Soft on Crime Conservatives

What's the common denominator between Bush's proposed plan to halt immigration at the border, and Stephen Harper's decision to neuter the now-mature and successful gun registry?

Simple: Neither man wants to use the tool that would effectively enforce existing laws. In the case of the Bush Republicans, we know that the Republican party can't bring itself to actually take on the real estate developers, meat packers, and plantation owners who profit from illegal immigration. Nonetheless, this doesn't change the facts - forcing businesses to actually verify the identity of their workers would remove one of the biggest incentives for illegal immigration.

Bush's proposal involved everything but forcing Republican donors to actually obey the law. There's a bit about developing new ID, but existing programs would serve this purpose - if the government took it seriously.

Harper, meanwhile, wants to shut down a program that aids in law enforcement every day. I honestly don't understand this - I have to register a car, a pet, a baby, whatever. But God forbid we make gun-toting Conservatives register their guns.

You know, this is a long-held Conservative belief: Enforcing the law is fine, just so long as it doesn't inconvenience us. My favourite example is the Harris Tory government in Ontario which shitcanned photo radar despite the obvious fact that it was a better tool for, you know, enforcing the law.

(Please spare the protests that it did nothing to slow traffic on the 401. I remember the difference as a passenger, and I was too young to drive.)

Similarly, the Harris government (specifically, Mike himself) was admantly opposed to enforcing traffic law within cities as well, standing in the way of municipalities who wanted to put up red-light cameras.

Note the Conservative choice: Faced with either a) obeying and properly enforcing the law, b) changing a law you disagree with, or c) simply stop enforcing the law, the Conservatives chose C. This of course won't stop them from criminalizing gay marriage.

Recent Wind Developments

One of the most common complaints about wind farms is they're ugly. To me, this is a silly complaint simply because coal-fired plants aren't exactly huggable. Frankly, I find windmills really attractive, if only because of the context. Meanwhile, Toronto has been having a hell of a time getting a natural gas plant built, showing that Nimbyism really wears many masks.

In any case, GE and MIT are working on adapting technology from the oil industry (gasp!) to build large, far-offshore wind farms. The idea is to put them far enough from the shore so that a) they get more regular and stronger winds, and b) the Kennedys shut the fuck up, please.

An interesting idea, for a number of reasons. First of all, it would dramatically increase the amount of wind power available to countries with large coastlines. Fortunately, this includes India, China, the US, as well as many other nations. Secondly, it illustrates an important point about the impending Green Revolution - while we desperately need to leave behind the oil industry, this doesn't necessarily entail everyone in the oil industry losing their jobs. People who build oil rigs may find themselves more profitably employed in the offshore windfarm biz.

Meanwhile, Robert Rapier has an interesting post about the possibility of storing energy underground in the form of compressed air.

Members of the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities have invested in a proposed power plant that would use wind turbines to drive compressed air into underground aquifers. The air would be released to generate electricity when needed.

The plant will use power from its own wind turbines, supplemented by cheaper electricity bought at off-peak times, to force air into rock formations at least 2,000 feet underground.

Current plans call for pressurized storage of tens of billions of cubic feet of air in rock formations deep underground.

This takes on the most common knock against renewable energy - intermittency. If this turns out to be cost-effective, there's the possibility of much greater potential, possibly in exhausted oil and natural gas fields.

The Line You Shouldn't Cross

Mark Twain once said "Never start a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel." Bush seems to have done just that, in a way that the press is (hopefully) unable to ignore:

Brian Ross is reporting at ABC news that the US government is tracking the calling patterns of political reporters to further their leak investigations.

If that's true, then I think we can set aside any pretense that administration policy on all manner of electronic surveillance isn't being brought to bear on political opponents, media critics, the press, everybody.

Just to be clear, these aren't investigations in to Plame-style leaks that destroyed important national security personnel. These are the leaks that hurt the Bush administration. I guess this is the rule to follow for the Bush Administration - to figure out what they care about most, just look at where they're breaking the law most flagrantly.

The funny/horrible thing is, this may very well enrage and terrify the press in a way that Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Diebold's voting booths, the NSA wiretapping, passing unconstitutional budgets, the politicization and militarization of intelligence, not to mention the whole Iraq war, never did.

"Shit! You mean that after all those cocktail parties, they'll still spy on me?!" As if a government unencumbered by law was only a danger to the little people.

Catastrophic Change

So I was waiting for a friend to arrive at a movie theatre a few weeks ago, and decided to kill some time in a bookstore. While there, I picked up - but didn't buy - a book written in the 1950s about the obvious madness behind US and Soviet policies. The author argued (based on the dustjacket) that the massive weaponry buildup that both powers were engaging in - including the then-newly terrifying nuclear arsenals - would inevitably lead to disaster.

This may or may not have been one of the first anti-Cold War tracts along those lines, but it certainly wasn't the last. For almost 50 years, the world was locked in the Cold War and nobody could see a way out. There were debates about the relative positions each side should take - we now know that even in the Soviet Union under Stalin, there was pretty fierce debate as to what Russia should do. But nobody seemed to be able to imagine a world without the Cold War rivalry basically intact.

Many years ago, I read a Tom Clancy-style novel that must have been written in the narrow time frame between the US victory in Iraq (February 1991) and the collapse of the USSR (December of that same year.) The book referenced the Gulf War, but had the Soviet Union as an existing entity, though a very weak one at that point. (Incidentally: The post-Soviet nemesis that was besting America across the globe: Japan.) It was astonishing because - reading it in the late 1990s - I found it hard to believe that the author couldn't foresee the fall of the USSR, given that it was literally months away.

And then just this year, in a course on intelligence and national security, one lecturer - a former intelligence analyst - put it this way: "People were really down on us for a while, you know. 'Why the hell didn't you guys see this coming?' they said. Well, let me tell ya - the fucking Soviets didn't see it coming, so I'm not sure how we were supposed to!"

The common thread to all this, of course, is the fact that almost nobody - and absolutely nobody in power - saw the sunrise approaching. They were rapidly approaching the end of a horrible, terrifying period in human history and nobody realized it. Nobody had even seriously considered the possibility of the Cold War ending with less than a whimper. But oddly enough, that's exactly what happened.

Not only did the Cold War end peacefully, but the speed at which it unravelled is really astonishing. The real thaw between Reagan's US and the USSR only began in Reykjavik in 1986, and by 1989 revolutions were sweeping across Eastern Europe. By January 1, 1992, the USSR no longer existed.

While I don't think the age we proceeded in to has exactly turned out to be roses and sunshine, we can't underestimate our good fortune. To put it succinctly, my father once believed that his duty as a husband and father was to figure out where to bring his family in the event of a nuclear war. I have never had to consider that possibility seriously.

(Yet.)

Why do I bring this up? Mainly because it's been on my mind lately. There's any number of other examples I could choose to illustrate this point. Look at how quickly Roosevelt changed American politics forever in the US. Look at how quickly the rise of China has changed, oh, every topic in the news. Look at how quickly oil prices have made all sorts of alternatives appear not just useful but necessary. The basic point is that history is not linear, and we delude and deceive ourselves to pretend that it is. When we talk about oil, or climate change, or Iraq, or any of the countless issues that humanity grapples with collectively on any given day, we need to remember that every once in a while, history throws us a curveball. And all of the sudden all of our projections - whether they were "optimistic", "pressimistic", or "business-as-usual" become worthless.

The Right Man

A message from the President-in-Exile.

(via too many damned people to remember.)

If Only the NDP would stop trying to win

Like Greg at Sinister Thoughts, I read the Walrus article by James Laxer with about equal helpings of interest and disinterest.

I was interested because Laxer is genuinely one of the left's (and specifically the NDP's) great minds. However, interest turned to disinterest as I got a few paragraphs in. Essentially, it's the same old argument that Liberals make: The NDP takes power away from the Liberals, thereby effectively giving power to the Conservatives. Ergo, the NDP is putting the Conservatives in power.

There's the obvious ideological retort here - there was barely any daylight between Paul Martin's small-government, tax-cutting agenda of the last decade, and Harper's proposals. But I don't find that argument particularly strong, despite the truth of it. Martin, despite my disagreements with his policies, at least brough competence to the table. And the Bush administration shows how valuable that is.

No, my real problem with blaming the NDP for the success of the Tories is that it effectively dismisses the goals of progressives so that our rivals can be handed victory. Sure, in some fantasy the Liberals could have retained our Parliament by taking the NDP. But what has the Liberal party done to earn NDP votes, after their years in power?

I know it's an odd question, but Liberals do need to ask themselves this. Because as shocking as it may be to hear, the left doesn't owe you guys our votes. Here's a radical idea: If the Liberals want the left's support, maybe they should have actually tried building a record of progressive policy successes. As much as it pains me to agree with the Conservatives on anything, the fact is that the Liberals did almost nothing to support Kyoto, and did a great deal of harm to Kyoto before grudgingly signing it. This compares positively only with the fanatics to our south.

