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

Try to read this TomDispatch...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Chinese state failing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My blog should just point to ever XKCD strip ever

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

A note to our American cousins

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

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

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

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

Conservative FAIL.

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

Like the universal gravitational constant, only funnier

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

Krugman on econ

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

Nevertheless, worth reading.

Then and now

Tom Tomorrow.

This is kind of what I'm talking about

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

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

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

Oh man...

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

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

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

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

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

See Dana Goldstein at Tapped as well.

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

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

Somebody call the waaaaahmbulance

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

I have yet to discover the downside to this scenario.

H/T to Greg.

I'm on a boat!

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

The intersection of rights and community

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

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

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

Links, getcher links here

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

For reals this time?

Colour me unimpressed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When do we start the clock?

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

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

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

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

Former Attorney General FAIL

Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this blog has sucked a bit more than usual lately

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did I mention the job bit?

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

Heard something about this on the news...

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

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

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

Quick shots

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

There's virtue in brevity

Kevin Drum:

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

Me, a few years back:

[thousands of words to say about as much]

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

Tab-clearing

This smelled like garbage from the beginning.

A robot's Passover.

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

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

Lawrence Solomon writes something non-crazy.

Heh. His name is "Guinan".

And he's a space scientist! NEEEEEERRD.

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

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

Baby steps

Fake Nobelist Paul Krugman writes:

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

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

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

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

This blog sucks

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

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

Authenticity in SF

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against dog-whistles

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

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

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

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

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

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

I doubt your sincerity

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

The shooting happened Sunday morning on Tunnel Road.

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

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

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

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

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

Going to the wall for 6,000 people?

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

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

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

Blogging without self-indulgence is like water without wet

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

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

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

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

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

Tab-clearing

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

George Lucas ruined this young man's life.

Colour-tunable OLEDs can match sunlight's feel.

Climate change will cause civilization to collapse.

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

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

Happiness, now in blog form

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

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

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

In praise of the National Post

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

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



Meanwhile, the Globe headline sticks to the known facts:



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sun Rises in the East

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

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

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

The numbers are out. Or in. Or something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your media at work

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

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

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

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

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

What I did this weekend, then weirdness

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

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

V: Where are the car keys?

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

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

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

V: Uh, go back to sleep.

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

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

Wowzers

Fox News everybody:

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

Charles Lindbergh died too soon, it seems.

Morning links

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

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

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

Ur doin it wrong

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

1) Neato, a robotic horse powered by biofuels.

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

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

Holy crap

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

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

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

Are we feeling proud yet?

Canada is back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Canada Day, everyone

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

Smitherman balks

The rumour is that when Ontario's minister of Energy and Infrastructure was confronted with the cost estimates for the new nuclear build, he suffered a severe case of sticker shock. For the nuclear reactors themselves, it may very well be terminal:

The Government of Ontario today announced that it has suspended the competitive RFP to procure two replacement nuclear reactors planned for the Darlington site....

Only the submission from AECL was compliant with the terms of the RFP and the objectives of the Government. However, concern about pricing and uncertainty regarding the company's future prevented Ontario from continuing with the procurement at this time.

This makes Ontario the latest in a long line of jurisdicions that have abandoned nuclear when they get a look at the bill.

Deep thought

The United States produced about as much oil in the month that Barack Obama was elected President as it did in the month that the Empire of Japan surrendered on the deck of the battleship Missouri.

Oil went way up after WWII in the US, then it came waaaay down. Despite being the wealthiest country on Earth, the Americans have not been able to cheat basic geology. Is anybody optimistic that the rest of the world can? Do you trust the dynamism, intelligence and accountability of the Saudi royal family?

Things I won't be doing

1) Changing my blog template, font, or background color green to "show solidarity" with Iranian protesters. It's ridiculous to argue that I need to demonstrate my belief that elections should be fair and people shouldn't be killed by the state. More than that, I'm not so narcissistic as to believe that my actions are what's important here.

