Former-Soviet-blogging

What's a wingnut to do?

The New York Times reports that, wonder of wonders, life is returning to some semblance of peace in Grozny. The NYT attributes this in no small part to the iron-fisted rule of Moscow's local bastard, Ramzan Kadyrov. But you've got to wonder how the Bush-sycophants read an article like this. On the one hand, you've got an endorsement of the "more rubble, less trouble" mania they're so fond of. On the other hand, the guy getting most of the credit is a muslim. On the other other hand, he's a Sufi muslim (are they friends for the US, or not?) On the other other other hand, he's a tool of the Kremlin and Putin -- and Vlad Putin's basically one war from being the next Hitler at this point, right?

Oh wait. The nutters don't believe anything printed in the New York Times. Nevermind.

In other eastern European news, the Prime Minister of Ukraine is running for parliamentary elections using Bob Dole's advisors. Bizarrely, he seems to be poised to win.

One of the interesting elements in both these stories is the continuing ability of Russia in particular, and the FSU in general, to confound prediction. You could say it about any country over a decent time span (try predicting American politics 4 years from now!) but what shocked me is how quickly Yuschenko in Ukraine went from being saviour to Satan, and how quickly Yanukovich was put back in the PM's office. You could also point to Turkmenistan, where the death of (crazy crazy crazy) dictator Saparmurat Niyazov seems to have given the Turkmen government the idea of trying to break Russia's monopoly on natural gas pipelines -- something I daresay Moscow didn't see coming.

Another day, another bad anti-MMP column in a newspaper

Ian Urquart [a-doy, I need to read bylines more closely...] at least, isn't making up wholesale fantasies of dhimmitude or anything. But he persists, like so many journalists, in worrying about fringe parties. Apparently, journalism now requires that we narrow the bounds of acceptable politics, not expand it.

But what's really annoying about this trope -- not just when Walkom uses it, but always -- is that it's not simply the size of a coalition that matters, but the stability. So a minority government has a very strong interest in seeking the cooperation of a large, moderate party with a number of seats. Tory's first attempt if he wanted a coalition government could very well be the Liberals, like the current government in Germany.

Oh, and on that note, it's incredibly aggravating that Ontario's media persist in pretending that Germany doesn't exist for the purposes of this discussion. Only Andrew Coyne is busy pointing out the comparison, because it looks really, really good.

Who's Greener?

NOW Magazine has a good article on one of the primary disagreements I have with the NDP as it's presently constituted: it's reliance on the support of extractive or otherwise environmentally destructive industries. In this election, the spotlight is on the forestry and paper industries, but not too long ago Hampton was saying that we needed to leave Lambton and Atikokan (coal power plants) online.

I understand Hampton's political pressures-- and I don't want to diminish the economic problems of the north -- but from here it's hard not to see the NDP's committment to the environment as taking second place to propping up old legacy industries because their workers give the NDP lots of votes.

Meanwhile, the Greens have, to put it charitably, a bunch of really bad ideas too. But the difference is that the wackiest of the Green ideas (such as the unsustainable green tax shift idea) is probably impossible in the real world -- as in, it's not going to happen, so the pro-Green points (their school platform among them) remain while the anti-Green points are irrelevant. Doubly so, when you realize that the Greens won't win anything.

I wouldn't be voting Green if I lived in a riding where the NDP wasn't fielding such a lopsided incumbent. (The Liberals and Conservatives, as far as I've seen, just aren't advertising in my riding.) But it's possible for my vote to not count even if I vote for the winning candidate, if that pol is guaranteed victory anyway. So I'm increasingly leaning towards voting Green.

Like Chet, I find myself wishing that I'd written this post by Rick Perlstein. Sadly, I haven't even written the best blog post reacting to Perlstein -- that honor goes to Robert Farley.

It's truly mystifying that, in 2007, a country of 300 million with thousands of nuclear warheads is whipping itself up into stroke over a country of 90 million with no nuclear weapons and that would pose exactly zero threat to America if the US government hadn't put hundreds of thousands of Americans within arms' reach of Tehran.

So yeah, here's Perlstein:

Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people...

