politics

For the price of a beer (or a pitcher, or a round), you can support VisibleGovernment.ca … the non-profit that promotes online tools for government transparency, openness and accessibility around government and civic data (yay!).

They’ve got a little fundraiser going, in celebration of Canada Day: Beers for Canada …

How we’ll spend your money

We work on several aspects of transparency:

Creating new tools: We work with developers and designers to build websites that encourage citizens and governments to communicate openly.
Encouraging government openness: We show elected officials the benefits of open, two-way discourse, highlighting places where information is lacking and celebrating the efforts of those who want to be more transparent.
Public awareness: We emphasize the civic importance of transparency and open government.
Working with other organizations: We share and collaborate with organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, MySociety and Changecamp.

We’re also organizing Code For Canada, an application design competition that awards prizes to people who build web, facebook, and iPhone apps that provide visualization, analysis, and access to federal government data sets.

So, go support a worthy cause.

Kids boycott classroom with CCTV cameras. People call them brats. Kids respond with an op-ed that every adult should read.

Many users suggested that cameras were a good idea because they could be used to keep an eye on bullying and student behaviour, we were accused of been “narcissistic megalomaniacs” angry at “being nabbed for our churlish troublemaking”. This stereotypical and frankly ignorant view ignores the fact that Davenant Foundation School produces some of the best exam results in Essex. Violent behaviour among pupils is simply not an issue, making the justification for putting cameras in our classrooms more surprising…

Eroding standards in schools and deteriorating discipline are down to a broken society and the failure of the education system. The truth is that we are whatever the generation before us has created. If you criticise us, we are your failures; and if you applaud us we are your successes, and we reflect the imperfections of society and of human life. [more...]

[via boing]

My pal Chris wrote a moving post about an experience he had growing up in South Africa, a white boy who went with his church to talk about Jesus in the “coloured” townships.

Which made me think about traveling and the relationship we rich, “white,”[*] educated people have with the rest of the world. I commented on Chris’ blog, but here’s what I wrote:

I was in Cuba some years ago on holiday and I recall reading before I went about how Cuba had been “spoiled” by tourism, and how you couldn’t have a genuine interaction with people any more because they see Westerners only for their wallets now. It’s true, as far as it goes – those Cubans did see me as a wallet.

But these days (even then), that kind of talk makes me angry, because built into it is this assumption that we deservea certain kind of treatment, as if the world is a kind of park, where we can go visit various places to get wonderful experiences: Bhutan for the mountains and the sage monks & yak-milk tea; Philippines for the sunrise while visiting tropical islands in a skiff guided by a wiseacre biologist; Hong Kong where we can do commerce with the shouting market people, who get such a kick out of Gweilos straying beyond Kowloon. Drinking beer late at night in the veld listening to stories of African leopards. Cuba for sexy music and smiling, dancing people.

I’ve experienced all these things and loved them, they are experiences I cherish. But I have done these things, am able to do these things because I am wealthy and white, and the world, truly is my oyster. I remember being in university, thinking: I will travel the world, I will undertake adventures, I will see distant land and do great things. And for a few years I did. I loved it; it was dashing and daring and exotic and all the things it’s supposed to be. And granted to me with ease, and no sacrifice, because of who and what I am.

I hated that trip to Cuba, not because Cubans see me for a wallet — which actually is “annoying” — but rather because of what I, as tourist, saw Cuba as: a place filled with people who should like me for who I am, give me the benefit of the doubt, people who should see beyond my colour and my new running shoes and instead have a conversation with me about what life is really like for them, because, well, I’d be happy to do the same for them if they came to Canada. That is, I saw Cuba as: entertainment. I’d paid for it, and didn’t get what I wanted.

And it pissed me off, not that Cuba didn’t deliver; but rather that I had put myself in that position, of “he who has paid to be entertained.” I don’t mean that on a surface sense, but at a deeper level. Tourism puts us in such an odd dynamic with people: you are there to get something out of an “experience” … joy, wisdom, commune with nature, commune with another culture, history, something…And the exchange? What do we give up? Our time and our money. Only one of which is worth anything to anyone.

I have this odd feeling that tourism and it’s thinly veiled cousin, “international development,” are about as colonial as a military invasion: the real beneficiaries are the tourists, the NGO’s and their rich, adventuresome consultants; just as the beneficiaries of military invasions are rarely those under whose name invasions happen, these days at least.

