Products and services, reviewed

--The Saga of the Seven Suns, by Kevin J Anderson. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend these books. That would be a bit much. But IF you have an unquenchable love of spaceships, things that go zoom, and aliens, then this series is decent fodder. But not much more than that -- pretty mediocre SF, really, though never bad enough to make me put it down. And it manages, in seven books, to tell a less interesting story than Dan Simmons told in one. Still, there's some gold in there if you're willing to pan through to get it.

--Rubicon, By Tom Holland. As I said in my post a while back about the Roman Republic, this book is excellent. Insanely readable and well-written, Holland manages to convey the end of the Republic with all the relevance that it has for the modern era too. But two things really sold me on it. One, it was recommended at Balloon-Juice with a hillarious quote. Two, Holland's introduction to the book describes the problems that face a modern historian really eloquently:

Even the narrative of great events and exceptional men, however magnificent it may appear, is in truth a mutilated ruin, like an aqueduct on the Campagna, arches striding, and then, abruptly, fields.

Holland's narrative comes across with a rare mix of power and humility.

Man, it feels nice to read for pleasure again.

Woof

Lordy. When I wrote -- not even a full week ago -- that I wondered if it was possible for a Liberal leader to go south of 25% in the polls, I didn't actually think we'd get terribly close to it. In all honesty, I actually assumed 27% was the floor for Liberal support -- and further assumed that the 27% was an outlier.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Again, obsessing over every poll is a waste of time -- albeit an amusing one -- but those of us who would like to see Prime Minister Harper be joined by the prefix "former" can be forgiven for wondering when, exactly, the Liberal comeback will start. If 308.com is right, then the Conservatives are now in majority territory, just barely.

One interesting note from the poll is that the news is at least as bad for the NDP as it is for the Liberals. Some have described the trend as the NDP voters switching to Conservatives, but outside of a few areas I don't think that's literally true. Instead, what's probably happening is that conservative Liberals, eager to back a winning horse (and one whom they agree with anyway) are bolting from the party, and the decline in Liberal fortunes is forcing NDP supporters to consider voting strategically, especially in Ontario where the NDP support is still mostly old enough to remember Mike Harris.

Well, now he's sure to win 200 seats

The only thing I'm going to say about Stephen Harper's little piano ditty is that, when I see the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada playing the Beatles all I can think of is this:

If you want more intelligent commentary, I endorse Andrew Potter's comments here.

Totally random question

I saw a university syllabus recently (for a course in third year) that, as part of an essay assignment, expressly forbade the use of sources other than the three (!) textbooks required by the instructor. This is totally foreign to my understanding of what a university paper should be, especially one for a later year.

So, because I know at least a few practising academics read this thing, some questions, coming from a total and honest lack of understanding:

1) Why would an instructor make a requirement like this?

2) Is it common to have a three-source paper in Ontario universities?

My assumption is that a professor might do this because larger class sizes have meant papers need to necessarily get smaller just to be marked. I entered University right before the double cohort, and pecking around it seems like first year students at Carleton have to produce much smaller papers (1/2 length) than I did in first year, but they're at least required to have outside sources.

So, input anyone?

Converging on zero

David Olive's take on the fall of the House of Asper is, I think, spot-on: an obsessive quest for convergence (which turned out to be disastrous everywhere it was tried, as intelligent observers realized years ago) and a reckless collection of vanity projects doomed CanWest. The only thing I think Olive underplays is the purchase of Alliance-Atlantis. While there's no one thing that you can point to and say, "that was what killed CanWest", the purchase of AA is the single biggest source of debt on the company's books.

This is an all-too-common sentiment among CanWest's supporters, and it's kind of funny:

"There is no doubt that in this environment, CanWest had too much debt," Asper said. A seismic understatement. "However, you should not confuse operational excellence with our balance-sheet issues."

As if there's a bright line between the operational side of the company and the balance sheet. The debt was piled on to the company expecting "operational excellence" -- massive profits extracted via efficiency and reduced consumer choice. You can't say the company has too much debt without saying what "too much" means, in this case: the company isn't making enough money. In turn, the company isn't making enough money because... not enough people are reading the newspapers and watching the TV channels.

It's not fair to say that CanWest is doing much worse than any other network -- indeed, BBM data suggests that CanWest is doing pretty well in terms of nightly viewership, thanks to its heavy spending on US programming -- its just that competitors like CTV or, yes, CBC either didn't get in to the convergence game or got out of it much, much earlier before doubling down on the stupid.

And you all caught the bit about CBC and the National Post sharing content, right? If the Public Broadcaster had reached a similar deal with either the Globe or Star, wouldn't we expect the Post to describe the agreement as... welfare? A government handout to a business that's failing in the market?

Okay, so a lot of this is schadenfreude on my part. But I lost all respect for the NatPo when they reprinted Jonah Goldberg's "Bomb Canada" screed in 2002, which was tasteless and should have been beyond the pale even for the Post. Goldberg, you'll recall, was saying that the US should slap Canada around to man us up -- nevermind that Canadian soldiers were already fighting with the US in Afghanistan, and we had already suffered casualties... at the hands of the US Air Force.

It's official

Michael Ignatieff: welcome to the Dion Zone.

Interestingly, the Coderre Contretemps seems to have really hurt Liberal fortunes... in Atlantic Canada. In Quebec, the voters have made their displeasure known... by punishing the Conservatives. Canadian politics is weird.

The big question is, has Ignatieff found the basement yet? Or is it possible for a Liberal leader to go below, say, 25% in national polls?

Stay tuned!

BONUS CRUELTY UPDATE: Alternately, we can now say that Michael Ignatieff is about as appealing to the electorate as Alan Keyes, 2004 -- what was once called the crazification factor. But let me give my Liberal friends a freebie here: Jack Layton is as bad as three Ralph Naders!

*silent tear*

I know we'll all have a quiet little moment of mourning when the Aspers lose control of Canwest. Truly, no family has done more to elevate Canadian discourse than this clan, and it's a shame that something as petty as "obligations to shareholders" could humble such upstanding believers in free markets.

Politics is a skill, and a hard one at that

Jim Travers writes one of the clearest, most brutal explanations for why the Liberals find themselves floundering in the polls:

Three times they failed to stare at themselves while looking for a leader. Three times Liberals opted for expediency over renewal.

In each case the party was so consumed with crowning a winner that it ignored red flags waving. It was so sure in 2003 that Paul Martin would sweep the country that it didn't stop to consider shaky leadership campaign performances that forecast his dithering as prime minister. It was so sure in 2006 that voters would soon dump Stephen Harper that it spared itself the tough choice between Ignatieff and Bob Rae by compromising on the obviously inept Stéphane Dion. It was so sure in December that Ignatieff was the new saviour that it aborted a leadership contest that would have hardened the winner and might have exposed the organizational and policy weaknesses now plaguing the party.

I find myself in the odd position of being kinder to the Liberal Party than a columnist for the Toronto Star, but I don't think Dion was anyone's decision -- I really think the party establishment assumed Ignatieff would win in Montreal, 2006, and was as shocked as anyone when Dion pulled out a squeaker.

That said, the entire column is worth reading. The last sentence should be seared in the the eyes of the Liberal leadership:

But should Ignatieff fail, blame will rest squarely on deluded Liberals who persuaded themselves that returning to power was inevitable and no more demanding than a beauty pageant.

via.

The Potomac or the Tiber?

I had, for a while, referred to Bush-era Washington as "Weimar on the Potomac", a phrase I had retired in my mind until I heard the words "death panels" for the first time. The toxic mix of a victimized, self-pitying nationalism and a belief that traitors in their midst were just aching to stab them in the back reminded me of nothing so much as the late German republic.

