DON’T BUY MICROSOFT PRODUCTS
DON’T BUY MICROSOFT PRODUCTS

DON’T BUY MICROSOFT PRODUCTS

(and yes, this includes xbox… it may be “ok” for now but just imagine they control that market too)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6263616.stm

Yeah, it’s not surprising.  Any cynic could have predicted that from the very start of this whole mess.  But it heightens my dislike of anything “republican”.  In my mind the term is synonymous with viciously crooked lying thugs with no respect for the law.  I cannot respect anyone who calls themselves a republican or associates themselves with that party.  Period.

Major kudos go out to John Edwards and Barack Obama for spurning FOX “news”.  It’s nice to see FOX finally being rewarded with the marginalization it has so long deserved.

What a dilemma they must face.  On the one hand, they want to complain about how the Iranians treated the captured UK prisoners.  But on the other hand, the tactics the Iranians used were less harsh than those the White House argued it should be able to use against detainees.

Thankfully I’m sure by now they’re already used to stretching the truth and twisting facts and holding steadfastly to double standards.  But man, that must be tiring.

So the reason I really like the GPLv2 is exactly that it allows everybody to be selfish and not having to really believe in any other politics. We can all be selfish and do things that make sense for ourselves, and it really boils down to a very simple equation: “I will get more effort out of other people working on it too, than I have to give back.”

And yes, you can be a free-loader, and not do anything at all, but on the other hand, if you do that you don’t really “cost” anything to any of the people who truly help in development, and you also won’t actually get your specific needs looked at. So to get the most out of the whole process, you really do end up having to help with the process yourself.

That’s a kind of beauty, to me. People are encouraged to chip in and help, not because of some political agenda, or because they try to be “good people,” but simply because it helps themselves more than not chipping in and helping would. That’s what I would call “positive feedback!” — Linus Torvalds

I think “positive feedback” is a really lame term for the awesome effect he described. Instead I would describe this effect as “systemic self-enforcing behavioral incentives providing a socially net positive outcome”. It’s a rare effect, but totally awesome when harnessed — you don’t need a complicated bureaucracy or reliance on assuming people or organizations will play nice.

I’d like to see politicians and other organizational leaders to target this effect broadly across society as an alternative to traditional approaches. If by design the self-interested actions of various members can lead to co-operation and mutual benefit without need for heavy-handed central management or irrational hope for goodwill… that would be a huge win.

I have to admit… this effect is a large reason why I love free software.

What makes anyone think that more troops would make much of an improvement in Iraq?  In my opinion, no amount of soldiers can stop suicide bombers looking to massacre pretty much anyone outside their religion.You guard the pipelines, they bomb the police station.  You guard the police station they bomb the hospital.  You guard the hospital they bomb the market.  You guard the market they bomb the mosques.  You guard the mosques they bomb the bus stations.  You guard the bus stations they bomb cafés.

It seems to me that unless you’re talking about instituting a police state, no amount of troops will be effective against the sort of violence inherent to this new worldwide trend of Islamic murder and thuggery.

It’s been a long time since I last shared my thoughts on this here humble weblog.  And I know what you’ve all been thinking: what does the venerable Worse Than Hitler weblog think about Iraq?  Well fret no longer, because that’s the topic of the day!

There has been much ballyhoo about the troop levels in Iraq.  Two of the most common trains of thought are either “we should increase troop levels to increase stability” or “we should decrease troop levels as they are a destabilizing force”.  Both of these positions ignore the reality of the effect that the presence of US troops have in the region.

The enemy that the US faces right now is one that uses “terrorist” tactics.  That is to say they use suicide bombs, hit-n-run, attacking civilians and anyplace vulnerable no matter how incidental they are to the actual target.  These are the tactics of an enemy who has very little strength or real power, it is a misnomer to conflate this type of activity with a full out civil war.

It seems to me that the reason these people are acting out of a position of weakness is because of the presence of the US troops.  A traditional civil war could not happen right now as it would be crushed in infancy by the obviously more powerful US forces.  So instead they lay back and snipe at each other and retreat into the darkness, creating martyrs to repay the actions in kind on another day.

Increasing the troop levels does nothing to address this fundamental nature of the existing conflict.  Throwing more people at the existing problem just means that the murderers on either side will resort to killing more and more incidental targets.  They really don’t seem to care, hitting mosques and bus stops and red crescent agencies.  It would be impossible to actually affect serious change with more troops unless they install the same sort of authoritarian police state that they are nominally trying to replace in Iraq.

So it seems to me that the existing troops are probably preventing a massively destructive full out civil war, but that they are unable to realistically curb the sort of violence that occurs on a daily basis in Iraq.  Would a short but devastating conflict be any better than the long protracted period of smaller scale random violence the current strategy is provoking?