I say all this because I am conflicted by Chris’ story of the townships … I have been treated well by people all over the world, treaded poorly by others; i’ve been robbed and cheated, threatened and bored to death. All of it great, and I wouldn’t trade it. Saying I’ve had yak’s milk in Bhutan gives me great pleasure (I was there to “help” the Bhutanese, naturally).

But it’s curious when our own innocence or blindness is caught out — as I guess the young Chris Hughes’ was — by something so moving, which is the twin realization that:
a) we do not belong somewhere
and yet:
b) we are welcomed nonetheless.

I think that might be just the thing that irks me about our modern white fascination with “doing” Asia, or “doing Columbia,” … this assumption that we do belong there. It’s our world afterall.

So I find Chris’ story very moving because, I interpret it something as a recognition that he did not belong where he was … and yet….and yet…there was kindness, despite his naivete, despite where he came from, despite the preposterousness of the situation, and not because of it.

* Re: “white” I use this term broadly, and really it’s the wrong term. It’s not “white”, so much as “affluent middle-class, educated westerner…” I’m using it as a cultural marker, not a racial one; though the two are not totally unrelated.

“The Big Takeover: The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution,” by Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone:

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world’s most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it’s AIG’s rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that’s been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren’t such a nightmare. [more...]

And:
“No Return to Normal: Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think,” by James K. Galbraith in Washington Monthly.

The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis—an integrated, long-term economic threat—rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That’s the thinking.

But the plumbing metaphor is misleading. Credit is not a flow. It is not something that can be forced downstream by clearing a pipe. Credit is a contract. It requires a borrower as well as a lender, a customer as well as a bank. And the borrower must meet two conditions. One is creditworthiness, meaning a secure income and, usually, a house with equity in it. Asset prices therefore matter. With a chronic oversupply of houses, prices fall, collateral disappears, and even if borrowers are willing they can’t qualify for loans. The other requirement is a willingness to borrow, motivated by what Keynes called the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a slump, such optimism is scarce. Even if people have collateral, they want the security of cash. And it is precisely because they want cash that they will not deplete their reserves by plunking down a payment on a new car.

The credit flow metaphor implies that people came flocking to the new-car showrooms last November and were turned away because there were no loans to be had. This is not true—what happened was that people stopped coming in. And they stopped coming in because, suddenly, they felt poor.

Strapped and afraid, people want to be in cash. This is what economists call the liquidity trap. And it gets worse: in these conditions, the normal estimates for multipliers—the bang for the buck—may be too high. Government spending on goods and services always increases total spending directly; a dollar of public spending is a dollar of GDP. But if the workers simply save their extra income, or use it to pay debt, that’s the end of the line: there is no further effect. For tax cuts (especially for the middle class and up), the new funds are mostly saved or used to pay down debt. Debt reduction may help lay a foundation for better times later on, but it doesn’t help now. With smaller multipliers, the public spending package would need to be even larger, in order to fill in all the holes in total demand. Thus financial crisis makes the real crisis worse, and the failure of the bank plan practically assures that the stimulus also will be too small. [more...]

As a start-up, I’ve complained about how conservative the Canadian business culture is, especially banking and finance. But boring has it’s benefits, when things get shaky. From Newsweek:

In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th.

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking. [more...]

Given that we lost 129,000 jobs in January alone, I don’t think it’s fair to say our economy is thriving. But certainly our banking sector appears to be in decent shape.

Speaking of which: 60:1 leverage in European banks? God help us.

When I worked at Prebon in 2000 (on financial/insurance products that would financing greenhouse gas reductions while hedging against the risk of greenhouse gas legislation), I remember trying to figure out the credit default swap market. At the time, it was a relatively new product, and it was where Prebon – a broker, not a trader – was making a killing. Generally in the financial business, new products are where all the profits are. Once your clients and competitors figure out what they’re buying, transparency comes into the market, efficiency, and prices/margins drop. But in the early days of a financial product, the margins are huge – because if you are offering something people want, and no one else is offering it, and no one else understands it, you can strip out enormous profits.

