You know, watching the US Senate and Congress deliberate yesterday confirmed a feeling I've had about some conservatives -- not all by any means, but many of the most vocal ones on this issue -- that they're arguing from ignorance.
There's a shallow form of ignorance, first of all. This would be the people who lie and say that scientists used to be worried about "global cooling" (they didn't) that glaciers are in fact growing (they aren't) or that warming will be a net plus for the world (it won't.)* These people are annoying, but these claims are also transparently political and don't really surprise me much: it's just the way the game is played.
Then there's what we could call "deep stupid." The less said about James Imhofe the better, but let's simply point out (via Dave at Gristmill) that even other dyed-in-the-wool conservatives think he was a petulant little child yesterday. More than that, he's deliberately maintained a burden of incredible, fundamental ignorance about the basic science he's talking about. Ditto Brit Hume here. Ditto many of the GOP Congresscritters (and sadly, too many of the Democrats) yesterday.
The argument in Canada over Kyoto takes an impressively weird character: Conservatives can't appear to reasonably argue against emissions reductions per se, so they argue against the Kyoto Process claiming that somehow, Kyoto in particular would be unduly onerous. This is absurd, because Kyoto says absolutely nothing about how Canada must reach it's goal -- and Canada got to set the goal in the first place.
I understand that nobody can know everything, and bloggers are by definition not experts on many issues -- I've certainly stepped beyond my expertise a bit, but I try and warn you when I do. But to argue passionately from a position of total and complete ignorance really just astounds me.
Learn about actual climate science, don't just read Michael Crichton novels. If you must read science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson's latest trilogy would be worth investigating. But try Flannery's The Weathermakers. Hell, if your conservative soul can bear it, watch Al Gore's movie. Skip the personal scenes and watch the slideshow bits -- it's as good a primer as you can ask for.
Then start reading about the solutions. They all have their pros and cons -- we've no silver bullets in our arsenal. But a few are looking more and more promising. Spain's burgeoning wind industry is now producing more power than nuclear on a good day -- this in a country who's modern wind industry is only about 10 years old. (Some guy named "Quixote" seems to have been an early opponent of renewable energy...)
The problem is real, and our solutions are real too. But none of this matters if the debate is defined by all the informed people agreeing, and those vocally opposed being unshakably hostile to anything resembling a fact.
* While Time Magazine and Newsweek ran cover stories about the possibility of "global cooling", a journal review finds no evidence of any scientist anywhere arguing seriously for such a scenario. Antarctic glaciers are thickening at the center because of increased snowfall -- exactly what is predicted in climate change models, and in any case the loss of ice at the shoreline dwarfs the add thickness. And it's impossible to see how the possible starvation of billions as the Himalayas dry out could be evened out by shorter winters for Russia.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Gore, cont.
If you've got some time you never, ever want back you could go watch the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works starring -- Al Gore!
Update: Because I do, in fact, have hours that I don't want or need back, I've been watching, and I've got to say the most notable thing is how moderate the Republicans are being -- with the notable exception of James Imhofe, who is a total tool.
Update: Because I do, in fact, have hours that I don't want or need back, I've been watching, and I've got to say the most notable thing is how moderate the Republicans are being -- with the notable exception of James Imhofe, who is a total tool.
Gore on Capitol Hill
The President-in-Exile is testifying to Congress on the Climate Crisis:
The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, well I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem. If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action.Heh. Indeed.
A raise for me, an I didna do nuthin
...this makes me smile:
The Ontario government will increase the minimum wage to $10.25 an hour by 2010, the Toronto Star reported Wednesday.Not only is this overdue, but it's especially amusing given that when it was just the NDP pushing for it, the Liberal bloggers screamed about how ignorant the NDP was and how this would crush small business.
The newspaper reported that the increase will be unveiled in the provincial budget on Thursday, after weeks of campaigning on the government from the New Democrats and poverty activists.
They had been lobbying for an immediate hike to $10 an hour from the present $8 an hour.
Instead, the wage will be bumped up over the next three years, sources told the Star.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Constitutional fundamentalism, cont.
How's this for a strict division of powers? The Constitution of Canada, when it comes to equalization payments, says the following:
It's nice to see that the rhetoric about "original intent" of the Constitution is as empty and ridiculous in Canada as it is in the United States.
Oh, and where did I find this passage? In the Report on the Fiscal Imbalance published by the Government of Quebec. They had, you can imagine, a different interpretation from mine.
It's worth pointing out that the PQ's desired solution to the fiscal imbalance is the elimination of all health transfers and handing billions of tax dollars to the Provinces in perpetuity. Exactly how long do you think Canadian health care would last, given that we've basically stopped enforcing the Health Act?
Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxationQuebec is entitled to funding for comparable levels of public services to keep its taxes comparable with the rest of Canada. Quebec is not guaranteed free money so that it can have the most expansive welfare state in Canada at moderate levels of taxation.
It's nice to see that the rhetoric about "original intent" of the Constitution is as empty and ridiculous in Canada as it is in the United States.
Oh, and where did I find this passage? In the Report on the Fiscal Imbalance published by the Government of Quebec. They had, you can imagine, a different interpretation from mine.
It's worth pointing out that the PQ's desired solution to the fiscal imbalance is the elimination of all health transfers and handing billions of tax dollars to the Provinces in perpetuity. Exactly how long do you think Canadian health care would last, given that we've basically stopped enforcing the Health Act?
How is this hard to understand?
So the Blogger's Hotstove features a debate between CalgaryGrit and Antonio from Fuddle-Duddle over the fiscal imbalance, and Charest's decision to spend some of that money on the all-important goal of... income tax cuts. Antonio's argument is summed up at his post here:
In the podcast, Antonio takes some Liberals to task for not believing in the Separatists Pixie Dust that is the fiscal imbalance, but here he really seems to lose his grip on facts when he talks about the money "the provinces send to Ottawa". (Um, no province sends any money to Ottawa. At all. The federal government raises and borrows money independently. Geez.) It would be easier for Antonio and other pro-Pequiste-rhetoric-Liberals if they could come up with a standard and enduring definition of what, exactly, the fiscal imbalance is. First it was that some Provinces were sending more money to Ottawa then they get back (Quebec isn't one of them) and now there's a vague idea that Ottawa needs to create "fiscal space" for the provinces, usually defined as the provinces getting a guaranteed chunk of the Federal tax revenue.
This is, in short, political cowardice of the highest order -- and not at all because it's coming from Quebeckers. Any politician who, with a straight face, says to his or her constituents that:
What's especially galling is that Antonio claims to be some kind of constitutional fundamentalist who believes that Ottawa has no role of any kind in provincial matters... except, it seems, for cutting blank checks. Look up your Canadian Political History, Antonio: the provinces were deliberately given a weaker financial position in the BNA, relative to the Feds. This has, after all, been the PQ talking point -- the Feds have the money, but the provinces have the needs. This wasn't an accident, people. The provinces were designed from the outset to have cap in hand.
This is the problem with this crap: "Fiscal imbalance" means any one of seven different things, but all just happen to mean more money for Quebec. "Constitutional powers" means that Ottawa should keep the magic money flowing, but can never, ever overstep its boundaries... meanwhile, Quebec has a Ministry of Foreign Affairs!
What a weird fucking country I live in.
Seriously this mock outrage over the Charest tax cut is absolutely ridiculous. In the late 1990s, the Quebec government decided not to cut services like other provinces were doing. They also modestly cut taxes. Faced with the choice, Quebecers (or their government) decided to keep their generous welfare state.What Antonio seems to totally ignore is the idea that Quebec should even be asked to consider reducing its own spending. Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to have the low tuition and high social spending that Quebecers enjoy here in Ontario. But the money that supports Quebec's social programs does not, will not, and has not come solely from Quebec. That changes things. We'd all love free money, but the real world doesn't work like that.
Charest did what anybody would expect him to do. Quebecers have been overtaxed because we chose to wait out the federal transfers to solve the fiscal imbalance. Now that we have them, Quebecers can celebrate and Charest can return some of the money to the citizens.
In the podcast, Antonio takes some Liberals to task for not believing in the Separatists Pixie Dust that is the fiscal imbalance, but here he really seems to lose his grip on facts when he talks about the money "the provinces send to Ottawa". (Um, no province sends any money to Ottawa. At all. The federal government raises and borrows money independently. Geez.) It would be easier for Antonio and other pro-Pequiste-rhetoric-Liberals if they could come up with a standard and enduring definition of what, exactly, the fiscal imbalance is. First it was that some Provinces were sending more money to Ottawa then they get back (Quebec isn't one of them) and now there's a vague idea that Ottawa needs to create "fiscal space" for the provinces, usually defined as the provinces getting a guaranteed chunk of the Federal tax revenue.
This is, in short, political cowardice of the highest order -- and not at all because it's coming from Quebeckers. Any politician who, with a straight face, says to his or her constituents that:
a) We need more money.Is a coward. No, I don't like it when Dalton McGuinty does it. But he at least hasn't been on a decade-long tear on this issue.
b) I refuse to do thehonorablenormal thing and cut spending, raise taxes, or run a deficit.
so c) We intend to go to Ottawa and demand, self-righteously, that our province be given money so that I don't have to face your wrath come election day.
What's especially galling is that Antonio claims to be some kind of constitutional fundamentalist who believes that Ottawa has no role of any kind in provincial matters... except, it seems, for cutting blank checks. Look up your Canadian Political History, Antonio: the provinces were deliberately given a weaker financial position in the BNA, relative to the Feds. This has, after all, been the PQ talking point -- the Feds have the money, but the provinces have the needs. This wasn't an accident, people. The provinces were designed from the outset to have cap in hand.
This is the problem with this crap: "Fiscal imbalance" means any one of seven different things, but all just happen to mean more money for Quebec. "Constitutional powers" means that Ottawa should keep the magic money flowing, but can never, ever overstep its boundaries... meanwhile, Quebec has a Ministry of Foreign Affairs!
What a weird fucking country I live in.
God is a bastard...
...if Rick Warren's opinion on God is any indication:
Seriously. "Rwanda." "Blessed." These words should not be used together in the same sentence. "Recovering", maybe. "Not the hellscape it once was", fine.
"Blessed", no.
Rick Warren, the influential evangelical preacher and author of the Christian best seller The Purpose-Driven Life, is encouraging his followers to support projects in Rwanda; he has embraced Kagame (who does not attend church regularly) as a "wonderful Christian leader" and asserted that Kagame's energy is proof that "God is blessing Rwanda."Up next: God "blesses" me by kicking me hard in the nuts.
Seriously. "Rwanda." "Blessed." These words should not be used together in the same sentence. "Recovering", maybe. "Not the hellscape it once was", fine.
"Blessed", no.
Mackenzie Valley: LNG, not pipelines
Interesting opinion piece in the Financial Post about the Mackenzie Delta natural gas issue. Basically, the proposed pipeline would feed more natural gas in to the all-consuming maw of Ft. McMurray to feed the tar sands. What scraps were left would go to American consumers.
Unfortunately, costs of building the pipeline -- never cheap -- have gone up dramatically. So the proposal in the FT is that instead of building a thousand-kilometer long pipeline, the Mackenzie gas be chilled and exported in a northern LNG terminal, similar to the Russian plan for the Shtokman field.
I like the idea -- the environmental impact is lower, the costs should be similar, if perhaps a bit higher, and instead of locking our gas sales in to a small number of customers in the south, we'd also theoretically be able to export to Japan and China -- maybe India and Europe in the future, depending on the economics. Europe and China are both intensely interested in diversifying their energy supplies, and Canada is about as reliable as you can get on these matters.
The distance to Japan or China shouldn't be a big problem -- it's about the same distance from Qatar to the US, a LNG trade that is already being pursued. In fact, the maritime routes from Qatar to any of the major gas consumers are quite long, so it would seem that if Qatar can be a major LNG exporter, than the Mackenzie Valley should have some opportunity.