I’m glad I don’t have to actually be the one to decide how to fix this, and can just smugly sit back and say “I told you so” to the morons who thought going into Iraq was a good idea to start with.  Though, it’s not really all that much comfort.

This BBC reporter seems positively giddy with the news that Palestinians are using crowds as human shields to protect houses that the Israeli military warns to evacuate before airstrikes.  If you think that story shows its bias too strongly, you can only imagine what he sounded like on the radio telling the same story… practically cheering them on.

Regardless, it seems to miss an incredibly basic point.  What precisely does this accomplish?  Think in terms of the completely forseeable conclusion.  You know, when the one where the Israeli military stops warning militants to clear out?  Oops, I spoiled the ending, you were supposed to guess that part.

The phrase “guilty until proven innocent” conveys horrible images of trials in authoritarian countries like the USSR or China, where the accused has to prove their innocence.  The sad part is, it’s impossible to prove innocence in nearly all cases.  Enter on stage right, Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper!  Not just for the USSR or China anymore, coming soon to a Canada near you!

The sentiment of the bill, trying to keep repeat sexual or violent offenders off the streets is a worthy goal.  However that is absolutely no excuse for the sort of authoritarian precedent this sets for Canadian law.  The “three strikes” law where you are automatically jailed for life on your third offense isn’t ideal either, but at least in that case you don’t have mock trials of people trying to prove they are not dangerous.  How on earth is one to prove they are not dangerous, anyhow?  The concept is truly absurd.

People who said “what’s so bad about Harper?”: I told you so.  Now we finally see the wolf that has been hiding in sheep’s clothing for so long, and it’s just as bad as the naysayers feared.

Last night saw the realization of what should have been obvious: your actions do not occur in a vacuum.  That is to say, your actions (or inactions) have consequences for other parties, and if you try to anticipate those consequences you can influence the future behaviour of other parties.

For example: let’s say you name three countries as the “axis of evil”.  Let’s suppose then you attack one of those three countries without provocation, and you’ve already used up any potential leverage from sanctions against the remaining two.  These actions, whatever their merit may or may not be, cause a wholly predictable reaction — the remaining two countries will have to do whatever it takes to prevent you from invading them as well.

It is not shocking in the slightest that North Korea and Iran are developing a nuclear arsenal.  In fact if you consider their perspective it is the only logical action they can take.  So when President Alracistasshole of Iran claims to be pursuing a pacifist nuclear program, he’s either lying or insane for not doing the one thing that could prevent a future invasion.

This is not to justify the morality of North Korea’s nuclear program — fact is I’m scared out of my wits that such a crazy person has access to a nuke.  Just that if world leaders had considered the logical consequences of how their actions would be received this problem could have been avoided.  When you back someone into a corner you give them a reasonable way out, and when you take extreme action you give a very clear explanation of why you acted this way.

If your actions are predictable than the other parties can know what steps they can and cannot do to avoid negative consequences for themselves.  But if your own actions are unpredictable, say by invading countries based on false evidence for short-term political gain, the other parties have to assume the worst
of you and prepare for such.  This is not complicated, indeed it is quite obvious.  Yet again and again we return to the same situation where truly unfortunate situations present themselves that did not have to be, in fact should never have been.

Yes, that’s right: the Republicans in Congress have agreed on a ‘compromise’ which allows a tribunal established under the authority of the President, using whatever criteria or definition it wants (because the law, while it refers to the Military Commissions Act of 2006 does not apply its rules to the tribunal) to declare anyone to be an enemy combatant for any reason it desires, and takes away that person’s right to sue to challenge their detention. — Bound in a Nutshell

[update] the author of that post wrote in a comment here that he’s now updated his entry to reflect that it’s not quite as bad as it seems — it only affects non-US citizens.  Thankfully we don’t know any of those right?  Those guys totally won’t know what hit them, SUCKERS!

One thing I haven’t seen much press on in the coverage of the recent coup in Thailand is why the military needed to intervene in the affairs of a democratically elected government.  I heard from some guy at work that there was an election there scheduled in November but was unable to confirm this — if true that means this coup was not about corruption at all but simply because they were unwilling to accept the likely results of the upcoming election.  That’s pretty scary.  Then again, when are coups not scary?

Can we like, roll back time to 2000 and replace Al Gore 1.0 with the current version and rerun the election?  Please?  Pretty please?

In his latest major speech, Gore hit two of my pet issues squarely on the nose: domestic payroll taxes and emissions taxes.   This man should be president.

Miss me?

To celebrate my return, here is a picture of Margaret Thatcher with a hilter mustache.

