the nutshell paragraph

I grew up in Ontario, so in my mind Bob Rae is linked to vague memories of some nightmarish era in political history — a long, deep recession coupled with mind-blowing deficits, strikes and social unrest. In fact, I can confidently say that the only thing Bob Rae ever did for me was give me a month off school, when the teachers went on strike.

But I have to give credit where it’s due. Here is Mr. Rae absolutely kicking the rhetorical tar out of some poor, unprepared Conservative MP from Western Ontario. There’s one sentence in there where Bob links the CPC to the Republican Party, Fox News and Sarah Palin in one devastating breath.

(A “ten-percenter” is a political pamphlet.)

Do you know why the possibly mentally-challenged Mr. Braid was there to defend the Conservatives in their smear campaign against the Liberals? Because Stephen Harper doesn’t have the balls to defend his own scurrilous garbage. I’m calling Stephen Harper out. Proroguing Parliament to avoid answering questions about detainee torture? Cowardice. Sending out a flier accusing the Liberals of being against Canadian troops because they want to look into the matter? Cowardice. Sending some poor fool on national TV to defend those decisions? Cowardice.

Here’s a tip for the Conservatives. If you’re going to behave like Republicans, you’re going to need bigger cojones.

I just love the lead sentence on this story from the Abbotsford Times, titled “Sex-trade worker honoured with plaque”:

More than 30 Lower Mainland drug addicts, prostitutes, friends and family gathered in Abbotsford Tuesday afternoon to honour the memory of dead sex-trade worker Penny Jodway….

…Jodway was known to rule the area with an iron fist. She used a combination of drugs, violence and intimidation to secure the corner for dealing and prostitution, said Barry Shantz, Fraser Valley director of the B.C. and Yukon Association of Drug War Survivors.

No, this isn’t a joke. The BC and Yukon Association of Drug War Survivors really does exist. Note how the article quotes this group, and not the police, on the issue of Abbotsford’s first street walker. (Really? The first one? Ever? What a boring town.)

See you in March, y'all!

CTV and the Globe and Mail are reporting that, once again, Prime Minister Stephen Harper plans to prorogue Parliament.

What started last year as an unusual (and successful) tactic by the Conservatives to forestall the collapse of their month-old government in the wake of their feeble attempt to legislate away the opposition parties has now become routine.

This is quite remarkable. Stephen Harper has decided that any controversy — such as the currently raging Afghan torture scandal — is reason enough to shut down the legislative branch of government. Under King Stephen the First, there is no democratic accountability.

Stephen Harper is hewing pretty close to abrogating his responsibilities as prime minister. And he may have no choice about it.

With his minority caucus, Harper can’t get anything substantial done in Parliament. He can’t use the confidence vote tactic — which forces the opposition to vote with the government or face an election — with anything that even smacks of ideology, because a majority of Canadians oppose him on most issues. (This, of course, is the irony of a minority government.) That’s why his only legislative successes so far have been crime bills — the only wedge issue on which the majority of Canadians falls on the Conservatives’ side of the wedge.

Any issue important enough to warrant a parliamentary battle will also be seen as important enough by at least some of the opposition to fight an election over. So Stephen Harper is stuck, and he has to find a way to hide the fact that he can’t govern. And shutting down the legislative branch of government on the pretext that we can’t have political rancor during the Vancouver Olympics buys him time until the next budget.

It also means that all the bills in the House and Senate will die, and will have to be reintroduced in the spring. That’ll allow Harper to reannounce all those crime-fighting initiatives that are the only things he can get through Parliament.

The question now is: How long can Harper keep it up? How long can he maintain the illusion that he is the prime minister of Canada?

I wasn’t going to bother with James Cameron’s overwrought, overexpensive sci-fi/fantasy/whatever Avatar. But this unsparingly negative review from John Nolte at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog has convinced me otherwise.