Of course, Canada will always be kind of a midget when it comes to the LNG market -- Qatar, Iran, and Russia alone control the large majority of natural gas reserves.
Unfortunately, costs of building the pipeline -- never cheap -- have gone up dramatically. So the proposal in the FT is that instead of building a thousand-kilometer long pipeline, the Mackenzie gas be chilled and exported in a northern LNG terminal, similar to the Russian plan for the Shtokman field.
I like the idea -- the environmental impact is lower, the costs should be similar, if perhaps a bit higher, and instead of locking our gas sales in to a small number of customers in the south, we'd also theoretically be able to export to Japan and China -- maybe India and Europe in the future, depending on the economics. Europe and China are both intensely interested in diversifying their energy supplies, and Canada is about as reliable as you can get on these matters.
The distance to Japan or China shouldn't be a big problem -- it's about the same distance from Qatar to the US, a LNG trade that is already being pursued. In fact, the maritime routes from Qatar to any of the major gas consumers are quite long, so it would seem that if Qatar can be a major LNG exporter, than the Mackenzie Valley should have some opportunity.
Of course, Canada will always be kind of a midget when it comes to the LNG market -- Qatar, Iran, and Russia alone control the large majority of natural gas reserves.
More on the Budget
One anonymous commenter down-blog seems to think that I was somehow upset at the largesse in Flaherty's budget yesterday. To which I can only say: boy, you haven't been here long, have you?
We've had two decades, at provincial and federal levels, of political parties governing by balancing the budget on the backs of the poor -- no cut was too cruel, no victim too low to be kicked. So I was terrified that when the Conservatives got to power, they'd be even crueler than the Liberals had been in power.
Well, money changes people as they say. No big tax cuts, no major reorganization of the government, no head-on attacks on the poor. It is, as I said, a thoroughly Liberal budget. I quoted Andrew Coyne as being furious that nobody was willing to slash spending and screw the poor anymore because that's what Andrew Coyne will always say, and he can turn a nice phrase when he's in high dudgeon.
But I vote for the NDP. Why would I be upset if the Conservatives and Liberals have abandoned the fetish of tax-and-service-cuts? Why would I be upset if the shibboleth of "spending discipline" has lost all meaning? For every big-spending budget the Conservative Party of Canada brings in, Paul Martin and Preston Manning die a bit inside, and that makes me happy.
The only thing that's going to save Harper on this budget is that a) the BQ is playing the role of the good whore and staying bought, and b) the Liberals are doing their best to make Harper still look "disciplined" -- Stéphane Dion is out there saying not only would he shovel more money to Quebec, but he'd spend more on Natives, the environment, etc, etc. After decades of parties competing on how little they could spend on Canada, it's nice to have the reverse situation.
It's especially nice if, like me, you believe the government has immense and expensive problems that it should be tackling -- climate change, peak oil, reinvesting in infrastructure and rebuilding our military.
So: To Stephen Harper, for doing your best to bury even the idea of small-government conservatism, I say huzzah! Thanks from the NDP!
We've had two decades, at provincial and federal levels, of political parties governing by balancing the budget on the backs of the poor -- no cut was too cruel, no victim too low to be kicked. So I was terrified that when the Conservatives got to power, they'd be even crueler than the Liberals had been in power.
Well, money changes people as they say. No big tax cuts, no major reorganization of the government, no head-on attacks on the poor. It is, as I said, a thoroughly Liberal budget. I quoted Andrew Coyne as being furious that nobody was willing to slash spending and screw the poor anymore because that's what Andrew Coyne will always say, and he can turn a nice phrase when he's in high dudgeon.
But I vote for the NDP. Why would I be upset if the Conservatives and Liberals have abandoned the fetish of tax-and-service-cuts? Why would I be upset if the shibboleth of "spending discipline" has lost all meaning? For every big-spending budget the Conservative Party of Canada brings in, Paul Martin and Preston Manning die a bit inside, and that makes me happy.
The only thing that's going to save Harper on this budget is that a) the BQ is playing the role of the good whore and staying bought, and b) the Liberals are doing their best to make Harper still look "disciplined" -- Stéphane Dion is out there saying not only would he shovel more money to Quebec, but he'd spend more on Natives, the environment, etc, etc. After decades of parties competing on how little they could spend on Canada, it's nice to have the reverse situation.
It's especially nice if, like me, you believe the government has immense and expensive problems that it should be tackling -- climate change, peak oil, reinvesting in infrastructure and rebuilding our military.
So: To Stephen Harper, for doing your best to bury even the idea of small-government conservatism, I say huzzah! Thanks from the NDP!
El mundo es plano
...Babelfish says that's the Spanish for "The World is Flat", and I couldn't help but wonder if there was some Spaniard in the 1500s writing paeans to the out-sourcing that was happening to Spanish industry and the massive new era of globalization that was occuring... and would make Spain a pauper country in the process. Turns out, there was. Stoneleigh has an excellent post about Energy and Empire, but this quote stuck out in particular:
Europe may be especially relevant -- as well as the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- as we're seeing a definite trend in middle powers coalescing into regional blocs for economic and security purposes.
So where does this leave Canada? Were there barbarians who weren't Romans, but fought alongside the Romans right up to the end of the Empire?
Let London manufacture those fabrics of hers to her heart’s content; Holland her chambrays; Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuna; Milan her brocades; Italy and Flanders their linens, so long as our capital can enjoy them. The only thing that it proves is that all nations train journeymen for Madrid and that Madrid is the queen of Parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody.(quoted in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes)The rest of Stoneleigh's article is excellent and definitely worth clicking through. This reaction in the comment threads also caught my eye:
These days Tainter's (and Homer-Dixon's) view of the fall of Rome looks a bit dated.... The archeological record does not show widespread agricultural decline. Many areas were going gangbusters and had never been better.Jesus, that sounds familiar. China has been able to grow itself in to a position of power not by opposing the American-built global system, but by working within it and trading with the US. Ditto Europe.
What archeology and the written record do show is that living adjacent to the Empire for centuries caused the barbarians to unite into fewer (and larger) polities. Their own farming output and population surged as they adopted better farming methods and traded extensively with the empire.
According to Heather, Rome did not run out of gas, it was overwelmed. And the forces that overwelmed it were in great measure a product of a dynamic that the Empire itself set in motion.
Europe may be especially relevant -- as well as the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- as we're seeing a definite trend in middle powers coalescing into regional blocs for economic and security purposes.
So where does this leave Canada? Were there barbarians who weren't Romans, but fought alongside the Romans right up to the end of the Empire?
Mining the Ocean Floor
So torn. On the one hand, I'm an environmentalist, so I don't exactly want to encourage rapacious industrial mining anywhere on Earth.
On the other hand, I'm a big nerd, so I can't help but find this stuff cool. Mining the ocean floor! It's not the asteroid belt, but it's a start.
On the other hand, I'm a big nerd, so I can't help but find this stuff cool. Mining the ocean floor! It's not the asteroid belt, but it's a start.
Heydon acknowledges that digging up the deep seas could make him a billionaire. But he insists that it’s also the solution to all the ills that land-based mining has caused. No indigenous societies need be disturbed. Better still, land doesn’t have to be butchered. There are no open pits, no leveled mountaintops. To make the most out of poor-quality ore, mining companies use cyanide to increase their yield and run the risk of polluting streams and lakes. None of that, he says, will happen underwater.
This new approach to mining comes as the industry reaches a critical juncture. Many of the major land deposits have been exhausted by the $225 billion-a-year industry. But demand for minerals has never been higher. China and India are rapidly developing a middle class that’s hungry to improve its quality of life. That means millions of new houses laced with miles of copper wiring and acres of corrugated iron roofing....
I have a supportive girlfriend
Me: Well, now that I'm going back to school, I'll need to put some money together.
Vicki: (Sounding like Antoine from Deuce Bigalow) People give me money to pleasure them.
Me: Uh, the line was "women give me money to pleasure them."
Vicki: I know what the line was. How much money, exactly, do you need to raise in 6 months?
Me: No really, I can't emphasize enough how crucial the "women" is in that line...
Monday, March 19, 2007
Shorter Jim Flaherty
Let's see... a $4 billion sop to Quebec, health care and education funding... billions more for transfer and equalization payments, tax credits for the middle class...
That's right everybody: it took the Conservatives to bring Canada the best budget of Paul Martin's career.
Or, as Andrew Coyne put it on CBC just a minute ago: Canada now has a party committed to spending more money, in real per person terms, than any previous government in history, and then it's got the parties on the left.
What a weird, weird time to be a headline junkie.
This should be the final nail in the "Stephen Harper wants an early election" nonsense. I think Paul Wells gets a lot of it right here, but more than anything it's clear that whatever else may happen, the polls don't yet support the notion that Harper would win a majority in the next election -- something he clearly wants to do. (Who wouldn't?) Harper needs some time -- maybe just another year, maybe less -- for Liberals to stop talking about his "hidden agenda" and actually try debating his policies on the merits. A hard thing, of course, when Stephen Harper is stealing Liberal policies.
And now, of course, I've gone on way too long for this to be a "shorter" anything post, so more later.
That's right everybody: it took the Conservatives to bring Canada the best budget of Paul Martin's career.
Or, as Andrew Coyne put it on CBC just a minute ago: Canada now has a party committed to spending more money, in real per person terms, than any previous government in history, and then it's got the parties on the left.
What a weird, weird time to be a headline junkie.
This should be the final nail in the "Stephen Harper wants an early election" nonsense. I think Paul Wells gets a lot of it right here, but more than anything it's clear that whatever else may happen, the polls don't yet support the notion that Harper would win a majority in the next election -- something he clearly wants to do. (Who wouldn't?) Harper needs some time -- maybe just another year, maybe less -- for Liberals to stop talking about his "hidden agenda" and actually try debating his policies on the merits. A hard thing, of course, when Stephen Harper is stealing Liberal policies.
And now, of course, I've gone on way too long for this to be a "shorter" anything post, so more later.
Back to school for me
Some happy news today in the mail. I've been accepted to a graduate program at a local Ontario University. (Vagueness deliberate -- I don't want you crazies stalking me.)
Because apparently I'm such a sucker for higher education, I couldn't get enough in 4 years of an undergrad.
Shouldn't affect this space until September or so.
Because apparently I'm such a sucker for higher education, I couldn't get enough in 4 years of an undergrad.
Shouldn't affect this space until September or so.
Friday, March 16, 2007
This can't possibly be true, can it?
I never understood why a person would plagiarize an essay for University -- especially in the era pre-Internet. You still have to read the stuff you steal, right? Why not simply give a day's worth of thought to the stuff you've read and try and do something as weird as, uh, thinking about it?
The Internet changes this dynamic a bit -- you can buy papers wholesale -- but fundamentally, I still don't understand the motivating impulse. Especially if you're this dumb:
Suddenly, those A's I racked up don't seem so impressive.
The Internet changes this dynamic a bit -- you can buy papers wholesale -- but fundamentally, I still don't understand the motivating impulse. Especially if you're this dumb:
The quality of plagiarism is so much less. Students just steal crap off the internet. So it's easier to pass off this low-grade stuff as your own, but it's also so easy to catch people! I personally like it when they leave the hyperlink in the paper.Dear God in heaven. That sounds like it's awfully common for him, doesn't it? How stupid can you be and still be admitted to post-secondary education?
Suddenly, those A's I racked up don't seem so impressive.
Operation Restore Smug
An expanded version of my thoughts on Dion's Kyoto plan, now on Gristmill.
...Canada, while signing the Kyoto Accord, actually has a worse record on CO2 emissions (relatively speaking) than the U.S., which famously didn't sign.