One thing that really interests me is how living in urban centres distances ourselves from the social constraints that you would have in smaller groups.  For example: in a tribe of 100 people, if you do something antisocial like let your dog poop everywhere everyone else will treat you like garbage.  But in a large urban society, those societal pressures don’t really apply for better or for worse — the good or bad things you do that would be rewarded or punished in a smaller setting are just ignored.  If your dog poops on the sidewalk you just move on, and you don’t really have to worry ever seeing anyone again even if they give you a nasty look when you walk away.

This has a lot of implications, for example how small town people don’t like “big government” and large cities are usually full of liberals who regulate everything.  It just makes sense in the different contexts, because in the smaller towns there is a relatively greater chance that societal pressures will be able to accomplish things that big cities require rules and regulations to accomplish.  That’s obviously just one part of it, but I digress.

What adds to that discussion is an article I ran across from South Korea, where the internets are so pervasive that the societal pressures of small groups can sometimes even apply on a larger scale.  Read this IHT article and note especially the bottom paragraphs.  Even in (assumedly) a large city, the mob rule of the internet has transformed a large city into using negative social pressure to punish someone for letting their dog poop on the sidewalk — something that would have otherwise just been anonymous.

Regardless whether you think the reaction was overboard or not (I certainly do), it has interesting (to me) implications about what this means in our society.  Is this mob rule going to replace some of the rules that we enforce today?  Instead of a $500 fine for people not cleaning up after their dogs, maybe the parks should just post photographs of offenders on a blog somewhere to get better enforcement.  Okay, maybe not.  But nonetheless it has implications for the future.

So I was listening to the radio the other day, and some Republican congressman or senator dude was talking about why he voted against the stem cell bill.  As part of his delicious slippery slope argument he said something to the effect of “if we allow this, someday we may start harvesting the organs of death row prisoners because like the discarded embryos they are going to die soon too.”

What struck me was not that his argument was dumb — I’m rather used to that by now.  Instead what struck me was that it’s considered unethical to harvesting the organs of a prisoner, but to kill them is considered ethical to this person.  The funny thing is that I have a strong suspicion that this strange ethical position is actually majoritarian, yet it makes absolutely no sense at all.  Prisoners may not have the rights to live, yet they are allowed the right to keep their organs beyond the grave.

Ken Dryden had an editorial posted on the Toronto Star the other day about Canada’s “place in the world”.  If I can rudely summarize, he places it as “Canada is the US’s polite little brother, and our primary role should be to act as a middleman because the US and the world can’t really understand each other but we understand both.”

I think he’s right.

When I ride the bus, it usually costs me $1.50 in the morning and $1.25 on the return trip — even though I’m going the same distance on the same exact route.  The reason for this is that King County Transit has decided in all their wisdom and glory that rush hour trips should cost more than non-rush hour trips.  This makes sense from a business perspective, you want to match your busiest times with your highest prices so that you can smooth out labour costs.  However, we’re not dealing with business, we’re dealing with public transit — and for this circumstance King County Transit has it completely backwards.

The point of government being involved in managing city transit is that it makes sense for a large public institution to build and provide the infrastructure that everyone can use free of charge (except for taxes).  Once the infrastructure is in place people will be able to live there, businesses will thrive, and so forth — all but the most shrill and ignorant libertarian agrees with this point of view.  And people generally accept this for roads but at least in most North American cities they are hesitant to pay for trains and buses.  The cost of roads of borne and given to the public for free, except that people wanting to use transit have to pay a monthy or trip-based user fee and for many people they except these fees to make money or at least break even.  As if this part of transit infrastructure isn’t somehow as worthy of investment compared with the relatively more inefficient road system?

But whatever, that’s the culture here and I suppose I’ve got to accept it.  But when I see them charge extra money for peak hour usage I really have to wonder: why are they trying to discourage people from going to work on the bus?  Even from the perspective of someone who never rides the bus at all, each person they can convince to train or bus or whatever will be one less person clogging the roads they use every day.  If anything, the situation should be reversed and people should pay less money to ride at rush hour, not more.  Bah.  I’ll pay the extra quarter, I don’t really care about the money all that much.  In fact I pre-paid a set of $1.50 tickets so none of this actually matters, except the principle of the thing.

I’ve been known to say that various things are the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, so much so that it’s a bit of a joke because the term has such little meaning anymore.  However.

The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard is that passports will be shipping with RFID emitters, broadcasting information out instead of passively containing information to be read.  Offhand I cannot think of a more shockingly bad misuse of technology, a glaring oversight that should be plainly obvious to any observer.

The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, coming soon to a pocket near you.

You’re calling out (albeit in a very very quiet voice): “Where can I go to find pictures of Canadian politicians hoping to gain votes by dressing up into ridiculous looking cowboy outfits?”