…A sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC clichés that not a single plot turn – small or large – surprises. I call it the “liberal tell,” where the early and obvious politics of the film gives away the entire story before the second act begins…

Set in 2154, Avatar is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War…

Think of Avatar as Death Wish 5 for leftists. A simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you freakin’ hate the bad guys (America), you’re able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all and still get off watching them get what they got coming.

Sounds great. To borrow a phrase from a politician I’m sure the above reviewer just loves … bring it on.

Oh, and one little irony Nolte may appreciate: This movie is being released by Twentieth Century Fox, part of the same company that owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Yup, that’s right Mr. Nolte, every time you tune your TV to Fox for your daily dose of “truth” or pick up the WSJ you are effectively giving money to a company that invests it in movies like Avatar. Enjoy!

Watching (and wincing) as President Obama and the Democrats make little headway in passing a health reform package, Matthew Yglesias comes to a conclusion to which a lot of progressives seem to be coming, which is that America is becoming ungovernable:

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously…

I’m willing to accept that in some ways America is less governable than it has been in the past. But are the problems the Democrats are facing in moving their agenda forward really the result of some kind of total structural collapse in the American political system?

Let’s think about this. Let’s think about the first eight months of the presidency of George W. Bush. Here was an administration that was well on its way to making the Carter (or so far Obama administrations) look like stunning successes on all fronts. Bush’s only noticeable action in that brief flailing period before 9/11 was provoking the Chinese into an international incident that resulted in China showing the world who’s really boss. Would the Bush administration have managed to get anything done had 9/11 not happened and given the White House unlimited political capital, a credit card blanche, to do as they pleased?

In all likelihood, no. In all likelihood the Bush administration would have been a humorous embarrassment quickly done away with in 2004. And herein lies the problem. America is perfectly governable — when it’s in the midst of a crisis, when it’s run like a military dictatorship, when political dissent is thrown out the window over national security concerns or because “we are at war” or the media simply feel no compunction to air opposing views.

But try pushing through a social agenda at a time when the country isn’t at war, or in the fifth year of a depression (the New Deal), or mourning the loss of JFK (the Great Society), and you’ve got a whole other ballgame. Clinton learned this early on in his presidency, when his health care agenda was shot down and he had “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” forced on him.

Let’s face it, short of a depression or a war or a presidential assassination, there isn’t much anyone can do to move social policy forward in the United States. There is however, the caveat that in US politics the “only-Nixon-can-go-to-China” rule applies: George W. Bush expanded Medicare benefits with relative ease, just as Obama would have no problem liberalizing guns laws. But reverse the two — Bush wants cuts to Medicare or Obama wants to limit gun sales — and you’ve got yourself a problem.

So I don’t think “ungovernability” is necessarily the problem. But I think this notion of ungovernability is being confused with another trend in American politics, and one that I think is tangibly easier to prove, which is the problem of the dumbing-down of the political debate.

There didn’t use to be Sarah Palins setting the environmental agenda or Michele Bachmanns dismissing the entire field of quantum physics as bogus. I challenge Palin to come up with the molecular formula for water. I challenge Bachmann to define the word “quantum” without reading verbatim off an online dictionary. In fact, I challenge Bachmann to define the word “quantum” AFTER she reads the definition in a dictionary.

No, what we have is not ungovernability, as such, but rather the rise of the Idiocracy.

Yes folks, America is headed for a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid. America is now a place that heckles its presidents during congressional addresses; that can successfully put the kibosh on much-needed health reforms by spreading completely baseless lies about “death panels’; that can convince the most ignorant members of the politically engaged population that it’s in their interest to see their hourly wage at Walmart slashed.

Yes, folks, this is the Idiocracy. Even George H. W. Bush has noticed something wrong with US politics.

During an interview with Parade magazine, Bush expressed disappointment with what he sees as a degrading American political debate.