Worse than the Americans! Well, we can't have that. There's nothing we Canadians love more than our high horses. Today, Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion -- elected leader of his party with a promise to clean up Canada's act -- made his proposal to restore our smugness public.
The Media's war on Heisenberg
Ezra has it right here:
We've seen this before -- the media crapped all over Al Gore in 2000, and then they turned around and talked about how "weak" he was as a candidate, totally ignoring their own history of outright lying about him. (No, he never said he invented the Internet. Shut up already.)
The media has this weird causality paradox, where they'll do things, and then pretend those things and their effects just magically occurred, and merrily report on the aftermath. That's how you get silly spectacles like the chattering class not reporting on a candidate's public pronouncements and then turning around and downgrading that candidate because the chattering class didn't report on his statements. The problem is the media, which is a major and powerful actor in our democracy, hews to an evidently absurd ethos which states that they cannot in any way influence political outcomes. Of course, there's absolutely no way they can avoid influencing elections, if only due to what they choose to cover. But if they state that publicly, the whole facade crashes down.To quote Prof. Farnsworth: "No fair! You changed the outcome by observing it!" The note that Ezra links to is pretty egregious -- the media is judging John Edwards as a failure because they (the media) are doing a crappy job of covering him.
We've seen this before -- the media crapped all over Al Gore in 2000, and then they turned around and talked about how "weak" he was as a candidate, totally ignoring their own history of outright lying about him. (No, he never said he invented the Internet. Shut up already.)
Okay, I'm impressed.
When the Conservatives first rolled out their laughable Clean Air Act -- with it's hallucinatory targets on CO2 -- I predicted that, Canadian politics being what it is, Harper had effectively raised the bar in Canadian politics: no party could dare propose something less stringent than the Conservative plan, so the Conservatives had effectively raised the basement of political expectations. Nevermind that Harper's proposals weren't too far removed from Liberal proposals not that long ago -- the Liberals had to up the ante.
Well, Dion has announced a Liberal white paper -- God knows if it will ever become policy or law -- that manages not only to impress, but actually shock me. It's not what I would have preferred in a perfect world, but for the real world it's a proposal that actually manages to be.. brave, in the Canadian context at least.
(Must.. restrain.. praise for Liberals...)
Dion wants, as of January 1 2008, to put in a cap-and-trade system that would cap Canadian emissions at our Kyoto target. Industry would pay $20/tonne for every tonne of CO2 emitted above the cap. The revenue thus raised would be deposited in a fund for CO2 reductions.
And, to disarm accusations that the Liberals are soaking Alberta, 80% of the monies raised by the fines must be spent within the province they came from.
The reductions required, by sector:
You can see that Alberta is going to scream bloody murder here. The two heaviest-hit sectors -- electricity generation and oil/gas -- are heavily concentrated in Alberta. But by the same token, most of the money will end up being spent in Alberta and Ontario (the two biggest emitters.)
The problem here is that the lightest burden falls on industrial emitters. Now, there's a good reason for that: industry actually does emit less CO2 than other sources. Still, politically it may come across as the west being forced to pay for Central Canada's industrial firms, a charge that has some history in this country.
The other problem should be evident by how impressed I am with it: business, much of the press, and the entire Conservative apparatus are going to scream bloody murder over this idea. (I am not a particularly good barometer for public opinion.) They'll call it unrealistic, a death knell for Canadian industry, etc etc. Frankly, just proposing this idea -- even if it never sees the light of day again -- is going to hurt the Liberals. As much as I like it, I figure it might be a bridge too far for the Canadian public, who've always liked the image of Canada as a green nation more than they've liked actions to justify that image.
(What will come first: the National Post editorial calling this "Stalinist", or Sunday morning?)
That said, the rhetoric of "balancing our carbon budget" is a PR masterstroke, reminding people who it was that balanced that other budget.
To the Liberals: More of this please.
To the NDP, Bloc: Up the ante. Keep pushing.
Well, Dion has announced a Liberal white paper -- God knows if it will ever become policy or law -- that manages not only to impress, but actually shock me. It's not what I would have preferred in a perfect world, but for the real world it's a proposal that actually manages to be.. brave, in the Canadian context at least.
(Must.. restrain.. praise for Liberals...)
Dion wants, as of January 1 2008, to put in a cap-and-trade system that would cap Canadian emissions at our Kyoto target. Industry would pay $20/tonne for every tonne of CO2 emitted above the cap. The revenue thus raised would be deposited in a fund for CO2 reductions.
And, to disarm accusations that the Liberals are soaking Alberta, 80% of the monies raised by the fines must be spent within the province they came from.
The reductions required, by sector:
You can see that Alberta is going to scream bloody murder here. The two heaviest-hit sectors -- electricity generation and oil/gas -- are heavily concentrated in Alberta. But by the same token, most of the money will end up being spent in Alberta and Ontario (the two biggest emitters.)
The problem here is that the lightest burden falls on industrial emitters. Now, there's a good reason for that: industry actually does emit less CO2 than other sources. Still, politically it may come across as the west being forced to pay for Central Canada's industrial firms, a charge that has some history in this country.
The other problem should be evident by how impressed I am with it: business, much of the press, and the entire Conservative apparatus are going to scream bloody murder over this idea. (I am not a particularly good barometer for public opinion.) They'll call it unrealistic, a death knell for Canadian industry, etc etc. Frankly, just proposing this idea -- even if it never sees the light of day again -- is going to hurt the Liberals. As much as I like it, I figure it might be a bridge too far for the Canadian public, who've always liked the image of Canada as a green nation more than they've liked actions to justify that image.
(What will come first: the National Post editorial calling this "Stalinist", or Sunday morning?)
That said, the rhetoric of "balancing our carbon budget" is a PR masterstroke, reminding people who it was that balanced that other budget.
To the Liberals: More of this please.
To the NDP, Bloc: Up the ante. Keep pushing.
Conservatives shouldn't like nuclear
An enduring mystery, to me anyway: Why do conservatives (regardless of partisan affiliation it seems) just love, love, love nuclear power? I mean, this is the icon of big government. An industry that literally could not exist without original and ongoing welfare on a scale that actual humans have never benefited from: The Manhattan Project was, proportionally speaking, multiples more expensive than the Apollo Program. Some 20% of US industry in the early 1940s was tasked with developing the first nuclear weapons, from which the modern industry still derives it's chromosomes.
Imagine, for a moment, if we spent 1 out of 5 dollars alleviating poverty in this country -- roughly $200 billion today. The mind does kind of boggle, even to a lefty like me.
And I don't understand why even some leftish people are warming to nuclear, when you see a chart like this (via The Oil Drum):
Look at that chart. Military uses of uranium weren't matched by civilian commercial uses until the mid-1970s. It's certainly fair to say that at least half of the nuclear industry's history has been exclusively military, that is: the production of weapons with sufficient power and number to irrevocably destroy human civilization.
Look, if you had said to me in the mid 1970s that we needed to begin a crash program to get off of fossil fuels, I'd have supported the French program, more or less: massive investments in state-run, standardized nuclear facilities. But this isn't the 1970s, and technology is already eclipsing nuclear technology. Efficiency is cheaper than coal. Wind is cheaper than nuclear. Solar is catching up quickly -- by the mid-2010s, it should easily be cheaper than nuclear.
And if we wanted to make the market fair, we'd ask the nuclear industry to do two things it simply cannot afford: take care of it's own waste, and insure its own reactors. Currently, the state does both these jobs for the nuclear industry, but refuses to provide similar subsidies for the renewable industry. But adding these costs to already-expensive nuclear power would basically price the industry out of the market (obviously, not something that worries me too much. I would, as a compromise, accept state insurance of renewable power.)
Or, to rephrase: nuclear power is something that cannot survive without massive government interference in the market, ad infinitum.
And yet, nuclear power is a kind of totem to conservatives on energy issues -- largely, I suspect, because it annoys the left. Talk about global warming, and some idiot is likely to say to you "oh, then I guess you hippies shouldn't have protested all those nuclear plants, huh?" Well, yeah. Between two bad options (coal and nuclear) on the one hand, and an actual good option (efficiency, renewables) on the other, we would like humans to choose rationally.
This is an issue I keep coming back to. I'm genuinely confused as to why nuclear has any backers in North America anymore.
Imagine, for a moment, if we spent 1 out of 5 dollars alleviating poverty in this country -- roughly $200 billion today. The mind does kind of boggle, even to a lefty like me.
And I don't understand why even some leftish people are warming to nuclear, when you see a chart like this (via The Oil Drum):
Look at that chart. Military uses of uranium weren't matched by civilian commercial uses until the mid-1970s. It's certainly fair to say that at least half of the nuclear industry's history has been exclusively military, that is: the production of weapons with sufficient power and number to irrevocably destroy human civilization.
Look, if you had said to me in the mid 1970s that we needed to begin a crash program to get off of fossil fuels, I'd have supported the French program, more or less: massive investments in state-run, standardized nuclear facilities. But this isn't the 1970s, and technology is already eclipsing nuclear technology. Efficiency is cheaper than coal. Wind is cheaper than nuclear. Solar is catching up quickly -- by the mid-2010s, it should easily be cheaper than nuclear.
And if we wanted to make the market fair, we'd ask the nuclear industry to do two things it simply cannot afford: take care of it's own waste, and insure its own reactors. Currently, the state does both these jobs for the nuclear industry, but refuses to provide similar subsidies for the renewable industry. But adding these costs to already-expensive nuclear power would basically price the industry out of the market (obviously, not something that worries me too much. I would, as a compromise, accept state insurance of renewable power.)
Or, to rephrase: nuclear power is something that cannot survive without massive government interference in the market, ad infinitum.
And yet, nuclear power is a kind of totem to conservatives on energy issues -- largely, I suspect, because it annoys the left. Talk about global warming, and some idiot is likely to say to you "oh, then I guess you hippies shouldn't have protested all those nuclear plants, huh?" Well, yeah. Between two bad options (coal and nuclear) on the one hand, and an actual good option (efficiency, renewables) on the other, we would like humans to choose rationally.
This is an issue I keep coming back to. I'm genuinely confused as to why nuclear has any backers in North America anymore.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Blackout law upheld
In a 5 to 4 decision, the country's highest court ruled that provisions of the Canada Elections Act must stand, forbidding the reporting of partial results in areas where the polls haven't closed.I wonder how many more years it will be until this law is totally, absolutely irrelevant -- until, that is, Ontario and Quebec no longer form a majority of the country's population.
"For the big broadcasters and big media in this country, we have been operating under this law for several years now. And we will have to continue to black out this type of information until the polls close in western Canada," CTV's Rosemary Thompson reported from the lobby of the Supreme Court on Thursday morning.
Alberta & BC combined only just exceed Quebec's population, and Ontario alone is almost 3 times BC's population, so we've got some time yet.
As it is, technology should make it practically irrelevant. I would think the most sensible blackout would be simply to embargo all election news, nationwide, until the polls close in BC. That would, however, mean that Newfoundlanders and Nova Scotians go to bed without knowing who their PM is, which doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. The Americans have had two Presidential elections where they went to bed not knowing who the President would be, and not knowing for a night didn't hurt anyone. (Indeed, the results were much worse than the confusion preceding them...)
It would also carry the risk of me having to listen to blowhards like Mike Duffy and Rex Murphy prattle on, fact-free, for a few more hours on election night. Not that anyone would notice the difference...
Why I bother reading Slate
Two interesting pieces:
1) Fred Kaplan on Bush's strange obsession: gratitude.
2) Jack Shafer praises Patrick Fitzgerald, from the reporter's point of view:
1) Fred Kaplan on Bush's strange obsession: gratitude.