The answer, my friend, is here.

Sometimes I hate how gullible and lame the news media is.

“In one example, an Indian driver here said Western Union prevented him from sending $120 to a friend at home last month because the recipient’s name was Mohammed.” Yahoo quoting the AP

Oh really? So Western Union is blocking anyone who wants to send money to someone named Mohammed — or at least that’s the idea what most any person would get after reading that article. But what is in fact the case? You can’t send any money to someone named Sahir Mohammed. The difference between these two blockages is so massively different that it completely undermines the point of the article, yet the AP writer and Yahoo both got suckered into printing something that is blatantly false.

Guess what? The government doesn’t want you to wire money to someone who has the same name as someone they have linked to terrorism! Golly gee whiz, how mean of them. Those big fat meanies, how dare they try to take basic reasonable measures to try to avoid financing the people who are actively trying to kill pretty much anyone remotely associated with the non-Islamic world.

And what… you say there are lots of names with Mohammed on the watch lists? Now, whose fault is that… If you have the same name as a terrorist (or serial killer as in the Seinfeld episode from years back), your life is going to suck. Who are you going to blame, the people trying to stop terrorism or the actual frigging Sahir Mohammed bastard who got your name on the list in the first place? Meh, they’ll print anything these days.

It’s pretty easy to be baffled by how stupid the “other side” of the political debates are, especially now that the divides are so great between the left and right wing thinking in most western countries right now.  How on earth could they cling to fact thats that are so obviously wrong, etc etc — I must confess that I repeatedly come to this conclusion myself.

Lately I’ve been reading a book about the last couple of decades of research about the mass dinosaur extinction that occurred about 65M years ago.  The author goes into a lot of detail about how these groups of well-intentioned scientists completely ignored evidence to the contrary and continued to insist for years that an impact scenario was unlikely.  They would use selective evidence, ignore recent findings and pick old research data instead of new ones, quote from one part of a paper out of context and ignore the rest which contradicted their thesis — the list goes on.  Any political observer will note that this pretty much exactly the same process that “the other side” uses to construct a false argument.

If a bunch of scientists trained in logic with very little at stake in the argument beyond personal pride can ignore evidence and come to a false conclusion, is it any wonder that political arguments are even worse — especially when the stakes are much higher and personal conflicts of interest are massive?

Shawn, your comment system is broken so I’ll reply here:

US law says that the government cannot legislate away the right of Americans to own guns.  Thus even as an anti-gun advocate like myself I can’t in good faith argue that the congress should pass laws which restrict those rights — this is just as fundamentally wrong as violating any of the other legal rights granted to Americans in the constitution and amdendments.

Of course, I would wholeheartedly endorse an amendment to reverse the 2nd… ;-)  But until that happens, the NRA are right to remind people that they have the right to own firearms, just as the ACLU is right to remind people they have the other rights the government might prefer to subtract from citizens.

Canada’s always-busy Senate has a new idea: an ad free cbc tv, supported not by advertising dollars but instead by taxpayers. I have to say that I fully support this idea. I have not read the full report, but I assume that it excludes sporting events coverage so they could still afford to show Hockey Night in Canada and the Olympics. But the money that CBC currently spends on dramatic programming could be better spent funneled into existing programs to make Canadian dramas for non-CBC channels. This would leave the CBC to what it does best: news, documentaries, and non-corporate culture. More like Australia’s ABC really, or a cut down version of the BBC perhaps.

I am disappointed in the lack of editorial oversight that led to the publishing of Heather Mallick’s viewpoint article dating June 16, 2006.

She rails against usage of the term “Canadian-born” and claims that it was used to distinguish from “Canadian”, but this interpretation is obviously incorrect and CBC editorial staff should have caught this. Saying someone is “Canadian-born” distinguishes them not from Canadians, but from immigrants.

Knowing whether these accused terrorists were born in Canada or if they were immigrants is important information as we Canadians assess what the terrorist plot means for our country. If they were all immigrants, perhaps this could mean that we need to look into our immigrant screening process — yet since this was not the case we know that we have a cultural problem that is made in Canada.

This information should be glossed over and withheld from the public just because it makes certain people uncomfortable. For an informed society we need to know details so we can assess the world around us and the country we live in. CBC viewpoint ought not to be a sounding board for people who want to bury their heads in the sand because the news makes them feel politically incorrect.

Well, I suppose actually it doesn’t. DRM doesn’t really taste that good with peanut butter, after all. But like many people in this modern era, my job depends on the fact that there are provisions in place to prevent copyright infringement. Specifically something called “Digital Rights Management”, DRM vaguely describes a set of actions that someone can do to prevent digital media from being copied. The most famous negative example of this is Sony’s disturbingly stupid release of software that broke peoples Windows computers when they simply inserted an audio CD.