But I just finished reading the fabulous Rubicon by Tom Holland, so you'll pardon me if a different metaphor springs to mind when we start seeing people advocate for a military solution to "the Obama problem". (via Balloon-Juice and Chet) Though of course, describing anything as "the X problem" has other, far more sinister, German overtones.

You can still read the full text of the original article here, though its original patron seems to have disowned both the text and the author. What's intriguing to me is less the hypothetical solution and more the grievances. John Perry writes:

Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

They can see that the economy -- ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation -- is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

None of these things, of course, started with Obama himself. Moreover, the idea that the US officer corps is going to displace the elected Commander-in-Chief over the nationalization of GM and Chrysler is... well, funny in many senses. But I suspect that this is an aperitif in the multi-course dinner of crazy that Perry is serving up, because he's just described running for re-election as a sinister plot to "seek continuation in office."

They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

By publicly declaring that the members of the intelligence community who followed illegal orders from their president will face... no consequences whatsoever?

They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.

Ooh, a double-barreled crazy! First, the missile defense is being replaced with something that works, not eliminated. Secondly, in what universe is increasing US troop levels and military spending synonymous with "allow[ing] to sag?" The crazyverse, that's where. Bonus: the avowed reason for Polish missile defense was the threat from Iran, and Iranian missiles can in no way threatan US soil, unless we define "US soil" as the territory of any US ally, formal or otherwise.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

Well, if I were a high-ranking general upset about these things, I might ask myself why I'd stayed silent for the eight years of the Bush Administraion instead of getting so exercised during the eight months of the Obama Administration. But then, I'm not a high-ranking general. And if I were in a room with a bunch of them, I would assume that we would all agree that the only legal, constitutional, and moral answer to give is "we obey the President of the United States of America, or we resign." But here comes the meat of Perry's conspiracy:

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

"Imagine a coup to defend the Constitution..."... from the duly elected government bound by that constitution. Nice. It's all high-octane crazy talk, bound together with the fevered imaginations of the teabaggers and the like. But I note that the list of grievances is pretty thin with actual constitutional violations -- no unlawful search and seizures, no trampling of states' rights, no restriction of the first or second ammendment. Instead, what motivates Perry is the fear that America will be put at risk by losing wars at the frontiers of its influence. And with the crack about letting enemies target missiles at America, he's really associating the desires of the military-industrial complex with the needs of the country.

And of course, this is where we come back to Rome. Rome had a military-economic complex of its own, well before the fall of the Republic. Wars in Asia (really in the Balkans, Turkey, and Syria) made generals and roman agents rich, rich, rich, so there was a constant desire to find new reasons to drum up "self-defense" wars against the next uppity Asian king. The first General to march on Rome -- as a defender of the constitution, of course -- was Sulla, who wanted to ensure that he be given the command of one of an apparently lucrative campaign against the king Mithridates. Sulla had been named General by the Senate, his rival Marius had been named General by the Plebian Assembly. Roman custom held that the assembly was superior to the Senate, but the Roman legions under Sulla's command -- and his conservative allies in the Senate -- had other ideas.

What's interesting to think about in all this, of course, is how quickly things changed for the Romans. The Republic had been roiled by civil strife for some time, but it was only with the election of the first Gracchi brother in the 130s that blood was actually shed in Roman politics. A decade later the second Gracchi brother was killed (and if you're thinking "Kennedy" here, you should really read Holland's book.) Then the great Social War erupts as Italian cities begin rejecting Roman power, and Sulla becomes the champion of Rome by bringing Italy to heel. Then, before the embers of the Social War can even cool, Sulla marches on Rome for the first time. This all occurs within about 50 years -- when the Republic's domestic politics had enjoyed 400 years of peace before that. Or, to put it another way, enough time had passed since the last true foreign threat to the Republic (Hannibal had been defeated in 202 BC) that nobody could really remember a time when Rome itself had been under threat. By 81 BC, Rome had been invaded by Romans, twice. 20 years later, Caesar's inexorable rise had already begun.

Here's my point. Politics are fragile. They are bound, more than we like to admit, by convention and custom, and not by laws themselves. The law itself, of course, can be bent to suit convention and custom as necessary -- so Canadian courts rule that Harper breaking his own fixed-election law isn't actually illegal because "confidence" of Parliament is something defined more by custom than by law. (And the court isn't wrong!) And when actors within our political system begin to start throwing custom out the window, then things can change very, very rapidly.

Since when did Martin go away?

Anyone else remember, in the heady days circa 2006, how Michael Ignatieff's leadership was key to resuscitating Liberal fortunes in Quebec? Good times.

There's a growing meme out there that somebody's really going to have to explain to me. According to a number of voices -- including, I think [1] Paul Wells [update: listening to it online, it seems this was Susan Delacourt, though Wells certainly agreed] on CBC's The Current this morning -- the problem with the Liberal Party today is that both the Chretien and Martin camps have collapsed, leaving no core of leadership to keep the party from drifting aimlessly.

Except. I can get that Dion was basically a surprise to the Party -- they had their man (Ignatieff) picked, and if he'd actually been a competent politician he probably wouldn't have barfed up all over the silver platter they'd prepared for him. But Ignatieff is the leader now. And Ignatieff was hand-picked and parachuted in to his riding by... Paul Martin. Moreover, wooing Ignatieff in 2004-5 was an explicit slap to the final great moment of Chretien's Prime Ministry: keeping Canada out of the war in Iraq.

The Martin wing, then, hasn't really gone anywhere. It's a bit much to say that Ignatieff was Martin's chosen successor -- for that to be true, Martin would have had to acknowledge the reality that there would be one day when he wouldn't be leader -- but certainly the policies (move right, always right!) and even the staff are largely the same. (Denis Coderre, as just one example, began his cabinet career under Chretien but was elevated substantially under Martin.)

Now clearly I lack the sources that Paul Wells does. But from where I'm sitting, the problems isn't that the Martin camp and Chretien camp have disappeared. Rather, the problem is the Martin camp keeps failing miserably under both Martin and Ignatieff, but maintains a blatantly autocratic habit of forcing its candidates to the commanding heights without bothering with anything so plebian as a competitive election -- because in a competitive election, candidates like Ignatieff and Martin keep, um, losing.

Now, surely Dion is not the poster boy for electoral success either, but I know I'm not alone in thinking that had he not had to deal with a constant barrage of knives coming from his own team, Dion would have put up a better fight in the last election. Not a few people have used the words "treated shamefully" to describe Dion's handling at the hands of his own party. One guess as to who was wielding most of the knives, 2006-2008?

Now, clearly, I'm not an objective observer when it comes to Michael Ignatieff. I am, as they say, not a fan. But I thought it was clear that the Martin wing of the party was very much still in control, having helped ruin Dion and elevate Ignatieff. So people, if I have the basic facts of this matter wrong, please illuminate me.

[1] My apologies if I've misattributed a statement to Paul Wells, but I was just waking up to my alarm clock and couldn't sort out voices and statements right away. [Clearly, I did misattribute this.]

So it's all been worthwhile then

Another note on that EKOS poll: Liberal supports stands basically where it was (nationally) after the 2006 election, or just a bit under. So despite having jettisoned two leaders, the country is basically as unimpressed with the party as they were when they elected Prime Minister Harper. If Ignatieff drops a bit further, he'll be well and truly in Dion territory (26% last election.) Alternately, he could almost be there now (the margin of error being what it is.)

