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.