Pot, kettle

So Ann Coulter's new book is titled "If Democrats had any brains, They'd be Republicans".

In other news, President Bush requires the big words in his speeches be spelled phonetically for him. And he still can't get "nuclear" right.

Yes, that's right, Ann Coulter thinks that Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) would've needed more brains to be admitted in to the Republican Party, currently led by George Bush (C student.)

More media ranting

So the CBC finally put up the Northwest Passage story, at 11:58 eastern. (Thanks, Shani.) That's exactly 2 minutes before the National aired on Newsworld in Vancouver.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour you expect to see from an institution that simply doesn't take the Internet seriously. At best, the CBC is seeing the Internet as nothing more than an adjunct to it's legacy broadcast functions. Maybe the website is only update every day at midnight -- though that's even worse, frankly, than what I think is probably the real reason for these kinds of delays: a fear that putting a page up on the web would cannibalize TV viewers.

Well, that's a real enough concern in this case, because the web-hosted page has absolutely nothing that the broadcast didn't -- I'd be far better off reading the web page than watching the broadcast version.

But you'd think that the CBC would pay some attention to what's actually going on in the media world -- the NY Times has just opened up a huge chunk of it's formerly-protected content to the Internet, because they make more money from "incidental" traffic (Googlers, blog links) than they did from subcriptions. The Guardian in the UK has an extraordinary online policy, and then you've got the sleepy little CBC which seems to not be getting it.

I don't want to dump too much on the CBC, because there are some high points -- the CBC's podcasts are fairly popular. But when you've got a 24-hours news channel (Newsworld) there's no excuse for the web to be your dumping ground.

Dear CBC

Please make your website suck less.

PS, you smell.

...okay, let me clear that up. The National tonight leads the news with a report that Ottawa is planning to bug the Northwest Passage. Essentially, it sounds like we're borrowing the SOSUS idea -- the hydrophones that the US buried in the North Atlantic to track Soviet submarines.

So, a really interesting story, and sufficient reason for me to write one of my rare "Stephen Harper does something I think might not suck" posts.

Except, because this is the CBC we're talking about, as of 10:10PM tonight, I can't find a single mention of this lead story on their website. So no link, meaning I'll have to wait until tomorrow and hope that somebody at the CBC discovers this Internet thingy the kids are all talking about.

Arctic potpourri

An interesting article in LiveScience -- more bad news from the Arctic! Yay!

A new study examining satellite measurements of the winter sea ice covering the Barents Sea (located north of Scandinavia) over the past 26 years has shown that the ice edge has recently been retreating in the face of rising sea surface temperatures, said study leader Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University.

Her research, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, showed that the warming waters in the Barents Sea—which have risen about 3 degrees Celsius since 1980—are to blame for the reduction in winter ice cover. Two factors contribute to the warming of the Barents Sea: warming Atlantic waters funneled in by the Gulf Stream and solar heating of the open ocean as ice melts in the summer, both of which make it harder for new ice to form in the winter.

Retreating summer ice is one thing -- retreating winter ice is quite another. Meanwhile, there's some explanation for why the ice has disappeared so quickly the last few years:

Julienne Stroeve of the NSIDC used satellite data that tracked the movement of the sea ice over the last 30 years to estimate the age of the ice—the older the ice, the thicker it is. Newly formed ice (about 1 or 2 years old) will only be about 1 meter thick, whereas ice that is closer to 5 years old will be between 2 and 3 meters thick.

Ice thickness is key to the survival of sea ice, because thinner ice vanishes much faster in the summer than thicker ice.

Stroeve and her colleagues found that while most of the Arctic sea ice in the 1980s was around 5 years old (with some sections even climbing up to 9 or 10 years old), the oldest ice the researchers can find now is only 2 or 3 years old. All the 10-year-old ice has melted away.

Which brings me to the news that world leaders are gathering in New York to discuss global warming. Matthew Yglesias points out the obvious: nothing of substance is going to happen until Bush leaves office. No country in the world is more in need of a better way to bring a government down. But Brian Beutler points out more obviousness: "Al Gore could become president next November..." and the US would still be years away from meaningful change.