Scott Tribe notes in comments that polls are snapshots, fickle beasts, etc etc. And he's quite right! Any individual poll is, in itself, meaningless. But my point is that we've seen a steady erosion in Liberal support since Ignatieff's announcement that he couldn't support the Harper government anymore.

The larger point, one that Chet has made time and time again, is that Canadian politics has been in a stunning kind of paralysis, especially since 2006 but arguably since 2004. All the sound and fury has truly signified nothing -- the Liberals have changed leaders, the other parties haven't, there's been a handful of scandals, rising stars in both parties have been privileged or humbled -- but the facts on the ground don't change.

If I were leading a political party in the Canadian parliament right now, I'd want to see damn good evidence that something major and structural was changing in my favour before I made a move. I politely submit that anyone claiming to see something like that in the Liberals' favour is either a) wrong, b) lying, or c) reading the contemporary equivalent of chicken entrails and tea leaves.

On unintended consequences

So last week the Liberal Party maneuvered to have the Bloc and NDP support a confidence motion in the house, and lo how we did hear crowing from our cousins in the middle: This'll show those stupid dippers, they said, and boy won't they look dumb supporting the Harper conservatives. And indeed, it does look silly to have the social-democratic left supporting the regressive right in Parliament. The Liberals seem not to have asked, however, what it would make them look like.

Answer: the Conservatives now have a 7-point lead in Ontario, a five point lead in Toronto, and are seven points ahead nationally.

Lesson for the day: you can make your rivals look bad, but it doesn't make you look good.

Hysterical paranoia -- not just for nervous parents anymore!

Earlier today, in my new neighbourhood:

Man: Hey, do you know whose dog that is?

(Turns to see perfectly normal-looking black lab, albeit not on a leash and seemingly unaccompanied by its owner.)

Me: Uh, nope. It's got a collar, did you check the tags?

Man: Uh, no, I'm afraid of being attacked.

Me: Come here boy, yes, who's a good dog, aw you're so friendly.... the tag says it belongs to 427. Hmm... I'm standing in front of 427. Looks like the crisis has passed.

Man -- not a boy, definitely a (young) man: Wow, that was really brave of you.

I can't vouch for everything in that dialogue, except for the last sentence, which is seared in to my brain. Are people actually afraid of unattended dogs now, even when they have visible tags and collars?

Lordy, summers at my cottage would've been like the Normandy landings for that guy -- trauma and bravery everywhere! So... many.. dogs...

(Training kids to be wary of strange animals: good idea. Not being able to differentiate, as an adult, between "unknown" and "dangerous": bad idea.)

Hm.

Okay, read this article in the NatPo and answer me a few questions:

1) Do you see this as (further) evidence that Stephen Harper is an incompetent/malicious PM?

2) Is there any evidence that the upgrades to water services in this country are unnecessary or wasteful?

3) Whose job is it, in the Canadian system, to make sure cities have sufficient resources to operate? (If you answer, "the federal government", go back to school.)

Look, I'm not a fan of Stephen Harper -- newsflash! -- but it is not his job to make sure that cities run well. It is, in fact, his job to make sure that Canadian water is clean and not posing a danger to human health. (It is a settled matter that the Feds have a strong obligation in the environment.) It is, in Ontario, Dalton McGuinty's job to make sure that cities have enough money to do their jobs properly.

Now, I would like to see a federal government committed to lowering the costs for cities. But the Provinces have fiscal resources too, and (to use Coyne's nice formulation) the argument that the feds should pay for Provincial responsibilities amounts to a) the feds have money, and b) we want money.

There is only one true "fiscal imbalance" in this country, and it's between the provinces and cities. When Queen's Park starts sending more of its money to the cities instead of enjoying the proceeds of the Harris-era downloading, then come talk to me.

Tab-clearing, 9/22

• TNC on Kanye, "manners" and all that:

Even Brooks view of the "Greatest Generation" is myopic. In 1948 Strom Thurmond authored the segregationist Dixiecrat charter, while immodestly fathering a daughter with a black women. In 1946, Isaac Woodward, a veteran of World War II, was beaten and blinded--while in uniform--by South Carolina police. The police were prosecuted, but the jury acquitted them, and a court-room full of Americans broke out in immodest applause.

This is history through the veil, again. It's virtually impossible to be a black person and believe that Americans were somehow more humble in the past. Our very existence springs from an act of immodesty.

• The Internet is not making us stupid. Stop saying that it is.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

• Classic book titles, 21st-century style:

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now:  Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now:  Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

• The ghost fleet of the recession:

"A couple of years ago these ships would be steaming back and forth. Now 12 per cent are doing nothing.."

• The relative energy efficiency of transport modes, revisited. Cyclists still win! (Thanks, Adam!)
• Surface area required to power the world with sun and wind.
• And finally, it turns out Ayn Rand and her cultists were kind of weird. Who knew?

Tangible steps... hmm...

President Obama did a sane thing today, and cancelled the construction of a non-working missile non-defense system that wouldn't work and thus couldn't defend squat. Did I mention it didn't work? The reaction of Joe Lieberman, as a proxy for every stupid person on the right today:

The administration must take immediate and tangible action to reassure our allies in Central and Eastern Europe that we are committed to their security and independence.”

Poland and the Czech Republic are NATO members, and thus the United States is required to come to their defense in the event of an attack on those countries. Moreover, US law requires that the US government treat Ukraine as a NATO member until such time as that becomes a formal reality.

There's pretty much nothing else the President could do that would commit the US to the defense of Central and Eastern Europe more than it already is. Maybe the current guarantees are meaningless -- no doubt Mikhail Saakashvili thinks so -- but if they are, it's not because a missile shield is or isn't being built. It's because the national interests of the United States are not the same as those in Warsaw or Prague.

Taking a page from Atrios' book

It's always fraught to comment on contemporary parenting when a) I don't have kids and b) I know how the moment you have kids, everybody knows more than you and is eager to share, but like Atrios I too read this piece in the Times from last weekend and shook my head. Kids not being allowed to walk home, three houses away on the same street, "just in case"? Insanity. But, an understandable form of madness I think: children, and especially young girls, are assumed to be victims-in-waiting in our culture. It doesn't agree with the data, but then again there's all sorts of things that don't agree with the data, including our use of the word "sunrise".

So I'm not going to get all self-righteous about people over-parenting their young kids (though I did flip through Lenore Skenazy's book and enjoyed it.) What I think is really far less understandable, and far more damaging, is that this over-parenting seems to now extend into the late teens and even, in some cases, early 20s. Any university staff will tell you their favourite story about helicopter parents, I'm sure, but I was listening to Hara Estroff Morano on a rerun of CBC's The Current last week and one story in particular dropped my jaw: a father who moved in to a hotel room closer to his son's university campus to help him through the trauma of changing his major.

As it turns out, I changed my major in the 2nd year of my BA. I think I told my father sometime before I graduated, but couldn't swear to it. He may have learned about it when he saw my diploma for the first time.

The hyper-careful parenting of pre-teen children may be illogical (driving your child to school exposes them to more risk, not less) but the hyper-parenting of teens and young adults is unreasonable. I don't know if there's a straight line running through both concepts -- they don't seem directly related to me -- but they do seem like two different categories: one is regrettable if understandable, the other is harmful to everyone involved.

Okay, awesome

Best President ever? Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

"He deserves a rich, full life. And he's not going to get one."

Try to read this TomDispatch...

A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub ring" -- the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir's walls as the waterline dropped -- stretches the almost 200-mile length of the reservoir.

Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to "normal" levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with cement: the water's edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them.