In his memoir of his year in Baghdad as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer recalled that President Bush once told him that the leader of a new Iraqi government had to be "someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq."As Kaplan goes on to note, Bush's attitude on gratitude seems to stem from an imperial mindset -- the bloody wogs ought to be grateful, right? And it's not just Iraq -- Bush genuinely seems to think that a) America is the best country in the world (a reasonable belief for an American President) BUT also b) every other country should also recognize that yes, America is the greatest country in the world. It's a lord-vassal mindset.
Bremer noted that Bush made this point three times in the course of a single conversation...
2) Jack Shafer praises Patrick Fitzgerald, from the reporter's point of view:
Thanks to the Valerie Plame investigation, the First Amendment lies in tatters on the ground, and a chilling effect has already started to freeze out press sources.What kills me about the whole Miller saga is that nobody ever points out that she chose to go to jail. Libby had already issued a waiver to every journalist in Washington, and every other journalist (including Cooper at the Post) had accepted that waiver, though in Cooper's case it was at the last minute. Miller was the only one who chose to believe that the waiver wasn't genuine. That's not Fitzgerald's fault, it's not even Libby's fault -- that's Miller's fault.
That's what many reporters and academics would have you believe. But now that the Plame investigation has ended, and all the subpoenas and threats of subpoenas are history, I don't buy it. The press (including me) may have overreacted in regarding special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald as some sort of Torquemada, and our fears of a shredded First Amendment are starting to look a little overwrought.
If the press needs somebody to blame for the last four years of First Amendment anxiety, it need look no further than the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. If he had told investigators the truth or even claimed Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when they came knocking, the press would likely have been spared....If Libby used the press consciously, he gives every reporter a paradox to consider: If journalists are in the business of finding and printing the truth, how tolerant should we be of liars, especially liars whose lies bring subpoenas down on the press?
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Wacky construction projects
A rail tunnel between Africa and Europe. Neato.
This is coming at a time when African countries are getting more and more serious about developing export industries, so this rail link to Europe could have a profound effect on development.
With all the talk about China's race for Africa, one wonders if we'll see a push from Beijing for a solid rail line from Africa (Egypt, I guess) to Central Asia. Time for me to go look at a map of old Soviet rail lines.
Now all we need to do is bridge the Korean strait, and the entire eastern hemisphere will be linked with lines of steel. Then there's the small matter of the Bering Strait....
This is coming at a time when African countries are getting more and more serious about developing export industries, so this rail link to Europe could have a profound effect on development.
With all the talk about China's race for Africa, one wonders if we'll see a push from Beijing for a solid rail line from Africa (Egypt, I guess) to Central Asia. Time for me to go look at a map of old Soviet rail lines.
Now all we need to do is bridge the Korean strait, and the entire eastern hemisphere will be linked with lines of steel. Then there's the small matter of the Bering Strait....
Heh. Kinda funny.
Air traffic control humour. No surprise, my favourite is this one.
Ground (with quite arrogant impatience): "Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?"(via Digg.)
Speedbird 206 (coolly): "Yes, twice in 1944, but it was dark,... and I didn't land."
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Well said
R Stanton, in comments over at LGM:
Those who argue that some citizens should be excluded from military service because their presence would hurt "unit cohesion" are saying that current soldiers should be able to decide with whom they serve. This is bravo sierra--the military is not a country club whose members should be able to blackball undesireables.
As a tank platoon sergeant I faced a variety of obstacles to unit cohesion, including affairs and arguments over women, unpaid gambling debts, racism, gang membership, laziness, and simple personality conflicts. The biggest one was the constant squabble between single junior enlisted troops who lived constricted lives in the barracks (daily inspections, etc), and the married soldiers who lived off post and lived much more freely (and also got time off for things like sick family members).
The point is that conflicts will always arise among any group of people large enough to complete a destructive military mission, and leaders--like General Pace--have the mission of solving these problems.... Saying that military units cannot integrate homosexuals into cohesive units is the same as saying that our armed services have too few effective leaders.
What strikes me as most interesting is not that General Pace is comfortable classifying a non-trivial number of his own troops as immoral. It is that there is a mission that he can't or won't complete because of morality or ethics, but this mission has nothing to do with killing thousands of innocent civilians or breaking the Marine Corps he leads. It regards instead his refusal to validate sexual preferences his religion demonizes.
Zhao lives
Zhao Ziyang died under house arrest two years ago now. And in case you were wondering why, exactly, he was under house arrest in the first place, a new book will remind you:
Further, the idea of delinking the party from government and business is a perfectly rational idea... if your aim is to eventually remove the party from government. I have a hard time believing that these kinds of reforms can be started and stopped to the liking of high officials.
(One of the ideas I like to think about is what kind of country a democratic China will be. There's a lot of factors that would, I think, push other countries towards a weak-federalist model. But national unity has a kind of totemic power in China, and this is a country that still remembers the period of warlordism pre-1949.)
Now, I think elections would be a good thing because I don't think the CPC could coexist peacefully with them for long. But as I say, you can understand why Zhao was under house arrest until his death.
For more backstory, see here.
And this quote from the same article is just priceless, illustrating why exactly Deng Xiaopeng was such a bastard:
Zhao Ziyang’s thoughts, available in a new book, point to his vision of change in China. The deposed Party Chief supported more elections, party democracy, and accountability.While certain aspects of Zhao's programs may eventually be adopted by the People's Republic, I'm going to reiterate my belief that the Communist party simply cannot survive local elections at the city level. The moment any kind of crisis came along, you'd have a perfect recipe for chaos -- the mayors of the largest cities in China (certainly Shanghai, Beijing, Nanking, Chungking) would, if directly elected, hold more authority (or legitimacy) than the officials nominally calling the shots.
Speaking from the grave, a remarkable Chinese political figure is calling for drastic changes in the Communist Party, including the elimination of the post of party chief, the abolition of party branches in ministries and companies, the introduction of independent trade unions and direct popular election of officials up to the city level.
In life, Zhao Ziyang, who was prime minister and party general secretary for nine years until he was purged after he refused to sanction the crackdown and massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, was an unpleasant reality for Beijing, a popular reformer who was kept under house arrest until he died in January 2005.
Further, the idea of delinking the party from government and business is a perfectly rational idea... if your aim is to eventually remove the party from government. I have a hard time believing that these kinds of reforms can be started and stopped to the liking of high officials.
(One of the ideas I like to think about is what kind of country a democratic China will be. There's a lot of factors that would, I think, push other countries towards a weak-federalist model. But national unity has a kind of totemic power in China, and this is a country that still remembers the period of warlordism pre-1949.)
Now, I think elections would be a good thing because I don't think the CPC could coexist peacefully with them for long. But as I say, you can understand why Zhao was under house arrest until his death.
For more backstory, see here.
And this quote from the same article is just priceless, illustrating why exactly Deng Xiaopeng was such a bastard:
“A Communist Party that does not crush the masses is certainly not a Marxist Communist Party,” he once said.There's an honesty there that you almost have to admire.
Blatant pro-Athenian bias in the Star
via Ezra Klein:
This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.Now this is far more interesting than the schoolyard snickerings about how gay it is, isn't it?
No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.
This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.
Unstated assumptions
Scott Tribe writes about immmigration:
Before I go any further, I'll just state the obvious: I'm wildly pro-immigration. My mother moved to this country as a young girl, my paternal grandmother moved here after serving as a Red Cross nurse in WWII (where she met my grandfather.) My girlfriend's parents came here for school when they were young, something I'm immensely happy for every day. So I'm in no way opposed to immigration. My reasons are just different from Scott's.
But for some reason we all seem to assume that Canada needs to keep growing, an assumption I don't think we tend to think about critically, if at all. What are the arguments for continued growth?
The most common one -- the one Scott uses -- is economics. Population growth is one aspect of economic growth. It is not, however, the most important one. That would be productivity, right? The economy could keep growing with a shrinking population -- see Russia since 1998. "GDP" really is just a number, and even if the aggregate GDP were static, in a shrinking population we'd all be getting richer.
We need to recognize that as much as we want there to be more Canadians in the world, there's a flip side to having more people in Canada -- those people live like Canadians. Inefficient, intensely polluting Canadians. It's even more problematic if we keep doing immigration the way we have been, with immigration channeled in to a small number of large cities that are already choking on urban problems -- sprawl, waste disposal, mass transit.
Let's assume, however, that we solve the environmental issues and we decide we still want Canada to growing (in numbers of people) as rapidly as possible. There are other alternatives: the French have successfully reversed their slumping birthrates by pursuing policies that are extremely family-friendly: guaranteed paid maternal leave, cheap national day care, and others. In then next few years, France should see it's birthrate exceed the replacement rate for the first time in decades.
So immigration isn't the only means for reversing a population slump. You want people to have large families? Make it easier for them to have larger families. Baby bonuses, subsidies for larger homes, try and direct some jobs in to smaller towns so people can afford houses more easily... there's plenty of alternatives.
Despite the environmental issues (which, if anything, deserve more time than I'm giving them here) I'm still, as I say, wildly pro-immigration, and I do think Canada should try and keep it's population growing. If nothing else, because we've got the room and I genuinely think that Canada is one of the finest places to live anywhere, and I was raised to share.
...despite criticism of the system from the right-wing (and some from those who consider themselves left-wing as well), Canada is going to need such a system for continued population growth in Canada.And why does Canada need continued population growth?
Before I go any further, I'll just state the obvious: I'm wildly pro-immigration. My mother moved to this country as a young girl, my paternal grandmother moved here after serving as a Red Cross nurse in WWII (where she met my grandfather.) My girlfriend's parents came here for school when they were young, something I'm immensely happy for every day. So I'm in no way opposed to immigration. My reasons are just different from Scott's.
But for some reason we all seem to assume that Canada needs to keep growing, an assumption I don't think we tend to think about critically, if at all. What are the arguments for continued growth?
The most common one -- the one Scott uses -- is economics. Population growth is one aspect of economic growth. It is not, however, the most important one. That would be productivity, right? The economy could keep growing with a shrinking population -- see Russia since 1998. "GDP" really is just a number, and even if the aggregate GDP were static, in a shrinking population we'd all be getting richer.
We need to recognize that as much as we want there to be more Canadians in the world, there's a flip side to having more people in Canada -- those people live like Canadians. Inefficient, intensely polluting Canadians. It's even more problematic if we keep doing immigration the way we have been, with immigration channeled in to a small number of large cities that are already choking on urban problems -- sprawl, waste disposal, mass transit.
Let's assume, however, that we solve the environmental issues and we decide we still want Canada to growing (in numbers of people) as rapidly as possible. There are other alternatives: the French have successfully reversed their slumping birthrates by pursuing policies that are extremely family-friendly: guaranteed paid maternal leave, cheap national day care, and others. In then next few years, France should see it's birthrate exceed the replacement rate for the first time in decades.
So immigration isn't the only means for reversing a population slump. You want people to have large families? Make it easier for them to have larger families. Baby bonuses, subsidies for larger homes, try and direct some jobs in to smaller towns so people can afford houses more easily... there's plenty of alternatives.
Despite the environmental issues (which, if anything, deserve more time than I'm giving them here) I'm still, as I say, wildly pro-immigration, and I do think Canada should try and keep it's population growing. If nothing else, because we've got the room and I genuinely think that Canada is one of the finest places to live anywhere, and I was raised to share.
Monday, March 12, 2007
We're on a mission from God.
I hate Taiwanese Nazis.[/elwood]
"We are attracted to the feeling of unity of that period," he said, "isn't that why people joing political groups of any sort? That sense of belonging and togetherness?"Yeah, but, dude. Some of us are smart enough to join the side that won.
Charming.
General Peter Pace reads from the GOP hymnal:
“I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral, and that we should not condone immoral acts.”... In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Pace also compared homosexuality to adultery. He claimed that the military should “not tolerate” homosexuality just as it rejects “military members who sleep with other military members’ wives.”This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, btw. Americablog has the headline quote of the day:
Maybe if General Pace spent as much time worrying about Iraq as he does my sexual orientation we wouldn't be getting our asses kicked by a bunch of two-bit thugs with homemade bombs.