Look: The NDP is a political party that espouses different policies than the Liberals. If the Liberals keep losing votes to the NDP (which some Liberals seem to believe) then it's an example of NDP proposals being more popular. Want to regain your popularity? Start acting like we live in a democracy, and start pandering. It's the Canadian way.

The Conservative Nanny State

Okay, so I finished Dean Baker's book last night, and it's good. Really good. You should all read it, if you can bear 100+ pages of economics literature. On the plus side, it's surprisingly clear and accessible. So download it here (PDF) and read it.

There's too much good stuff in there to pick one example of, but one of the things that's been bothering me lately is the leftish and greenish fetish for small enterprises. When Republicans talk about "small businesses", we should all keep our hands on our wallets. But I worry about the left version of this fantasy, too. There's this vision out there - one I've shared, on occasion - that we can rebuild the economy in a way where the market is dominated by small producers and open distribution networks. This would, the plan goes, eliminate the monstrous, gigantic corporation, clearing the way for the worker/environment (take your pick) to flourish. Call this vision the world without Wal-Mart.

Now, like I said, I've shared this vision on occasion. But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am of its viability in the real world. Economies of scale are real things, and it's hard to imagine a world where basic economic laws didn't apply. Food is just one example - the economies of scale from massive farms are obvious. Yes, this is an unsustainable form of agriculture. But we have to ask: is the next agricultural paradigm (hopefully, a sustainable one) going to succeed without the same economies of scale? I don't see it.

(Like everything on this blog, I welcome correction.)

Now, there are counter-examples. Energy is one area where it might be possible for a substantial fraction to be generated locally, via solar or small wind. If advanced batteries take off, a person or small business could conceivably make and store enough energy for their home or office. But there's still going to be a need for large generation in one form or another for the foreseeable future.

But what we're unlikely to see - unless fabbing takes off, I suppose - is small business industry taking the place of large enterprises. That being the case, progressives need to think of ways for us to arrange large enterprises in ways that don't inevitably lead to the kind of destructive tendencies we see everyday from the McDonalds and Walmarts of the world.

Fortunately, a lot of people have already been thinking about this stuff. My suggestions: Read up on the Mondragon Cooperatives and other alternate corporate forms. If you're more inclined towards fiction, read the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, or his earlier book Pacific Edge.

It's the rule of law, stupid

Matthew Yglesias is right:

The problem is that the evidentiary basis for believing the people in question had al-Qaeda connections now turns out to have been illegally obtained evidence from the broader NSA program. And then the problem reiterates itself -- if the listening-in stage of the program reveals anything interesting, you can't use that in a court either. You can't use it to get further warrants, you can't use it as the basis of a prosecution, basically you can't use it at all. So if you want to act, you're going to need to do one of these detention-without-trials deals or maybe a "rendition" or a military tribunal or what have you. And then, once the guy's in custody, if he tells you anything you can't use that either. So the whole process starts again and soon enough there's an entire parallel justice system operating entirely in secret without any oversight or real rules.

And that's the optimistic scenario in which all of the relevant people are maximally honest, honorable, and competent. Leaving aside the reality that nobody with a single shred of honesty or basic human dignity would be working for George W. Bush at this point, that's simply not a realistic picture of any large-scale enterprise. Things are bound to go wrong -- badly wrong -- when you have all these people operating outside the law without any checks or scrutiny.

I hate to sound off on Ignatieff again, but this is why he scares me so much. By oh so ruefully conceding that torture may be "necessary", Ignatieff is essentially giving up on the rule of law. Wholesale.

I don't know how much more clearly it needs to be put: Torturing people for information - when they haven't been convicted of any crime by due process - makes a mockery of our claims to be a liberal democracy. Period. It really doesn't matter whether our motives are pure, or whether we're conscious of being "The Lesser Evil" as Iggy puts it. It's not a sign of moral complexity or intellectual bravery - it's just building the intellectual framework for Bushism. We can pretend that we're doing it to protect liberal democracy, but if we've already started torturing people, then we've really already lost.

Green Factory?

Well, maybe not "green" in the purest sense, but definitely a step forward:

GM’s Tonawanda (NY) Engine Plant, the world’s largest engine manufacturing facility, has achieved landfill-free status in its manufacturing operations by reducing waste generation, recycling and converting waste to energy.

More than 95% of the waste materials from the plant’s manufacturing operations (23,233 tons annually) are recycled and nearly 5% (or 1,060 tons annually) are converted to energy at waste-to-energy facilities.

The recycled streams from the plant. Scrap metal and swarf (the turnings from metalworking) dominate, accounting for a combined 24.5 million tons of the waste (97.7%).

Originally built in 1937, the 3.1 million square foot plant produced 1.1 million engines in 2005. GM employs approximately 2,500 people at the plant.

The plant is the second GM plant in the US, and one of a very few automotive plants in the world to reach this achievement. The GM Flint Engine South Plant in Flint, Mich., was the first GM plant to achieve zero landfill status in its manufacturing operations in March, 2005.

And I want you to pay special attention to this:

Recycling the 46,260,000 pounds of scrap metal (equivalent to the weight of 13,217 cars), reduced energy consumption by 786,074,232 kwh, according to GM’s calculations, as it takes more energy to make metal from ores than it does from scrap.

One of the most-repeated idiocies I hear over and over is that recycling doesn't really help the environment, because it takes "more energy to recycle than X...", where X might be any alternative, including landfilling the waste.

It's very simple: scrap metal is still far more useful - purer "ores", if you will - then the stuff we dig up. If we didn't recycle, it would have to be dug out of the ground. That's way more energy-intensive than recycled ores. This is why people have been recycling most simple metals for eons.

Recycling: Good for the planet.

But don't forget - it's "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle." Reduce what you use first. Reuse the rest. Recycle the scrap.

Catchy slogans can still be right, after all.

Something I'd Forgotten

If you had to name the factor most responsible for the Canadian recession of the early 90s, some would mention NAFTA and its predecessor, FTA. Some others might mention the deficit (which actually should usually accelerate the economy, but people would blame the deficit nevertheless.) Few would mention NAIRU.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of the "new economy" was the speed with which unemployment dropped below 6% in the US. It happened quickly enough that Greenspan didn't have enough time to put the brakes on the economy and throw a few million people out of work. 6%, you see, had been the lowest level most economists believed that unemployment in the US could go without spurring inflation. And not just inflation, but accelerating inflation - a wage-price spiral. Hence, 6% (the safe marker) was the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU.

This wasn't just a concept - it was seen as the edge of the known world: lower than 6%, and the central bankers of the world believed "here there be dragons". For example, in 1995-96 Alan Greenspan raised interest rates precipitously - doubling the fed funds rate in just over a year.

Canada's experience with NAIRU was far, far harsher, as anyone who's read "Shooting the Hippo" by Linda McQuaig can tell you. Canada's central banker at the time - Jim John Crow - believed that we couldn't rest until we'd eliminated not just accelerating inflation, but any hint of inflation. (John Crow's previous experience had been in Latin America, and apparently he never noticed the colder weather in Ottawa.) The result was interest rates among the highest in the industrialized world, which didn't end until Crow was replaced. For one shining moment, Canada actually experienced deflation - at the cost of an economic slump far more pronounced than the one to the south of the border.

Anyway, I'd actually forgotten about NAIRU until I read about it again in Dean Baker's book. James Galbraith (son of the recently-deceased John Kenneth) has an excellent description of it in this book review:

Laurence Meyer is a leading advocate of one of the worst ideas in the modern history of economics.... Meyer's terrible idea is known as the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU): the notion that there exists a threshold unemployment rate below which inflation increases without limit. The NAIRU was invented, mainly by Milton Friedman in 1968, in dissent from the prior doctrine of the Phillips Curve, the idea that full employment would entail only a modest rise in the permanent rate of inflation. Then, in the early 1970s, high inflation combined with unemployment to shatter the Phillips Curve. The NAIRU doctrine taught that even trying to push the unemployment rate down with monetary policy was futile; and, worse, that if unemployment were to fall for a substantial time below the NAIRU threshold, inflation would not only rise but also accelerate. This would lead over time to hyperinflation--to financial and social disaster....

By the late 1990s, circumstances had changed. Unemployment was falling below established estimates of the NAIRU--and eventually to levels rarely observed in peacetime. Yet prices remained strikingly stable. Meyer was on the Federal Reserve Board. What to think? What to do?

Meyer chose to adhere to the NAIRU concept, while conceding ground, bit by bit, on his estimate of where the threshold of hyperinflation might be: a rationale which unfortunately always made him fear the worst. As unemployment fell, he would argue that inflation was just around the corner. Therefore (although in appointing him President Clinton had clearly hoped for better), he found himself generally favoring increases in interest rates--not because inflation was rising, but only because his model told him that it soon had to.