...and not think immediately of the fate of Lake Baikal the Aral Sea in the former USSR. [a-doy, thanks Zack]

The "bathtub ring" Ward describes is fully in evidence at Lake Mead as well, as I saw this spring doing, uh, research in Las Vegas. Yes. Research. Totally serious was my purpose in the American southwest.

Of course, the drying of the American west is just one symptom of the warming of our planet. Given that there's basically no chance we'll keep the planet's fever below 2 degrees now, any sane plan for dealing for the next few thousand years of badness is going to mean an exodus from the hot, dry places of the Earth: places that were pleasant enough when water, and then AC, were plentiful, but whose continued habitation is a risky bet at the very best. The collapse of the American southwest will, once and for all, demonstrate the futility of trying to technocratically "manage" our problems away. The idea of artificially filling the basins of the Colorado is a kind of fantasy that no doubt appeal to those who think global warming can be solved with orbiting mirrors, but quickly fails the laugh test. (Desalination? Where do we put the gigatons of leftover brine?)

The entire discussion puts me in mind of the Star Trek: TNG episode "The Inner Light" where Picard relives the life of a doomed man on a baking world. One of the best episodes ever, though it makes me think our civilization too will only be remembered by the probes we've launched in to space.

Is the Chinese state failing?

Fascinating piece from OpenDemocracy about the state of Chinese politics as the People's Republic approaches its 60th anniversary:

Several academics I talked offered sharp insights into the party's and government's current predicament. One as good as said that democracy at the village level had made things worse. Another complained that lawyers were now becoming a huge enemy within, challenging the government and starting to articulate demands that were becoming more and more political in their complexion.

Behind all of this is the immense security apparatus that the CCP now relies on for so much for its authority in "difficult" areas. A recent report estimated that China had no less than 1 million secret-intelligence operatives. How are these tasked and funded; who they are answerable to; how is their effectiveness assessed? These are not simple questions to answer. But somewhere, on someone's budget-sheet, is the costs of a huge amount of people assigned to use government money on "dealing with subversive and terrorist activity". It would be fascinating to know just what this amounts to in financial cost alone.

I am more disheartened than I was even a month ago by how things are in China. The central state seems less effective and in control in many areas than I had thought.

It will be a darkly funny outcome if the People's Republic itself succumbs to a period of warlordism -- the party has implicitly used the threat of civil strife as a justification for its monopoly on power.

Whether the CCP can understand the basic insight of democratic countries, and survive it, is the question of the decade. I'm far less optimistic about either outcome than I was only a few years ago.

My blog should just point to ever XKCD strip ever

This is funny. Extra funny -- seeing 538.com on the blogroll. (Of course, it's only funny if you've read Enders Game.

A note to our American cousins

I see Ezra and Matt comparing idiot Joe Wilson's outburst to the British tradition of heckling our elected leaders.

In fact, accusing an MP of lying is the one thing not protected by Parliamentary privilege, and if not immediately apologized for can have an MP removed from the House of Commons (in Canada and the UK at least -- dunno about other commonwealth countries.) Of course, the President isn't an MP, but addressing a joint session more closely resembles a Speech from the Throne, and I cannot imagine a scenario where any party would put up with an MP interrupting the Queen or a Governor-General, much less calling them a liar. We'd be in a by-election before you could say "tut tut, cheerio".

Two things he needed to do, and he couldn't do them

Stephen Harper had exactly two things that were necessary, if not sufficient, to win the likely fall election: STFU about majorities, and do nothing to revive an increasingly irrelevant charge by the Liberals that he had a "secret agenda".

Conservative FAIL.

Not that the Liberals seem to be doing at all well -- as I've said more than once, summer polls were probably hiding a non-trivial Conservative advantage. Let's just hope we're not seeing something as severe as the Dion slump at work.

Like the universal gravitational constant, only funnier

GOP family values pol caught bragging about two affairs. At once.

Krugman on econ

If you haven't read it yet. I disagree with the basic thesis a little, because I think Krugman under-estimates how inherently politicized economics is, as been, and always will be. When the wealthy and powerful needed the government to stay out of their way, we had classical economics. When we needed a government that could wage and win two global wars, we had Keynesianism. And then when the Cold War was winding down in the 1970s and 1980s (though it didn't always look like it was!) we got neo-classical economics -- basically the same old "fuck the poor" mentality dressed up in an analytical drag.

Nevertheless, worth reading.

Then and now

Tom Tomorrow.

This is kind of what I'm talking about

Angus Reid has a new poll out, and 308 has a projection based on it. Headline? If current trends hold, Ignatieff is likely to win one whole seat more than the results which were so bad in 2006 that Paul Martin felt he had to resign his leadership of the party. In short, the phrase "Prime Minister Stephen Harper" isn't going anywhere yet. Paul Wells notes the same thing I did a few days ago with a different angle: if the best the Liberals can do is tie, then they're behind:

Party preference polls bounced around a bit this summer, but basically the Liberals and Conservatives are tied. That’s between elections. Historically, going back almost half a century, the Conservatives underperform in polls between elections and then deliver a bit of a surprise at the ballot box. Which helps explain why Chrétien in 1997 and Paul Martin in 2004 were surprised to see their opponents take a serious bite out of their hide, and why the Harper Conservatives and the Dion Liberals were tied in August before Harper opened an 11-point gap on election day last year.

But once again, when the Liberals lose, it won't be their fault.

Oh man...

So I was all set to write a post about how, on the list of "things about the state of Israel which upset me", a linkage between Toronto and Tel Aviv is about the last thing on that list, and I think protesting a focus on Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival is about the silliest thing I can think of. First of all, the politics are dubious. Secondly, if you're the kind of person who believes that Jews deserve a homeland but strongly oppose the oppression of Palestine, there needs to be some aspect -- here, now, in the present -- of your views on Israel that isn't about the occupation. Respect for films coming out of Tel Aviv seems like a good place to start. Thirdly, if we're going to connect Toronto with some part of Israel, isn't the cosmopolitan heart of the Jewish state the logical place to start?

So I was going to write all that (whoops!) and then I saw this via LGM -- it's entirely unrelated, but puts me in a less charitable mood.

The Prime Minister's Office and the Jewish Agency unveiled an aggressive advertisement campaign for the Masa project which is designed to strengthen Jewish identity among youths in the Diaspora and their bonds to Israel.

One video clip likens Jews who marry outside of the religion to missing persons, with fake notices and pictures which drive home the point.

As part of the campaign, similar "missing person" notices will be plastered on walls around the country.

See Dana Goldstein at Tapped as well.

Of my Jewish friends, almost none have settled with other Jews in their lives. In one case, a wife converted because it was important for the Jewish husband, but she surely wasn't Jewish when they started dating. And of course, some of my friends are themselves products of heterogeneous marriages. For their parents and spouses to be likened to kidnappers by the Israeli government makes me... well, I'm gonna go with "less charitable" and leave it at that.

Slightly more charitable update: I suppose the alternative explanation is that Jews who marry out of the tribe are runaways, not kidnapped, but frankly the entire analogy is just one big bag of fail -- consider how often, for example, runaways are fleeing abuse at home?

Somebody call the waaaaahmbulance

Jeffrey Simpson just can't handle these minority governments anymore. The Canadian people have disappointed Simpson for five years now, and if we don't wise up soon, he's going to take his toys and go home.

I have yet to discover the downside to this scenario.

H/T to Greg.

I'm on a boat!

Here. Sad that the US Navy seems to have force the takedown of this video from Youtube.