Activist types don’t like that, and as my friend joh3n pointed out the other day, they are all too willing to bend the truth past its breaking point in order to make DRM sound like the devil. Whether their true intent is to just get free stuff or actual moral issues about freedom of information isn’t Now, I have to concede a point — part of the argument that anti-DRM folks present is that DRM can make it hard for you to do things with your owned media that you really ought to be able to do — I am also frustrated by this. However, by using this as an example of why DRM ought to be abolished in the US is both naive and limited in perspective.

It’s naive because politically, railing against DRM is a dead end. The United States economy has evolved over the years, from manufacturing and such to now where the one thing that the US is indisputably good at is producing entertainment that the rest of the world wants. You’ll hear US music on the stations of France, see the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast in Japan. When I was in Tunisia the tour guide drivers would swap cassette tapes back and forth so half the time you’d be listening to traditional Arabic music and the other half Madonna or whatever. So it is only natural the US government would embrace policy that tries to protect the creations of the producers who make these lucrative exports. Arguing against that is as foolhardy as trying to convince the Saudis that they should stop exporting oil because it’s bad for global warming — arguably true but a fruitless and naive approach.

It’s limited in perspective because it is theoretically possible to satisfy both the demands of the media industry (they want you to not be able to share your media with others) and the demands of the public (they want to not be trapped to a specific computer, platform, etc). There is no technical reason why you couldn’t have a DRM implementation that allows for portability between platforms so you could buy your song on iTMS and play it on your car stereo on your way to work, and play the same video/song/whatever on your iPod, Mac, Windows, Linux, or even some platform that doesn’t exist yet.

So if there is no technical reason why we can’t this, why don’t we? The simple answer is because the major DRM implementations have been left in the hands of corporations who have an interest in not having these open platforms. The two biggest players in this market are Microsoft and Apple, each of which has an obvious interest in attempting to leverage the proprietary nature of their DRM implementations to provide vendor lock-in. Apple wants you to buy your music collection off iTMS which will then force you to buy an iPod if you want to have portable music. Microsoft wants to keep people locked into Windows, so they let people use any player they want but tie everything back to their Operating System moneymaker to limit people’s ability to switch away.

There is another term for the actions described in the previous paragraph: anti-competitive behaviour. Obviously for-profit corporations like Apple and Microsoft have a shareholder duty to try to maximize their various monopolistic power, but this is why governments ought to step in and legislate a limit to that power. Apple should not be allowed to force someone to buy an iPod to play back music they bought via iTMS, if someone else can make a player that conforms to the terms of the DRM but lets them play the music, that should be allowed. Likewise if someone writes a player to be able to play MS DRM content on Linux which again conforms to the rules of the DRM, this should be fully legal under the law. And to top it off, the specifications of these DRM implementations should be forcibly opened so that anyone can write a legal application on any platform they want, so you can listen to iTMS songs on your Sony Walkman and play MS DRM’d videos on platforms that don’t even exist today.

Unlike the naive banging-head-on-table-to-get-attention that anti-DRM activists are doing now, there actually are steps that could be taken to satisfy the demands of consumers with the demands of the media producing corporations. All that is required is some political will, which may not come from the current administration but is certainly feasible in the near future. Isn’t a feasible goal something better to work toward rather than complaining that the sky is blue until you are blue in the face?

Danny boy announced he is leaving CBS, being effectively forced out after “rathergate” a few years ago.  Boy did he ever get unfairly shafted over that.  The mistake he made was going to press with a document showing that Bush didn’t attend his national guard traing which was later found to be fraudulent.  But this was only discovered because the author of the fraud formatted exactly like the default ms word style that obviously wasn’t around when Bush was supposed to be keeping Texas safe from the Charlie threat.

Certainly, it’s the job of journalists to check their facts and have multiple citations of evidence before they go to press to make sure that they aren’t being scammed — especially for something as politically hot as this particular issue.  However what most people seem to skim over is that the fraudulent document was the supporting evidence.  Everyone who was actually doing their National Guard duty had no recollection of President Bush ever being there, and there was no evidence for his actual attendance even though there was ample evidence that was recorded for his fellow guards.  This was all circumstantial and not proof, but it made a compelling case.  Can you blame Rather for going with the story once he had a document that confirmed all this?

I can’t.

Apparently it is now illegal in the state of WA to give information about casinos.  I’m not going to link to the news article that describes this new law, because doing so may in itself be illegal.

I bet you think I’m joking.