There's a joke about economists: People who worry about whether something that works in fact can possibly work in theory. It sounds like that joke was invented to describe Meyer.

It's good to remember that for most of my lifespan, the government saw full employment as something to be avoided like the plague. Some of the most powerful institutions in the country were devoted to keeping unemployment high, for ideological reasons. In short, it's a valuable lesson for progressives: The Government is not always our friend.

My Favourite Economist strikes again

Yes, Dean Baker has a new book out, available for free download here. (PDF)

The introduction has a great passage about how stupid we all are:

It is clever policy for proponents of these agreements to label them as free trade agreements (everyone likes freedom), but that is not an excuse for neutral commentators to accept this definition. Back in the 1980s, President Reagan named the controversial MX missile system the Peacekeeper to make it more palatable to the public. Thankfully, the media continued to use the neutral MX name to describe the missile system. However, when it comes to trade agreements, the media have been every bit as anxious to use the term peacekeeper as the proponents of the agreements, using the expression free trade almost exclusively to describe these agreements.

The American Way of War

Robert Farley has an excellent post about why America keeps winning wars. The whole thing is excellent, but this graph, I think, is key:

I would say first that the US has excelled in the technical aspects of war in some cases, if not in others. I would also suggest, though, that it's not quite the right question. Part of the US approach to war (and, really, part of any sensible approach to war) is to make sure that the battle is won before it is fought. Overwhelming logistical superiority helped to win the Civil War, both wars against Germany, and made the final campaigns against Japan a foregone conclusion. Logisitic superiority, which includes a careful integration of industry and warplanning, is itself a technical skill, and it's one that the United States has executed better than any other country.

Eerily Familiar

Anyone else remember NAWAPA?

Ezra Klein at Tapped:

Let me recommend Jon Margolis's fascinating piece on TAP Online about Canada's strange, and potentially untenable, refusal to export their fresh water. As Margolis writes, "Canada has 20 percent of all the world’s fresh water, to slake the thirsts and irrigate the crops of only 0.5 percent of the world’s population. [And] with the United Nations estimating that almost two-thirds of everybody, or almost 5.5 billion people, will face chronic water shortages by 2050," such protectiveness of their reserves will eventually appear cruel.

Cruel? Meaning no offense to Ezra, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't required to take basic science courses in elementary school. Let's start with the basics: The water cycle is crucial to maintaining the biosphere. Everywhere, even deserts, the amount of water that flows through the system is a crucial variable to supporting wildlife. Disrupting those flows is a really, really bad idea if we have any desire to maintain an ecological balance. Water plays any number of roles in a local ecology - not just the obvious, but heat balancing, supporting necessary microorganisms, etc.

Furthermore, the experience of CO2 has shown that even small disruption to the overall flow can have massive effects.

There's a second question that needs to be asked: Who owns "Canada's" water? I certainly don't, and have never claimed to. Canada has so much water because a) We're a huge friggin country (bigger than the US, bitches!) and b) our lattitude means we have no vast deserts like the American southwest. Yes, we're small population-wise, but that doesn't mean we have a high per-capita level of water reserves. Because I would argue that most of our water doesn't belong to us - instead, it provides a crucial service to maintaining the wilderness in this huge country. It is a necessary trust fund, crucial to maintaining the liveability of this country. Even if it could be diverted to the US (a huge engineering proposal) it would be a disastrous and short-sighted crime against the land to do it.

Finally, it needs to be remembered that, like any nominally "renewable" resource, if the rate of extraction is greater than the rate of replenishment, you have a de facto non-renewable resource. Given the levels of exports that would be necessary to slake America's thirst, we're necessarily talking about supertanker-levels of exports. Because of economic factors, we're almost certainly talking about exports from the already-overtaxed Great Lakes, especially Lake Superior.

And for what? No doubt Americans like former Ambassador Cellucci will talk about the poor Mexican or third-world farmer, desperate to irrigate his fields. But Canadians know exactly where any water exports are going to go - exactly where 80% of the rest of our exports go. Margolis, at least, is honest about what we're talking about here:

What they’re talking about is making sure that the suburbanization of greater Las Vegas, Phoenix, and smaller metropolises in the Southwest is not impeded by lack of H20.

Sorry, Yankee. We don't owe you squat for something that petty. Ezra asks:

Margolis focuses mostly on Canada's unwillingness to sell water to the profligate United States, but I'd be interested to know their position on dampening drought and quenching Third World thirst.

This is kind of like asking what our policy is on oil exports to Namibia. Nice in theory, but we know where all the oil is going to go. The global poor could only ever be a cover for the real issue. But to actually answer Ezra's question, I'm not sure what good Canada can do for the massive problems of, say, desertification in Africa. Canadian water can't be used to stop the spread of the Sahara - the only solution to that is changes in land use, and less-intense farming. Probably coupled with a massive tree-planting project, like China is attempting. Canada may have 20% of the world's freshwater, but that's not actually that much. Certainly not enough, on its own, to stop these massive global crises.

Water in the 21st century is going to be very much analogous to energy - we're going to have to figure out new sources, and ways to use it a lot smarter than we are now. For example, lining and covering the aqueducts that feed southern California could save an immense amount of water. For the American southwest, maybe seawater desalination can keep Vegas growing. If not - and here's a shocking idea - howzabout we don't build cities in the desert? I know, Communism!

I actually think seawater desalination may be what we have to rely on. Based on this report from the California state government, it looks like it should be possible to deliver desalinated water for fractions of a penny per litre. The highest cost they quote is $4,000 per acre-foot, and there's a hell of a lot of water in an acre-foot. I know southern farmers have gotten used to using water for free, but there's a limit to how many monsoon crops you can grow in the desert. The scale is truly daunting - the US uses 137 billion gallons of water per day (520 billion litres), on average, for irrigation alone - but no less daunting than a massive water-export scheme.

The expense will be something rather large - some quick math on my part sounds like $700 billion annually, but remember that American irrigation is woefully profligate - the Israelis and Saudis could teach American farmers more than a thing or two. I'm not sure what the scale for improvement is, exactly, but one imagines it's huge.

Meanwhile, if we're serious about doing something long-term for reducing water tensions in the world (coughcoughIsrael/Palestinecough) desalination is a much better bet than squeezing Canada dry.

Cheap Shots

Via Greg at Sinister Thoughts, Canada's environment minister:

"Later this week we will release Canada's greenhouse gas inventory and it will show that Canada's (level of emissions) is now 35 percent higher than the Kyoto targets that the Liberals set," she told Parliament.

"To put that into perspective ... that would mean that today we would have to take every train, plane and automobile off the streets of Canada. That is not realistic."

I actually hadn't noticed any planes or trains on Canada's streets.

That's the tricky thing about global warming, I guess. Just when you think you understand the problem, some Conservative tells you that it's hopeless.

Holy Christ this is so right it hurts

Blender's done a collection of the 500 best songs since 1980. At number 4: One, by U2.

In late 1990 they had begun recording at Hansa studios in Berlin, where David Bowie and Iggy Pop worked up some of the ’70s’ best rock experiments. But after a few weeks, the location was starting to seem ill-chosen. Just yards from the recently toppled Berlin Wall, the band watched a city realize that unification alone wasn’t going to solve all its problems. Recalled engineer Flood: “There seemed to be this dark cloud hanging over the whole session.”

Then producer Daniel Lanois heard Bono working on some middle-eight fragments and, elsewhere, the Edge toying with a guitar line that sounded promising. He got the band together, and they reluctantly began to play what would become the basic structure of “One.” Immediately, the Edge said, “Everyone recognized it was a special piece. It was like we’d caught a glimpse of what the song could be.”

The finished product retains that initial hypnotic feeling. The opening, echoing guitar sounds more like a sad fade-out coda than a beginning — tenuous, even defeated. And when Bono’s voice enters, it’s with an exhausted question routinely asked by doctors, mothers and, most important, lovers who want permission to leave without being the bad guy: “Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” Then, as he muddles through that achingly familiar script, something changes. Lines that could be pulled from any doomed couple’s final argument are capped by a larger idea when Bono sings the words “One love,” a little ambivalently. Of course, any devout Rastafarian or dorm-room pothead will recognize “One love” as Bob Marley’s call for solidarity among the poor — it’s as if Bono, while he ponders his failure to rescue a troubled partner, starts to consider his failure to save the world. The Edge’s guitar punctuates his every statement with a tight little riptide swirl, the sound of weariness in the face of a challenge to “do what ya should.” Amid these doubts, the drums and bass continue to urge Bono on to a nobler goal....

“One,” which never actually made it to No. 1, charting only at No. 10, is certainly a breakup song. But it’s also very much about the duty to stay together, about finding some kind of connection in times of war, fragmentation, plague, poverty and cultural difference. About being too cynical to believe in the hippie version of global oneness, but too much of a believer to reject it.