“There has to be a certain decorum and civility,” Bush said, adding that Rep. Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” during the president’s address on health care to a joint session of Congress “smashed” the decorum of Congress. “I thought, ‘How have we gotten here?’”

Paul Krugman in the New York Times has also noticed, but put it a little more diplomatically than I’m willing to do:

{M}y biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

Krugman frames the idiocracy argument in terms of economic policy. After thirty years of neo-liberal economic dogma were conclusively shown to result in disaster (and not for the first time, ahem, Great Depression), the prevailing wisdom on Wall Street and in Washington is that, to rescue the economy, you need to do more of the same.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

So the idiocracy is all-pervasive now, running from the banks to Washington’s corridors of power to Fox News-watching minimum-wage workers. “Enlightened self-interest,” the Ayn-Randian principle that allowing people to pursue their selfish goals will result in the greatest good for all, has been replaced by unenlightened self-interest: This is what’s best for me, and since I hold the strings of power…fuck you all.

Idiocracy, rather than ungovernability, is here. But once you have the former, the latter tends to quickly follow, as does long-term civilizational decline.

How long can America hope to be competitive in the global economy if its political leadership thinks science is a competing faith to Christianity? How long can America keep from declaring bankruptcy when reforming the crippling effects of health costs on families and businesses won’t even be considered by a majority in the Senate unless they are deficit-neutral, while spending trillions on unnecessary wars gets congressional approval with barely a debate?

In America, a very ugly political countdown has begun. It’s a race to the bottom — the bottom of intellectualism, the bottom of the economic pecking order, the bottom of geo-political power. And if/when America gets there, there will no doubt be those who will argue that it was because America didn’t spend enough on wars, or because it didn’t hew to Jesus’ message as closely as it should have. Empires come and go, but delusions can last forever.

Turns out we have a black hole much closer to our neighborhood than anyone had suspected.

An international team of astronomers has accurately measured the distance from Earth to a black hole for the first time. Without needing to rely on mathematical models the astronomers came up with a distance of 7800 light years, much closer than had been assumed until now.

[T]he astronomers could establish that the black hole of V404 Cygni is 7800 light years from Earth, slightly more than half the distance that was previously assumed.

Fellow researcher James Miller-Jones adds: “We are now trying to apply the same measurement method to several other black holes.”

Just short of eight thousand light years isn’t all that bad. Though in cosmic terms, it really is the neighborhood. Guess we’ll find out soon enough how many of these we have floating around in the back yard.

On Monday the Guardian became the latest major institution to serve Canada its own ass on a platter. “This thuggish petro-state is today the only obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen,” writes George Monbiot.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

Yowza. This is overstating the case, but sadly, only a little. Mr. Harper is not the only world leader in the Let’s-Do-Nothing Club, but his list of allies grows thin. Now that even China and India have committed to reducing carbon emissions (if you call intensity-based targets “reducing carbon emissions,” which Mr. Harper does), Canada is the last country of any global consequence still refusing to play ball. Mr. Harper’s long-term emissions target for 2050 is a big fat question mark.

Until last year, the world could pretend that Mr. Harper was just providing cover for George Bush, but with Barack Obama in the White House, it’s pretty clear that the prime minister is doing this on his own initiative. The world’s last neo-conservative government is setting fire to a few bridges on the way out. And yes, obviously the Alberta oil sands have everything to do with it.

The Canadian public and the media have done their best to ignore this problem. For the most part, this issue was barely on the radar until people like Ban Ki-Moon started dissing Canada in public. The Globe and Mail noticed last Friday, but still buried Moon’s comments in the third paragraph.