Meanwhile, in our little corner of Canada, PM Harper is apparently planning to defend his government against slurs and accusations that he's lying to the Canadian public about his climate change policies. Slurs and accusations, incidentally, coming from within his own government.

Meanwhile, this quote from an American scientists seems as apt as any description of humanity's dilemma in the 21st century:

“We understand the physics behind what’s going on,” Dr. Serreze said. “You can always find some aspect of natural variability that can explain some things. But now it seems patterns that used to help you don’t help as much anymore, and the ones that hurt you hurt you more.”

Positive-feedback loops where harmful behaviour is magnified and beneficial behaviour is minimized. Yes, it describes climate change. But it's also, interestingly enough, one description of the effect drug addiction has on the human brain. When it becomes severe enough -- when an addict has made a total mess of their lives -- the only way to break the cycle is to take someone out of their lives, isolate them for a period of usually more than a month, and help them build new cycles in their brain that don't require whatever substance they were jonesing for.

Comparisons between the North American love of fossil fuels and drug addiction aren't novel, and I don't particularly like the idea that we require a crisis before meaningful political change can happen, but there's a pretty solid psychological and political basis for it.

This is going to be one of those days where I'll be really angry all day, I can tell.

Leadership material

Shorter Tom Flanagan: The Conservative Party of Canada can't possibly win an election with fair rules. Thank God the rules aren't fair!

(Hey, the Jurist is on vacation or something. Somebody's got to step up.)

About that 3% threshold...

(Update: Uh, there's something wrong in this post. A commenter points out that 3% of the votes will get you 3% of the seats, not a single seat like I say below. I don't think this changes much in the argument -- the math still works out to local seats being something like half as hard to scrounge up votes for, especially in by-elections. So while the math below is a bit off, I'm going to leave it as is.)

So, yeah. Apparently, the 3% threshold that Ontario's proposed system requires is too low, and it's going to create a forest of small parties, all of whom will collectively tear apart Ontario's politics. Because apparently massive political changes are made by parties with only one seat in Parliament.

Let's try some math, here.

In the 2003 Ontario general election, 4,497,244 people voted. For simplicity's sake let's say 4.5 million. 3% of 4.5 million is 135,000 votes. So in order for a party to get one list seat in the Legislature under MMP, they'd need to get 135,000 votes across the Province.

Meanwhile, in the actual 2003 election, we can see that actual ridings were won with vastly less voters. In London-Fanshawe, the Liberal candidate (Khalil Ramal) won with a total of 13,920 votes -- 0.31% of the vote, one-tenth as many votes required to win a hypothetical list seat. In the 2005 Scarborough-Rouge River by-election, Bas Balkissoon won his seat with 9,000 votes (0.2% of the 2003 provincial vote!) And remember, in the MMP system, the vast majority of ridings will still exist, only some of them will be larger. This will mean that slightly more voters will be needed to win a single riding, but not nearly enough to make up the difference between a riding and a list seat.

There's this idea out there that somehow, list seats will be "easier" to get. But elections are made by a party getting a bunch of people out to vote, and the fewer people you need to get voting for you, the easier it is to get a seat. Clearly, if you were a fringe party looking to spend some money to win a seat in the Legislature, grabbing a list seat would be the hardest possible way to do it. In terms of actual people voting, your money would be 15 times more effective in Scarborough-Rouge River (2005) and almost ten times more effective in London-Fanshawe (2003).

It's easy to underestimate how hard political campaigns actually are. They take a lot of money, and a lot of volunteers, and despite what Murray Campbell thinks, Youtube voters aren't particularly eager to throw their votes away. Indeed, those crazies he disparages are probably more engaged in the political process than most of his readers. Getting 3% of Ontarians to vote for you is really, really hard -- the Greens are the only "fringe" party that's come close, so far, and they only got 2.8% of the vote. The next runners-up, the Family Coalition Party, got 0.8% of the 2003 vote -- they'd have needed to quadruple their vote in order to get a single seat. (And once more, a single seat in Parliament and fifty cents will get you a phone call.)