“There’s the idea that ‘we get to carry each other,’” said the Edge of his favorite lyric. “‘Get to’ is the key. The original lyric was ‘We have to carry each other,’ and it was never quite right—it was too fuckin’ obvious and platitudinous. But ‘get to’ … it’s like our privilege to carry one another.”

31%

I might go out and get hammered if Bush's approval, now at 31%, drops in to the 20s. Do I hear 25% anyone?

Actually, the poll has a number of interesting questions in it.

6. Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?
Approve: 29%
Disapprove: 67%

16. If George W. Bush supported a candidate for political office in your area, would that make you more likely or less likely to vote for that candidate, or wouldn't it affect how you voted one way or another?
More likely support: 8%
Less: 36%

My favourite is this one:
19. Is your opinion of George W. Bush favorable, not favorable, undecided, or haven't you heard enough about George W. Bush yet to have an opinion?
Favourable: 29%
Unfavourable: 55%
Haven't heard enough: 3% <----- Who could these people possibly be?

That favourable rating is Bush's 2nd lowest since polling in 1999 - you have to go to October, 1999 to see 27%. Interestingly, the first few polls of that year show higher favourability ratings - apparently, there were a bunch of people who started to dislike Bush the more they learned about him. If only there'd been more.

Bush's unfavourable rating in this poll is the highest it's ever been. Cheney - Cheney! - has a lower unfavourable rating than Bush. (49%) Cheney also has four times as many people who haven't heard enough about him. (12%) Again, who are these people?

Unfortunately, the American people are still labouring under a number of delusions:

33. Is the price of gasoline something a president can do a lot about, or is that beyond any president's control?
Can do: 63%
Beyond control: 30%

34. Is the price of gasoline something Congress can do a lot about, or is that beyond Congress's control?
Can do: 66%
Beyond control: 26%

Well, at least 30 and 26% of respondents got it right.

You get a Gold star!

Via Battlepanda, Michael O'Hare asks the excellent question:

As a piece of social policy, one has to wonder about the wisdom of slapping a big tax on the only people who are providing any of this oil we want so badly. One doesn't even have to wonder about the whole concept of all the schemes to make oil less expensive; did the demand curve for petroleum suddenly tilt the other way while we weren't looking? One more time, what's the logic of subsidizing domestic production and exploration: is there some prize for being the first country to use up its petroleum?

There isn't, but there should be, dammit! Some suggested prizes for the US to be the first country to use up the last of its petroleum:

1) A thank-you bouquet from Osama bin Laden and co.
2) A polar-bear-skin rug for every American.
3) Wristwatches made of dead Iraqi children.

Leave your own suggestions in comments.

YugoslavIraq: Michael Ignatieff should be so proud

Via Matt Yglesias, a good-news, bad-news piece from Iraq: The good news is that community groups are springing up all over the place - surely a sign of incipient democracy.*

The bad news is that these community groups are armed militias protecting themselves from government death squads.

As evidence mounts that Shiite police commandos are carrying out secret killings, Sunni Arab neighborhoods across Baghdad have begun forming citizen groups to keep the paramilitary forces out of their areas entirely. In large swaths of western Baghdad, and in at least six majority Sunni areas in its center, young men take turns standing in streets after the 11 p.m. curfew, to send out signals by flashlights and cellphones if strangers approach.

In some cases, the Sunnis have set up barricades and have taken up arms against Shiite-led commando raids into their neighborhoods. In other cases, residents have tipped off Sunni insurgents. Watch groups have been assembled in other mixed areas, including Baquba to the north and Mahmudiya to the south, residents and officials said.

*Actually, Russia saw an actual surge of community- and interest-group formation when the CP fell. Those groups didn't actually amount to anything, a mystery that many PoliSci scholars continue to puzzle over.

My latest gig

Not content with this blog and my guest-posting gig at Ezras, I've accepted an invitation to contribute to Gristmill, Grist Magazine's blog.

My first post is up here, about a small group of plucky entrepreneurs who are trying to save America from foreign oil.

Okay, not so much. The real post is a lot more sarcastic.

This Day In History

My father sent me this in the email:

May 10, 1940

German forces have invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg by air and land.

The invasion began at dawn with large numbers of aeroplanes attacking the main aerodromes and landing troops. The Dutch High Commission says more than 100 German planes were shot down by its forces.

In London, it has been announced that Winston Churchill will lead a coalition government after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said he was stepping aside.

Two days ago his majority plummeted in a vote of confidence in the Commons during a debate on the war and there were calls from the Tory benches for him to go.

Imagine that - the British Parliament, in response to the incompetent prosecution of the war, responded by abandoning the disastrous leadership and replacing them with someone new.

Of course, if Chamberlain had only had Karl Rove on hand, he could have accused Churchill of being a pro-Hitler terrorist-lover with an illegitimate black baby.

For a bit less sarcasm, let me just point out one sentence that stunned me, from the "in context" part of the above page:

Yet in six weeks, and at a cost of only 30,000 dead, German forces had conquered the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and on 21 June forced the capitulation of France.

The Germans lost 30,000 men, but this was considered the equivalent of a bloody nose for what they'd accomplished. It's clear, I presume, how much war has changed since 1940.

But really, it's the good kind of "point of no return."

James Hansen, America's foremost climatologist:

Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the Earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a point of no return beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far ranging undesirable consequences.

The changes include not only loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to worldwide rising seas. Sea level will increase slowly at first, as losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating ice streams are partly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet thickening in the ice sheet interiors. But as Greenland and West Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by melt-water, and as buttressing ice shelves disappear due to a warming ocean, the balance will tip to rapid ice loss, bringing multiple positive feedbacks into play and causing cataclysmic ice sheet disintegration.

You know, I'm willing to bet that scientists don't use the word "cataclysmic" that often. When they do, we should probably listen. But this little nugget from Hansen's talk scares me. Really.

There has been publicity lately about restrictions on NASA communications with the media. NASA is working on that and I have high hopes that NASA will fix its problem and be a model for other agencies. We will see. But I am told by NOAA colleagues that their conditions are much worse than those in NASA. A NOAA scientist cannot speak with a reporter unless there is a listener on the line with him or her. It seems more like the old Soviet Union than the United States. The claim is that the listener is there to protect the NOAA scientist. If you buy that one, please see me at the break; there is a bridge down the street that I would like to sell to you.

You know, eventually we'll have to start referring to American media as "state-run", for accuracy's sake if nothing else.

You can read his full talk here, via Past Peak.

Conservatives are the same all over

Matthew Yglesias, yesterday:

Paul Krugman says that when Iraq goes badly, the bully-boys of the right "won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back."...

The first response to almost any difficulty is to decide that we need to chuck one of the system's building blocks overboard. Democracy makes it harder to cheat on international agreements, free speech is a threat to morale, legal restraints on the intelligence apparatus are holding us back. Such things as legislative oversight of the executive and the existence of a professional bureaucracy are intolerable. When disaster relief efforts go poorly, the solution is domestic deployment of the military. Even political competition itself over questions of national security policy is a form of aid and comfort to the enemy.

Lost in all of this is the possibility that democracy is a successful form of government that's tended to spread over time precisely because it's a successful form of government.

Robert Farley:

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was conveniently forgottent that many conservatives (including the Team B types) believed that the Soviet capacity to mobilize its society would prove too much for the United States to handle. Democracy was great in the abstract, this line of thought went, but was insufficient to meet the threat of a totalitarian foe....

And now, again, we see the conservatives begin to suggest that we fail in Iraq because of fundamental flaws in our way of life. Our propaganda isn't good enough, and our media has too much freedom, our national security apparatus allow too much difference of opinion, and our generals are allowed to criticize after retirement. Finally, our democratic system has made us too soft and too weak to do the things that need to be done.

Democracy: Great in the abstract and a useful bludgeon, but don't let it slow you down.

Mahmoud Ahmadenijad:

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic systems.

I have no doubt that two and a half thousand years ago, around the Athenian agora, a substantial minority of the citizens believed that, in order to win the war against Sparta, or Persia, or whoever the enemy of the day was, the Democracy that Athens nominally supported needed to be destroyed.

I have no doubt of this because, oddly enough, the conservatives in Athens eventually did overthrow the Democracy during the war. In 411 BC, shortly before the war ended, the conservative elements in Athens, who'd never really been wild about Democracy to begin with, overthrew the government and instituted their own council of 400 oligarchs. They eliminated the rights that the majority of Athenian citizens had enjoyed for more than a century, all with the claim they were returning Athens to its "ancestral constitution."