Sure, they're just eggs now...
But each and every one is guaranteed to be a chicken! I'm sure of it!
But all this really pales in comparison to looking at an extremely tight, 3-way race for first in Quebec and proclaiming that separatism is dead.
With the Quebec election in full swing, one thing is clear: André Boisclair and his separatist Parti Québécois are in the middle of a full-scale political meltdown....Um. Right. The ADQ that's eating away at the sovereigntist vote? It's probably doing well among separatists because, well...
The abysmal performance of the PQ in the polls is nothing less than the political confirmation of a decade-old economic and cultural fact: the threat of Quebec separatism is over and gone for good.
In the 1995 Quebec referendum on the Parti Québécois government's proposals for sovereignty, Dumont campaigned for the "Yes" [to breaking the country] side...This is more than just a little odd. First of all, let's just say it's an odd kind of federalist who thinks the ADQ is a white knight. It's especially odd coming from the head of the Dominion Institute, committed to a pretty WASPy, Upper Canada Tory vision of Canada.
But all this really pales in comparison to looking at an extremely tight, 3-way race for first in Quebec and proclaiming that separatism is dead.
The Problem
Tony Smith in the WaPo:
*The question of whether Ralph Nader had an empirically correct analysis of the situation in 2000 is totally different from the question of whether he was worth voting for in 2000. Nader's political objectives have never been particularly noble, something that only became clear to me post-2000. In any case, I'm happy to say I never wasted my vote on him. (Yes, I am able to vote in US elections. Sadly, only in New York.)
Iraq had flustered the congressional Democrats because Democrats don't have an agreed position on what America's role in the world should be. They want to change the Bush administration's policy in Iraq without discussing the underlying ideas that produced it. And although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, the fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the Bush-Cheney doctrine....I would, unhesitatingly and immediately, say that anyone who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 was a moron*. That said, the underlying critique -- that Clinton-era neoliberalism was not sufficiently distinguishable from actual Republicanism -- has been borne out by the facts. Neoliberals flocked to the GOP banner -- whether they admit it or not -- to fight this damn war, and the only excuse they have now is that they thought they'd win. Well, duh.
In fact, these neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives. The neocons' think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), often salutes individuals within the PPI, and PPI members such as Marshall signed PNAC petitions endorsing the Iraq invasion. Weeks after "With All Our Might" appeared, the Weekly Standard, virtually the PNAC house organ, gave it a thumbs-up review. And why not? The PPI and PNAC are tweedledum and tweedledee.
It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand. The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.I'll keep asking until I get a good answer: Is America prepared to be just another country? Or will we see war after war after war based on the premise, not that America is powerful and good, but that America is powerful because it is Good.
*The question of whether Ralph Nader had an empirically correct analysis of the situation in 2000 is totally different from the question of whether he was worth voting for in 2000. Nader's political objectives have never been particularly noble, something that only became clear to me post-2000. In any case, I'm happy to say I never wasted my vote on him. (Yes, I am able to vote in US elections. Sadly, only in New York.)
Ralph, why must you turn my office in to a house of lies?
It would be nice if the people who keep claiming -- as loudly as possible -- that there's still this yawning chasm of debate about global weirding would, um, stop lying.
n the part of the "Swindle" film where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous---because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important --- diametrically opposite to the point I was making --- which is that global warming is both real and threatening in many different ways, some unexpected.
Friday, March 09, 2007
Teh Gayz
So, just asking: Does every single review of 300 talk about how gay the movie is? Has anyone read a single review of this movie that hasn't used the word "homoerotic" in some way?
I mean, I get it: oiled men, spear thrusts, etc. And let's not even mention the whole Greek aspect. But reading the reviews, you'd think we're lining up for Brokeback Mountain II: Persian Boogaloo.
I mean, I get it: oiled men, spear thrusts, etc. And let's not even mention the whole Greek aspect. But reading the reviews, you'd think we're lining up for Brokeback Mountain II: Persian Boogaloo.
Yay for the EU. Can we join yet?
I once again renew my calls for Canada to join the EU.
One problem: Wind is cheaper than nuclear. Wind is nipping at coal's heels, for chrissakes. Has been for years now. So it's a mystery why Slovakia would be pushing nuclear while avoiding wind. What we have here is the usual failure of imagination when it comes to renewables.
Leaders of the European Union have reached a historic agreement to reduce greenhouse gases and transition to renewable sources of energy in the ongoing fight against climate change.Good news, all in all. But this little tidbit weirds me out.
The ambitious plan will see EU nations commit to a binding agreement to achieve a 20 per cent share of renewable power from sources such as wind energy and solar power.
It also met a requirement set out by the Czech and Slovak members, with a phrase that states nuclear energy meets the growing global concerns about safety of supply.....So on the one hand, you've got eastern countries pushing nuclear as a CO2-light alternative, but they're also saying they can't afford wind.
Some of the poorer EU nations, including Slovakia and Poland, raised concern about the details of the plan, claiming they could not afford to invest in expensive alternative energy sources such as wind.
One problem: Wind is cheaper than nuclear. Wind is nipping at coal's heels, for chrissakes. Has been for years now. So it's a mystery why Slovakia would be pushing nuclear while avoiding wind. What we have here is the usual failure of imagination when it comes to renewables.
Evolving standards
You know, I'm actually kind of surprised to see newspapers dropping Ann Coulter's column over the whole "John Edwards is a faggot" incident.
Let's be clear -- I'm not that old. But not ten years ago, I'm quite certain this wouldn't have gotten Crazy Annie dropped from any papers, much less 6. Ten years ago you would have had some Conservative applauding her brave words and stance against the dreaded "political correctness".
I think it's fascinating to remember just how acceptable Ann's kind of homophobia was within my memory. (My parents, of course, get to remember a whole different level, lucky them.) I remember very clearly, about fifteen or so years ago now, CBC deciding to air some whackjob who blamed the entirety of the AIDS epidemic on gay men. Because, you know, no straight people ever have unsafe sex, ever. Or something. Also, around the same time, I wrote a school project on the history of the Gay Rights movement in North America, and for my trouble I got threatened with physical assault from my "peers". It goes without saying that my sexual orientation was also questioned, but that was (still is?) kind of a given for all boys that age.
It's important to note that the conservatives Crazy Annie was talking to cheered her remarks, and applauded her homophobia. I'm not painting anybody with that brush -- unless you were in the audience, I guess -- but it's clear that gays and lesbians still have a lot of work ahead of them. Still, it's moments like this where I can't help but remark how much has actually changed.
Let's be clear -- I'm not that old. But not ten years ago, I'm quite certain this wouldn't have gotten Crazy Annie dropped from any papers, much less 6. Ten years ago you would have had some Conservative applauding her brave words and stance against the dreaded "political correctness".
I think it's fascinating to remember just how acceptable Ann's kind of homophobia was within my memory. (My parents, of course, get to remember a whole different level, lucky them.) I remember very clearly, about fifteen or so years ago now, CBC deciding to air some whackjob who blamed the entirety of the AIDS epidemic on gay men. Because, you know, no straight people ever have unsafe sex, ever. Or something. Also, around the same time, I wrote a school project on the history of the Gay Rights movement in North America, and for my trouble I got threatened with physical assault from my "peers". It goes without saying that my sexual orientation was also questioned, but that was (still is?) kind of a given for all boys that age.
It's important to note that the conservatives Crazy Annie was talking to cheered her remarks, and applauded her homophobia. I'm not painting anybody with that brush -- unless you were in the audience, I guess -- but it's clear that gays and lesbians still have a lot of work ahead of them. Still, it's moments like this where I can't help but remark how much has actually changed.
Tech stuff
This is interesting. Bob Cringely (who ought to know):
Fascinating time to be paying attention to the computer industry.
I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.It is just a rumour at the moment, but it's one I believe. It would fit in to Apple's long-term behaviour: give individuals the creative tools to manipulate, edit, and create whatever media that available technology will make feasible. This goes back to Apple's long-term advantage in desktop publishing, and continued with the iPod and the "Rip, Mix, and Burn" campaign. I think it's clear that Apple is doing this again with video this time, and so does Cringely:
Why Apple would do this is fairly clear to me, but first let's clarify what I mean by hardware video decoding, because it isn't implicitly the MPEG-2 format used in present-day DVDs. I'm not saying Apple's video-decoder chip won't also decode MPEG-2 (it may or may not -- I simply don't know), but the chip's primary codec is H.264, which is at the heart of both Apple's QuickTime software and its iTunes video downloading service.
WHY Apple would add H.264 video-decoding hardware to its entire line of PCs comes down to supporting iTunes and any similar video distribution efforts Apple may spring on us. By going with a chip, Apple ensures the same base performance level from every machine it sells, from the lowliest Mac Mini right up to the mightiest four-core Mac Pro. Up until now it took a multi-core machine with a lot of memory to support real 1080p (HDTV) decoding, but soon you'll be able to do that easily on a Mac Mini while leaving the main CPU to handle other chores like networking, running the graphical user interface, or perhaps integrating in real time a variety of video ad streams.
Apple's new policy, if true, will turn on its head the whole notion of forcing users upmarket if they want better video support. THE POLICY WILL COST APPLE MONEY, not just for the video chip, but also for the lost sales of higher performance machines.
So what's in it for Apple? Potentially a lot, because the chip Apple has chosen doesn't cost $7, it costs more like $50, and it doesn't just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.Apple has earned a reputation as a disruptive company. And they do love that reputation, they love it sooooo much. But this really is an interesting jump -- it will be interesting to see how PC companies react. What will Dell and HP start packing on their systems? Will they follow Apple's lead, or go with another standard?
This will change everything. Soon even the lowliest Mac will be able to effortlessly record in background one or more video signals while the user runs TurboTax on the screen. Macs will become superb DVR machines with TiVo-like functionality yet smaller file sizes than any TiVo box could ever produce. In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone.
Fascinating time to be paying attention to the computer industry.
Surprising as sunrise
So. Newt Gingrich -- you remember him, right? Divorced his wife while she lay in her hospital bed, attempting to survive a little thing called malignant cancer? Because he was already fucking around with some younger piece of GOP hill tail? It turns out, he was also screwing around when he was spearheading that whole "let's impeach the President for a blow job" foofaraw. Sez Newt:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.But wait! It's not over yet!
"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press.
Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.But of course, this isn't the only case recently of the country's "highest officials" committing perjury, right? We've just concluded the trial of now-convicted-felon Scooter Libby. And what, pray tell, does Newt have to say about this shame of the nation, having some of the most powerful people in the world lie to federal officials under oath?
"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.
"I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."
I think that's very dangerous for the United States to criminalize actions that are meant well. Now, again, I think we have to wait and see what the report looks like, but at least, up to this point, I have not seen any evidence from Mr. Fitzgerald that there was, in fact, a crime initially committed.You see, Newt -- like all red-blooded conservatives -- knows who's really at fault here:
Joe Wilson was a stunningly malicious person systematically defaming the president of the United States in a way that was harmful to the United States.Boy, if only we could criminalize harmfully defaming the good name of a sitting President, huh Newt? Then we could really shake things up. And I'm sure that Republicans would never, ever break that kind of law.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
"America has been conducting an experiment...."
"...for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference."Those are the words of Gen. Tony McPeak, USAF (ret.) Who, incidentally, originally campaigned for Bush in 2000. Sucker.
In the same article by Rolling Stone, Sen. Bob Graham looks on the sunny side of life:
I believe the chance that the chaos in Iraq could bring countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia into the mix is in the forty to fifty percent range. The big danger is what I call the August 1914 Syndrome. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo — what would have been in the scale of history a minor event — set in motion activities that turned out to be beyond the ability of the Western powers to control. And they ended up in one of the most brutal wars in man's history by accident.Nice. Read a nice line a few days ago -- "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Seems apt.