For reference, here are the three party leaders, and the number of votes they got in their respective elections (Tory won a 2005 by-election):

Dalton McGuinty: 24,647 (0.55% of the 2003 Ontario vote.)
Howard Hampton: 15,666 (0.35% of the 2003 Ontario vote.)
John Tory: 15,633 (0.35% of the 2003 Ontario vote.)

Only one of the three party leaders who currently hold a seat at Queen's Park got even one-sixth as many votes as they'd need to win a list seat.

Murray Campbell is Googlestupid

(Googlestupid: "the act of looking like a complete idiot by saying something you could have realized was completely wrong by searching the internet for less than five minutes.")

Lordy, lordy, lordy. I try to be charitable (sometimes) to political disagreement, but the anti-MMP people in the upcoming Ontario referendum just keep saying incredibly stupid things, or relying on outright fantasies. First we had Liberal diehards worrying about the NDP running a decoy list -- because the NDP is known to have buckets of cash sitting around with nothing to do, and because it's certainly not the Liberal Party that's been trying to, for example, co-opt the Green Party federally. But today's example comes from a Murray Campbell column a few days ago:

It offers the same potential to rip apart Ontario's body politic as Mr. McGuinty fears financing more religious schools would.... New parties would spring up because the threshold is so low - just 3 per cent of the vote. (Rick Mercer passed that mark in four days with his 2000 spoof of Stockwell (Doris) Day and YouTube gamers would love the challenge of persuading 135,000 voters to support a spoof party.) MMP advocates say it's speculation that parties based on religion or ethnicity would be formed but, equally, it's speculation that they wouldn't. Could Mr. McGuinty have resisted the pressure to adopt sharia law if he had needed an Islamist party to govern?

Are you kidding me? Seriously? Jesus Christ...

Here's news bulletin: According to Statistics Canada, only 3.1% of Ontarians are Muslims. (And by "news", I mean of course the 2001 census.) If you type "Muslims in Ontario" in to that obscure research tool academics call "Google", you'll find the statscan link deviously hidden in 2nd place. So, even if we insultingly assume that all of them are slavering Al Qaeda recruits in waiting, they'd still need 96% unanimously voting for an Islamist party for them to get a single seat. And exactly how many Muslim women would vote that way in a country with the secret ballot? And how many of them are children ineligible to vote? Or is Murray Campbell counting on the 1.7% of Jewish Ontarians to back up the Al Qaeda Party? And even if the Ontario muslim population has doubled since 2001, will one seat ever, in the remaining history of the Province Ontario, be enough to swing the fate of a government? Wouldn't Ontarians demand a new election instead?

On and on. Just an incredibly stupid thing to write, much less to have printed in a national newspaper. And we won't go in to the fact that Campbell is creating a Muslim boogey man, when the votes of Christian fundamentalists probably outnumber Muslim fundamentalists in Ontario by at least an order of magnitude. (There's 20 Christians for every Muslim in Ontario.) The reality is that 70% of this Province is either Catholic or Protestant. Other Christians make up another 5%, and then "no religion" makes up about 15%. So between the thoroughly-conventional Christian churches, and the atheists/agnostics, you've got 90% of the population. I don't know why Campbell decided to spin a fantasy about Ontario being reduced to an Islamic Caliphate with the tyranny of 3% of the population, but it's silly and insulting to Ontarian muslims. Not to mention Mr. McGuinty, who apparently is helpless before the Muslim hordes of Ontario.

(I just want to really, really emphasize how insulting it is to assume that any significant number of Ontario Muslims would support an Islamist party. Speculating about it in a national paper does grievous harm to Campbell's cherished "body politic" by convincing Canadian Muslims they'll never be trusted, no matter how much they assimilate. Campbell's doing far worse then MMP will ever do.)

Campbell's broader point, that MMP will "tear apart the body politic" of Ontario, deserves at least a pro-forma rebuttal. First off, the system reccomended for Ontario is explicitly modelled on the German system, a country whose body politic was forcibly ripped apart, not with elections but with tanks, concrete, and razor wire. And guess what? The German system has helped reconcile the two halves of Germany, to the point where an East German woman now leads a coalition government with the SDP. (German Muslims apparently being unable to force a Caliphate on Berlin, either.) Secondly, Rick Salutin makes the excellent point here:

Under stable provincial governments for 20 years, Ontario has been a whirligig of instability: vanishing industries, degraded services, disruptive strikes, fractured communities—largely, I'd argue, due to arrogant behaviour by governments that didn't represent the majority and didn't have to worry about it. I imagine what people really want is stability in their lives and communities. You might get more of that under a more representative, more democratic system.