They were able to do this not in spite of a war that was nominally to preserve democracy, but because of that war. Athens had grown tired of the war, and they believed that the 400 could bring about a peace. As it turned out, the Spartans didn't much care who was running Athens, only that Athens was a threat. Meanwhile, the (lower-class, democratically-minded) Athenian Navy returned from overseas, and quickly routed the oligarchs and returned the Democracy to power.

The lesson? First of all - when Conservatives talk about Democracy being inconvenient, they're not speculating idly. Given the chance, yes, they'd happily sell us down the river to keep power. Secondly, long wars are fundamentally corrosive to Democracies - something the American founding fathers understood well.

Nevertheless, we know that conservatives like Bill Kristol really, really missed the Cold War when it was gone. Conservatives like George W. Bush have publicly mused that a dictatorship would be great, so long as they're the dictators. There's a tendency to see those two strains of conservativsm separately. They're not. Conservatives don't like voting, don't like voters, and don't like government. Is it any surprise the threat to democracy comes from them, not from outside?

A Bit More on Iraq

When writing about people like Cohen, or for that matter Ignatieff, I'm kind of struck by how little mockery these men are actually subjected to. Both of these men, like a substantial number of pundits, advocated for the war against Iraq. And yet somehow they've earned the right to be taken seriously in a way that Howard Dean, or Al Gore, never did.

A few months ago, Cerbeus asked whether or not Iraq should be a litmus test for Liberal leadership candidates. I said yes, absolutely. My reasons were and are simple. The Iraq War was a simple matter: Either you agreed with the lies (or worse yet, believed them) that were used to justify this crime, or you didn't. The people who were gullible enough to believe those lies, or in Ignatieff's case mendacious enough to invent their own lies ("The American Empire is a good thing!"), are responsible, in their own small way, for this war too. Men like Ignatieff especially represented a gift to the Bush administration - Iggy gave the war a form of humanitarian "cover" it might not have otherwise had.

This isn't to say that Cohen or Ignatieff could have stopped this war - neither is that important. There are almost certainly less than 5 men who could have stopped this war, and they all work frequently on Pennsylvania Ave. Nevertheless, I have a simple question for the audience, about men like Cohen and Ignatieff, not to mention everyone else who supported this crime against world peace:

When to we get to treat them like the moral and intellectual retards they are?

I mean, really: Ignatieff is considered a serious candidate for the Liberal leadership? On what basis? The fact that he was wrong - just plain wrong - on the most important international issue since the end of the Cold War? How does that qualify him for office?

Ignatieff's defense is a familiar one: He believed the war would liberate the Iraqi people. This is what's most frustrating about the pro-war camp: Their inability to separate reality from fantasy. Ignatieff thought he was supporting the war that would liberate Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz supported a war that would break up OPEC and remove a threat to Israel. Donald Rumsfled supported a war that would prove his concepts of "transformation" in the military. George Bush, for his part, supported a war that would find Iraq in posession of WMDs.

And me, I supported the war where we got to go kill some Nazis again. Given this crowd, who's going to tell me I was being irrational?

In the real world, men like Ignatieff, Cohen, and the rest of the pro-war crowd weren't supporting the liberation of Iraq or the preservation of world peace. They were supporting exactly the kind of war we were all likely to suffer with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in charge. They were supporting an incompetently-committed war crime, and nothing more.

Now if only Cohen could stop clutching his pearls long enough to write about that obscenity, instead of some nasty letters he got.

Why Do I Keep Doing This?

Richard Cohen is still pissy:

The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have.

This is the last paragraph of Richard Cohen's latest column. I should have stopped reading right there.

Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls.

Aw, I think the mean ol bloggers hurt his feelings.

That last sentence may actually be the weirdest thing I've ever read. The anti-war crowd can't win or lose the war itself - we already lost the only fight that matters: The war happened. Nevertheless, we've already been proven correct by events. The only question of victory or defeat that remains is for the US military.

Now, as for the question of electoral victory, I don't think anti-war partisans are going to have an electoral impact, one way or the other. Cohen seems to think that hysterical shrieking is going to freak the norms or something. If you read the full column (not that I recommend it) he compares it to the victory of Richard Nixon in 1968, which Cohen attributes to crazy left-wing activists swinging the vote to the GOP.

In Cohen's version of history, there was no racist appeals by the Nixon campaign, there was no divisions within the Democratic party itself, there was no crackdown in Chicago, and of course, there was no assasination of Robert Kennedy. No, what really mattered was that some hippies didn't shower.

It's worth remembering that Cohen supported this war - see his March 11, 2003 column "When Peace Is No Better Than War" (available on Lexis-Nexis) - for possibly the stupidest possible reason: Despite acknowledging that the Bush administration lied about everything in the run up to the war, Cohen wrote:

But the fact remains that were it not for those 250,000 troops sitting out in the desert, there would be no inspectors in Iraq. Hussein kicked them out once and he will kick them out again, just as soon as the world, as is its wont, loses interest and succumbs to the lust for oil, contracts and, in the case of France, the chimera of a glorious yesterday.

Why is it every US pundit assumes that France is motivated only by the desire to be a great power again, while the US is motivated by nothing by hugs and puppies? When, God when, will we see a Friedman, a Cohen, or even a Brooks admit that the US is motivated by the same lust for power that they accuse France and China of?

I recently saw "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's Oscar-nominated movie. It is based on the Holocaust experience of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish concert pianist. It occurred to me that for some of that time -- 1939, 1940 and almost all of 1941 -- the United States was at peace, faced with no imminent threat from Germany. It took the irrational attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan to get us into the war. Had Japan not struck, God only knows what might have happened.

I do not equate Iraq with Nazi Germany.

Nice. Cohen learned well from the Bushies - bring up WWII, but strenuously deny that you ever compared Hussein to Hitler.

The threat is not the same. But what is the same is that once again we are faced with a beast and the challenge to do something about him. The world has repeatedly ordered Hussein to disarm. He has not done so.

Actually, he had. And the inspectors that Cohen thinks only got in because of US militarism proved that Iraq had no WMDs well in advance of the war. But Cohen, like a good Republican, didn't believe them because after all, you can't trust the French. Or something.

I have neither the credentials nor the inclination to get into a theological dispute about a just war. Frankly, I think there is altogether too much "God talk" already. What's more, I have some doubts about this war -- especially the challenge of governing and rebuilding Iraq afterward. But I have less doubt about the sort of peace that would result from what, after all, would be appeasement. Saddam Hussein -- not to mention other despots -- will have taken the measure of us. He will resume his old ways. By then, a just war might be unthinkable -- and a just peace no longer in our grasp.

Munich, 1938 was the best thing to ever happen to warmongers. Step 1) Lie about an imaginary threat. Step 2) Prepare for war. Step 3) When challenged, claim that your opponents wouldn't have fought Hitler.

I'm not the first person to write this by any stretch, but it's worth repeating: The Munich analogy doesn't indict the anti-war crowd. Quite the opposite. After all, in 2003 there was only one country that had massive military superiority over its rivals, had spent years mantaining high levels of military spending despite a lack of serious enemies, and was preparing to invade a small country in defiance of international opinion and law. And it wasn't Iraq. If Churchill were alive today, he'd be in the House of Commons talking about the gathering threat the US posed to world peace. And he'd be just as surely ignored by his party as he was in the 1930s.

Something New

To me, anyway. A potentially superior biofuel - butanol. Via R-Squared:

How does butanol compare with ethanol as an alternative fuel?

Butanol has many superior properties as an alternative fuel when compared to ethanol. These include:

-Higher energy content (110,000 Btu’s per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol). Gasoline contains about 115,000 Btu’s per gallon.

-Butanol is six times less "evaporative" than ethanol and 13.5 times less evaporative than gasoline, making it safer to use as an oxygenate in Arizona, California and other states, thereby eliminating the need for very special blends during the summer and winter months.

-Butanol can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines where ethanol must be transported via rail, barge or truck

-Butanol can be used as a replacement for gasoline gallon for gallon e.g. 100%, or any other percentage. Ethanol can only be used as an additive to gasoline up to about 85% and then only after significant modifications to the engine. Worldwide 10% ethanol blends predominate.

If you read this website, they claim that butanol can replace gasoline in conventional engines, without any modification. They also claim they can make butanol out of corn, with a per-bushel yield similar to conventional ethanol production. That's not great, but butanol's superior energy yield might make it a winner.

One method of making butanol is using synthesis gas, the same feedstock used in the Fischer-Tropsch process. That might mean the plasma-FT process we heard about months ago might be one way of making this stuff without relying on corn. But don't take my word on that.

Interestingly, the reports I've seen quote a price of $3.75/gallon for butanol, or $0.93 per litre. Given that gasoline is selling for more than that in Canada most days, and is likely to go to $1.20 this summer, I wonder if we'll see any experimentation.