That’s still a whole hell of a lot better than the National Post, which — for reasons I can only imagine have to do with prior proprietary relationships — decided that a convicted fraudster with no credentials in science is the proper person to define the newspaper’s take on the whole issue. Here is Conrad Black uttering one falsehood per sentence about climate change:

The basic relevant facts are that carbon emissions are not the principal factor in global warming, and despite dire contrary forecasts and ever-increasing carbon-emissions in the world — especially as the economies of China and India, representing 40% of the world’s population, expand by six to 10 percent each year — the world has not grown a millidegree warmer since the start of this millennium. And its mean temperature rose by only one centigrade degree in the 25 years before that. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide emissions does have a gentle warming effect if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

I love that expression — “a gentle warming effect.” What, exactly, is gentle about coastal flooding and the desertification of southern Europe? Whatever; fortunately, most Canadians are not buying Black’s take on climate change, in much the same way they’re not buying the newspaper he launched a decade ago. About two-thirds of Canadians want Canada to lead global efforts to fight climate change, not lag in them. But for Mr. Harper, it’s all about making excuses for a currently lucrative industry that has no long-term prospects. My bet is the world will have moved on from Alberta oil long before the Alberta oil has been exhausted.

Which is sad, because it’s exactly this economic angle that Mr. Harper is missing. Kind of pathetic for an economist, if you ask me.

Let’s say for a moment that Conrad Black is right, and climate change is a massive lie foisted on the world’s public. (Incidentally, to believe this, you would have to believe in the largest, most improbable conspiracy theory ever concocted, which is that two or three generations of scientists from all corners of the globe came together in a plot to defraud the public by infiltrating all the major peer-reviewed journals on earth and publishing falsehoods, while at the same time suppressing any publication of basic data that would disprove the fraud. But anyway.) Let’s just say climate change isn’t happening. You know what? Signing on to a climate change deal is still a good idea.

Because here’s the reality of our situation. We are running out of fossil fuels. This is a mathematical certainty. The demand for fossil fuels is growing, and the finite supply is shrinking. The analysts can debate all they want whether peak oil will be in ten years, or five years, or whether it happened last year. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that if we want to maintain anything even remotely resembling our modern standard of living, we need to find viable alternatives to carbon-burning fuels.

And right now the only tools we have to initiate any sort of global effort to replace fossil fuels are climate deals like Kyoto and whatever comes out of Copenhagen, if anything. They create an impetus to search for alternative energy sources. And whether or not we put any effort into it won’t change the fact that a few generations from now, we will be using alternative energy sources, because fossil fuels will have run out. The only question is, which countries will lead the effort, and reap the profits when the time comes to switch technologies, and which countries will face a net loss by having to buy those technologies from other countries.

It simply doesn’t make sense for Mr. Harper to protect the Alberta oil sands at the price of Canada’s long-term economic health. But then, what sense have any of Mr. Harper’s policies had, thus far? It’s all been ideologically-driven nonsense, and most Canadians aren’t expecting any different when it comes to the environment.

The one saving grace that Mr. Harper has is that, ultimately, he’s a coward who doesn’t think for himself. (This is why he first declared he wasn’t going to Copenhagen, and then promptly changed his mind when Obama announced he plans to go, and then even had the gall to get his lackeys to claim he “always” planned to go.) This is a saving grace because, now that Harper is isolated on the world stage and looking increasingly like the dinosaur that he is, he’s likely to bend to public opinion. When even your conservative allies like Sarkozy and Berlusconi won’t back you up, you better have big cojones to tell the world go screw itself. And Mr. Harper’s cojones just aren’t that big.

So he is going to have to come up with something. My bet is we will see yet another turnaround from Mr. Harper, some sort of sudden “announcement” of a change in Canadian policy either before or after Copenhagen. It will likely be a snow job, but if it actually involves something concrete, like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade or even tougher emissions targets, Mr. Harper might inadvertently do some long-term good for Canada’s economy, and prevent it from becoming the petro-state that it’s morphing into. With any luck, Mr. Harper might show some of those “leadership qualities” everybody’s trying to convince me he actually has.

In 2004, researchers studied 49 people who believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible or partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, to see what their reaction would  be when confronted by evidence, straight from the Bush administration, that this wasn’t true. What the researchers found is that — surprise, surprise — people believe what they want to believe:

Of 49 people included in the study who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn’t true.