2) Changing my Twitter or Facebook picture to some shade of green. See above.

3) Getting exercised over the fact that the President of the United States took a question from a blogger. Dana Milbank is a fucking idiot. Hey Dana: if the question was planted, why didn't Obama answer it? Moron.

The Ontario Tories have a new leader

And he's a piece of work, no doubt about it. But I'd like to interject something to the Liberals all high-fiving each other, celebrating the return of a harder, nastier form of Conservative leader. (Libs have been celebrating "getting to run against Mike Harris again.")

1) Mike Harris beat you. Twice.

2) Mike Harris has been out of office for more than 7 years. Perhaps he is no longer a relevant political opponent? Perhaps those of us who live in this Province hope, maybe in vain, that our government would have had a new idea between now and then?

Woah

Michael Jackson's Thriller was probably the first song I ever listened to repeatedly - our house had a copy of the record. And now the dude's dead.

The world feels different, somehow.

Well said

Flocons and I disagree frequently about union tactics, but he's absolutely right: at a time when -- to pick only the most obvious example -- Iranian protesters can't even get a fair election, it's a privilege to be squabbling over a garbage or liquor store strike[1].

To dissent slightly in a way that I don't think he'll disagree with, there are plenty of serious First World problems that actually do need action. See, for example, this:

With unabated greenhouse gas emissions, the world faces a growing risk of ”abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts”. This is one of the conclusions in a scientific synthesis report released Thursday.

Based on more than 1,400 studies presented at a congress in March in Copenhagen that attracted some 2,000 scientists from more than 70 countries, the report presents the newest scientific evidence that has emerged, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report came out in 2007....

”Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of serious impacts, including the crossing of tipping points, and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult and costly,” the report warns.

[1] Seriously, people in this town are treating an LCBO strike as if there's a war coming.

The dilemma for the Right

Harper is dangerous to the Canadian left because he gets this dynamic (even if it's different in Canada), and has been far more successful at locking up the nutters:

The country is getting increasingly less white — and that might be the biggest problem facing the GOP right now. Ronald Reagan could afford to suffer losses among blacks and Hispanics and still win. John McCain couldn't. As The New York Times' John Harwood recently noted, McCain won the same percentage of the white vote that Ronald Reagan did in 1980 — and lost.

No matter how you cut the numbers, they're devastating for the GOP. Consider this fact from Gallup: Since 2001, Republicans have lost votes in every demographic group except churchgoers. And the party is sucking for air among young voters; Obama beat McCain by 35 points among voters under the age of 30.

If Republicans don't find a way to appeal to future generations of voters soon, they could be lost for decades; research shows that if young voters support the same party in three consecutive elections, they're likely to keep doing so for the rest of their lives.

"We can't go through another presidential election where we lose the youth, lose women and lose minorities and think we're going to get to a majority," said McCarthy.

The Ontario provincial Conservatives, I'd wager, will not be so successful.

My life's ambition

You know, it makes me happy to know that whatever else I might do in life, somewhere in hell Richard Nixon is gonna be bothered by any kids I have.

Seriously, dude had issues. Interracial kids should be aborted?

Compare and contrast

It looks like Chet basically called it right on the strike, but one of the things I'm surprised about is the particular gripe that I'm not seeing: you'll recall that during the last TTC strike it was alleged that the TTC was causing a threat to public health by impeding the flow of nurses from their homes to work. I was, lets say, unimpressed with the logic in this position.

Nevertheless, it was explicitly part of the reason that the TTC was legislated back to work so quickly.

Now, however, you have increasing problems of illegal dumping of household wastes in places like public parks which is in actual fact a clear and present public health threat, and yet people are more angry at the idea that somewhere, somehow city workers are getting 3 weeks of sick days.

Gee, it couldn't be that the people who thought the TTC was putting us all at risk of getting the bubonic plague were simply grasping at straws for a simple-minded justification as to why organized labour should lose a basic right? Could it?