Anway, at the time the CDS market was pretty new and pretty hot. A credit default swap, nominally, is an insurance policy against the issuer of a financial product (say, a bond) defaulting. What it became was something else altogether, a massive commodity trading scheme where the underlying commodity (the CDS) had come completely uncoupled from the underlying assets. By the time things started collapsing last year, the CDS market was $30 trillion dollars. It’s a massive liability that no one’s really owned up to yet. NYTimes has a good article explaining things and asking when the next shoe will drop:

Any honest assessment must include the role that credit-default swaps have played in this mess: it’s the elephant in the room, the $30 trillion market that people do not want to talk about.

Credit-default swaps are insurancelike contracts that Wall Street created in the early 1990s. They allow bondholders to protect themselves against losses if a company or a debt issuer defaults….

Sellers of C.D.S.’s spent years raking in premiums while underestimating or simply ignoring the possibility of rising defaults. Regulators let the market grow unchecked.

In the end, far too much of this insurance was written at way too cheap a cost. Now, with Wall Street and the economy in tatters, the fear that already-hobbled financial companies may have to pay off huge amounts on C.D.S. arrangements hangs like a cloud over the markets.

C.D.S.’s have already figured prominently in taxpayer bailouts. The $150 billion rescue of the American International Group, for example, came about because of swaps the insurer had written on mortgage securities. And the $100 billion taxpayer backstop handed to Bank of America on Jan. 16 had a good bit to do with soured credit-default swaps that the bank inherited when it acquired Merrill Lynch. [more...]

I was just in London for BookCamp (fantastic, see my comments here). When I fly, I usually download a number of TED Talks to watch on the plane. Loved this one, about the moral decision-making of liberals and conservatives.

[via liber.rhetoricae]

Canada’s feisty copyright lawyer, Howard Knopf, explores how good intellectual policy could help Canada thru the economic mess:

Most governments are now taking decisive steps towards decisions on and implementation of major stimulus/investment packages to rescue, resuscitate and even reinvent national and international economies. Canada, apparently, is going about this in its own way, with no such decisions yet announced. In Canada, things are actually getting “curiouser and curiouser” as we head towards a political crisis.

However, following the Rahm Emanuel maxim that “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste”, here are some bold ideas that would probably never fly or even be seriously considered in normal times in Canada about using IP and IP policy to help fix up the economy. Some of these would require legislation or regulations. Some would not and would only require sufficient leadership, will and skill at the political level – which are not necessarily any easier to come by [more...]

What happens if (or, rather, when) China decides to stop financing US debt to create export demand for its manufactured goods, and instead starts to spend that money on creating consumer demand in China?

David Simon is a former journalist who quit his job because he could no longer do it the way he wanted to do it: the companies that run papers these days don’t want their journalists to ask the most important question out of the famous five Ws + H (who what where when why how) … That is: Why? … It’s the tough one, that takes time and attention and doggedness, and it just doesn’t seem to work well with the “bottom line” (which, for those counting, is looking pretty grim).

Eventually Simon, along with a former cop, and former teacher, created the TV show the Wire,

In this talk at Berkeley, he explains why he is not (or maybe is) the most angry man in television, how the decline of journalism is paired with our disfunctional democracy, how a barge, not a hurricane, caused the floods in New Orleans, lies, damn lies and statistics, systematic corruption, and how we should all pick something to give a shit about and, absurd or not, fight for it.

Here is the video. Watch it. It’s the most compelling bit of web content I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Interesting article in the WSJ, about that scrappy entrepreneur, Barack Obama:

If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history.

Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts policies aimed at reigniting the national economy? Amid a recession, two wars, and a global financial crisis, will he come to see that unleashing the entrepreneur is the best way to raise the revenue he needs for his lofty priorities?

Like every entrepreneur, Mr. Obama’s rise was improbable. An unusually-named, African-American first-term senator defeated two of the most powerful incumbent political brands, the Clintons and John McCain. Like many upstarts, he won by changing the rules of the game.

Mr. Obama, following FDR’s mastery of radio and JFK’s success on TV, is the first candidate to fully exploit the Web. The community organizer seemed to realize that new social networking and video technologies were perfect for politics. It didn’t hurt that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes worked for the campaign. “What ultimately transformed the presidential race,” Joshua Green of The Atlantic wrote in June, “was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos.”