It’s an argument I hear a lot — why isn’t the Liberal Party of Canada “one member one vote”? Well, it shouldn’t be. Politically motived people always like to argue that their pet scheme ought to be the one that is used to pick the leader of their party. The LPC picks their based on a strange and terrible delegate system, the main US parties base theirs on what people in Iowa and New Hamshire think for some horrible reason, and the old Reform party of Canada used to implement one member one vote. All of these ideas are suboptimal for choosing the leader of a political party.

Why? Because it’s not the way that voters will select a leader in the actual election. Canada does not have a “one citizen one vote” system, it’s a FPTP plurality system by riding. The United States does not choose their leaders based on how NH and IA vote, it’s decided by a per-state value setting awared to the largest majority in each state. And the way that you should choose your leader is exactly the same. I’ll tell you why.

A very good example of this is the story of the Reform Party of Canada, as it existed a few years ago. As I said a few paragraphs ago, they had the fabled “one member one vote” system that some people think is so brilliant. But how did it end up working? Well, most of their members came from Alberta, and so people from Alberta chose who would lead the party, which ended up shaping the direction of the party so that it served what people in Alberta liked rather than what Canadians like. So Reform ended up winning huge majorities in Alberta, but didn’t get hardly any other votes in the rest of the country — this lasted until the eventual death of the party when they merged with the PCs who had a proper country-wide electoral system which altered the direction that potential party leaders would have to take. Now they would have to cater to people all over the country, because people in New Brunswick were just as important as the people in Alberta even if there were proportionally less of them there.

Likewise, the leadership campaigns in the US go state by state starting in little backwater states and leaders go door to door trying to win the votes of a few party diehards who vote in primary campaigns. This leads to choosing people that may not be appropriate to the rest of the party or the rest of the country. Once you get past the primary stage, door to door campaigning just isn’t that much of a useful skill. Having national appeal, charisma, and personality end up being big factors in the tv-centric elections… but that’s not what the US party leadership systems are designed to select for.

Going back to the LPC, I’m not going to pretend that I like their current system. It leads to back room deals, allows insiders to have unwarranted control over the process, and leads to joke campaigns such as the downright corrupt one that Paul Martin won by utilizing his network of personal LPC contacts to dominate the process. But the one thing you could say about it is that at least it’s national — they have to chase delegates in QC and AB just as they would in Liberal-rich ON and BC. It forces them to not cater to the interests of a single region and promotes national unity. If they only had to care about Ontario votes, they could select a leader popular in Ontario who is hated elsewhere — or vice versa.

No, the best way to achieve electoral success is to mimic the campaign that would be forthcoming in the actual election. Have all the states in the US vote at once and use the electoral riding calculations to determine who will face the other party. Have the electoral districts in Canada each select a majority candidate and let the aggregate winner represent the party in the next election. No back room deals, no special treatement for certain regions, and no naive one person one vote.

I realize that for some people it is contrary to their preexisting ideology to admit that global climate change is in fact a reality. Because if it were true, it would mean that the whole culture of uber-individualism has to have limits. This is frustrating to the “don’t tread on me” crowd, consisting of libertarians and other far-right “conservatives”, who out of necessity to defend their positions and insist that global climate change is a myth.

This is why the new Al Gore movie has such a brilliant title, because global climate change is in fact An Inconvenient Truth. Something we would rather pretend doesn’t exist because the implications of it pretty much suck… and it’s apparently possible to keep sticking our heads in the sand for a while longer thanks to the amazing powers of denial.

Blah blah blah, this is all obvious. What isn’t obvious though is that if you do a google search for “inconvenient truth”, one the sponsored links is to a anti-reality group who call themselves “friends of science”, whose main agenda is apparently to preserve the unmaintainable status quo for as long as possible and serve up clever sounding quotes in order to mislead people into thinking that there is some sort of “debate” over the reality of global climate change.

Sponsored links means that every time you click on that link, they have to pay money to google. So I challenge each and every one of you dear readers to do a google search for “inconvenient truth” and click on the friends of science link. Read the site or not, it doesn’t really matter. But what does matter is that we can slowly burn off their money serving up stupid ads to people who aren’t stupid enough to be fooled by their propaganda — an inconvenient clickthrough.

Well, that didn’t take long. The same conservatives who only a short while ago were proclaiming the end of the world because Canada approved same sex marriage now admit that neither they nor their constituents really care about the issue. Yes, that’s right… the most controversial topic of last year is now a non-issue, people have already accepted it and are moving on. As is the ways things go with civil rights, but it’s still good to see.

Money quote:

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said of his constituents: “I haven’t had a single person come up to me to talk about it.”