The intersection of rights and community

Will Wilkinson -- last seen going to bat for the nutters bringing guns to town hall meetings -- has an excellent point here.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. ... And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with. Most Americans these days seem happy enough to see women succeed as high-achieving go-getters. And who doesn’t love Tim Gunn? But most of us have not yet given up on oppressively restrictive, strongly normative conceptions of hetero masculinity.

We (I speak as a white, hetero man) extend rights to others not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it expands the frontiers of what it means to be a good, happy person. People who want to restrict rights need to think hard about why they want to make it more difficult to be happy in this world.

Links, getcher links here

• Kindle greener than paper?
• Ahh, the uncomprimising meritocracy of liberal democracy.
• re: Michael Bryant: He ain't the only one.
• China begins hoarding strategic metals? I think during the Cold War South Africa threatened to do the same thing.
• This will definitely make me take the US Chamber of Commerce more seriously.
• This is almost a month old, but yes, cyclists can be assholes as well.
• Does anybody else worry about us funnelling bitumen to the head of the Great Lakes? Because I really do.
• UPDATE: I do so love when people line up to throw money away.

For reals this time?

Colour me unimpressed:

The federal Opposition Liberals will no longer support Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Tuesday, making the prospect of a fall election more likely.

In a fiery campaign-style address to a room full of supporters in Sudbury, Ont., Ignatieff said the Liberals would return "competence and compassion" to the federal government to replace a Harper government that "doesn't care."

"Mr. Harper, your time is up; we cannot support this government any further," he said. "The secret weapon on our side is Stephen Harper's record. … We can do better."

I certainly agree that Harper's record is a powerful recommendation for change. But what, exactly, recommends Ignatieff's Liberal leadership on this question? As just one example, are the Liberals arguing for a larger stimulus or a smaller deficit? Neither? Both?

On the more basic political question -- what makes the Liberals think that Canada is clamoring for change? None of the existing polls suggest a large, dissatisfied block in the country want an election and a new government. Indeed, the existing polls probably hide a substantial advantage for the incumbent government, as Stephane Dion found out too late.

In short, nobody else in the country is as angry about Harper's Premiership as the Liberal Party of Canada is. Similarly, nobody else in Canada is as convinced of Ignatieff's superiority to Harper as the Liberal Party is. Until the rest of us are, Ignatieff probably shouldn't start measuring the drapes.

But hey, I've gotten plenty of things wrong in my prognostications before. Maybe we're headed to a Liberal majority. I sure don't see it. Hell, at this point I'd sooner expect a Harper majority. The only clear Canadian political trend of the last 5 years is stasis in the polls which manages to manifest itself as a loss of seats in the House for the Liberals. (Given the dishonesty embodied in our electoral system, those two facts are not contradictory.) That's worth restating: the only clarity in the last five years of Canadian politics is that the Liberal Party has gone from 168 seats in the House when the 37th Parliament was dissolved in 2004 to 77 seats today, with no obvious prospects for resucitation.

When do we start the clock?

So a bunch of news sources are reporting today as the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. That is, 70 years ago today, the German Luftwaffe began bombing Polish towns and the Kriegsmarine shelled Danzig. Of course, Czechoslovakia had been annexed a year earlier, and before that the Nazis had supported the Fascists in Spain. Meanwhile, the real fighting between Germany and the Anglo-French allies would not actually begin until 1940 -- that's why it's called "The Phony War."

And in Asia, it's even more odd because while war officially started in 1937, the Japanese were invading Manchuria as early as 1931.

Indeed, American (though ironically very pro-Chinese) wartime propaganda like Why We Fight explicitly dates the beginning of World War II from the invasion of Manchuria, not Poland or even Pearl Harbor.

I'm certainly not offended by marking the beginning of the war this way -- Canada did, in fact, declare war on Germany because of the invasion that started this day. (The anniversary of the declaration of war will be the 10th, right before another auspicious anniversary.) But it's important to note that the war was raging before we joined the fight. Canadians love to mock the late American entry to the war -- and it's a privilege that I'm willing to earn by being similarly mocked by the Chinese and Spanish in kind.

Former Attorney General FAIL

Jesus.

Ontario's former attorney general Michael Bryant is facing two charges after a fatal hit-and-run in Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood Monday night.

Mr. Bryant will be charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving causing death, a police source tells the Globe, after a collision left a 33-year-old cyclist dead.

My limited understanding is that Bryant managed to impress absolutely nobody at Queen's Park while he was there, and let's just say that I'm very, very glad that this man is no longer the chief law enforcement officer for the Province of Ontario.

In the narrowest possible grounds for his defense, it is quite possible given the general biking culture in this city, that the cyclist instigated the "altercation" that seems to have ended horribly. I don't know how, exactly, it could have escalated to the point where Bryant was using mailboxes to scrape the cyclist of the side of his car, and frankly don't think it matters. Nor, apparently, do the police.

Boy, Dalton McGuinty really, really didn't need this.

I don't know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman

Speaking of which, this was published mere days before our offer on the house was accepted. It seemed terrifyingly relevant.

Why this blog has sucked a bit more than usual lately

I'd hate for people to get the wrong impression -- that the appearance of the Mark Steyn fan club a few weeks ago had somehow cowed me into silence -- so let's clear the air, if you don't mind a little explanation for why the blog has not been my #1 priority for the last while.

Well, let's start with an addendum to this post: yes, I finished my coursework for my masters degree many months ago, but there was still a substantial assignment left to do: in the case of my degree, a 40+ page reported feature-style article that involved many hours of interviews, months of research, and a hard drive failure which caused me to lose most of my data at the worst possible moment. Writing this article -- which I have finally finished as of a few days ago -- has taken much of my waking moments for the last few months.

Most, but not all. Because at the beginning of that work, I decided that I owed it to Vicki to finally start getting serious about planning our wedding. She's a sweetheart, so I'm sure she would've waited longer if I'd asked her, but she's already exhibited the patience of a saint, and I make it a rule not to try the patience of saints.

Oh, and as my degree winds down I'm trying to find a job. So, there I was, in early August, trying to find a job, finish a masters degree, and plan a wedding, when Vicki and I did what you would expect of two people who clearly already had enough on their plates: we bought a house. If you haven't done it, I wouldn't actually recommend the process except for the reward at the end. Actually, it's kind of like a wedding in that sense, or a masters degree.

So my apologies for not being able to comment on the insanity of the American health care debate. Not that I have much to add -- death panels? Are you kidding me? -- but one of my whinier friends has complained about this particular field lying fallow too long.

Reasons why this blog will continue to suck for some time to come: I now have to fix up our new place, pack up our old place, and move. Oh, and find a job.

Did I mention the job bit?

"We could use gryphons and we don't. That's what separates us from them."

Heard something about this on the news...

I have nothing much to say about the death of Ted Kennedy, except that if I had been the youngest brother of men like JFK and RFK and had started losing my elder brothers to violent deaths when I was 12, and had lost all of them before my 40th birthday, I suspect I probably would have had a long struggle with alcohol and a failed marriage.  Indeed, I suspect those would have been the least of my problems.

Unlike Ted Kennedy, I'm not sure I would have come back from that.  The usual suspects will make their usual noises about Chappawhatsits, and it's true that he had the career he did because he was a Kennedy first. But many men have been blessed with more and parlayed it in to far less -- see Bush, George W.

So thank you, Senator Edward Kennedy.  Rest in peace.

Quick shots

• There is something about owning a car that all too often leads to sociopathic behaviour.
• On that topic, could we maybe give cyclists even 1/20th of the space to park that we devote to cars?
• This list makes me think I am officially an adult, and thus sad.
• The oil industry continues to be evil.
• On a related note, methane continues to seep from the arctic. In brief, we're boned.
• In another five years, the Russian army could suck considerably less.
• Finally, Roger Ebert shares his thoughts on AA after 30 years of sobriety.