The results of Mr. Obama’s decentralized Web effort were staggering: 8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 50,000 local events, 1.5 million Web volunteers, and 3.1 million donors who contributed almost $700 million. Republicans, Charlie Cook reported on Nov. 3, believe their large but impersonal centralized databases could not match the tacit knowledge, individual initiative and agility of Mr. Obama’s diffuse social networks.

Such creativity could bubble up because Mr. Obama was stable at the top. Not just anyone could recruit an army of volunteers and let them run free, establishing their own networks, offices and events. Because Mr. McCain lurched from one message and tactic to the next with dramatic frequency, his supporters froze. They spent more time defending or deciphering his shifting policies and tactics than they did organizing and persuading. Mr. Obama’s even temper and relentlessly consistent message, on the other hand, encouraged supporters to take risks without the worry of being blindsided.[more...]

The article goes on to argue for laissez-faire economic policies and deregulation, much of which I don’t agree with. Experience at LibriVox tells me that what leads to success is a clear objective, backed up with carefully designed regulation that clarifies what people can/can’t do, and *then* the widest amount of freedom possible, within set constraints. Obviously LibriVox ain’t the United States, but unleashing individual creativity is still about balancing openness with clear boundaries, and that’s the challenge Obama has, writ not just large, but world-wide.

One part of the recent economic picture has been the too-cheap credit that has kept us all feeling really rich for the past decade. In the most famous story about this problem, cheap credit meant many people bought houses they couldn’t afford, and we all know what happened there. When the bad mortgage market collapsed – as it had to do, since it was built on fantasy demand – the housing market went with it, wiping out apparent wealth people had invested in their homes. Initially people here talked as if it was a problem specific to the USA, and that the Canadian real estate market and economy would be fine, since our banking and real estate sectors are significantly more conservative. The fundamentals of the Canadian economy were fine (whenever you hear that, you can assume the opposite).

The problem is that while our banking and mortgage systems might have been in better shape, the underlying demand for real estate is driven by the health of the overall economy. 30% of our GDP is generated by direct exports (not counting the significant spinoff economic activity that comes with those exports). 81% of our exports go to the ravenous USA. So, with a little bit of math you can conclude that if the US stops buying, Canada’s economy is up the creak.

And the problem is that the “cheap credit” problem was hardly confined to the real estate market. It’s in every bit of the economy. Credit was sloshing around everywhere, and that means spending everywhere: corporate mergers and acquisitions, new business, expansions, small business loans and student loans, car financing, luxury good purchases, lots of jobs for lawyers, accountants, and every kind of supplier to the big and little companies you can imagine, including web designers. Credit sloshing means we all feel rich, since there’s lots of cheap money to invest in new projects, lots of money and work to spread around.

But starting with the mortgage crisis, credit started drying up. All of a sudden the the rosy prospects for the whole economy contracted greatly. With credit expected to be no longer cheap, all the big spending ways of companies and governments and individuals, and all the VC money starts to tighten.

Imagine you have a platinum card, $100,000, and you spend accordingly, assuming you’ll be able to pay it off later. Then all of a sudden your card gets cut to a $1,000 limit. You’re going to spend less money: fewer trips, fewer gold necklaces, fewer iPhones. And each company that used to benefit from your largesse will feel the pinch too.

That’s why the stock markets have plunged. Because as each company’s credit has dried up, they are likely to buy less (services, materials etc). And since each company is likely to buy less, each supplier sees drops in their orders across the board. So everything is going down down down.

Since the stock market has long been a proxy for “health of the economy,” at least in the media, a shudder of terror went through just about everyone as the Dow, Footsie and TSX (and the rest of them) started to tank. But in some sense I get the feeling that people still think this is an abstract problem, with impacts on their RRSP statements, mutual fund holdings and stock portfolios, robbing them of significant paper wealth, but not quite linked to the day to day of life.

Of course it is: the result will be job losses across the board.

And then there is another problem: China.

While cheap credit was one reason we’ve all felt so rich the last decade or so, the other part of the equation is China’s manufacturing sector. Ever notice how cheap things are these days? You look at an item, say a BarBQ at Costco, and you just can’t figure out how something with so many components, materials, weighing tens of kilos, could have been assembled, built and shipped to you for such a low price. It often doesn’t make any sense, but we haven’t really bothered to care about that, we’ve just happily bought and bought more.