Oh well

Nope, that data ain't coming back.

Balls.

Gah

So the reason my blogging has been so paltry as of late is that I'm working on a large article as my final assignment for my Master's degree, which has to date involved at least 5 hours of interviews with some pretty interesting people.

Last night I was consolidating the files scattered across three different hard drives when the USB drive I was using decided to cack out on me. I have, it seems, lost all of the recordings of my interviews.

Gun in mouth ---> pull trigger.

Man, I fucking hate computers. Anyone know a good service that can recover data from a corrupted USB drive?

For some, it's only ever too soon

Walter Cronkite is gravely ill, and people close to him don't expect him to pull through. Dammit.

A great idea

More like this please.

A local architect thinks it is a good idea to add a roof to the Gardiner Expressway that could be turned into a park with trees, bike paths and concession stands – while cars would zip along underneath....

"I've been appalled at the folly of taking down the Gardiner," Klein told the Star in advance of his speech. "It's about thinking innovatively, keeping it, adding on to it, renovating it, and renewing it. That's the fundamental part of the organic growth of cities."

His idea, dubbed the Green Ribbon, calls for the addition of a new level about 8 metres above the highway's elevated section from Dufferin St. to the Don Valley Parkway. Columns would be added to the side to anchor a new level, which would become a linear park stretching for 7 kilometres. The estimated costs range from $500 million to $600 million.

This would go a small, small way towards beginning to level the amount of transit space devoted to pedestrians and cyclists. If you could do the same thing to the DVP, and link it to the railpath that's being built in the west end of the city, you would have something close to a cyclists and runners highway, analogous (and in some cases, literally on top of) the motorists highways that bring them in to the city.

One thing you'd want, given the height of the Gardiner, would be a pretty roomy elevator system to bring cyclists and pedestrians up to the top.

Cars don't need pretty places, humans do.

Somehow, amazingly, it's never their fault

I'll not defend the conduct of CTV News in general, or Mike Duffy in particular, but for the love of all that's holy I wish Liberals would take their lumps like grownups.

Does it really matter how Dion was treated by CTV, particularly by Mike Duffy?

Actually, yes, particularly in a country where the RCMP might well have determined the outcome of the 2006 election, when it announced an investigation, in mid-campaign, into allegations of irregularities on the part of finance minister Ralph Goodale. It caused a sensation. The Liberals lost that election; no charges materialized.

Last October, the polls suggest the Liberal party's ascent stalled after the interview. While we cannot say if Dion's momentum would have brought his party victory, it isn't impossible.

Look, I was a fan of Dion's, but if Liberals want to know why they've lost two election in a row now, they really need to stop blaming external factors. Dion never really surpassed Harper in any meaningful way, and the big drop in his numbers came in early September, well before the Duffy interview. Indeed, it seems like the biggest impact on Dion's numbers came at the beginning of the campaign, as voters realized they might actually have to vote for the poor bastard. As for 2006, the upward movement in Tory numbers starts a week before the RCMP announcement. Dodgy, certainly, but I've never been convinced it was a primary factor in explaining the Conservative win.

Now, I'm of the opinion that the Party itself is to blame for this, for never really getting behind Dion and basically waiting for him to fail so that Iggy/Rae could have a go at it. But more than a few observers have put the failures of 2008 squarely on Dion's shoulders, so maybe they're right.

But the myth that somehow the RCMP, CTV, or some other boogeyman can explain away objectively bad politicking on the part of Liberal politicians is not helping matters. It would really help things if the Liberals would choose people of demonstrated political ability, instead of dubiously qualified academics.

A useful reminder

Or, "In which I throw the libertarians a bone".

