born in December 2006, now boasts more than a million documents.
Described on one blog as the "first stateless news organisation", Wikileaks has servers in countries which include Sweden and Belgium, where it benefits from press secrecy laws.
The idea behind the site is the need for transparency, with the basis being that it allows anyone to upload content, which will then be looked at by a group of volunteers, all journalists, who decide what to publish.
On submission of a document, which is encrypted, Wikileaks promises to prevent it being "technically traceable to your PDF printing program, your word installation, scanner, printer" and to make the contributor anonymous from an early stage.


By Kristen Shorten, Herald Sun, December 2, 2010
"Whether you agree with what Julian does or not, living by what you believe in and standing up for something is a good thing," she (his mother) said.

"He sees what he's doing as doing a good thing in the world, fighting baddies, if you like."
But she conceded she feared her 39-year-old son had "gotten too smart for himself".
"Of course, I'm his mother, he's my little boy," she said.
"I'm just a normal mother. Whatever a normal mother would feel is what I would feel about all of it.
"I'm concerned it's gotten too big and the forces that he's challenging are too big."


It seems the world is, once again, divided over the "ethics" of the wikileaks "dump" of some quarter million diplomatic notes. Those on the inside, including diplomats and political leaders, insist the acct has made it difficult if not impossible to carry on their various assignments because of the danger of disclosure and the lack of trust that results from that exposure. Those on the outside, or rather on the inside with wikileaks, prefer a metaphor that make Julian Assange and his "crew" a king of modern day David attempting to slay the evil Dragon of the various deceptions, innuendo and prevaracations that attend much of the world's diplomacy and conflict.
As a former diplomat, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Yemen at the time of the attack on the U.S. Cole, put it on NPR's On Point yesterday, "We were always trained to operate from the premise that whatever we did could end up on the front page of the New York Times." If that is correct, and there is no reason to doubt her veracity, then all diplomats work from such a premise and this is an extension of such exposure, albeit from anonymous, and multiple and 'encrpyted' sources who are not accessible  for "backgrounders".
And while the rules of the game may have changed, and the protection of secrecy taken on new parameters and  perhaps even new protocols, that may have a potentially positive impact on how the world's statesmen and women do business.
In the short term, (and both the media and Wikileaks are really focussed on immediate publicity and ratings for their own separate and symbiotic interests) this kind of "dump" is just another bump in the road for an already extremely bumpy ride through the diplomatic channels of geopolitical relationships. Brinkmanship, threats and enhanced military power have been, and seem to continue especially among rogue states, to be the levers of influence in bilateral relations between countries that are less than allies with each other.
The terrorists, in all shades and stripes, have demonstrated the power of "stateless operatives" to wreak havoc among innocents. And Wikileaks, as the blogger above dubs it, the new "stateless news organization," will have a "run" at demonstrating the power of trumping the traditional news sources like Reuters, and the various newspapers and media outlets, all of which operate within national and international laws. And in both cases, we, the ordinary folk, represented by our political leaders, run the risk of giving these interlopers too much power, and too much coverage, and too much venom.
I recall a conversation with a former secondary school principal who had just been harrassed by a very blustery history department head, a graduate of the London School of Economics, about some school policy or other. The principal was preparing for a March break trip with his family to relax and wind down from the pressure of all the minutiae that crossed his desk hourly, and was beside himself with anxiety because of this latest "tempest". I recall attempting to "dampen" his anxiety by reminding him that much of this was sheer "bravado" and theatrics and that there was nothing venomous in the bluster except a kind of "Piggy-like" (from the character in Golding's Lord of the Flies) super-ego trying to enact his excessively high standards and expectations. The same history 'head' had demonstrated a similar kind of bluster in a public forum while asking then Prime Minister Trudeau about some international situation, to which the PM responded, "I'm not sure what all the anger in your question is about," in an understatement that ripped all the helium from his question.
And there is a similar kind of "theatrics" in this latest global dust-up. Remember that Assange's parents travelled about presenting "theatre" as their livlihood while their son was growing up. He may have a keen intellect, and a combative personality that likes to prick the balloons of the 'powerful' for his own, and he would argue the world's enhancement. And there may even be some laws that his organization has broken. I really don't know.
However, if both the terrorists and the Wikileaks dumps have demonstrated nothing else, they have shown how immature and frightened and therefore vulnerable the establishment seems to be to 'unusual threats' from unusual sources. And, like the principal above, attempting to 'do a good job' and attempting to 'act responsibly' and to 'prevent embarrassment' from the school board and it officials, and from the state departments of various countries, the Hillary Clinton's of the world are expected to "react" and to condemn the kind of rhetoric that falls way outside the normal whisper of diplomatic "speak". And that is as it should be.
And when we have just recently learned that for eighteen minutes on April 8th, 2010, much of the world's internet traffic was funnelled through China, making it feasible for the Chinese to record, save and study all of the information coming from such sources as the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon and who knows what other 'important' and official and presumably 'encrypted' sources, it would seem relevant and pertinent for all countries and official organizations to take extreme measures to protect the security of their (our) technological systems. And this latest 'dump' may yet prove to be a similar kind of stimulus to act in ways that really do take such threats as the  Aptil 8th China "siphoning" seriously.