Carrots, Sticks, or birthday cakes?
Matthew Yglesias:
That said, I think the piecemeal approach is the preferable one here. Neither side is particularly trustworthy to the other, so before you can negotiate some kind of big-bang, all-encompassing solution -- as preferable as that might be to both sides in theory -- you need some trust-building steps in the interim. I would say as a first step Iran should comply fully with the IAEA inspectors (which would not, yet, mean they have to change their nuclear program in any way, much less abandon it) and the US should make a pledge not to attack Iran and to pursue these issues diplomatically.
Leverett has a point, however: the Iranians don't want a piecemeal negotiation, because they think the Americans will agree to the stuff that most benefits them and abandon any issues that could benefit Iran. I don't have a particularly good answer to that concern, and it's a valid one from Tehran's point of view.
The basic idea is that you maintain a running dialogue with Iran offering carrots in exchange for verifiable steps at disarmament, while simultaneously maintaining a running dialogue with America's main allies and the other major powers about ratcheting-up Iran's diplomatic and economic isolation. The idea is to ensure that the United States is consistently the reasonable party, consistently the one prepared to strike a deal, and therefore that international diplomatic momentum remains on our side.First off, the obvious: neither of these sensible options will be pursued while Bush is in office, nor would the Iranians trust an American initiative coming from this White House. So this discussion really is the definition of academic until January 2009.
Among sensible people this is one major school of thought. The other, represented by Flynt Leverett's ... holds that we should be aiming at a "grand bargain" to resolve all the outstanding bilateral issues. ... they think this is "not practical." Leverett, by contrast, thinks it's not practical to separate the issues.
That said, I think the piecemeal approach is the preferable one here. Neither side is particularly trustworthy to the other, so before you can negotiate some kind of big-bang, all-encompassing solution -- as preferable as that might be to both sides in theory -- you need some trust-building steps in the interim. I would say as a first step Iran should comply fully with the IAEA inspectors (which would not, yet, mean they have to change their nuclear program in any way, much less abandon it) and the US should make a pledge not to attack Iran and to pursue these issues diplomatically.
Leverett has a point, however: the Iranians don't want a piecemeal negotiation, because they think the Americans will agree to the stuff that most benefits them and abandon any issues that could benefit Iran. I don't have a particularly good answer to that concern, and it's a valid one from Tehran's point of view.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
A Canada that can say "no".
I kind of laugh when Canadian politicians talk about "guarding Canada's sovereignty". Especially when Conservatives do it, but the Liberals (especially from the business wing of the party) aren't immune from my skepticism. The Conservatives, however, are in power at the moment, and have racked up a bit of a record already. Softwood is the best-known, but in general Harper has made it clear that he actually has no real idea for a Canadian foreign policy separate from the wishes of the United States.
I don't actually think the Harper-Bush comparisons are fair, and I think they over-complicate things. Harper would be trying to make nice with any American president, because he can't imagine a way for Canada to a) dissent from American views that wouldn't b) risk upsetting American business or political leaders. I think he's probably right about that: I just don't particularly worry about B, and I don't think it's proper or right for the Prime Minister of Canada to base every single foreign policy action on those concerns.
Which brings me to this question of Canada's national sovereignty. On the one hand, we have a party and Prime Minister who have loudly proclaimed their goal of guarding Canada's claims over the Arctic. On the other, the very same party has made it clear that a) they will not oppose American foreign policy objectives, and b) they will accuse those who do of "anti-Americanism" and endangering Canada's most important relationship.
(This anti-American canard has a happy home in the Liberal party as well. See Ignatieff, Michael and Martin, Paul.)
Some authors, most recently Jack Granatstein, argue that Canada needs a larger military to protect our sovereignty and participate in the War on Terror. (Much of Granatstein's efforts have been devoted to convincing Canadians that the GWoT is "our war too." So on the one hand, we're supposed to give ourselves the tools of sovereignty, but we mustn't contemplate using them in any way other than that dictated by Washington. But sovereignty isn't particularly useful getting dusty in the closet. Unless Canada actually does something as radical as disagree with the United States, and act on that disagreement, we might as well not be sovereign at all.
Let's take the hypothetical case of an attack on Iran: There's plenty of evidence that such a thing is planned, and is certainly favoured, by constituencies in America. But there's no conceivable explanation that such an attack is in Canada's interests. (There's no sane explanation that it would be in America's, or even Israel's interests either, but we're talking Canada here.) There's plenty of ways that such an attack will in fact do great harm to Canada's interests -- not the least of which is retaliation against NATO forces in Afghanistan. What, then, is the proper response for the Government of Canada if American bombs start falling on Iran?
Does anyone think that Stephen Harper's instincts will be to immediately and loudly denounce the US? Anyone? If so, based on what?
How about something even more hypothetical: Assume we actually had a robust Navy capable of operating in the Arctic, and the Americans began sending ships through our waters without permission. Would Stephen Harper, say, order the RCN to board those ships and turn them around? He's claimed the mantle of both sovereignty-champion and America-friend. What happens when they're in conflict?
This is the dilemma for the pro-American (that is, anti-Canadian) sovereignty hawks: For good or ill, the country that will threaten Canada's sovereignty and interests the most is the United States, simply by virtue of American power and America's own interests. (I'm not imputing malice here. Just the usual American attitude of ignoring Canada, "all tucked away down there.") You cannot simultaneously crow about protecting Canada's sovereignty unless you're willing to, at least on the big issues, break with Washington and risk DC's opprobrium. Yes, Fox News will call us the Venezuela of the North. Live with it.
One of the things our home and native placate-America-at-all-costs Parties of both sides curiously forget is that Canada really is a country that was, is, and will always define itself in opposition to the United States. The United Empire Loyalists literally came here because they didn't want to be Americans, and they built Ontario as a result. Francophones not only don't want to be Americans, they're still not totally sold on this whole "Canada" idea.
The point is that "anti-Americanism" isn't just something that Canadians affect as an air of superiority, though it is sometimes that. Not being American is what we do up here, though we still like to sell stuff to the Yanks. Lots of stuff. Cheap.
Speaking of which: oil. I've said before that if Canada is serious about meeting Kyoto, then we simply must begin closing down the tar sands. There's no way that maintaining, much less expanding, such a CO2-intensive energy sink is possibly compatible with Canada's environmental goals.
At the same time, we can't do this without cutting off our largest customer. How exactly does Stephane Dion plan to do one -- meet our Kyoto objectives -- while placating the pro-business, pro-American side of the Liberal Party? (I assume Harper won't even try.) I don't envy Dion the task, I really don't.
James Laxer has some thoughts on what an independent Canadian foreign policy would look like, which prompted this post.
I don't actually think the Harper-Bush comparisons are fair, and I think they over-complicate things. Harper would be trying to make nice with any American president, because he can't imagine a way for Canada to a) dissent from American views that wouldn't b) risk upsetting American business or political leaders. I think he's probably right about that: I just don't particularly worry about B, and I don't think it's proper or right for the Prime Minister of Canada to base every single foreign policy action on those concerns.
Which brings me to this question of Canada's national sovereignty. On the one hand, we have a party and Prime Minister who have loudly proclaimed their goal of guarding Canada's claims over the Arctic. On the other, the very same party has made it clear that a) they will not oppose American foreign policy objectives, and b) they will accuse those who do of "anti-Americanism" and endangering Canada's most important relationship.
(This anti-American canard has a happy home in the Liberal party as well. See Ignatieff, Michael and Martin, Paul.)
Some authors, most recently Jack Granatstein, argue that Canada needs a larger military to protect our sovereignty and participate in the War on Terror. (Much of Granatstein's efforts have been devoted to convincing Canadians that the GWoT is "our war too." So on the one hand, we're supposed to give ourselves the tools of sovereignty, but we mustn't contemplate using them in any way other than that dictated by Washington. But sovereignty isn't particularly useful getting dusty in the closet. Unless Canada actually does something as radical as disagree with the United States, and act on that disagreement, we might as well not be sovereign at all.
Let's take the hypothetical case of an attack on Iran: There's plenty of evidence that such a thing is planned, and is certainly favoured, by constituencies in America. But there's no conceivable explanation that such an attack is in Canada's interests. (There's no sane explanation that it would be in America's, or even Israel's interests either, but we're talking Canada here.) There's plenty of ways that such an attack will in fact do great harm to Canada's interests -- not the least of which is retaliation against NATO forces in Afghanistan. What, then, is the proper response for the Government of Canada if American bombs start falling on Iran?
Does anyone think that Stephen Harper's instincts will be to immediately and loudly denounce the US? Anyone? If so, based on what?
How about something even more hypothetical: Assume we actually had a robust Navy capable of operating in the Arctic, and the Americans began sending ships through our waters without permission. Would Stephen Harper, say, order the RCN to board those ships and turn them around? He's claimed the mantle of both sovereignty-champion and America-friend. What happens when they're in conflict?
This is the dilemma for the pro-American (that is, anti-Canadian) sovereignty hawks: For good or ill, the country that will threaten Canada's sovereignty and interests the most is the United States, simply by virtue of American power and America's own interests. (I'm not imputing malice here. Just the usual American attitude of ignoring Canada, "all tucked away down there.") You cannot simultaneously crow about protecting Canada's sovereignty unless you're willing to, at least on the big issues, break with Washington and risk DC's opprobrium. Yes, Fox News will call us the Venezuela of the North. Live with it.
One of the things our home and native placate-America-at-all-costs Parties of both sides curiously forget is that Canada really is a country that was, is, and will always define itself in opposition to the United States. The United Empire Loyalists literally came here because they didn't want to be Americans, and they built Ontario as a result. Francophones not only don't want to be Americans, they're still not totally sold on this whole "Canada" idea.
The point is that "anti-Americanism" isn't just something that Canadians affect as an air of superiority, though it is sometimes that. Not being American is what we do up here, though we still like to sell stuff to the Yanks. Lots of stuff. Cheap.
Speaking of which: oil. I've said before that if Canada is serious about meeting Kyoto, then we simply must begin closing down the tar sands. There's no way that maintaining, much less expanding, such a CO2-intensive energy sink is possibly compatible with Canada's environmental goals.
At the same time, we can't do this without cutting off our largest customer. How exactly does Stephane Dion plan to do one -- meet our Kyoto objectives -- while placating the pro-business, pro-American side of the Liberal Party? (I assume Harper won't even try.) I don't envy Dion the task, I really don't.
James Laxer has some thoughts on what an independent Canadian foreign policy would look like, which prompted this post.
Now I'm depressed
Matthew Yglesias:
Ugly.
Just as during the 2002 Homeland Security debate, you see that the Democratic Party is very substantially the creature of public sector unions. When an issue is important to them, Democrats will really fight for it. Not just lip service -- they'll run meaningful political risks on behalf of the public sector unions.It's not just that there's no powerful anti-war constituency, it's that there's several powerful pro-war constituencies in the US.
To stop a war with Iraq? To halt torture? Illegal surveillance? Suddenly you see a lot less speed, a lot less determination, and a lot less backbone.
Ugly.
When Authoritarian Cultists write letters...
via The Vanity Press, this letter to the editor makes me laugh so hard:
Now if I can just get my Jewish friends to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour... and take Communion.
It’s time to stomp out atheists in America. The majority of Americans would love to see atheists kicked out of America. If you don’t believe in God, then get out of this country.I can be a Baptist, Catholic, or a Methodist? Wow! That is inclusive!
The United States is based on having freedom of religion, speech, etc., which means you can believe in God any way you want (Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, etc.), but you must believe.
I don’t recall freedom of religion meaning no religion. Our currency even says, “In God We Trust.” So, to all the atheists in America: Get off of our country.