The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence — even when it came from President Bush himself.

The voters weren’t dupes of an elaborate misinformation campaign, the researchers concluded; rather, they were actively engaged in reasoning that the belief they already held was true.

From AP:

Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

“The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

You’ve got to give them credit. At least they’re preparing for contingencies. More than you can say for most governments.

“Crossword puzzles are a threat to the criminal justice system,” says the Guardian:

Determined to determine whether reading or doing a puzzle can lead to a detriment in face processing, Lewis did an experiment. In his words: “The tasks tested within the experiment presented here were: reading a passage from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code; solving a sudoku puzzle; solving a literal cross- word; solving a cryptic crossword”.

Sixty volunteers took part. They looked at some faces, “then engaged in their puzzle or read the passage for five minutes”. Lewis then began to test their memory of the faces. “Between each test item, however, participants continued with their puzzle or read the text for 30 seconds.”

Sudoku and literal crosswords seemed not to affect how well the volunteers identified the faces. But, according to Lewis, when the volunteers did cryptic crossword puzzles, they became less reliable at recognising faces.

Blessed be the Prophet Blankfein

Goldman Sachs’ public image — like its prospects for long-term survival as a single entity — keeps getting worse. It wasn’t enough that one of the company’s senior advisers recently declared that we must learn to tolerate income inequality because it keeps people motivated (completely ignoring the irony that everyone else recognizes, which is that his own wealth is no longer meritorious and the actual lesson being taught is that socialism is good if you’re the guy at the government’s teet) — now Emperor Blankfein has come out and declared that Goldman is doing “God’s work.”

Yep, they have proclaimed the Divine Right of Derivates Traders.

Ah. So God’s work apparently involves scamming people into getting mortgages you know will collapse in value. Or maybe seizing control of the stock market. Are the people of Goldman the “meek” who are destined to “inherit the world”?

I don’t suppose there’s any point in dwelling on the obvious: Goldman Sachs executives are delusional; in no sense should they be trusted to being a crucial element of the global economy, etc., etc. We knew all that.

All that’s left now is ridicule. So let it begin:

L’Osservatore Romano is reporting that Goldman Sachs is indeed Doing God’s work, and His Former Holiness Joseph Ratzinger has confirmed the unsolicited hostile takeover. Writing under his pen name Benedict XVI, Ratzinger verified that total control of the popular religion has been transferred to Goldman Sachs and His New Holiness Lloyd Blankfein.

But evidently Satan has a problem with this:

Goldman Sachs’ Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s comment that bankers are doing “God’s work” came under fire today from one of the longest-standing allies of the firm, Satan, the Prince of Darkness.

In a rare press conference, the usually reclusive Beelzebub blasted Mr. Blankfein for his remark, telling reporters, “Lloyd Blankfein needs to remember who he works for.”

Ouch. No wonder Goldman employees have stopped following the news.

Pesticides can increase suicidal thoughts…

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s chumminess with Fidel Castro made him the target of Mexican surveillance for years…

The Mississippi Review has published what its editors say is the world’s shortest essay…

Jesus has appeared in the wood pattern of an Ikea bathroom door…

Is Malawai the cradle of human civilization?

An excerpt from Dave Eggers’ novelization of Where The Wild Things Are…

Novelist Jose Saramago says the Bible is a handbook of bad morals…

In case you’re wondering why the White House has had enough and gone to war against Fox News, here’s your answer.

Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker had a great article about a month ago breaking down exactly what’s happening with Fox “news”:

This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

For all of Fox’s hysterical claims that the Obama administration is ushering in a new era of socialism and/or fascism (they can’t seem to decide which one it is), Eric Boehlert at MediaMatters argues that it’s Fox news itself that is reflective of some kind of authoritarian banana-republicanism slouching towards Washington:

Greenwald noted the similarities between Fox News’ overt role in U.S. politics with places like Venezuela, where the opposition TV station led the failed 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, as well as Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a media magnate, uses his TV ownership to agitate. “Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are really using that model to organize and galvanize this protest movement,” wrote Greenwald. “It’s a totally Fox News-sponsored event.”