Rob Farley has, as he puts it, "a long, largely unoriginal rumination on the state, coercion, the Odessa Steps, and Tank Man." But I think that probably the most useful thing for citizens of modern states to understand (except for the exponential function) is this:

The most common interaction we have with the state is thus; the state demands property that we regard as our own, and if we refuse to hand this property over it sends men with guns to our house. If we resist these men with guns, they imprison us. If we resist too effectively, they kill us. This is true of every modern nation-state. Liberal democracies differ from authoritarian states in that they allow us to complain loudly about the process, to minimize its arbitrariness, and to have some (very) small say in how our property is reallocated. This difference isn't trivial, but it isn't as large as normally assumed.

Vague, rambling question: The nation-state is as much a product of the technology it draws upon as anything else. Mass conscription only makes sense when armies can be armed relatively inexpensively, and bureaucracies administered easily, and both of these conditions were fulfilled during the latter half of the 19th century.

But, at least in the wealthiest countries on Earth, neither of these conditions is true anymore -- armies are expensive, and even the most ruinously expensive ones (say, the US Department of Defense) are shockingly incapable of executing political missions (say, pacifying a Southwest Asian country.) Administration, meanwhile, is also expensive and always getting more so. (Both of these assertions are contestable -- feel free to do so in the comments!)

So here's the query: are the stresses placed on western nation-states a sign that a) western nation-states are in trouble; b) all nation-states are in trouble; or c) John is reading too much in to the fiscal situation of western democracies, and the nation-state is alive and well thank you.

Bonus question for people who choose answer B: What forms of political organization could replace the nation-state, assuming the rules that Rob Farley outlines are correct -- what form of organization would be a better killing machine?

I'm personally a fan of answer A -- I think the nation-state has already undergone substantial changes in the last 150 years or so, and assimilated them more or less well. I expect it to remain a vital, healthy killing machine well into this century and beyond. (See, I can be optimistic!) However, the political situation in western democracies makes me think that younger, more reform-able nation-states such as India or Brazil may become more competitive killing-machines, on the margins, than western ones. I've written before that I suspect we haven't seen the last Big War in human history yet. We just don't know what it will look like when it comes.

How crazy? This crazy.

In a sign of growing concern in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government over US President Barack Obama's Middle East policies, Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled proposed Israeli sanctions on the US in a letter to cabinet ministers on Sunday.

In the 11-page letter, obtained by The Jerusalem Post from a minister on Monday, Peled recommends steps Israel can take to compensate for the shift in American policy, which he believes has become hostile to Israel.

"Obama's ascendance represents a turning point in America's approach to the region, especially to Israel," he wrote in the letter. "The new administration believes that in order to fight terror, guarantee stability and withdraw from Iraq, a new diplomatic slant is needed involving drastic steps to pacify the Muslim world and the adoption of a more balanced approach to Israel, including intensive pressure to stop building in settlements, remove outposts and advance the formation of a Palestinian state."

Uh.... hmm.... I... Uh...

Wow. Israeli sanctions against the United States? Boy, how effective could this be? According to this, total Israeli imports from the US in 2007 amounted to... $14.4 billion. That's just a bit more than 1/10th of one per cent of US GDP. In terms of a trading partner, Israel ranks behind India, Belgium, Switzerland, and Korea.

Meanwhile, this delusional scenario would put Israel's exports to the US in obvious risk, meaning almost half of all of Israel's trade, amounting to 1/5 of its GDP, would be threatened.

Not to mention that the IDF is totally, entirely dependent on American trade to keep (among other things) its air force flying. This proposal is just totally insane, but its a mark of what the far-right in Israel is thinking at the moment -- a ruinous trade war with the US, rather than withdrawal from the West Bank and negotiations with the countries on Israel's borders. ("Neighbours" is probably the wrong word, in this context...)

I'm not even going to go in to Peled's suggestion that Israel get involved in domestic US politics to pressure Obama... though if there were any justice right now, people would be lining up to apologize to Walt and Mearsheimer.

And, just so we're clear, Peled has a home in the governing Likud Party, not one of the further-right fringes. Who, for further clarity, have a home in the governing coalition. Yeesh.