There's virtue in brevity

Kevin Drum:

When we get to the point where one side is able to conduct war effectively with virtually no fear of loss of life, does that mean that public pressure against war will start to fade away? After all, demand curves slope downward. When war becomes cheaper, we'll get more war. Right?

Me, a few years back:

[thousands of words to say about as much]

Sometimes I'm way too wordy for my own good.

Tab-clearing

This smelled like garbage from the beginning.

A robot's Passover.

If you read this chart, and conclude "the problem with the world is that there are too many cyclists", you are dumb.

Is immigration bad for the environment? An old argument, one I tend to come down on the "no" side.

Lawrence Solomon writes something non-crazy.

Heh. His name is "Guinan".

And he's a space scientist! NEEEEEERRD.

Actually, it's a pretty interesting post at io9 talking about how our Sun is not, in fact, the ideal candidate star for the development of life. Nor, for that matter, is Earth the ideal planet. Smaller K-class stars, and larger rocky planets, seem to be better suited.

The Copernican revolution continues to keep moving us further and further from the centre of the universe.

Baby steps

Fake Nobelist Paul Krugman writes:

My guess is that the myth of the rational market — a myth that is beautiful, comforting and, above all, lucrative — isn’t going away anytime soon.

An explicit admission that yes, one of the core concepts in contemporary economics was propounded and held to be true because it was valuable that people believe it to be true.

Krugman is already further along the path than most, but it's nice to see the pages of the NYT allow a glimpse at how economics is actually practiced.

In other Krugman-blogging, check out his conversation with Charles Stross. Fun.

This blog sucks

Sorry for the radio silence, but shit has gotten kind of real in the last week, and so the blog suffers.

Or, potentially, the lack of new content makes it suck less, given my average level of production.

Authenticity in SF

The question of whether Science Fiction should have less scientific inaccuracy is kind of like asking whether it would be nice if suntans weren't linked to skin cancer: well, sure, but expecting one without the other isn't a sign of a well-developed mind. But this post made me think of the matter, and I wanted to specifically note that the recent film Moon did a passable, though not perfect, job at keeping the science plausible and serving the plot at the same time.

But everyone knows China is doing nothing to stop global warming!

BEIJING – China has taken advantage of a drop in electricity demand due to the global financial crisis to speed up a campaign to close small coal-fired power plants and improve its battered environment, an official said Thursday.

Authorities have closed power plants with a total of 7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule, said Sun Qin, deputy administrator of the Cabinet's National Energy Administration.

"This couldn't be done when power demand was very intense," Sun said at a news conference. "Due to this financial crisis, the power generation has slowed down, so we took this opportunity to accelerate the shutdown."

Meanwhile, in this country even slowing the pace of tar sands investment is off the table.

Against dog-whistles

The perceptive observer may have noticed that I have a bit of a thing about the use of the phrase "honour killing". The short version is this: while it probably describes certain acts reasonably well, I basically see it as a dog-whistle for the crazy right -- like "death tax" or "partial-birth abortion".

But there are words that can be both accurate and totally useless, or worse serve to obscure and confuse matters. Consider that it would be technically accurate to describe Bernie Madoff as a crooked Jewish banker, but no newspaper worth the pulp it's printed on would describe him as such, and with good reason -- Madoff's crookedness had nothing to do with his Jewishness. (Just ask evangelical Christian Ken Lay.)

The sad fact of the universe we live in is that most women who die violently, die at the hands of men they know -- husbands, boyfriends, fathers, even sons. This is true of white Christians at least as much as brown Muslims. Indeed, given that Muslims are outnumbered by Christians in Canada about 30 to 1, and that substantial Muslim populations are a novelty in Canada's history, it's a absolute certainty that acts that could reasonably be described as "honour killings" have been committed far more frequently by white Christian men. Ergo crazy, shame-driven patriarchal violence has little or nothing to do with Islam, and only a little to do with religion.

The other problem is that all of this feeds in to an increasing, and increasingly stupid, view of Muslims within western countries. Mark Steyn has never had an original thought, so it's no surprise to learn that he didn't originate the genre of "scary Muslims are outbreeding us!" horror story. What's dispiriting is that some liberal voices are busy praising a book that is, if anything, just as incoherent and factually incorrect.

But what intrigues me is how tightly coupled, but incoherent, the two concepts are. Basically, the "Eurabia" thesis says that Muslims are fertile, confident, and have a strong culture that is overtaking Europe's, but the "honour killing" thesis says, effectively, that Muslim men are brittle, petty, and prone to avenge perceived slights with disproportionate violence.

None of this is any more illogical than we've come to expect from the Right. It's just a shame that when it comes to idiotic moral panics, too many lefties are busy joining them.

I doubt your sincerity

ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- A driver, now identified as an Asheville firefighter, shot a bicycle rider because he was angry the man was riding with his child on a busy road, Asheville police said.

The shooting happened Sunday morning on Tunnel Road.

Officers said the victim was riding with his wife and had his 3-year-old son in a child seat attached to his bicycle when a driver approached him.

Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road.

Diez pulled a gun and opened fire, hitting the victim in his bicycle helmet, according to police.

Nothing says "I'm concerned for the safety of your child" like firing a weapon while enraged and, by all appearances, crazy.

Love to see what the guy's attorney tries to do with that.

Going to the wall for 6,000 people?

The government of Canada is going to the WTO to try and coerce Europeans to buy seal products? I'm not the only one who thinks this is insane, right?

I can't wait until the next time Canada tries to lecture the Japanese at the IWC. Our government is going to spend millions -- in all likelihood, more than the seal hunt brings in on a given year -- to defend part of the income of 0.02% of the population of Canada. (Seriously: WTO challenges are decidely not cheap.)

Is it out of the question for the sealers to find another customer, on their own dime?

Blogging without self-indulgence is like water without wet

I'd like to take a moment to note my father's (probably temporary) retirement.  He's left a line of work he'd been in since before the last US helicopters left the embassy in Saigon[1], and he's the kind of guy who marks important moments in his life that way -- so I come by it naturally.

He really left it all on the road -- as of 5PM yesterday[2], he was still corresponding with colleagues, as if he was going to find some last little gem to put out before he left.  I think I probably would have just run out the clock starting sometime in June.

Congratulations, dad.  Even without a job you're still wealthier than me, so dinner's still on you for a while yet.

[1] Stories have been told, multiply.  (Of course, by the time the US diplomats returned to Vietnam, the embassy was moved to Hanoi, and Saigon was called Ho Chi Minh City.)

[2]  Seriously.  I've seen the emails.  I'm relatively certain they weren't being sent from a movie theater, this time.

Tab-clearing

Marcus Gee, after too long, finally pens a sensible column.  Still gives no evidence of picking up a phone.

George Lucas ruined this young man's life.

Colour-tunable OLEDs can match sunlight's feel.

Climate change will cause civilization to collapse.

On a related note: what will the climate deniers say when 2009 ends up hotter than 1998? Something even stupider, no doubt.

Finally, while this story was generally interesting, I object to the conflation of divorce and war as similar childhood traumas.

Happiness, now in blog form

Rob Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money is a daddy times two.

Speaking as one half of an unmatched pair, I don't know whether the appropriate reaction is "congratulations" or "you poor bastard." My parents would have more precise input, but I think time (and the fact that they no longer have to feed, clothe and house me) has clouded their memories.