It's true, Salutin here is "speculating" about the positive impact of MMP, but he's at least not creating fantastical boogeymen out of whole cloth.

Look, the press in Toronto seems to be incorrigibly anti-MMP, with only a few exceptions. I don't know why (PR, when it eventually comes to Canada, will make political reporting far more interesting) but it's there. But if we're going to have a debate about this stuff, let's please stop basing the anti-MMP arguments on total, and totally crazy, fantasies.

(I read the Campbell article after reading Salutin's column, via Chet.)

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Mike Tidwell, at Gristmill:

All those happy lists in magazines and on web sites -- "10 things you can do to save the planet!" -- actually trivialize the scale of the problem. We'll never solve the climate crisis one light bulb at a time. What we need, à la the civil rights movement, are ten historic statutes that ban abusive and violent practices like the manufacture of gas-guzzling cars and inefficient light bulbs.

Other people -- including a whole panel of PhDs from around the world -- were critical of this point of view. They accused me -- wrongly -- of dismissing altogether the virtues of voluntary change. As I type this essay from my solar-powered house, with a Prius in the driveway and a vegetarian lunch in the oven, I assure you I view voluntary measures as very important. They just won't save us in time, that's all. The Arctic ice is melting way too fast....

The problem is we've somehow forgotten how it's done. Martin Luther King famously and repeatedly asked, "Why should we wait one more day for our freedom? Why?" King resisted public pleas to go slow; to let voluntary measures work; to understand that some people just can't change very quickly. No, King said, America must have a new set of laws that address the great moral urgency of now!

So why -- with Arctic ice vanishing, and hurricanes getting bigger, and sea levels rising -- why are we still politely urging Americans to change a few light bulbs and voluntarily spend a little more for a hybrid car? What breakdown in ethical thinking prevents us from insisting that all serious conversations on this topic focus on demanding governmental standards that allow only 50 mpg cars into the marketplace? In other words, given the great ecological, economic, and moral implications of global warming, why should we wait one more day for clean, efficient energy? Why?

On the Civil Rights note, it's worth remembering how many self-described liberals in the US allegedly supported the rights of blacks, but thought that MLK (retroactively re-branded as the moderate of the US Civil Rights movement) was "too extreme".

In June 1963, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that King headed was in the midst of the Birmingham campaign that brought images of Bull Connor’s police dogs into Americans’ living rooms, 60 percent of all Americans thought the public demonstrations with which King was by then synonymous “hurt the Negro’s cause” more than they helped it. By May 1964, that percentage had risen to 74 percent. By October 1966, following the SCLC’s nonviolent direct actions in Selma and Chicago, it reached 85 percent.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now see black protesters in the 1960s as the victims of state-sanctioned violence. But at the time, they were seen as the instigators and "trouble-makers" that were causing the problem.

This presents a real problem for the Green movement. Direct action to change people's minds on the environment would, in a far more direct way than MLK's protests, be attacks on their own lives and property (see what happens when people slash SUV tires.) And Tidwell's Civil Rights analogy breaks down because there's no convenient, begging-to-be-defied legal absurdity as there was in segregation*. There's just... our lives, each and every one of them. As Tidwell points out (and I emphasized) we've somehow forgotten what political action means in North America. This is the charitable interpretation: uncharitably, it's possible we just don't care.

On the other hand, the Civil Rights analogy holds up very well in that the solutions that are necessary are far more radical than political consensus will ever allow. For a great summary of how radical MLK really was, read this book review.

I don't know what the answer here is. I suspect, as with the civil rights movement, the result is going to be a job perpetually half-finished. It's just that in this case, a half-finished job means global extinctions and millions dead.

*I feel somewhat queasy writing about how "convenient" bus and lunch-counter segregation was from the point of view of protest politics, I assure you. Outrages upon human dignity shouldn't, I think, be reduced to their tactical benefits. Nevertheless....