I like campaign finance reform, and I supported the Liberal efforts in Canada’s to reform the system there just as I support the various reforms propsed in the US.  But of course, people always manage to find loopholes in the new rules… but I’m glad to see that at least one Liberal leadership candidate is getting flack for his obvious abuse of the system.  Also-ran contender Joe Volpe has a lot of support from the pharmacuetical industry, and what do you know but a lot of his campaign contributions have come from that source.

The funny part, though, is that it’s not just drug company executives who are contributing the maximum personal amount ($5,400), but so are many of their teenage kids!  This flagrant abuse of the system has thankfully been given a high media profile so hopefully this will curb this sort of thing in the future, though I cynically suspect that toddlers contributing maxiumum amounts to the CPC will continue unchecked.  But anyhow, the whole point of this entry is that the scandal has provoked a hillarious website, Youth for Volpe.  The site is down at the time of me writing this, but a PDF copy is cached here.

Our esteemed Prime Minister Harper* has taken it upon himself to declare war on the press corps, who he has decided are biased against him. Forget for a second about how laughably stupid his claim is, considering this is the same press corps that openly mocked Paul Martin in a live press conference when the former PM made a disingenuous remark. No, forget that. The bigger issue here is that Harper is trying to divide the country much as his Republican counterparts in America have done since 2000.

By declaring war on the media, in the long run Harper sets up a strategy of spinning any negative commentary on the biases of his media enemies. This has been established in the US with great success by Harper’s ideological counterparts, where the news is completely split between some organizations that report the news and other organizations that report what the Republicans would like the news to be.

In trying to establish similar success, Harper needs to convince his supporters that the media is out to get him — so when a real scandal breaks he can just revert to his previous statements and suggest that the problems are just illusions of Liberal spin. Canada already has CPC friendly media outlets in newspaper and television form, and Harper is attempting to give them an excuse split from reality much like their US counterparts.

We will all pay for this in the long run, I suspect.

* saying that still makes me puke, in case you’re keeping track

“Peak Oil” is a common phrase in the opinion sphere nowadays, referring to the famous claim that oil production has reached its limit and that from here on out world oil production will diminish while demand continues to rise. As supply drops and demand rises, the prices will skyrocket causing worldwide panic and chaos. But I don’t buy that theory, or at least I don’t buy the fact that we have reached that point in the world oil supply.

Why not? Because of the information in this link. That’s right: I’ve done no geological research nor have I consulted with any experts or read through raw data. But still, just looking at that link tells me all I need to know to predict that oil supply and demand will likely not change a whole heck of a lot in the next five years.

If you don’t understand what that is, it’s a chart of oil futures for the coming years. In layman’s terms it means that you can purchase the right to buy oil delivered some time in the future specified by the contract you make. What this means is that at the rates listed today you can buy oil for next year, the year after that, or eve delivered in December 2012 if you are into that sort of thing. Of course, no oil actually changes hands, it’s just the right to exchange oil that you’re buying and selling, but basically it’s the same thing.

And what does that chart tell us? It says that if you pay about $74 today you can get a barrel of Light Crude Oil next year. And even better, for $67 today you can get one delivered in 2012!

But so what? What does that have to do with anything? After all, market values go up, market values go down — it’s not like this is a blueprint for things to come. And indeed, I strongly doubt that the futures market would have predicted five years ago that oil was at the relatively high price it is at today. However that situation is different, because unpredictable things happened (war in Iraq and associated pipeline bombings, political instability in several oil producing country, etc). The market does not predict these things because it’s no oracle, it’s just an aggregation of collected wisdom and only takes into account the risk of those things happening in the future.

So despite the fact that the markets have been wrong in the past, we still have to come to the conclusion that the market does not think that oil prices will substantially rise in the coming years as the theory of Peak Oil predicts. Why does this matter? Because unlike opinions which are either free or for sale, with markets people have to put their money where their mouth is.  To phrase it another way: why on Earth are prices in the future not forecasted to be going up when the demand is going up if production were declining?
Which is to say that if you really think that oil prices are going to skyrocket in the coming years, you can make an incredible fortune if you buy now. But the important point in all this is that people are in fact not buying now. People do not seriously believe that oil is going to dramatically rise in price because if they did they would invest accordingly, but the market does not reflect this at all. So I don’t need to look up the raw data or sift through geological data because the people who unlike me do this for a living already did that and have not come to the conclusion that oil is running out in short order. Again remember, the market is not an oracle, and any number of factors could emerge to affect the price of oil in the coming years — but the oil supply is probably the easiest factor to predict, and the prediction is that things will be as they are now for at least a while.

The best part of all this though is that if you think I’m wrong, you can put your money where your opinion lies and make a fortune in the process. But somehow, I suspect you won’t, even if you are a true believer in Peak Oil.