Completely detached from traditional newsroom standards, Fox News has become a political institution, and the press needs to start treating it that way. The press needs to treat Fox News the same way it treats the Republican National Committee, even though, frankly, the RNC probably can’t match the in-your-face partisanship that Fox News flaunts 24/7. Think about it: Murdoch’s “news” channel now out-flanks the Republican Party when it comes to ceaseless partisan attacks on the White House.

Like authoritarians everywhere, Marcus Gee at the Globe and Mail uses the fear of crime to convince people to part with their privacy and submit to a police state. In an article entitled “Toronto would be safer with a camera on every corner,” Gee makes the standard argument for planting CCTV cameras on every corner: Accept our surveillance state or be murdered.

In typical fashion, Gee uses a recent homicide in the news to show us that we would be living in a safer city if there were cameras everywhere — just to make sure you understand that, if you don’t support police cameras watching our every move, YOU ARE SIDING WITH MURDERERS.

What’s really amusing about Gee’s piece is how utterly banal it is. (What was Hannah Arendt’s phrase? The “banality of evil”?) It presents absolutely no new argument here that would convince someone who hasn’t yet made up their mind one way or another. It does, however, fall into some perfect little stereotypes relating to how these arguments play out. For example, Gee writes near the end of his column:

If CCTV still creeps you out, remember that you’re already on camera every time you walk through the mall, enter a parking garage or go to the bank machine. If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re committing a crime, watch out. There may be cameras watching. The more the better.

There you go. The innocent have nothing to fear. Or, as it would come out of the mouths of Hollywood-movie Nazis, ze innocent haf nussink to feah. And just above that laughable stereotype of an argument for fascism, Gee asserts the following:

Then, of course, there is the whole issue of privacy. Opponents of CCTV say it is taking us toward an Orwellian world where the state can follow our every move. While it’s healthy to worry about Big Brother, those fears are overblown.

Nobody watches the live video being recorded by the handful of CCTV cameras in Toronto. The only time anyone sees it is if police request footage for a crime investigation; otherwise it is simply stored and then automatically erased after 72 hours.

You see — fears of a police state are “overblown,” because “nobody watches the video” anyway. Ah, well nothing to worry about then. Because of course, we know that municipal employees are never corrupt, that a police officer or a transit guard would never use these technologies to spy on people for their own purposes. Nor are they greedy, and would never consider selling footage to private detectives or TV stations. Never.

Ultimately, though I agree with Gee’s assertion. More cameras would make the city safer. And here are some other ideas that no doubt would make the city safer:

– GPS tracking devices on everyone’s ankles.

– Portable body scan devices, Manchester Airport-style, that would allow police to remotely check under your clothing for weapons, drugs, etc.

– Security checkpoints at major intersections.

– Soldiers, armed with machine guns, patrolling subway stations and shopping malls.

– Clockwork Orange-style psychological reprogramming for repeat offenders.

– Constant monitoring of all electronic communications — phone, email, Skype, etc.

– A Department of Pre-Crime to pre-arrest people considered at high risk of offending, based on psych profiles, etc.

All of these technologies are or will soon be possible. All of these technologies can be argued for using Gee’s hackneyed old arguments. Where we draw the line on a surveillance state will depend on our collective will as a society. How much freedom and privacy will we sacrifice for additional safety?

I used to think that Canada was relatively immune to the police-state arguments that have been so successful in the United States and Britain. But now I watch as the news media grow ever more hysterical about crime, even as the crime rate in Canada continues a decades-long downward trend. And when arguments like Gee’s start showing up in the newspapers, the signs are all there that our will to preserve Canada as a free society is weakening.