Oil stuff 3

So the oil industry's demands of the Canadian people, so far this week, are this:

One: Start fucking. The oil industry needs more workers. (Immigrants are also acceptable, but only if the feds foot the bill for training them and teaching them to speak normal-talk.)

Two: Don't even think about taxing oil profits, you dirty pinko hippie.

Three: Lay out billions of dollars of subsidies for the Mackenzie gas pipeline.

Now, if you're a normal human being with a sense of reason -- or shame -- you might see a conflict between demands 2 and 3. But you aren't privy to the genius of the oil industry (commie.) Let's take this little nugget:

For starters, the line will allow the eventual production of an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas north of the 70th parallel, equivalent to 10 years of Canadian consumption.

There is already up to 7 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves where the pipeline is going. The Mackenzie Delta is a triangular region, 75 miles from point to point.

First of all, "10 years Canadian consumption" is only half the issue (literally) because Canada exports half its production to the US. How much of the natural gas (taxpayer funded, no less) is going to be sent to the US? Will Ottawa be given any say on restricting exports in a time of shortage? (No, commie.) This is relevant because, you see, the Russians are coming!

Moscow is another issue. Ever since Russia's submarine stunt in the Arctic, it's obvious that Ottawa must establish sovereignty, beyond just subsidizing First Nations' traditional way of life and building a few ice roads.

By making the Mackenzie Valley pipeline a national priority, Canada will put its money and support where its sovereignty mouth is.

Huh? Moscow's claim is over a huge chunk of the Arctic Ocean, not over any Canadian land, nor even over the Northwest Passage. I'm sure that building a pipeline 1,500 miles away from the North Pole (and 3,000 miles from St. Petersburg) is going to send shivers down Moscow's spine. But even if we take this sovereignty argument seriously, doesn't that just imply that Canada should, I dunno, use its energy resources as a source of national sovereignty? Like, exactly what Russia is doing? Or should we just invoke national sovereignty when it's convenient for the oil lobby?

More oil stuff

So the Albertan government has finally decided to deal with the mess that Ralph Klein left them -- oil royalties were way, way too low by international standards even before $80/bbl prices came along. The report by a government panel concludes that a) royalties should be raised for all oil and gas projects, but especially the tar sands, and b) nobody should be grandfathered out of the hike.

The oil industry is reacting in it's usual calm and measured fashion:

Some Calgarians were angry, with one broker e-mailing his clients with the subject line: “Caracas on the Bow River,” comparing Alberta with Venezuela and its socialist President Hugo Chavez, who expropriated oil assets this year.

“If [the report is] enacted, investment decisions will be impacted … [the report] reads a bit like a Chavez-style manifesto,” Steve Larke, a Peters & Co. Ltd. broker, said in the e-mail.

This is the oil busines' reaction to an incredibly modest tax increase -- being called an authoritarian socialist. (Whether you think Chavez is one or not, it's clearly how it was intended.) Clearly, these people have no sense of perspective, nor any feeling of obligation to the public.

So let me respond in an equally calm and measured tone: Alberta-style conservatism is the Canadian equivalent of Saudi Wahhabism. Not particularly useful or beloved, even by the people who originated it, it's largely succeeded in political and ideological terms simply because of the vast torrent of oil money that it can draw on. It serves no higher purpose except serving it's political masters and their underlings, in this case brokers who got used to treating public property like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

So for once in my life, I'm going to say huzzah to the Conservative government of Alberta. Raise the royalties, piss off these whining toddlers who call themselves businessmen, and take one step closer to joining the political reality of the rest of Canada.

Unsurprising news for the morning

Energy CEOs call for national policy

LONDON -- In Alberta's oil patch, the words "national energy program" are usually uttered as a curse, a reference to the ill-fated 1980s program of oil nationalization and price controls.

But in a possible sign of changing times, several senior Canadian energy executives have used a gathering in London this week to make an unprecedented call for an increased federal role in their industry - some even daring to call for Ottawa to develop a comprehensive national energy policy.