I worked for an environmental tech R&D company for a while, and one of our main products was a power inverter for alternative energy sources. A major part of the inverter was printed circuit boards. To get prototypes built here in Canada cost about $350 a piece, and took several weeks. To get the same thing from China too several days, including shipping, and cost $35 a piece.

That’s 10% of the Canadian price, and while I’m sure workers are paid poorly in China, I had trouble squaring such a price difference.

And the problem is that our whole economy is built on Chinese imports – of consumer goods sure, but just about everything now has Chinese components somewhere or other, especially anything in the hightech sector.

So if there is a problem in Chinese pricing, and if there is a real readjustment, then we’re all going to face the consequences. Here’s what Avner Mandelman has to say in today’s Globe:

You see, China, like Nortel and Japan and Soviet Russia, has been selling most things below true cost – which is the direct cost of production plus the cost of capital – and thus lost money on much of what it produced, and so destroyed much of its capital. A company that does so must eventually lay off workers and go bust. China, in my opinion, now faces similar risks, which Mr. Wen finally admitted.

Why does China sell below true cost? Because it is a dictatorship that wants to keep its restive people employed, and so, like (democratic) Japan before it, it keeps throwing good savings at bogus products. I say bogus because if you sell below true cost you create fictitious demand that otherwise wouldn’t be there had the product been priced realistically. Thus the large factory you built to satisfy the goosed-up demand cannot be rebuilt once it wears out because you didn’t include depreciation in the product’s price.

What this means is that we’ve been rich based on two simultaneous fantasies: cheap credit and cheap goods from China. But cheap credit eventually dries up, and the cheap goods from China have essentially been sold at below cost, meaning China’s whole economy could come tumbling down.

It’s hard to figure out how all of this will play out. After all, China owns much of the US’s debt, and China can only keep it’s economy going if the US keeps buying. So everyone has an interest in keeping the fantasy going, but the laws of physics, I fear, are going to get in the way eventually.

All that to say, things might be much worse than we think they are. I hope not.

I’ve been imagining this headline for a few years now.

I’m no conservative, but I’ve long said that the people who should be most angry with Bush & Co. (or, better, who are most responsible for Bush & Co.) are the real conservatives in America. They have allowed this president, his administration, and the people behind him to undermine true conservatism in the name of power. It might have been a decent deal while Bush ruled the White House, but the long-term implications for the movement could well be devastating. We’ll see. Anyway:

Last Monday, former Bush White House aide Peter Wehner made a startling statement in an op-ed in The Washington Post. He said that while “the GOP is in bad shape, conservatism is not.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism has been badly damaged by Wehner’s former bosses, President Bush and Karl Rove, and others who never understood our movement, who only saw it as a tool to serve the political needs of this administration, never as a framework for governance.

From steel tariffs to prescription drug benefits, to the massive expansion of the police powers of the national government, to bloated transportation and energy bills, to federal mandates to the states on education, to nation-building, Reaganism was not only thrown under a bus by this administration, it also repeatedly ran back and forth over it.

The work of millions of conservatives going back to the 1940s has been sullied and misshapen into something unrecognizable, and Wehner writes as if he was simply an innocent bystander, rather than an active participant in its demise.. [more...]

I’m doing a Master’s in Concordia Media Studies program, or at least part of a Master’s (taking just one class at the moment). Below is a paper I just wrote for the Media Theory class I am taking (with Charles Acland). After doing much writing in the past years – blogging, novel writing, article-making, it was strange to have an actual assignment with rules. This is a “synthesis paper” that is supposed to analyze three papers, and make them “speak to each other. ” What came out was something a bit more polemic, and I had some trouble shoehorning in ideas from one paper in particular. Anyway, here it is. For posterity. Comments welcome.

The serious contenders for organizational models of Western societies have more or less fallen away since 1989 leaving some form of liberal democracy as the only viable option for now. The pitched battles of the 20th Century between democracy and the big isms (fascisim and communism), have shifted somewhat onto home turf, with the role of the public sphere itself questioned, and in many cases diminished. At the same time there has been a countermovement protecting and growing the public sphere, in particular on the web where production and distribution of independent media – from blogs to music to film to encyclopedia – has fractured the dominance of some of the entrenched powers that control the public sphere.