This is worth noting, even though I have no idea what its significance might be:

The growth of British trees appears to follow a cosmic pattern, with trees growing faster when high levels of cosmic radiation arrive from space.

Researchers made the discovery studying how growth rings of spruce trees have varied over the past half a century.

As yet, they cannot explain the pattern, but variation in cosmic rays impacted tree growth more than changes in temperature or precipitation.

Ever since word spread last week that the Obama administration plans to put serious restrictions in place on pay at seven companies that received bailout cash, the Wall Street crowd has complained that the policy will cause a “brain drain” out of Wall Street. Colin Barr thinks that’s just fine:

Still, we say Godspeed to this “talent.” After all, the traders and suits in the corner offices don’t exactly have an unblemished track record. In 2008, Citigroup, BofA and Merrill Lynch (since acquired by BofA) posted a grand total of $51 billion in losses.

Yet even as they were running themselves into the ground, the firms managed to pay out more than $12 billion in bonuses — including 1,606 million-dollar-plus bonuses, according to a report from the New York attorney general’s office.

“Even a cursory examination of the data suggests that in these challenging economic times, compensation for bank employees has become unmoored from the banks’ financial performance,” the report said.

No kidding. If we actually lived in a capitalist economy, these companies wouldn’t even exist anymore. They would have disappeared in a puff of stupid decisions sometime in the second half of last year. The “brain drain” would have swallowed one hundred percent of their “talent.” As far as I’m concerned, the bailout recipients are now on welfare, and their compensation should reflect that.

Welfare rates are kept intentionally stingy, as a motivator to keep people looking for work. (We want to avoid a “brain drain” from the work force to the welfare rolls.) Similarly, executives at companies enrolled in corporate welfare should receive the minimum amount of compensation possible, to ensure that they are motivated to pay off their debt to the public and start turning real profits again as soon as possible.

And, in the meantime, if poor compensation on Wall Street spurs people to leave jobs with Citibank and AIG in favor of jobs at companies that actually make real products and money, like, say, Google or RIM — well, frankly, I can’t see a downside to that.

A strange propaganda battle has been playing out in front of the entire Canadian television viewing public of late. On the one side is a group calling itself “Stop the TV Tax,” which is telling us that the broadcasters are about to convince the government to slap a ten-dollar-a-month “TV tax” on all Canadians who purchase cable TV. They’re saying get involved and stop this injustice.

On the other side is a group called “Local TV Matters,” which is telling us that the cable companies are blocking an effort to save local television from bankruptcy, that local TV is threatened by a precipitous drop in ad revenue, and that unless we tell the government to act, we won’t have local news on TV anymore. They’re saying get involved and stop this injustice.

Naturally, these two astroturf campaigns are being run by the companies involved. The “Local TV Matters” folks are a consortium of Canada’s major broadcasters, who want to charge cable companies for carrying local TV station signals that are free over the air. The “Stop the TV Tax” folks are the cable and satellite companies, which are telling us, point blank, that if that happens, they are going to pass the cost on to the consumer — hence the notion of a “tax.”

Both campaigns are disingenuous. The cable companies have grabbed the ten-dollar-a-month figure seemingly out of thin air. The numbers being discussed would be closer to six dollars per month. (Granted, the ad says “up to.”)

But the TV Matters campaign is far worse. Check out the website — you can’t tell that what they’re talking about is a new fee on cable companies. And the idea that this money would save local stations and therefore local TV content is bunk. As others have noted, local stations have been closing for years. They’ve lost their local identities: The CBC doesn’t even brand its local affiliates separately anymore; CTV barely does; Global TV never did. Not to mention that a new fund, amounting to one percent of broadcast distributors’ revenue, was already set up this year to support local news in markets of less than one million people.