The Return of SF Blogging

It's time once again for what I assume is the least-favourite topic I deal with in this blog - my enduring love for science fiction. I know many of you tune in for energy issues, sustainability, left-wing politics and what not. But it's my blog, and if I want to write about the latest DVD box set I own, then that's my right as a Canadian. Until it's outlawed by the Conservatives.

The latest DVD box set I bought turns out to be the Borg Star Trek collection of DVDs. Paramount has hit on a good business model: Even most Trek fans will admit that, all things considered, it's not worth buying the full series on DVD. For 7 seasons in each of TNG, DS9, and Voyager, there's probably less than two dozen episodes in each series worth actually owning. Depending on who you ask, DS9's count could be much, much lower. So release the few good episodes on smaller DVD packages! In this case, the Borg collection has a bunch of excellent episodes.

However, there's a problem with Star Trek that is quite beyond Paramount's control. Something has finally managed to do for me what the worst episodes of DS9, the most ridiculous dialogue from Voyager, and all the Wesley Crusher episodes of TNG never managed to do: Make the men and women of the Federation look like the nancy boys and girls they are.

That something is of course Battlestar Galactica.

Let's compare Executive Officers, shall we? In TNG, we had Riker. In BSG, it's Colonel Tigh.

Riker is crippled by self-doubt, unable to accept a command of his own. His insecurity pervades every area of his life, from his relationship with his father (they literally joust in one episode) to his on-again, off-again relationship with Deanna Troi. After seven seasons of TV and 4 movies (only one good one) Riker finally earns his own command, despite being essentially the same dope he was when we first saw him at Farpoint.

Tigh is crippled less by self-doubt (though that emerges) and more by his alcoholism and violent temper. It is no exaggeration to say that Tigh would not only kick Riker's ass, he'd do it without putting down the bottle. More than that, however, Tigh is simply a better-developed character. In only 33 episodes, Tigh has grown and changed as a character in ways that none of the TNG characters ever did.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare the Enterprise and the Galactica. After all, we never really saw what the Enterprise would look like in a wartime scenario - outside of glimpses in Yesterday's Enterprise. It's only natural that the exigencies of war would produce leaner, meaner soldiers. But DS9 was largely built around the war with the Dominion, and that crew and Commander still sucked hard enough that they had to bring in Worf and the Klingons to make it a bit more interesting.

(It's no accident that DS9 took a darker turn with the Dominion war, and came closest to BSG's tone. Moore was a major writer for DS9.)

I'm not alone in my belief that BSG makes the Federation all look a bit silly - a number of the people I know who watch BSG have said the same thing to me. I realize this all has a bit of a "could Superman beat Spiderman" sound to it, but I think it's actually an important indicator of the ways SF, and more broadly TV, has changed in the decade since TNG left the air. TV shows that appeal largely to the same audience are far more sophisticated, with better writing and production than in previous years.

There's certainly things to criticize about today's TV industry - namely, the increasingly short times that shows have to "make it". TNG was given an entire season to see if it was worth keeping on, while today a show might get as little as 6 episodes. Nevertheless, the upshot is that those of us whose shows do make it get some excellent viewing.

Stop Yer Whinin'

One of the points Matt Simmons has made a number of times: In terms of $ per gallon, gasoline and oil are some of the cheapest fluids out there. As an example, the costs of various commodities, expressed in barrels-equivalent:

Oil: $69.35
Natural Gas: $39.44
Ethanol: $113.40
Gasoline: $125.42
Milk: $192.50
Coca-Cola: $447.21

Gasoline is 2/3 the cost of milk, and less than 30% the cost of Coca-cola. So where's the screaming about windfall profits there? Milk is at least good for you.

Jack Straw Forced Out?

...by Bush? Apparently.

(CBS/AP) Two London papers have speculated this weekend that complaints by President George W. Bush forced a British minister from his post because of his opposition to the use of nuclear force against Iran.

The Independent suggests that a phone call from the U.S. president to British Prime Minister Tony Blair led to the removal of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Friday.

The newspaper reports that friends of Straw believe Mr. Bush was extremely upset when Straw pronounced any use of nuclear weapons against Iran "nuts."

Both The Independent and the Guardian write that Straw's "fate was sealed" after a White House phone call to Blair....

Straw said Britain would not launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran and he was as "certain as he could be" that neither would the United States. He said he has a high suspicion that Iran is developing a civil nuclear capability that in turn could be used for nuclear weapons, but there is "no smoking gun" to prove it and rationalize abandoning the plodding diplomatic process.

So here we have probably the third most important man in the British government, who was turfed for stating inconvenient facts.

Even more disturbingly, he seems to have been turfed on the orders of a foreign head of state. Exactly how deep does Blair's loyalty to Bush go?

Boy, if any country could ever use Conservatives in power, it's the UK today.

Shameless Grovelling

Just in case people think I've turned around on Andrew Sullivan, allow me to mock him for this foolishness:

Something a little embarrassing has been happening to George W Bush and Dick Cheney lately. They’ve been rumbled as closet softies. On two groups not exactly dear to the Republican base — illegal Hispanic immigrants and gay couples — the president and vice-president are quietly, privately tolerant, even sympathetic. And this news could prove devastating to their electoral fortunes....

Does their personal tolerance make their policies less or more distasteful? I’d say more distasteful, since they know better. A man with a gay daughter in a loving relationship should not be campaigning on the idea that such relationships destroy the family. Whose family? Cheney’s?...

But in this there is also, perhaps, an emerging possibility. If the Democrats win back all or half the Congress this November Bush will have to deal with them. Can we say triangulation? He’ll have new allies to pass an immigration measure he can live with and take credit for; and more cover when the anti-gay forces recede.

We may get a kinder, gentler Bush yet. It’s there underneath. It’s just that it might take a Democratic Congress to bring it out of the closet.

Here Sullivan has made a very simple mistake - he's confused Bush's personal feelings towards individuals (tolerance, even respect) with Bush's feelings towards the group (which could tamely be called repressive.) Bush isn't supporting awful policies just because he thinks he'll win a few congressional votes (though that certainly factors in.) Bush actually thinks that gay marriage will ruin the American family - a stupid and homophobic belief, but an honestly-held one.

Anyone with a brain can see the contradiction between Bush's personal beliefs and his politics, its true. But this is not an uncommon dichotomy for bigots to hold in their heads. I'm sure most southern whites got along just fine with the blacks they knew, so long as they didn't talk politics.

Sullivan would like to believe that, unencumbered by the party he leads, Bush would turn in to a nicer guy. What evidence is there of this? I know for the Bush fans hope springs eternal (at this point hope is all they have) but really, this is just sad, desperate pleading from the disillusioned. Sullivan - when he wasn't smearing the left as treasonous dogs - always hoped that Bush could end the gay-bashing and racism in the GOP. Bush will have had 8 years by the time he's done, and I think we can safely predict the GOP will still be as racist and homophobic in 2008 as it was in 1999.

Then there's that last nugget at the end - that if a Democratic congress pushes Bush to be more gay-friendly, he should take credit for it. I actually worry that this is how Bush will redeem himself: by taking credit for the actions of the post-2006 Congress. I propose that, to guard against this, Democrats start calling all their proposed laws things like the "Laura Bush Murdered her ex-boyfriend Act, 2007" or "The Bush Daughters are Drunken Trollopes Act of 2008." I think Bush might even whip out the veto pen for that.

"A Kind of Paganism"

via Andrew Sullivan, of all people:

BELIEVING that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies....

"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."

Why does Brother Guy Consolmagno hate Jesus?

Oh, Sweet Jesus YES.

You know, I had a spidey-sense kind of tingling when I saw the new CIA chief, but it hadn't clicked.

August Pollak puts it all together for us.

Problems Without End

More than a little ink has been spilled over the promise of the tar sands, the gluey sand mined in Alberta and cooked to make oil. According to some, the tar sands promise a new Saudi Arabia, without the Saudis. (We Canadians aren't nearly as successful terrorists.)

There are, however, a number of problems with the vision of Canada replacing the bin Ladens and Chavezes of the world.

The first is simply fuel. Making the tar sands in to fuel takes more energy than the fuel itself contains - as much as three times more, according to some estimates. This was affordable when natural gas was cheap and oil was less so. If the price of oil were the only determinant, the oil sands would indeed be a plentiful source.

The problem is that natural gas supplies are getting stretched tighter and tighter. North American production peaked a few years ago, and it has hurt the plastics and fertilizers industries hard. As conventional an authority as you could ask for - Lee Raymond, former head of Exxon - has said that the North American decline will continue even if political obstacles are surmounted and Arctic gas is finally brought in to production.

The second problem is, of course, environmental. For a more thorough list of the environmental problems you can look at the Pembina Institute, but the short version is that tar sands production is awful for ground water, consumes vast amount of water itself, and pollutes the ground and air. Incidentally, tar sands production is one of the largest reasons for Canada failing to slow its CO2 emissions.

