Tangible steps... hmm...

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

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

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

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

Taking a page from Atrios' book

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

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

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

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

Okay, awesome

Best President ever? Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

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

Try to read this TomDispatch...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Chinese state failing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My blog should just point to ever XKCD strip ever

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

A note to our American cousins

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

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

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

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

Conservative FAIL.

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

Like the universal gravitational constant, only funnier

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

Krugman on econ

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

Nevertheless, worth reading.

Then and now

Tom Tomorrow.

This is kind of what I'm talking about

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

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

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

Oh man...

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

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

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

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

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

See Dana Goldstein at Tapped as well.

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

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

Somebody call the waaaaahmbulance

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

I have yet to discover the downside to this scenario.

H/T to Greg.

I'm on a boat!

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

The intersection of rights and community

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

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

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

Links, getcher links here

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

For reals this time?

Colour me unimpressed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When do we start the clock?

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

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

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

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

Former Attorney General FAIL

Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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