Atheists have casued the ruin of this great nation by taking prayer out of our school and being able to practice what can only be called evil. I don’t care if they have never committed a crime, atheists are the reason crime is rampant.
Now if I can just get my Jewish friends to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour... and take Communion.
The sloppy man-love for terrorists continues...
The left is often criticized for sympathizing with terrorists. This sympathy almost never -- with some notorious exceptions -- takes the form of actually agreeing with bin Laden's motives, goals, or methods. Rather, it takes the form of asking North Americans to do something they're not normally inclined to do -- read a frikkin book. Since 9/11, the left has repeatedly asked politicians and pundits to actually learn about the history of the muslim world, and at least address the grievances therein honestly. Asking people to actually learn about the state of the Palestinians in no way calls for the destruction of Israel, after all. Talking about America's role as guarantor to authoritarian Mideast vassals means that America has made mistakes, not that it's the great Satan.
And yet, the left is frequently, obsessively demonized for being "soft on terror", "hating America", etc.
So it's somewhat amusing to see an increasing honesty by the right in America. First you had Dinesh D'souza's The Enemy at Home which quite openly says that bin Laden is right, America (or maybe just New York, if you get my meaning) is a decadent bordello and deserves what it got on 9/11. Now, you've got this from the US House of Representatives:
The interesting point here is that actually, unions were restricted from certain activities during WWII -- but they were allowed to organize, and American industry prospered, or at least wasn't overtly harmed, by that organizing.
And yet, the left is frequently, obsessively demonized for being "soft on terror", "hating America", etc.
So it's somewhat amusing to see an increasing honesty by the right in America. First you had Dinesh D'souza's The Enemy at Home which quite openly says that bin Laden is right, America (or maybe just New York, if you get my meaning) is a decadent bordello and deserves what it got on 9/11. Now, you've got this from the US House of Representatives:
Yesterday the Senate voted 51-46 to give 40,000 airport baggage screeners the right to unionize. The House supports a similar bill, but President Bush has threatened a veto, which there doesn’t appear to be enough votes in either the House or Senate to override. The New York Times reports that Sen. Richard M. Burr (R-NC), called the bill “absolutely absurd. Terrorists don’t go on strike. Terrorists don’t call their union to negotiate before they attack.”So our labour laws should be reconfigured to reflect the fact that we're at war. Moreover, they should be reconfigured specifically in regard to the enemy we're facing. So.... did we bring back slavery when the Nazis did? Because I missed that. I know we went kind of crazy for internment camps, but that wasn't really a labour practice.
The interesting point here is that actually, unions were restricted from certain activities during WWII -- but they were allowed to organize, and American industry prospered, or at least wasn't overtly harmed, by that organizing.
My racism towards my own kind disgusts me
Overheard at our dinner table, earlier this week:
My Girlfriend: Try this, it's great. I think every culture has their own version of sweet and sour sauce.
Me: (Pointing to myself) Not the Irish.
MGF: Yeah, well, you people boil everything.
Me: See, that's why I love you. A crueler person would have gone with this: "I said cultures, dumbass. You shivering, pale, island-dwelling leprechauns don't count. Now give me your pot of gold."
My Girlfriend: Try this, it's great. I think every culture has their own version of sweet and sour sauce.
Me: (Pointing to myself) Not the Irish.
MGF: Yeah, well, you people boil everything.
Me: See, that's why I love you. A crueler person would have gone with this: "I said cultures, dumbass. You shivering, pale, island-dwelling leprechauns don't count. Now give me your pot of gold."
Democracy is a strategic asset
Rob at LGM:
The admission of failure has, in fact, led to some incredible outright military successes: Lincoln famously tore through several Generals until he found men who would actually fight and win against the Confederacy. The Allies in WWII had to change their strategies several times during the war -- more than once in the land war in Europe alone! -- and still beat the ferociously competent Wehrmacht.
Even in the absence of an outright success, the admission of failure is important because it's the only way of lessening the disaster. Wouldn't Bush's approval rating be higher now -- wouldn't the country of Iraq be immeasurably better off -- if the US had left in 2004, or even 2005? I think so.
Implicit in most wingnut critiques of the anti-war left (and the anti-war right) is that democracy is a handicap in war. Dissent weakens a country at war, so we are told, and therefore democracies are at a disadvantage compared to autocracies. International relations theorists (Stam and Reiter in particular) tell us that this isn't empirically true; democracies, on the whole, tend to choose their wars better and fight better when engaged. There are certainly some examples of military organizations in authoritarian states performing very well (the US Army never matched the performance of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, for example) but democracies do very well at the political and strategic levels, and some democratic military organizations (IDF, US Navy) have proven quite formidable.....This is relevant today in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It's become clear in the last year that our current approach in Afghanistan is failing, and we need to change course -- either withdraw entirely, or radically change our committment. (I'm leaning more and more towards complete withdrawal over time, simply because I don't think there's a reasonable chance that we'll commit the necessary resources to win, nor do I think we have a coherent idea of our strategic objective or the steps necessary to win. Yes, I blame the Conservatives and the Liberals for this state of affairs.) But the first step, no matter what we do, is to admit that currently we are failing. Politically, this is impossible in Canada today largely because Stephen Harper has so polluted the debate with catcalls of "soft on terror" and "hates the troops".
What Kingdaddy's example suggests is that democracies may be able to determine when and how to lose a war better than autocracies, as well. Democratic states have a built in system for re-assessing foreign commitments, while autocratic states don't.
The admission of failure has, in fact, led to some incredible outright military successes: Lincoln famously tore through several Generals until he found men who would actually fight and win against the Confederacy. The Allies in WWII had to change their strategies several times during the war -- more than once in the land war in Europe alone! -- and still beat the ferociously competent Wehrmacht.
Even in the absence of an outright success, the admission of failure is important because it's the only way of lessening the disaster. Wouldn't Bush's approval rating be higher now -- wouldn't the country of Iraq be immeasurably better off -- if the US had left in 2004, or even 2005? I think so.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Andrew Sullivan makes me forget he's an ass, just for one moment
Today:
Coulter's defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. But it isn't. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word "faggot" is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man....
A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men - and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. We have as much and maybe more courage than many - because we have had to acquire it to survive.
Now we can drop the "alleged"
Scooter Libby, convicted felon.
Harry Reid is already pressing Bush to make a no-pardon pledge. Um, yeah, good luck with that Harry.
Harry Reid is already pressing Bush to make a no-pardon pledge. Um, yeah, good luck with that Harry.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Two posts on China
(These are both over at Ezra's place, and I neglected to cross-post them earlier, so I'll just smoosh them together here.)
Something Bush hasn't (yet) been able to ruin
Just to add to the whole Delong-Klein remarks about China (and what schoolchildren of the future are taught) [see here - J] I think it's worth pointing out one of the biggest reasons to be optimistic about future Sino-American relations: America remains astonishingly popular among actual people (if not their governments) even in places where there's a history of hostility.
China, cont.
For a perfect example of the kind of writing Sino-American relations don't need, read this by Mark Helprin.
Something Bush hasn't (yet) been able to ruin
Just to add to the whole Delong-Klein remarks about China (and what schoolchildren of the future are taught) [see here - J] I think it's worth pointing out one of the biggest reasons to be optimistic about future Sino-American relations: America remains astonishingly popular among actual people (if not their governments) even in places where there's a history of hostility.
Perhaps the best example is Iran, where decades of frosty relations between Washington and Tehran -- punctuated by terrorism on one side, accidental jetliner shoot-downs on the other, and vicious propaganda on both -- still hadn't managed to poison the minds of Iranian people against Americans. Name a Muslim capital, aside from Tehran, that had spontaneous pro-American rallies after 9/11. While I suspect Iranians' opinion of America has cooled somewhat since then, it's worth remembering how friendly the people of Iran were, despite all the water that was already under the bridge -- a history that was much, much worse than any current or future problems the US and China are likely to face.
So even if Sino-American relations go frosty over trade issues (and I'm barely old enough to remember this story with Japan) provided that cooler heads keep things civil, I suspect we actually don't have much to worry about. Keeping the actual governments of the US and China on the straight and narrow is far more worrisome to me than keeping their constituents rational.
While it may be painful for Professor Delong to hear, I don't think any schoolchild takes their teacher that seriously about long division, much less international politics.
********China, cont.
For a perfect example of the kind of writing Sino-American relations don't need, read this by Mark Helprin.
Helprin makes much of America's reduction in it's nuclear arsenal, and the supposed disadvantage this will bring vs. China, but there's really only three things you need to know:
1) Much of the so-called reduction will amount to putting the warheads in storage, so they could be put back in to service very quickly. They are not being permanently dismantled.
2) Even if this were not true, the DOE and DOD recently announced they will begin building new warheads in the near future (circa 2012.)
3) Even if both of the preceding weren't true, it's should be a mystery to me, you, or anyone else how America is more secure with 10,000 warheads instead of 1,000. The insanity of the Cold War arms race was just that -- insanity. Russia and the US could have capped their strategic nuclear arms at 1,000 apiece and still effectively destroyed each other multiple times. (In that either state would totally cease to function after "only" a handful of nuclear strikes.)
The same holds true for China, only more so. If China develops a second-strike capability -- and why wouldn't they? -- there's little America can do about it, including multiplying America's already-robust nuclear force. After all, the US has had a second-strike capability for generations now.
Helprin seems to hang his hat on the idea that China, being a less technically-advanced society than the US, would be willing to target the US' networks without being vulnerable to similar counter-attacks. But of course, the most dangerous offensive parts of the Chinese military are, yes, exactly those that are most technically dependent and vulnerable to counterattack. Obviously, it's always possible that Chinese leaders are insane, but Helprin makes it clear how that he thinks they are in fact clear and disciplined grand strategists.
But this is par for the course in this debate: First, praise the Chinese leadership for their clear, decisive grand strategy and contrast it with the vacillating, weak-need American conduct from Clinton onwards. Then, assume the Chinese go insane some point in the future, preferably with a long enough lead time for some major defense spending.
Heh. Good one.
Olaf:
How are Liberal policies - from the ATA provisions, to the environment, to the war in Afghanistan, to smear tactics and attack ads from Paul Martin's campaign handbook - all of a sudden terrifying to Liberals? If the Liberals of 2007 could meet the Liberals of 2004, they'd be shocked at how terrifying they were not 3 years ago.By the same token, though, wouldn't the Conservatives of 2004 be disgusted at how Liberal they've become?
Last week's blogging, today!
(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)
Many if not most of you probably saw this at Kevin Drum's place, but it's kind of important and I'd like to think energy-blogging is still something I do every once in a while.
Apparently, Stuart Staniford at The Oil Drum (your one-stop energy news shopping destination) has crunched the numbers, and says that Saudi Arabia's oil production is now in decline. Moreover, the decline looks like the same pattern we've seen in other modern, full-spectrum production fields like the North Sea -- 8% this year, with the likelihood of accelerating declines in years to come.
Not, as they say, a good thing.
Now the obvious retort is that as prices have "fallen" this year, the Kingdom has cut production artificially. Staniford attempts to address that hypothesis -- to my mind, convincingly -- but this issue is obviously going to require more analysis.
Some further thoughts below the fold.
My immediate reaction to this news is that the Iranians can breathe easier if it's true. One of the main theories flying around is that the Saudis would try and artificially lower the price of oil to hurt Iran's finances. If Saudi production has indeed peaked, the reverse is likely to happen: the price of oil will start increasing again, and by 2010 or so the market could be short by 2 million barrels a day. Add in Chinese and Indian growth, and, well, I hope you're saving up for a Prius. Or a Volt.