As if that weren't enough, this Saturday's Toronto Star has a whole page devoted to the manifold problems of Canada's rising dollar. The recent increase in the value of the Canadian dollar has been largely attributed to the rise in commodity prices, including oil.

The problem is that Canada's economy is largely export-driven, and the higher dollar is leading to problems for many of our industries. Name the industry - filmmaking, manufacturing, agriculture, tourism - and it's probably suffering from a high dollar. This is in addition to the high costs of oil, itself an economic problem.

And these problems all come from a pretty pathetic level of production - about 1 million barrels per day. Some optimistic projections call for that to quadruple by 2020. How Canada will manage to meet the natural gas demands alone is a mystery.

Hypercars Emerging

In 1991, the Rocky Mountain Institute put out the idea of the Hypercar, a lightweight, high-efficiency car that could get 100+mpg. 15 years later, we're finally seeing some major progress in high-efficiency hybrid cars.

First, there are rumours that the 2008 Prius will get 100+ mpg.

Secondly, the 2007 Honda Fit will use their well-tested Insight drive train, with the promise of 50+ mpg. Not Hypercar-levels of performance, but still a good step in the right direction.

Finally, and most happily, one company is building a plug-in hybrid drivetrain that promises 200-250+ mpg, depending on the car. In particular, AFS Trinity says that this drivetrain could go 40 miles without liquid fuels. Even better, AFS seems to be a fan of flex-fuel cars as well. They say their 250 mpg car could get 220 mpg on 85% ethanol. Even if the real mileage is closer to 200 (ethanol gets worse mileage than gasoline), that means effectively getting over 1200 mpg of gasoline.

A car like that would effectively eliminate most of the common objections to ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. Most of the gasoline use would be replaced by electricity - most humans commute less than 40 miles a day - and the remainder that needed liquid fuel would be mostly replaced by ethanol. Because so little ethanol would be required, we'd need little extra farmland to cultivate. If the mileage can be pushed even further, the demand for ethanol could be so low as to allow lower-intensity cultivation, meaning we wouldn't need to rely on massive doses of fertilizer and pesticides.

How does an organic gas tank sound to you?

An Inconvenient Truth

(Cross-posted at Ezra Klein's.)

So the President-in-exile was in Toronto last night pitching his film, and a family member was able to score tickets. We watched the movie, then Gore himself arrived to answer some questions.

John's one-sentence review: Every single last one of you has to see this film.

For those who don't know, An Inconvenient Truth is a film about a slideshow that Gore has given all over the world, trying to sound the alarm bell about what he is calling "the Climate Crisis." The slideshow and the film both go over, in some detail, the science behind climate change and the likely effects. At the very end, Gore also talks very briefly (too briefly, in my mind) about the potential for averting the disaster before us.

That's my one complaint about this film - at 97 minutes, it could easily have used another 15 minutes or so explaining in the same kind of detail and breadth the potential for turning our particular Titanic away from the icebergs.

What surprised me about An Inconvenient Truth was not Gore's passion or his intelligence - both have been on ample display since he was robbed in 2000. (Sadly, more abundantly on display since 2000 than before.) No, what is honestly surprising is how accessible Gore (and the filmmakers, obviously) makes the science behind climate change. I've studied this stuff pretty extensively as a layman, and I know how difficult it can be to explain to people that No, This Is Different. Gore manages to be both accessible and alarming without coming off (to me, anyway) as hysterical.

The film is also a very personal one. Gore recounts how the two big traumas in his life - the near-loss of his son, and the death of his sister from lung cancer - both changed his ways of thinking. His son's near-death made him realize that leaving this planet in a liveable condition for the next generation is a moral imperative, and the death of his sister made him realize how their prosperity (the Gores grew tobacco) had contributed to the death of a loved one.

The question-and-answer period after the movie was gratifying as well. Asked what hope Gore sees for religious communities to turn public opinion around, Gore noted the good works some evangelical churches are doing. Gore explicitly compared those who believe that the Rapture makes environmentalism unnecessary to suicide bombers. Take that, Jenkins & LaHaye.

I don't think I've seen a politician of such obvious intelligence speak since the last time I watched Clinton on TV. Even in a Canadian audience, there were two questioners who begged him to run in 2008, and I wasn't the only one calling him Mr. President. In the end, AIT is depressing not for its content but for its context - as Atrios has said, this is a film of what might have been.

Americans Don't Want Efficient Cars

One of the more pernicious myths that's harder to kill is the idea that American's don't want efficient cars, and that policies to try and shift Americans towards a greener future are doomed to fail because of that. Two data points relevant to this belief:

1: Half of Americans want hybrid cars.

The CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found 48 percent of Americans have cut back significantly on the amount they drive because of higher gas prices. The figure is 59 percent for those living in households earning less than $50,000 per year and 36 percent for those making $50,000 or more.

More than half of all Americans (54 percent) said they have reduced household spending on other items because of high gas prices.

Hybrids, meanwhile, aren't selling because of the added cost, even though 57 percent of those polled said they would seriously consider one.

That last sentence, of course, is a mistake. While some people obviously can't afford hybrids at the current premium, that's not to say that "hybrids aren't selling." There's months-long lineups for most models.

Data point 2: A used 2003 Toyota RAV4-EV was auctioned on Ebay for almost $68,000. This is the short-lived electric model that Toyota built to comply with California law. The story of the various EVs made by Ford, GM, and Toyota is a depressing one, and there's a documentary coming out called "Who Killed the Electric Car?" I would reccomend people go see it. In any case, the fact that the few remaining EVs are still floating around - and are beloved by their owners - does speak to the potential.

The Force Will Be With You. Always.

Because George Lucas will never let this franchise die. That said, my little nerd heart is squeeing like a fangirl. Via Slashdot:

In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film. That means you'll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.

This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st. International release will follow on or about the same day. Each original theatrical version will feature Dolby 2.0 Surround sound, close-captioning, and subtitles in English, French and Spanish for their U.S. release. International sound and subtitling vary by territory.

I think it's fair to say that one of the worst things Lucas did to the original trilogy with his latest (god-awful) DVD release was to put Hayden fucking Christensen in to Return of the Jedi. I know Vicki will never forgive him for that.

It would be interesting to watch the originals and the remastered ones, and decide whether or not the digital additions really make that much of a difference.

On What Planet?

(Cross-posted at Ezra Klein's.)

It's almost not worth responding to, but Matthew Yglesias points out that Andrew Sullivan is being dumb: "One thing that today's high gas prices strongly suggest is that, whatever else it was, the Iraq war was surely not about oil."

Matt already deals with the obvious: That the US - indeed, the world - has only ever been interested in the Middle East for oil, and Gulf War II is only an extension of that policy. Simply put, it's the Korb Hypothesis: "If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn't give a damn."

That said, there's a lot of obvious counter-examples that, in Sullivan's words, strongly suggest that the war did have quite a bit to do about oil. Recall Bush's speech on the eve of the war:

"And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

Now, it's tempting to see that as an innocuous statement, especially given Saddam's history of torching wells. Of course, those were Kuwaiti wells. I wonder how that statement actually played on the so-called Arab street, however.

Recall also the famously-guarded Ministry of Oil buildings. I don't even think any of this is especially malign. While I said before that I think war waged expressly for oil is an obscenity, a war in an oil-rich country must by definition take that in to account. So if war with Iraq was necessary I don't think it's irrational to plan for contingencies. As Bush said, the oil was going to be a future source of wealth for the Iraqi people.

Of course, we know now that a) the war was entirely unnecessary, a point even Sullivan needs to concede, and b) this administration was never that big on contingency planning anyway. Which leaves us with the question: Why the single-minded focus on protecting the precious, precious oil?

I leave that one for Andy.

Sometimes You Don't Get The Joke

And sometimes, it's because you are the joke.

The last time we saw Richard Cohen, he was proudly bragging about his own stupidity. No, really. These days, he's decided that he's fit to lecture us all on how dreadfully unfunny and rude Stephen Colbert was at Saturday night's WHCA dinner. (Seriously. Watch the video. Judge for yourself.)

First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy. This is well known in certain circles, which is why, even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to "say something funny" -- as if the deed could be done on demand.

Can't you just hear Milhouse's voice, plaintively screeching "My mom says I'm cool!"

The commentary, though, is also what I do, and it will make the point that Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

So it was rude of Colbert to mock the President in a situation where the President couldn't respond? How about when the President mocks the dead, as he did when he was a Presidential candidate? The dead, after all, are prevented from responding to attacks far more surely than the President of the United States.

How about when the President mocks the dying, as he did in 2004? The soldiers who continue to die in Iraq (2400 and counting, now) and the civilians who die in far larger numbers are dying for a war based on lies, and this President has the gall to mock them all. Even if they'd been at the 2004 dinner, they could not respond. They're dead.