When is privatization not?

When it's the nuclear industry, silly:

Canadian taxpayers must continue to finance AECL's commercial business even if the government moves forward with its plan to privatize the nuclear Crown corporation, a report from the C.D. Howe Institute says.

Ottawa would be expected to cover the monetary risk of regulatory delays, both in the certification of AECL's new Accelerated Candu Reactor (ACR) and in environment reviews required for the siting of plants in Canada, says the report released by the business-backed think tank.

At the same time, the government will have to underwrite the research and development costs of reactor design if AECL is to compete with international rivals, whose governments provide significant support for their nuclear companies.

Lemon socialism at its finest -- privatize the rewards, socialize the risks. Kind of funny to see the CD Howe Institute come out in favour of further subsidies. Aren't they usually pro-market?

Politico: still written by the stupid, for the stupid

Lead story on Politico:

In a nearly 6,000-word address Thursday extending an olive branch to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama managed never to utter the one word that comes to mind most often when many Americans think about Islam: terrorism.

Uh, he mentioned al Qaeda a bunch, spoke about September 11th, and declared that the Palestinians need to give up violence and adopt non-violent means of protest. But no, he didn't use the word "terrorism". For this, you clear A1?

Okay, maybe the Internet isn't the future of journalism after all.

It's a sickness

Like Atrios, I've started getting hooked on reading the comment pages of my local newspaper.

I can't stand Miller, BUT unfortunatley he will get elected again. Look on a higher level at what he's doing. He's basically getting all the young votes with the bikers, and he's getting all the immigrant votes with the protests and going to all their events and all that. And since the immigrants and young people make up the majority of the city, he's got the vote and he knows it.

Yes, it's a crying shame that Toronto happens to attract immigrants and young workers, and that elected leaders cater to the needs and desires of the majority. If only Toronto could be more like the older, more homogenous communities like Flint, MI or Youngstown, PA, we'd be set.

I'm with Royson James on this one -- the idea that Miller is going to lose the next election over the feverishly imagined "War on the Car" or some variant thereof is a joke. Yes, the last census says that driving is the dominant form of transportation in Toronto. But a rather more important metric is how many people identify as car-dependent. And guess what? Drivers are in the minority in Toronto. Only Montrealers rely on their cars less.

I have my disagreements with Miller, but the thing that keeps me in his defense is the mendacity and obnoxiousness of his enemies. The "War on the Car" is really "A War in defense of the people who live here", and if Miller is making the lives of suburban commuters marginally more irritating so that those of us who live, work, and play here can have substantially more enjoyable, liveable communities, I have no problem with that.

UPDATE: Oooh, actual data!

Of note on the issue of transportation, an overwhelming majority — 61 per cent versus 27 per cent — told Environics that they prefer transportation spending to go to public transit instead of roads .... Given recent rhetoric, those numbers have to be an encouraging sign to a city council moving forward on sustainable transportation issues.

But the bottom line is this: After implementing a set of controversial tax measures earlier in this term of council and while weathering a global recession, the number of Torontonians satisfied with their municipal government is identical to Mayor David Miller’s 2006 election totals.

Clearly, Miller is doomed.

Good on the Globe

Okay, so tragically they continue to publish Marcus Gee. But after running an excellent three-part series on the sad state of the Toronto Humane Society, the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has intervened with Toronto Police to investigate the claims made in the articles, as well as other claims since.

Exactly the kind of local, relevant, and effective news that will save newspapers, if anything will.

I've been remiss

I should really have written something -- anything -- about the murder of George Tiller. But others have said it better, and it's not like the Internet lacks for commentary.

I suppose the one thing I'd say is that America has been, is, and will continue to be a country where terrorism works. It worked to reverse the tender shoots of racial equality post-Civil War. It worked to keep southern blacks out of any positions of power for generations. It is working today to deny poor women the right to choose the fate of their own bodies. (Wealthy women will continue to have options when their Republican husbands leave the poor none.)