Man, it seems like a lot of people I know are having kids lately. And just yesterday, my dad's all like "being a grandparent is so much fun... no pressure."

In praise of the National Post

For being the only newspaper to play it cool on this Kingston-Canal-Murder story. Basically, the facts are that after an almost month-long investigation, a muslim husband and wife and their son are being charged with murdering their three daughters and the husband's first wife.

The police, when asked, have specifically refused to use the words "honour killing", and good on them for doing so. The last thing a case like this needs is the use of inflammatory words, especially when the investigation is ongoing. So what do the brain trusts at the Toronto Star run as their web headline for the story? This:



Meanwhile, the Globe headline sticks to the known facts:



But the Post gets singled out for praise because not only does its web headline keep things cool:



But it deals with the honour killing charge briefly and factually:

A second vehicle, a Lexus, which had been driven back to Montreal by the girls' brother, has been linked to the crime scene, police said.

They would not confirm media reports that the deaths were part of an "honour" killing.

And, appropriately given the inherent speculation of the charge, puts it right at the bottom of the story.

So here's to the Posties! Just because I don't say it much, doesn't mean I don't like being able to say it every once in a while.

If we can land a man on the moon, why can't we land a man on the moon.... again?

One of my earliest memories involves the space program. My parents, believing it would do me good, had placed me in a Catholic school during the first few years of my academic life. These years corresponded with the early years of the Space Shuttle launches, and one launch in particular made the news in a big enough way that even an almost-five-year old couldn't ignore it.[1]

So the next day, as the nun was explaining to us kindergartners the breadth of God's powers (everything that happens, He made happen. Next?) I asked what, to me, seemed both important and timely: Did God make the space ship blow up?

I was told that yes, of course, God made the space ship blow up.

There are two ways the rest of this story can go: my lifelong skepticism of organized religion, or my lifelong obsession with manned space exploration. Tomorrow is July 20, 2009. Which way do you think we're going?

Manned space exploration suffers from a number of drawbacks, as far as we evangelicals are concerned. The first is that it is expensive. Not "invade a country that poses no threat so we can be bogged down in a ruinous war" expensive, nor even "help out bankers who've spent years reaming us for fun" expensive, but expensive nonetheless. Optimistic proposals to send a crew to Mars run to $100 billion over 10 years, and more pessimistic analyses take in to account the fact that America's industrial base can no longer make a commercially successful car, much less a lunar lander, and come up with much higher numbers.

I'd like to see what Barack Obama has to say about Apollo 11, I really would. I think if someone can imbue this whole mess with some awe and dignity again, it would be him. But even I can't really tell you with a straight face that, on this anniversary of an enormous accomplishment, we should do it again before another decade passes. (That would make 50 years, and the likelihood of some or all of the Apollo 11 crew having passed by then is non-trivial.)

As I implied above, if we're going to light a pile of money on fire, I think the space program is one of the least obnoxious ways to do so. But even I can see that any money spent on my pet project is less money to go around for other things, like stopping the planet from dying. For example. While I don't think the fiscal reality is that a trade-off is necessary, I think the political reality is that a) military spending is sacrosanct, and unlikely to get less so, while b) NASA, as successful as it is at protecting its budget, has spent 40 years coasting on goodwill largely left over from the Apollo era.

And some day soon, the number of Americans who have no living memory of an Apollo launch will outnumber those who do.

Aside from the fiscal problems, there are some other, more intractable problems associated with space flight, especially the kind where we wrap men (almost always, penises seem to be required somewhere in the mission) in exotic fabrics and shoot them off at several miles a second. And that latter part of the process is a biggie: the amount of energy it takes to send even a minimal crew to the astronomical equivalent of the Canary Islands is truly staggering, and regular readers won't be surprised to think that I'm not certain that kind of energy will be easily available in the future -- or if it is, it won't be politically palatable to squander it on a vanity project.

So that leaves the wild cards: what happens if, say, the Bussard Fusion people turn out to be right, and we're soon deluged with all the cheap energy we joule-addicts could want? Suddenly, lofting a crew from the Earth to Mars, Jupiter, or Neptune looks positively primitive, and we can start discussing how much we want to invest in manned exploration of the inner Oort cloud. But that's basically what it will take: some kind of game-changing technology to make the task a whole lot easier.

I continue to think that the space program is valuable, and long for the days when Vicki and I can retire to our personal O'Neill colony in the sky. But fundamentally, we don't have a way of getting there from here. And in the meantime, there's important work that needs to be done planetside, first.

[1] Okay, an almost-five-year old me.

The Sun Rises in the East

While Canada can barely get any stimulus, and the US's stimulus is late and inadequate, and German central bankers basically try to strangle the economies of Europe, China's economy grew at an enormous rate as Beijing both spent enormously on infrastructure and lent massively from state-run banks.

Are we seeing the center of demand for the global economy wander across the Pacific? Not yet, but at the very least we're seeing the beginning of it, I think. Of note is the fact that China's growth is continuing in spite of a collapse in exports.

Fascinating times. If only we didn't have a Prime Minister who'd spent a few years pissing off our new Chinese overlords...

The numbers are out. Or in. Or something.

Two weeks ago the government of Ontario notified the public that the bid by Crown Corporation AECL was being abandoned because the price was too high. What we didn't know was how high the bid had been, and whether Smitherman was right to balk. (I assumed so, but the Province has been throwing so much good money after bad in the auto sector...) Well, the Toronto Star has the numbers today (via The Jurist):

Sources close to the bidding, one involved directly in one of the bids, said that adding two next-generation Candu reactors at Darlington generating station would have cost around $26 billion.

It means a single project would have wiped out the province's nuclear-power expansion budget for the next 20 years, leaving no money for at least two more multibillion-dollar refurbishment projects.

AECL's $26 billion bid was based on the construction of two 1,200-megawatt Advanced Candu Reactors, working out to $10,800 per kilowatt of power capacity.... By comparison, in 2007 the Ontario Power Authority had assumed for planning purposes a price of $2,900 per kilowatt.

That's extraordinary. The economics of wind+storage are becoming so favourable, so quickly, that AECL (and every other fission-monger) has an enormous incentive to wring out every possible efficiency early on to try and guarantee some kind of path dependency for future governments. But, when confronted with a government that demands even a bare measure of transparency in its accounting[1], they can't even do that.

This is not a great day for the nuclear industry in Canada. Having said for years that if they couldn't sell an ACR to Ontario, AECL was going to go out of business, they simply cannot bring their costs down to make nuclear a viable option. (This doesn't imply incompetence on AECL's part -- you can't do the impossible, and my guess is this basic scenario will be played out in a bunch of different countries in coming years.)

There are plenty of options left. If the province still has a hard-on for nuclear, building the previous generation of CANDUs -- the ones that Darlington was built to accomodate in the first place -- may save some money, though I imagine they'll still be more expensive than gas. Natural gas supplies have recently been uprated with the addition of enormous shale gas resources (I'm skeptical about these claims, however.)

What will probably happen is some variant of the following: the new nuclear build will be conclusively terminated, the refurbishment will go ahead (and extend the lifespan of some of our reactors) and the explosive growth in Ontario's wind energy industry will continue or even accelerate. Because of our ample nuclear and hydro capacity, we have baseload and spinning reserve to accommodate a high percentage of wind power (though certainly less than 50%) until somebody cracks the energy storage nut. Whether it's ZENN's Eestor-powered cars, or more mundanely some pumped-hydro or compressed-air variant, there are plenty of options for energy storage (and anybody who's still carping about intermittent renewables is basically not a credible voice.)