Specifically, the oil industry knows it's currently in the worst of all possible worlds: they know a price on carbon is coming, but they don't know what the price will be. So they can't possibly plan their next round of investments rationally until Ottawa shits or gets off the pot. This, in turn, means that we're going to need an election, and we'll need for the Conservatives to lose it. Harper isn't realistically going to bring in a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, but his intransigence is not going to help the oil industry in any case.

Meanwhile, it's not even that I disagree with this statement, so much as it nicely encapsulates the total alienation from human communities that large market actors live with:

More federal money for education for oil workers is another key demand.

Several of the oil firms are spending large sums funding trade schools in their operating areas, but still are short of skilled workers.

Mainly, though, they said Canada needs a larger population.

You see, there aren't enough Canadians to guarantee the oil industry the profits they would like. So -- rather than restrain the ambitions of the oil industry even a little -- the obvious answer is that we need more people. So get to fucking, Canada: the oil industry needs you!

Change the channel, it's a political debate!

I haven't really posted a lot about the provincial election, but they had the debate tonight.

Funniest moment of the debate, by far: "Premier McGuinty, the next question is for you, and it's about broken promises."

Watching the post-debate press conference with Howard Hampton. He just said, in a very heterosexual way: "I disagree with John Tory, but he's not a scary guy. He's not an ugly guy either."

In my riding, I've got this weird situation of the NDP candidate being a shoe-in. While this pleases me politically, it's also got me thinking about voting for a party other than my usual party. Partly because I think it's silly the Green Party is excluded from the debate, I'm half-seriously thinking about voting for my local Green candidate.

Cautious optimism...

Jesus. I might have to sing the praises of Joe Lieberman. That's gonna need a shower.

The outlines of a bill considered a frontrunner in the Senate, to be co-sponsored by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who caucuses with Democrats, and John Warner (R-Va.), calls for 20 percent of the credits to be auctioned. The other 80 percent, which would be allocated free, would be worth billions in the market that would be created. Some environmental groups are calling for a 100 percent auction of credits.

Lieberman, following a forum sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute Wednesday, said such a change to his legislation was possible. “We’ve heard [calls for a 100 percent auction] from some stakeholders and heard that from some of our members. We’re thinking about it. Warner and I haven’t closed our minds to that. It’s on the table,” he said.

The cap-and-auction solution is infinitely preferable to the cap-and-handout system, though I'm basically lukewarm on cap-and-trade systems generally. But whatever we choose -- carbon taxes or cap-and-trade -- either is preferable to nothing.

First China, now the Saudis

Bailing out of the falling greenback: it's the new black.

Something I did not know, but should have

I knew, as a Canadian, that our population is extraordinarily concentrated in a few small urban areas. This belies the idea that Canada is a large country -- the Canadian people are in fact quite small in number, and aren't even particularly well-dispersed.

But I didn't realize how concentrated Ontario's population actually is. If, on a map, you drew a line of latitude from Ottawa west to Georgian Bay, all the land in Ontario south of that point would consist of only 15% of the land, but over 95% of the population -- more than 11 million of Ontario's 12.5 million people. This also implies that this line and the shores of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario would encompass fully one-third of Canada's population.

Yeesh. A beautiful country, and we're barely living in it.

I'm shocked at how un-shocking that is

So I was walking by Harvey's yesterday, and they had on their windows a poster advertising the following:

CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE!!!! MADE FROM 100% REAL ICE CREAM!!!!

And I admit, I was intrigued. Not enough to actually get the milkshake, but damn close. You see, sometimes the ordinary is bracing in it's very ordinariness.

To put it another way, sometimes we're shocked to see something we really shouldn't be. So when the former Commander of CENTCOM for the US military says

"There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran... Let's face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with (other) nuclear powers as well."

You're almost shocked by the implied rationality, the sanity, the ordinariness of it all. No slavering Cheney in the wings yelling about how Iran is planning on some combination of holocaust and world domination (somebody's got to sweep up the ashes, I guess.) No drooling simp of a President talking about how foreign countries need to respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, totally devoid of the self-consciousness that would be required for a sense of irony.

Just a basic statement of fact.

Bracing.