At heart this is an ideological struggle, about the value of the public sphere as a legitimate tool or platform for the creation of societal good. On the one hand, there are what Nancy Fraser calls “civic-republicans,” dedicated to debating together in the service of the common good of society; on the other, “liberal-individualists,” who think that the common good is best achieved by reducing (government, public) interference with the choices of individuals (Fraser, 20).

Particularly in the past decade we’ve the liberal-individualists ascending. There has been significant erosion of the public, through shifting of power, responsibility, and even respect from what once was called “public” into the other spheres. The examples are numerous especially in the United States, where the battles have been most pronounced: the corporate encroached on public defense in the form of military contractors; the political ate into public lawmaking and regulation with politicization in the US Department of Justice, and scientific independence at the Environmental Protection Agency, and other public institutions; “free-markets,” private actors and corporate self-regulation were chosen over public oversight in the lead-up to the economic meltdown of 2008; and the role of “community organizers” was dismissed as unserious at this year’s Republican National Convention. In all these cases, an argument has been made that private/corporate/political actors are “better” at producing societal good than are the quasi-governmental agents of public sphere. (Whether this is a true ideological position, or a cynical manipulation for benefit of the few is beside the point – in the public debate on the question, a large percentage prefer private/corporate to public).

While we’ve seen this kind of questioning of the value of the public, there has been another battle emerging in the true Habermasian public sphere of discussion and ideas, in the form of regulations surrounding the Internet, particularly on copyright and net neutrality, two fundamental principles that have seen the flourishing of a public sphere on the web. On both counts, there is a powerful movement seeking to cordon off the public space of the web – mainly for commercial reasons. Such actions may result in radical alteration of the public sphere of the web: a reduction in the ability of all members of society to equally access the idea distribution mechanisms of the Internet; and the locking down of ideas and information through draconian copyright laws.
We have seen many segments of the public sphere under attack – both the official public, tasked with “enforcing the public good,” and the public idea sphere itself, the space where discussions and deliberation about the common good are supposed to happen. The attack comes from many different angles. One ideological underpinning, championed by free-marketeers, deregulators and the libertarian-leaning on the right of the spectrum, is the belief that the “public good” is best served by self-interested individuals, and not by a concerted effort of “society” (read: “government”) to engineer public good on the public’s behalf.

So given the tenuousness of the public sphere today, it’s worth asking a few questions: Is the public sphere still important? If so, why? And if so, what should we do about it?

By 1962, Jurgen Habermas was already describing the death of the idealized public sphere of the liberal era (18th and 19th Century), a time when members of the (bourgeois) public conversed and wrote and debated about the good of society. Indeed, as the bourgeois public gained power, control of the public sphere meant control of the mechanisms of democracy. The result was transformation of the traditional delineations of public, private, corporate, and political. The public gained new responsibilities (through governmental and private associations) for areas previously the responsibility of families: unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement plans, and the other social mechanisms of the (public) welfare state. As these new public institutions expanded into the private, however, they established themselves “above the public whose interest they once were” (Habermas, 176). The role of the private family was eroded: it was no longer a central economic unit, but rather a consuming unit; and further the family disengaged completely from the “social labour context,” with the former public role of the family disappearing entirely (Habermas, 154).

At the same time the public sphere of ideas was invaded by the consumerist media. For Habermas this was the most significant shift, as the space for debate and deliberation about public good was turned over from the true public, to a “pseudo-public, or sham-private” world of cultural consumption (Habermas, 160).

The resulting society, more striking now in 2008 than it was in 1962, was one where decision-making “takes place directly between the private bureaucracies, special- interest associations, parties, and public administration. The public as such is included only sporadically in this circuit of power, and even then it is brought in only to contribute to its acclamation.” (Habermas, 176). Namely: in the election process, some portion of society gives a tepid benediction to a government that implements actual policies with little or no input from society itself.

The reasons for this state of affairs is fairly clear: in a democratic society, access to power is delivered through the vote, and the process of voter decision-making happens largely in the public sphere, where the options, choices, flaws and advantages of various candidates and policies are (supposedly) debated. So control of the public sphere is essential for access to power in general. Dominant forces will always vie for dominant control, and in the case of democracy, control is found by dominating the public sphere through whatever means necessary: through special interest groups, lobby groups, PR firms, media outlets, religious institutions, think tanks, as well as the more official tools of public infrastructure: schools, economic policies, environmental regulations etc.