We won't go entirely nuclear-free for decades, but if the government is smart they'll put us on a mildly greener path than the one we were on only a month ago.

[1] The McGuinty government insisted on price transparency from the fission-mongers, but has been incredibly, notoriously secretive with its employers -- i.e., the Ontario public. It's worth noting that there's not a single government confirmation in the Star piece. It's pretty shameful to have a matter of public importance played out like a Balinese puppet show.

Your media at work

So two things happened on MSNBC's airtime yesterday. First, Pat Buchanan advocated the brutal murder of a young man for the crime of expressing an opinion:

Well, first, with regard to Levi, I think First Dude up there in Alaska, Todd Palin, ought to take Levi down to the creek and hold his head underwater until the thrashing stops.

Then, later in the evening Marcy Wheeler (Firedoglake's emptywheel) said the following:

[Y]our idea is that after investigating Bill Clinton for a blow job for like five years, we shouldn't investigate the huge, grossly illegal things that were done under the past administration, only because Alberto Gonzales was too much in the back pocket of Dick Cheney to do it while he was still in office. That's ridiculous.

MSNBC apologized for one of the two statements made above. Can you guess which?

What I did this weekend, then weirdness

Ah, wilderness. Spent the weekend camping in Killbear Provincial Park with good friends, and proceeded to watch, very early Saturday morning, as my tent walls went nearly transparent in the middle of an unholy lightning storm, and the walls bowed inward as somebody mischievous apparently turned a firehose on us. I was told later that was just the rain, but little in my experience has prepared me to believe that much water can fall from the sky.

The next night the temperature dropped substantially and I buried myself in my sleeping bag. Oddly, I woke up very early on Sunday feeling fine, until I changed out of pants in to shorts. (This was a mistake.) It didn't occur to me until later that maybe waking up at 7 was unnecessary on a weekend, but then later at home, 10PM rolled around and I basically passed out. Vicki woke me up a bit later, and we proceeded to have a really odd conversation:

V: Where are the car keys?

J: Umm... my brain isn't working.

V: (Slowly) Where. Are. The. Keys.

J: The AIs wanted the back yard. I said no. [Seriously.]

V: Uh, go back to sleep.

Clearly, the lesson is my mouth and brain aren't connected really well while I'm sleeping. But what prompted my strange, near-hallucinatory utterance? That, at least, has a relatively easy answer: I've been reading David Marusek's Counting Heads, a really excellent SF novel about nanotechnology, sentient computers, interstellar colonization, and a bunch of other things. The book clearly stuck with me when I went to sleep. As, apparently, did my concerns over the back yard. [?]

I'm almost done Counting Heads, and then I move on to the sequel, Mind Over Ship. I have enjoyed CH so much I can barely wait to get to the next one.

Wowzers

Fox News everybody:

In case you're wondering, the topic at hand was a survey of Northern European countries where married couples and other socially active people avoided the worst effects of alzheimers and dementia. And from that, Kilmeade heard "yeah, but they're all aryan ubermensch anyway, so it doesn't apply to America."

Charles Lindbergh died too soon, it seems.

Morning links

1) The Arctic ice cap is thinning dramatically at the same time as it loses area cover as well. Not really news, but more data to back up what we already suspected.

2) Google announces a new linux-based OS to compete with Windows in the netbook sector. Linux is always only ever 18 months from beating Windows, so I'll believe this when I see it, but it's true that Google has both deep pockets and a well-established brand. The big key will remain whether Google can convince IT departments around the west to abandon MSFT.

3) Blu-ray continues to, um, suck. PS3 is third of three in the console market, and portable, reusable media are getting to the point where buying actual discs seems like a waste of money. Example: $150- or so will buy you a 1TB drive and a portable enclosure. SD Cards can already hold 32GB of storage, and the next generation could hold up to 2TB -- 40 Blu-ray discs on something the size of a thumbnail. And if this pans out, we'll have these records for a long time.

Ur doin it wrong

Ah, the conflict of being a technology nerd and a penitent environmentalist. I can see something like this, and simultaneously think two things at once:

1) Neato, a robotic horse powered by biofuels.

2) NATURE ALREADY MADE HORSES. STOP THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW.

This post is for my mother, who ensured that I've spent a sufficient amount of time in a stable to write this.

Holy crap

So, one of my obnoxious little habits as a blogger is to point out when I've been right before other people. Nevertheless, when I started referring to the Arctic Ocean as "a slightly fresher lake" because of all the global warming and whatnot, I really thought I was making a lame joke. Uh, not so much:

In particular, the authors find that freshwater volume in the Canada and Makarov basins on the Pacific side of the Lomonosov Ridge increased by about 8,500 cubic kilometers (about 2,000 cubic miles), while the freshwater volume on the Eurasian area decreased by about 1,100 cubic kilometers (about 260 cubic miles).

The freshening of the Arctic occurred in conjunction with the recent dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice, the authors note. They find that these changes have altered Arctic Ocean circulation, with a large increase in northward transport of fresh water in the Canada Basin.

Are we feeling proud yet?

Canada is back!

Canada and Japan were blocking a possible deal on climate change at the Copenhagen summit, Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Adviser, warned yesterday.

Speaking at the World Conference of Science Journalists, Sir David said that the two countries had stepped into the breach left by the Bush Administration, which had strongly resisted cutting CO2 emissions.

“Copenhagen is faltering at the moment,” said Sir David. “The Americans are now fully engaged. But several countries are blocking the process.”

Governments previously were able to hide behind the US’s intransigence on climate change, he said, but the pro-climate policies being launched by the Obama administration means this is no longer possible....

Canada’s position is widely believed to be driven by its powerful industry lobby, which is keen to exploit oil reserves in the country’s tar sands. “These people are very outspoken, aggressive lobbyists,” said Dr Robert Falkner, a specialist in international relations at the London School of Economics. “They are gung-ho about rising oil prices and want to exploit that.”

But we can expect the Liberal Party to stand up to the Mass Death lobby, right? Wrong:

In part, he said, the Liberals have tried to win votes in Toronto by blowing off Alberta and bashing the oil sands. Mr. Ignatieff believes that strategy is insane for a number of reasons.

“I think sometimes we tried to establish our environmental bona fides by running against the oil sands,” he said. “And I just think: This is a national industry. It's pumping something like $8-billion into the federal treasury. So it's slightly bad faith to beat the goose that lays the golden egg over the head with a stick. The goose is a little messy. The goose needs to be cleaned up. The goose needs to make better use of the yard, but let's make this a sustainable industry that all Canadians can be proud of.”

First off, I would hope that a politician with any sense would avoid avian metaphors when talking about the tar sands. Secondly, the idea of making the tar sands "sustainable" is a fantasy, though it's clear that the influence of Marc Jaccard continues to be felt. It's fantastical because a) we still have no strong evidence that CCS is ever going to be a real technology, and b) even if we had working CCS today the oil lobby would never be willing to pay the price to clean up their own emissions. Inevitably, the Feds will end up subsidizing any CCS scheme, and that's assuming they can ever find a working model. And of course CO2 is only one of the many, many problems inherent to tar sands production -- water issues, settling ponds, and air pollution are all serious issues too, and are even more intractable than CO2 pollution.

I really want Liberals to be honest about what the choices are now between the Conservative Party and their own. We can choose between a party that has no serious commitment to cleaning up the country's worst environmental problem, led by a man who vocally supported the Iraq War -- or we can vote for the Conservatives. Blech.

Happy Canada Day, everyone

I now present you the most Canadian thing anywhere on the Internets: Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage" interspersed with stills from Due South. You're welcome.