Even moderate conservatives have been pretty atrocious in the last few days. When you can't even make an unconditional declaration that murder in church is bad you've really lost the plot. But it's the hypocrisy that really angers me, as it angers Fred Clark here:

Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?

Paul Hill argued that abortion was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust -- just like the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical groups said it was. If that's true, Hill said, then he wasn't merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against abortionists. If you're confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of Adolf Hitler -- as all these groups insisted was the case -- then surely one is obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day appointing enough judges to change the law of the land. Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, he decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill's premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won't work. Hill's violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned -- as all those groups suddenly insisted he was -- it was because of the madness of that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?

What I realized then, in 1994, as I watched these groups line up to condemn violence against "mass-murderers" and to renounce armed opposition to "the Holocaust," was that these folks didn't really mean any of it. They were horrified by the spectacle of someone taking their own rhetoric and arguments seriously. "We don't really mean anything we say," these groups rushed to announce. "We don't really believe any of that."

And since they no longer bothered to claim they believed it, I stopped trying to believe it too.

You cannot regularly compare your political opponents to Nazis, mass-murderers, and genocidaires and then demand that the rest of us believe your words are without consequence.

And this isn't over. Listen to this video, especially starting at 05:15 :

The same voices that are cheering Tiller's death in private will cheer the next death, and the next one, and the next one.

Things I'm not angry about

The size of our federal deficit.  In a recession, a deficit is normal and even healthy.  And while the deficit is large in absolute terms, in proportion to GDP it's not even close.  A $50 billion deficit is roughly 3.5% of our GDP, which was the kind of accomplishment that Martin and Chretien celebrated when they managed to bring federal spending that low. It may not be a great long-term position, but nobody thinks that's what this is -- when employment and GDP growth pick up again, the deficit will shrink naturally.

Similarly, in terms of % of GDP Canada's deficit isn't that far from Ontario's current deficit:  According to the headlines today, Ontario will run an $18 billion deficit this year.  Ontario being 40% of Canada's GDP, that works out to the equivalent of running... a $45 billion deficit nation-wide.  Liberals who are unconcerned about Ontario's deficit don't have much ground to criticize Harper.  And Conservatives who aren't concerned about Canada's deficit have absolutely no basis to criticize McGuinty.

Now, the size of the deficit isn't the only thing that matters -- it's how we got here, and how we get out that matters more. Here, I'm in the "pox on both your houses" camp. Both McGuinty and Harper have given too much away in tax breaks, though Harper has been more egregious on this count. And looting the commonweal, as Harper proposes to do, is the worst form of false economy: coming out of a recession we'll be left with fewer tools at our disposal to build the sustainable economy we need.

I'll also state that neither Ontario nor Canada have covered themselves in glory, given that large chunks of this deficit are the direct result of the decision to throw piles of money at the auto sector, in the vain hope that an industry that's shed tens of thousands of jobs over the years will continue to shed jobs at a slightly slower pace.

All that said, McGuinty at the very least is spending money -- and crucially, encouraging others to spend money in a big way -- on new green energy projects, which have a better chance of bringing us out of this slump than most other sectors.

Shut up, that's why!

Marcus Gee, who in two columns has vaulted in to top contention for the worst urban columnist at a major newsdaily, graces us all with his opinion on Toronto's 5 cent plastic bag tax. This is basically a no-brainer kind of policy: retailers tend to offer free bags because it's something consumers have gotten used to, but it has all sorts of costs. Retailers, obviously, bear a direct cost of providing something for "free". More stores would charge for bags, except for the fear that they would lose out to competitors if they did so.

So the first beneficiaries -- before we even get to the letter E in environment -- are businesses. And lo, Gee can't even get that right:

There is more sanctimony than sense behind this rule, which took effect Monday and which will require even the hard-pressed corner store guy to post signs explaining the five-cent charge.