The dominant group of the twentieth century were the spiritual descendents of the “bourgeoisie,” and they have succeeded in defining debate and discussion in the public sphere according to their interests. The public sphere, by virtue of the power of dominant groups, necessarily has become less about “the good of society” and more about “the good of the dominant groups.” Hence, media, public institutions, financial regulation, even armies were turned over, with general approval of this “public sphere,” to a smaller subset of the dominant group, with the inevitable concentration of power and wealth as more of both were grabbed by the dominant (whose dominant status inevitably leads to greater power). Most recently, the liberal-individualist faction of the dominant group has succeeded in transferring vast amounts of public power and wealth into corporate and private hands.

It seems apparent (to some anyway) that the faith in self-interested actors alone to generate the best outcomes for the “public good” have been misplaced, by any number of metrics: bungled Iraq, problematic Katrina, and most devastating, the recent economic melt-down. Still, the question is far from settled in the public at large. The debate about the value of the public sphere still rages, even as the concept of the “public” has regained some currency in the recent strong moves of governments and central banks around the world to inject some public stability into the shaky foundation of the private/corporate financial system, left too long outside public control. The former US Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, a long-time champion of anti-public deregulation, has issued his mea culpa, and to some extent the tides seem to be turning back to the civic-republicans (Andrews).

Into this late 20th Century mix came a new medium which made for a different kind of public sphere from that which had come before: the Internet. The Internet, coupled with technological innovations that have come to be known as Web 2.0, meant that everyone with access to a computer and the web could easily, and essentially at zero cost, distribute ideas, arguments, facts, and opinions not just to a local public, but to the entire world. Habermas’ complaint about the “new media” of the sixties, that it deprived the public “the opportunity to say something and disagree,” had found an answer (Habermas, 171). With the new tools of the web – blog, podcasts, digital video, wikis and the rest – the entire world could in theory not just answer the traditional media, but make their own, and rival the established giants who had dominated the media landscape for the previous half-century at least. The first most striking unseating came at the hands of Wikipedia, the “encylopedia anyone can edit,” that, regardless of opinions of its quality, undoubtedly is the most used encyclopedia in the world right now, probably the most used encyclopedia in the history of the world. Blogs came to challenge journalism, though rather than unseat the mainstream, they’ve served instead as a public counterpoint to the corporate pseudo-public media, holding them to account through rigourous (and often politically opinionated) fact-checking, answering and disagreeing as Habermas would have hoped.

Not just in content creation has the web affected media,; it’s also opened up a range of choice for the general public – which was previously beholden to the editorial decisions of the few big media corporations that controlled a constantly-growing percentage of mainsteam-media producers. Access to media from all around the world, the explosion of independent and previously-unheard media producers on the web, added to the already proliferating array of quasi-public groups, including non-governmental organizations, social activist networks, lobbyists, special interest groups, and countless others now defines our current public sphere.

Whether or not Nancy Fraser’s “plurality of competing publics” is a desirable conception of the public sphere becomes almost beside the point: it’s out of the bottle, and it’s almost impossible to imagine how it might be put back in. Not that there is any desire to do so. Habermas’ polite gentlemen smoking cigars and discussing the “good of society” was an (idealized) anachronism in 1962; in 2008 it’s unimaginable. This is the motley shape of our contemporary public sphere: a sphere where bad US mortgages topple French investment banks; where a central Canadian election issue is how the country will reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to meet international obligations for a treaty signed in Kyoto; where a months-long commission inquiry in Quebec discusses what sorts of things immigrants should or should not do when they come to this province; where a major controversy arises in Toronto when the school board approves a black-only high school; where international trade deals govern our economic health; and where an ever increasing amount of the goods we consume come from elsewhere, while we sell more than ever of our own production onto export markets; where hundreds of millions of individuals fill the web with writing, images, videos and audio every day.

A plurality of publics is what we have, and it’s fair to say that we’ve arrived here for precisely the reason Fraser suggests: a single “public sphere” just won’t cut it. The public sphere is still the seat of political decision-making, flawed though it might be, and so all these groups – from the oil lobbyists to the homeless activists – all these publics or counterpublics or subaltern counterpublics are required to represent themselves in the public sphere if they wish for their needs to be met, or even heard, by the machinery of power.