…and it was ok.  It wasn’t perfect by any measure, but if you are a politically interested person like myself nothing will ever be perfect.  I am a bit disappointed that one tax cut didn’t seem to make it in, the capital gains rollover exemption where an investor could divest an asset and reinvest within 6 months to avoid the tax penalty.  But they seem to have still budgeted for a surplus, which is both excellent and surprising — I only hope their revenue forecasts were not stupidly optimistic — if not I have no major complaints even if it’s not the same document I would personally design.

As someone who is extremely frustrated with the US immigration system, you might expect me to be with the protest rallies today.  But I’m not, and it’s not just because I’m lazy.  I just plain don’t support illegal immigration, simple as that.  In fact, I can’t really fathom anyone seriously taking the position that illegal immigrants don’t deserve to get kicked out of the country when they are encountered.  Call them “undocumented workers” if you like, but if they don’t have their documents  that means they are breaking the law, it’s pretty silly to play a semantical game over this.

The fact is, unless you are of the position that all peoples should have completely unfettered access to the country (meaning no border controls and even no checkpoints) you realize that there should be some sort of control over who is allowed into the country and who is not.  I’m not one of those “in this post-9/11 world” guys in the slightest, but even I realize that there is a very real threat in allowing anyone to enter the country without being checked at all.  So illegal border crossings should not be tolerated, and this should be considered a serious offense.
“You can’t go and eject 11m people from the country” is something I’ve heard over and over again, and it’s utter nonsense.  They manage to give millions of speeding tickets every year, and it’s possible to do that because you don’t do it all at once.  You eject people as you find them, one at a time if necessary, just like they’d handle any other kind of lawbreaker.  You prosecute the people who employ them illegally and try to find those who provide the workers with false documentation when applicable.

Immigration reform is important, it’s a worthy topic for re-evaluation — but what is not interesting is the question of what to do with illegal immigrants.  Reform the system, surely, but to those who skipped the queue: why on Earth do you think you have the right to stay?

Once again, just like last year, the news and blog worlds are breathlessly abuzz with news that someone mocked the President at the annual White House Correspondents dinner. And this year is no exception, with liberal-leaning people thinking that they somehow pulled a fast one on their enemy. The insightful commentary ranges from “I can’t believe he said that!” to “the crowd was so uncomfortable” to “did you see the look on Bush’s face when he said that?” — completely forgetting that just last year they were saying the same exact thing. Someone was so excited that he actually set up a weblog with it’s own domain name dedicated to thanking Colbert for having the nerve to challenge the President, take a gander at the responses it got.

Egads, people… it’s the White House Correspondents dinner. It’s whole purpose is to do exactly that, make fun of the President, they’ve been doing this annually since pretty much forever. Colbert did a good job of it, but it wasn’t mind-blowing or anything. There were a couple of good lines, and most of those weren’t even really that unfair to Bush. Bush’s reaction was as it should be, he laughed at the funny bits and didn’t laugh at the unfunny bits… and after it was over he congratulated Colbert and said “good job, good work” (I think). Because that was what he was invited there for.

There are lot of low-quality versions floating about the internet, but a high-resolution copy of Colbert’s presentation is available via bittorrent if you’re so inclined.

Hello Mr. Dryden,I just wanted to say that I was very impressed by your take on the issues, specifically in the area of “creating conditions for success“.

Too often do I see the left try to use the government to create success and fail, or the right just give up and let market forces prevail no matter what outcome. Your vision of laying the groundwork for Canadians to create success via education is a refreshing take on what is usually a very stale issue. It’s almost like an infrastructure project, where you lay the solid foundation for Canadians to build our future on.

Unfortunately I am a non-resident Canadian, so I cannot join the Liberal Party to help in that way, nor can I afford to donate to the campaign at this time. But I wish you the best of luck in the coming times, and hopefully in the future I can do something more. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

–
Cheers,
-Ryan Thiessen-

It’s not really all that amazing or shocking, but when Canadians when to the polls and elected a bunch of pseudo-Americans to run our country, we got a Harper government* that would represent Americans, not the actual citizens of the country who elected him.  We won victory after victory in the courts, a clean series of wins that said without any doubt at all that by the mutually agreed upon rules of NAFTA the US tarriffs on Canadian softwood lumber were illegal.  And yet, despite Canada having won all the battles, the Harper government* gave up the war and negotiated a loss.  Well done folks.  Why the hell do we even pretend to have free trade when (a) the Americans elect right wing idiots who flaunt the rules at every opportunity; and (b) the Canadians elect right wing idiots who shamelessly give away the keys to the henhouse to the biggest baddest foxes they can find?

Sorry about the multiple posts on politics today, folks, but I’m all insane in the membrane over this.

* puke, etc