For the environmentally inclined, you could read this as "good news", in the sense that the Saudis have taken to boasting that they can destroy the alternative energy market by simply pushing the price down through the basement. If that's no longer true, one of the 800-lb gorillas most hostile to alternative energy and climate change measures -- the Saudi government -- is less dangerous.
The problem, of course, is that the substitutes in the short and medium term are likely to be much worse than Saudi crude. The USAF is looking at liquid fuels from coal, and Canada is trying to expand it's tar sands capacity despite massive economic and environmental damage. Both CTL and tar sands are worse from an environmental and financial point of view. The only thing they have going for them is not funding al Qaeda, which admittedly isn't nothing.
As we tiptoe closer to that time when global oil production peaks, and starts to decline, I hope people will begin to seriously deal with the fact that there is no supply-side solution to this problem. We can't expand production of any of the alternatives fast enough to cope. Efficiency and conservation are going to be the name of the game.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
The Old Lie
So now Obama and McCain have both been forced to apologize for, um, speaking factually.
Barack Obama:
Is it still too early to say that America wasted -- yes, wasted -- 60,000 lives in Vietnam? How about the Kaiser's Germany? Too early to say those millions were wasted?
Lives are wasted in war because war is a waste. It is failure. It is the definition of a negative-sum game: everyone is worse off then they could be otherwise. Even the winners are worse off. But, when leaders are foolish enough to start wars that they then lose, there's no excuse for mincing words. America will not have achieved its goals in Iraq. America will lose. American soldiers will have died for nothing. They will have been wasted.
The lesson to draw is that wars are bad, and you shouldn't start them. That it has to be said -- in my case, said over and over on this blog (apologies to regulars) -- is maddening.
Barack Obama:
We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we've now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.John McCain:
"We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."Fred Clark:
Two leading senators, one from each party, have used the word "wasted" and yet we are not allowed to ask if their use of this term might, in any sense, be accurate. All we can manage to ask is whether or not the senators will offer an apology to anyone who might take offense at the possibility that soldiers' lives -- in this particular case, or ever, even in the abstract -- might have been sacrificed for naught, i.e., wasted.Indeed.
This is lethal foolishness.
Is it still too early to say that America wasted -- yes, wasted -- 60,000 lives in Vietnam? How about the Kaiser's Germany? Too early to say those millions were wasted?
Lives are wasted in war because war is a waste. It is failure. It is the definition of a negative-sum game: everyone is worse off then they could be otherwise. Even the winners are worse off. But, when leaders are foolish enough to start wars that they then lose, there's no excuse for mincing words. America will not have achieved its goals in Iraq. America will lose. American soldiers will have died for nothing. They will have been wasted.
The lesson to draw is that wars are bad, and you shouldn't start them. That it has to be said -- in my case, said over and over on this blog (apologies to regulars) -- is maddening.
The face you show the world
Somebody please give me a better explanation of this cartoon (via Olaf):
(Mackaycartoons.net)
Because all I'm coming up with is racism and authoritarianism.
Apparently, this editorial cartoon -- which ran in the Hamilton Spectator -- was in response to the Supreme Court's ruling against the "security certificates" section of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001.
First of all, the obvious: the terrorists are all turban-clad bearded men, leaving us no guesswork as to whom the artist considers the biggest threat to Canadian security today. Is it too much to ask people to remember that in one of the most prominent occasions that the Canadian government has reponded to a terrorist threat, it was from white francophones? The FLQ crisis is also relevant because, yes, it shows how arbitrary the state can be when it comes through your living room. How about the fact that the last time armed Canadian soldiers were deployed domestically it was at Oka?
Now, the artist shows the terrorists being caught -- protected -- by the Charter, apparently because a cartoon of Beverly McLachlin french-kissing a bearded swarthy male was too hard to draw. But the contempt is obvious -- the Charter is protecting terrorists and putting good Canadians at risk. As if it weren't clear enough, the words "it's all fun and games" makes it clear how little the artist actually thinks about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- something trifling, amusing, but ultimately dangerous if taken too far.
It's difficult to interpret this cartoon in any kind of decent light. Basically, we're being told to surrender, in law, basic freedoms from arbitrary state power. Or else They Will Kill Us. One of the cornerstones of present Canadian democracy is positively dangerous. The terrorist threat is so dangerous that a basic aspect of our politics needs to be changed -- or maybe abandoned outright?
This is why Oka, or the FLQ crisis, are relevant. Yes, if Canadians are ever subject to terrorist attacks in the future, the Charter will defend the accused (assuming they make it to trial, unlike the London or 9/11 criminals.) But the two examples above show that we actually don't know who the state will end up rounding up on any given day. The War Measures Act was passed in 1914, when the biggest threat facing Canada was... Kaiser Wilhelm II. Yet it was used to intern Ukrainians in WWI, the Japanese in WWII, and against the people of Quebec in 1970.
The War Measures Act is gone, and it's replacement is now subject to the Charter. If we are truly fortunate, the Government of Canada will never repeat the old mistakes of the WMA. This is due to the simple fact that Mackay (the artists of this cartoon) wants you to forget: the Charter doesn't just protect the accused -- it protects us all.
But it's just a cartoon, right? No. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is a long, storied, and (sometimes literally) colorful history of editorial cartoons being used to propagate paranoid, authoritarian and racist "memes" going back at least as far as the French Revolution, and perhaps further (my reading only goes so far.) Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) got his start writing left-wing editorial cartoons in the 1930s, that occasionally veered into virulent anti-Japanese racism. (See the excellent book "Dr. Seuss goes to war.") Political cartoons are incredibly effective means of rhetoric, because they are simple yet symbolically dense. Just look at how verbose I've had to be to analyze this one. The same process happens in a few seconds of glancing at it, but it happens deep in our lizard brains. And it is clearly meant to elicit an unreasoned, irrational political response.
A few years back, right-wing bloggers took to calling themselves "South Park Republicans", which made me laugh. The whole idea of associating your ideology with an (admittedly funny) cartoon, whose sole political content usually comes from a two-minute monologue at the end of an episode full of scatological humour seemed to be an exercise in delegitimizing your own side. Cartoons are obviously not only a right-wing phenomena, but the right really did adopt South Park as a touchstone for a while.
In the broader context, this is the kind of communication that is being repeated -- propagated -- by the right. I don't think Olaf is an authoritarian/fascist/racist/Nazi for putting it up on his site. In fact, it's jarring how the cartoon he used as a pictorial headline contrasts with his otherwise reasoned and informing post beneath it.
But Olaf: Did you consider not putting it up?
(Mackaycartoons.net)
Because all I'm coming up with is racism and authoritarianism.
Apparently, this editorial cartoon -- which ran in the Hamilton Spectator -- was in response to the Supreme Court's ruling against the "security certificates" section of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001.
First of all, the obvious: the terrorists are all turban-clad bearded men, leaving us no guesswork as to whom the artist considers the biggest threat to Canadian security today. Is it too much to ask people to remember that in one of the most prominent occasions that the Canadian government has reponded to a terrorist threat, it was from white francophones? The FLQ crisis is also relevant because, yes, it shows how arbitrary the state can be when it comes through your living room. How about the fact that the last time armed Canadian soldiers were deployed domestically it was at Oka?
Now, the artist shows the terrorists being caught -- protected -- by the Charter, apparently because a cartoon of Beverly McLachlin french-kissing a bearded swarthy male was too hard to draw. But the contempt is obvious -- the Charter is protecting terrorists and putting good Canadians at risk. As if it weren't clear enough, the words "it's all fun and games" makes it clear how little the artist actually thinks about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- something trifling, amusing, but ultimately dangerous if taken too far.
It's difficult to interpret this cartoon in any kind of decent light. Basically, we're being told to surrender, in law, basic freedoms from arbitrary state power. Or else They Will Kill Us. One of the cornerstones of present Canadian democracy is positively dangerous. The terrorist threat is so dangerous that a basic aspect of our politics needs to be changed -- or maybe abandoned outright?
This is why Oka, or the FLQ crisis, are relevant. Yes, if Canadians are ever subject to terrorist attacks in the future, the Charter will defend the accused (assuming they make it to trial, unlike the London or 9/11 criminals.) But the two examples above show that we actually don't know who the state will end up rounding up on any given day. The War Measures Act was passed in 1914, when the biggest threat facing Canada was... Kaiser Wilhelm II. Yet it was used to intern Ukrainians in WWI, the Japanese in WWII, and against the people of Quebec in 1970.
The War Measures Act is gone, and it's replacement is now subject to the Charter. If we are truly fortunate, the Government of Canada will never repeat the old mistakes of the WMA. This is due to the simple fact that Mackay (the artists of this cartoon) wants you to forget: the Charter doesn't just protect the accused -- it protects us all.
But it's just a cartoon, right? No. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is a long, storied, and (sometimes literally) colorful history of editorial cartoons being used to propagate paranoid, authoritarian and racist "memes" going back at least as far as the French Revolution, and perhaps further (my reading only goes so far.) Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) got his start writing left-wing editorial cartoons in the 1930s, that occasionally veered into virulent anti-Japanese racism. (See the excellent book "Dr. Seuss goes to war.") Political cartoons are incredibly effective means of rhetoric, because they are simple yet symbolically dense. Just look at how verbose I've had to be to analyze this one. The same process happens in a few seconds of glancing at it, but it happens deep in our lizard brains. And it is clearly meant to elicit an unreasoned, irrational political response.
A few years back, right-wing bloggers took to calling themselves "South Park Republicans", which made me laugh. The whole idea of associating your ideology with an (admittedly funny) cartoon, whose sole political content usually comes from a two-minute monologue at the end of an episode full of scatological humour seemed to be an exercise in delegitimizing your own side. Cartoons are obviously not only a right-wing phenomena, but the right really did adopt South Park as a touchstone for a while.
In the broader context, this is the kind of communication that is being repeated -- propagated -- by the right. I don't think Olaf is an authoritarian/fascist/racist/Nazi for putting it up on his site. In fact, it's jarring how the cartoon he used as a pictorial headline contrasts with his otherwise reasoned and informing post beneath it.
But Olaf: Did you consider not putting it up?
"Worse than you can imagine, even after recalling that they're worse than you can imagine."
Brad Delong's summary description of the Bush Administration seems particularly apt this morning. The WaPo (via pretty much everybody) has this today:
Basically, out of a fit of madness, the Bush administration abandoned a non-proliferation regime that was working (the Agreed Framework) because of the now-dubious assertion that North Korea was working with Uranium. Because of the Bush Administration's actions -- and subsequent refusal to negotiate in the intervening years -- the North took back it's Plutonium, and made bombs much much faster.
As Rob puts it:
North Korea has weapons today because Republicans elect stupid, stupid people.
The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed....THIS IS IMPORTANT.
The administration's stance today stands in sharp contrast to the certainty expressed by top officials in 2002, when the administration accused Pyongyang of running a secret uranium program -- and demanded it be dismantled at once. President Bush told a news conference that November: "We discovered that, contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they're enriching uranium, with a desire of developing a weapon."
The accusation about the alleged uranium program backfired, sparking a series of events that ultimately led to North Korea's first nuclear test -- using another material, plutonium -- nearly five months ago.
Basically, out of a fit of madness, the Bush administration abandoned a non-proliferation regime that was working (the Agreed Framework) because of the now-dubious assertion that North Korea was working with Uranium. Because of the Bush Administration's actions -- and subsequent refusal to negotiate in the intervening years -- the North took back it's Plutonium, and made bombs much much faster.
As Rob puts it:
North Korea has nuclear weapons today because George W. Bush is a stupid, stupid man.I'd go one further. After all, it was a GOP talking point throughout the Clinton Administration that Clinton had been suckered by Pyongyang. Well before Bush came to office, the GOP-held Senate was ruining any chance for peace on the Korean Peninsula. So, no, it's not just Bush.
North Korea has weapons today because Republicans elect stupid, stupid people.
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