But to Richard Cohen, it was Colbert who was taking advantage of Commander Codpiece's "sense of decorum or tradition or civility". Even if you grant this is true, why not? I actually agree with Cohen in one sense - Colbert wasn't especially funny. Some of his lines died on delivery, and he flubbed one joke. So what? Colbert wasn't trying to make the press laugh, and he especially wasn't trying to humour the jackass sitting two seats down from him. Colbert's most honest line of the night was "I have nothing but contempt for these people."

Colbert's objective - and it was obvious to anyone not blinded by their own egos being trampled - was to puncture the sense of coziness between the Press and the White House. Cohen says that Colbert wasn't being brave, because no possible consequence could have befallen him for his remarks at the WHCA.

Stop right there for a moment - anti-Bush celebrities have been getting death threats since 9/11. So to say that Colbert is risking nothing in Bush's America is an offensive lie, and Cohen knows it. He just thinks that the Dixie Chicks deserved their trouble.

But let's grant Cohen's argument - that Colbert is unlikely to be killed, or face any consequence for his monologue. That doesn't make it not brave. There is a certain bravery in pointing out other people's cowardice, after all. This was the point to Colbert's most cutting line of the night:

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

What pisses off Cohen so much is that a comedian - a comedian! - managed to unmask the nasty, festering incest between the Press and the White House, in a way that makes it impossible to ignore: The WHCA is the perfect icon of that same cozy relationship, after all.

The reason this is so offensive to Cohen is quite simple: He thinks this is the way things oughta be. He's okay with the Press, the government, and big business colluding to control what people say in to the cameras, where the little people might hear things they're not supposed to. Colbert broke the cardinal rule of a White House function (aside from asking why the US invaded Iraq, I mean): He - just for a moment, sadly - disrupted the narrative that the Press and the State work so hard to build and preserve. This is why Colbert needs to be silenced and ignored by the major press, just as Helen Thomas has been ignored.

Had Colbert done this in 2002, he'd be talking about how Bush stole Florida. And Cohen would be tut-tutting away, asking why he was so rude to bring up ancient history like that.

Lets Get The Party Started

Wow. Even Pink is getting in on the Bush-bashing songwriter ticket.

Who'd a thunk that the Dixie Chicks would have stumbled on such a lucrative business model?

To get a taste of the lyrics to "Dear Mr. President":

Let me tell you bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way
Let me tell you bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away
Let me tell you bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box
Let me tell you bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
You don't know nothing bout hard work

Via The Reaction.

For a small commission, no doubt

Verbatim Glenn Reynolds, via Atrios:

Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we'd be called imperialist oppressors, then.

As Tim Lambert writes, "Yeah, because that's pretty much the way it worked out in Iraq."

Now, there's multiple levels of stupidity going on here, but the most important and salient stupidity is this: The pumps are already at full speed. Anyone who thinks that the Iranians and Saudis aren't pumping at full tilt is a moron. Forget OPEC's statements - if prices were under OPEC's control, they'd still be at $25 a barrel - $30, tops. Until relatively recently (pre-2000), $40 was considered a dangerously destabilizing price for oil. (This was incredibly self-serving of the westerners who decide these things.) Whether you favour structural explanations (Chinese and Indian demand) or more financial ones (western speculation) the fact is at the moment the price is out of Riyadh and Tehran's hands.

More offensive is a sentence quoted by Reynolds, from a Max Boot editorial:

Of the top 14 oil exporters, only one is a well-established liberal democracy — Norway. Two others have recently made a transition to democracy — Mexico and Nigeria. Iraq is trying to follow in their footsteps. That's it. Every other major oil exporter is a dictatorship — and the run-up in oil prices has been a tremendous boon to them.

Memo to Max Boot, from Canada, the UK, and Netherlands (the number 10, 11, and 13 oil exporters): Fuck you too, douchebag. If we bump out the EU from the CIA's rank, then the US is the number 14 exporter, giving us 5 liberal democracies in Boot's odd choice of the top 14. Expanding to the top 20 would include Italy, Australia, Belgium, and South Korea, meaning that almost half of the top 20 exporters would be democratic nations.

(In the interests of fairness, Boot is probably using this chart from the EIA. I have no explanation for why the lists are so different, though I suspect that some of the smaller producers may have dropped off from production decline.)

Somehow, I don't think Boot was really interested in contrary evidence. After all, you can't build a case for counterproductive policies by claiming to be impoverishing Australia.

In the meantime, there are some unilateral steps we can take: Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ease restrictions on building new refineries and pipelines. Eliminate the 57-cent-a-gallon tariff on ethanol imports made from Brazilian sugar cane. Increase federal funding for research and rollout of fossil-fuel substitutes such as hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol (produced from grasses and agricultural waste) and plug-in electric engines.

I'm truly amazed at the longevity of ANWR in Republican circles. Honestly. Here's a pristine piece of wilderness that could be ruined by drilling, produce a likely negligible amount of oil (most of which will likely be shipped to Japan anyway), and won't start producing for a decade anyway. And that's if we started drilling today.

It's not actually a mystery, however. The fact is Alaskan oil production is in decline, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) was a huge expense incurred by the major oil companies. There's an obvious incentive for them to keep TAPS going as long as possible, including drilling ANWR.

Ugh. Creeping Fascism Alert.

Sorry, I didn't get you anything for "Loyalty Day."

Loyalty Day is also a time for us to reflect on our responsibilities to our country as we work to show the world the meaning and promise of liberty. The right to vote is one of our most cherished rights and voting is one of our most fundamental duties. By making a commitment to be good citizens, flying the American flag, or taking the time to learn about our Nation's history, we show our gratitude for the blessings of freedom.

What any of this tripe has to do with the Republican idea of Loyalty(tm) is beyond me.

The Humour Behind Historical Illiteracy

You know, if they were capable of it I'd say the war hawks had started being ironic. John Kenneth Galbraith's body isn't even cold yet, and they've started advocating for massive, WWII-style strategic bombing (among other destructive paths.) Galbraith, of course, was one of the men who, after WWII ended in Europe, showed that the bombing campaigns waged by the allies did remarkably little to slow German industry. In fact, the Germans were harmed to a far greater effect by the incompetence of their own leaders.

Arthur C. Clarke (himself only barely this side of the reaper's blade) once said that good ideas go through three phases: 1) "That's impossible!" 2) "Well, it might work, but it'd be a waste of time." 3) "I said it was a great idea all along!" The concept of large-scale strategic bombing should have gone through the opposite process by now.

After WWI, there was a great deal of theorizing that said the next war would be fought almost entirely from the air, and belligerent air forces would destroy the enemy's industry and military power without requiring large armies. (This motive - not requiring the personnel that modern militaries inevitably do - is a common one, especially for democracies.) The experience of WWII showed how difficult this was in practice. Literally hundreds of thousands of planes of every describable form and function battled across the skies of Europe and the Pacific, and in the case of Germany (as Galbraith's work showed) did surprisingly little. In Japan, the results were a bit more favourable (if that's what you want to call the firebombing of Tokyo) for the airpower theorists, but still the Japanese resisted remarkably long - and the weapon that ended the war was not the massed squadrons of the RAF or the 8th Air Force, but the single bomb dropped by the Enola Gay.

Nevertheless, the actual history of the effectiveness of strategic bombing from WWII and on shows a remarkable lack of effectiveness, in terms of actual industrial harm done. This led to the obscenity of the Vietnam-era bombing campaigns, where the actual "effectiveness" excuse was dropped, and the stated aim was simply to cause the civilian population and the North Vietnamese leadership enough death and destruction to "bring them to the table." Hm.. mass destruction used as a negotiating tactic, all to spare the US the embarassment of military defeat. And it failed even at that.

So far: Strategic bombing: 0. Reality: Much, much more.

The advent of precisiong-guided munitions briefly rehabilitated the idea of the solider-less war: witness the euphoria after the first Gulf War, when some said that from now on the US wouldn't need to actually invade anywhere. Kosovo seemed to be the cornerstone to this myth - the idea that war could now be won without risk. But Iraq has shown once again how little airpower actually means when it comes to a ground war. You can't fight an urban war with strategic bombing, if only because you'll be bombing your own troops.

If history had any sense, we'd have finally gotten to the first of Clarke's three points - "that's impossible!" - but instead we keep oscilatting between "that's brilliant" and "it's a waste". Meanwhile, we keep killing innocent people from the air.

Okay, I guess it's not that humorous after all.

And I'm Back

...and may I just say Uhaul sucks.

That said, my computer is finally hooked up, I'm settling in nicely with the next big phase of my life: Post-university, co-dwelling with my girlfriend. Scary stuff, I assure you.

It might take me a while to get all the way back to speed, but please bear with me.

In the meantime, if you haven't already go to Youtube and watch the Stephen Colbert speech from the White House Correspondents Dinner. It's gold.