So ultimately I side with the TV Tax people. The cable and satellite providers are some of the wealthiest companies in Canada, and I ‘m loathe to defend their monopolistic fiefdoms, especially when they’re making clear that any charge they incur they will dump on me. But when it comes down to it, it’s patently unfair to charge the consumer, via cable company or any other method, for channels we have no choice but to purchase.

The CRTC mandates that cable companies carry the signals of any local (”local”) TV stations in the area where the cable service is provided. You can’t buy cable service without getting these channels. So charging for them is, in effect, a cable TV tax. From the consumer’s perspective, it’s not a “local TV tax” because the people who get local TV from the air don’t pay it. It’s just a new tax, is all, the funds from which will be given to subsidize TV broadcasters, which subsidies they can use any way they want. (They haven’t committed themselves to actually spending the money on local content.)

So I have a proposal that will resolve this problem: If the local TV stations want to be a paid-for service, their purchase should be optional like all other pay-TV channels. I’m perfectly willing to let them charge for their channels — but I should have a choice whether to buy what they’re selling.

And given that they’ve recently convinced the CRTC to allow them an unlimited amount of commercial time per hour, I have a feeling I won’t want to pay for their services. I shudder to think what reruns of all my favorite ’70s sitcoms will be like once the broadcasters chop them down to make way for fifteen minutes of commercials per half-hour. It’s not enough that they want to pollute our brains with a constant stream of consumerist propaganda — they want to charge us for it, too.

Well, no thanks. I can think of more than a few people who would love the opportunity to trade in their ad-ridden “local affiliates” for HBO or the sports-channel packages. Which is precisely why the CRTC won’t allow it to happen. Von Finkelstein and the gang will argue that Canadian society would fall apart if people stopped watching local TV broadcasting. After all, the whole point of creating the CBC and mandating Canadian-content rules and limiting foreign ownership of media was to “build the Canadian nation.”

Well I’ve got news for you, CRTC. The days of nation-building via television are over. Who actually watches local TV anymore? I watch the national and American news channels, and leave the TV tuned to one of the cable movie channels by default. My girlfriend is a cooking-channel addict. Many of my friends stick to the pay-channel shows. Others just download whatever they want to watch via torrent. Yet others are collecting their favorite shows on DVD and don’t even watch “live” TV. The local affiliate? Good for sports scores at 11:25 pm, and that’s about it.

You know who is watching local TV? The people with rabbit-ear antennas, the ones who never made the jump to cable. The only people who WON’T be paying the new TV tax, if it happens.

So time to let ‘er rip and let the local channels compete in the brave new five-hundred-channel universe. If the CRTC is worried about the disappearance of Canadian culture from the airwaves (cablewaves?), they’re going to have to address the matter in a completely different way anyway. Forcing people to pay for something they don’t use won’t convince them to buy locally.

Check me out on last night’s Jeff Farias Show. I trash-talk Fox News, defend (then criticize) the Obama administration, and cry “For shame!” at Wall Street. Punditry is fun!

MSNBC crusader Dylan Ratigan explains what he means when he talks about corporate communism:

Lack of choice, lazy, unresponsive customer service, a culture of exploitation and a small powerbase formed by cronyism and nepotism are the hallmarks of a communist system that steals from its citizenry and a major reason why America spent half a century fighting a Cold War with the U.S.S.R.

And yet today we find ourselves as a country in two distinctly different categories: those who are forced to compete tooth and nail each day to provide value to society in return for income for ourselves and our families and those who would instead use our lawmaking apparatus to help themselves to our tax money and/or to protect themselves from true competition.

The Financial Times reviews Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

The final lesson is that financial liberalisation and financial crises go together like a horse and carriage. It is no surprise, therefore, that the last 30 years have seen waves of financial crises, of which the latest one is merely the biggest. The current crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. Yet, argue the authors, no one should have been surprised by this outcome. The US showed all the classic symptoms of a country heading for crisis: a huge current account deficit; soaring house prices; headlong credit growth; and, let us not forget, excessively complacent regulators.