The sign, whatever it costs, will cost less than one month's order of the "free" plastic bags. In a recession, especially for small retailers, lifting the cost of bags off of the balance sheet could make a difference. I work for a large retailer, and without giving away trade secrets I can say it makes a difference for us. Smaller stores, operating on smaller margins, ought to do even better. Given that retailers are free to keep the five cents per bag, and plastic bags cost less than five cents, this is basically a win for small businesses.

Okay, but then there's the environmental aspect of things. And here, Gee goes from wrong to nonsense:

Yet plastic bags are already one of the most heavily recycled items around. People use them to line garbage bins, which means they don't have to buy garbage bags at the store. They use them for kids' school lunches. They use them to pick up after their dogs. In short, plastic bags are darned useful – so useful that most people keep a stash of them somewhere in the kitchen or the broom closet, ready to grab....

What is more, says a city report, “plastic bags do not degrade significantly over time and therefore this volume of plastic bags will persist if landfilled.”

But that is one of the plastic bag's virtues. Sitting inert in a landfill, it doesn't decompose and let off methane gas that could escape into the atmosphere or degrade and poison the soil.

A few things to unpack here:

1) Regular readers will know my skepticism of mainstream economics, but even I can figure out that if you give a bunch of people Good X for free, the demand for X will be high. And if X can reasonably be substituted for some other purposes, even imperfectly, that would otherwise cost, then people will use X. Gee sees a bunch of uses for the free plastic bag, and assumes that those uses are inherent to the plastic-ness, instead of the free-ness.

2) These bags -- especially (hopefully!) those used to line garbage cans and pick up dog feces -- are not being re-used that many times. I pack my lunch in them, you get two or three uses out of them before the holes start to form and you have to pitch them anyway. Yes, they're useful. No, that doesn't stop them -- like most of our plastics -- from ending in a landfill.

3) This is rather important: not all of our plastics are sequestered in a landfill. Indeed, much of it makes it to our rivers and lakes, from there eventually to the oceans. Gee is allegedly a journalist -- should he maybe have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? The North Atlantic has its own counterpart in the Sargasso Sea, and given that Toronto sits along one of North America's premier waterways -- and owes its existence to a direct route to the Atlantic -- it's not unreasonable to think that maybe we ought to minimize our plastic use.

We then arrive at the third and final act of this mediocrity:

So the main problem – if there is one – is the space it takes up in the ground.

But is that really such an insuperable hurdle? Since the city bought the Green Lane landfill site near London, it has had a backstop for the landfill sites in Michigan that it used to rely on so heavily. Toronto now has landfill space until at least 2024 or 2025, more than enough time to find new sites, even taking into account the huge regulatory and not-in-my-backyard difficulties. If Ontario has anything in abundance, it is space.

Right, and Toronto is so beloved by the other communities in this province -- who would never dream of making fun of us for our lack of winter preparedness, for that matter -- that they'll be happy to take our trash, ad infinitum, for a few smiles and a handshake. Oh, and of course we'll magically be able to transport our trash to these cheap, magical new dumps north of Sudbury, without cost or carbon emissions.

And I'd like a pony.

But all of Gee's column is an excercise in magical thinking. Plastic bags should be free! Why? Because shut up, that's why! And garbage doesn't cause any problems? How? Because shut up, that's how! And we'll always be able to find more places to dump our trash! Where? Shut up, that's where!

It's true that plastic bags are a small part of the overall municipal waste stream. But charging for them isn't just symbolic -- it's a cost-free way to let businesses run smarter and reduce the environmental impact of daily shopping. And if we can make this work, then yes, let's take on the disposable drinks and bottled water while we're at it. So you've got to wonder: what's not to love?

Actually, scratch that. You've got to wonder: why is Marcus Gee getting paid by the Globe and Mail?

Nuclear: still too expensive to matter

Shockingly, the much-heralded, little-witnessed "nuclear renaissance" isn't happening so much, in the real world.