The Internet gives instant global distribution to any counterpublic which can and cares to use it. In a sense the Internet offers the utopian promise of the liberal democracy’s free marketplace for ideas, where in theory race, class, colour or creed need not have any impact on how one’s ideas are viewed. (The reality is something different: the Western experience is that the overwhelming majority of those producing content for the web are the modern equivalent of the Bourgeoisie; though the explosion of web use in China, and the innovative use of mobile technologies in Africa suggests that Western middleclass dominance of the digital communications may well be fleeting).

In any case the actual and potential importance of the web is significant, as a space where individuals and counterpublics have the ability to create and distribute their own media, define their own issues and their own experience. The web might offer a cure to the malaise identified by Negt & Kludge: that those excluded from power have their experience defined for them by a public sphere (media, school, political parties etc) controlled by those with an interest in continued dominance (Negt & Kludge, 65, 70). In fact, without a true and vibrant counterpublic sphere, the powerless life-experience is “split in two halves,” one half contributing to the consumer culture that supports the dominant; and another half “disqualified” by the dominant systems of society (Negt & Kludge, 76).

The web offers one space where, in theory anyway, counterpublics can and will emerge, with space to define themselves, their own experiences on the own terms, providing a means to avoid Negt & Kludge’s existential bisection.

For this reason, debates about what the web will look like in the future are essential. If maintaining a plurality of competing publics is the best case for participatory democracy, and if participatory democracy is thought to be desirable, then we should be careful about the sorts of policies and regulation we apply to the web and to other distributed forms of media communications as they evolve.

The web was built with two technical/philosophical principles: neutrality, and free flow of information. As it applies to the plurality of counterpublics, net neutrality ensures that all content on the web is treated equally on network – so data/content from TimeWarner is not privileged over data/content from HomelessNation, simply because TimeWarner pays Internet Service Providers a premium. The net neutrality principle is a precondition for a vibrant plurality of counterpublics, yet it is under threat in the United States, and already regularly violated in Canada, for instance when Telus blocked a pro-union website during a labour dispute in 2005 (Geist, December 19, 2005). Similarly, copyright law governs the way ideas and knowledge are created, used, and shared, and recent legislation tabled in Canada, modeled after the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, makes it easier for corporate interests to lock down knowledge, and stop its spread. While the commercial interests of content creators is important, there once was an ideal applied to copyright law that protecting content creators should be balanced against the public good. That principle seems to be abandoned, in the name of inscribing and closing off ideas within corporate ownership, to a far greater degree than any previous copyright law allowed (Lessig, 139).

Regardless of Nancy Fraser’s objections to Habermas, and Negt & Kludge’s worries about the working class metaphorically torn in half by an oppressive public sphere, until another model comes along, most of us will be stuck figuring out how to make some variant of the public sphere in a liberal democracy work better. While they aren’t ideal, the underlying principles of deliberation, debate, and a public sphere, pseudo or not, that generally helps society to work towards something like the “public good” remains the most compelling vision of contemporary democracy.

There is an argument to be made that the best solutions are arrived at by having the greatest number of possible solutions competing for attention. In practice, of course, things don’t work out so smoothly, but the ideal remains embedded in our conception of the advantages of democracy. In order to have the greatest number of possible solutions competing for attention, we need a vibrant public sphere, which is necessarily made up of competing counterpublics. The web has provided – in theory at least – a public sphere of ideas equal to Habermas’ lettered ideal (if cluttered with much else as well); with egalitarian space for all of Nancy Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics (if stratified still along class, racial, geographic and gender lines), and providing in principle a space for the working class to find their true experience (if somewhat shaped and mediated by similar forces that influence the rest of the public sphere). Still, as a marketplace for ideas, the public sphere of the web is a significant improvement on all that has come before (much like Churchill’s democracy, the web might be the worst form of public sphere, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time).

As the forces that have encroached on other realms of the public in the past decades begin circling the web, we should be cautious to help defend and indeed strengthen this unique chance at a wider, more effective realm of ideas, in the name of the public good.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Edmund (2008). “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” in New York Times, New York: October 24, 2008.

Fraser, Nancy (1993). “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, Bruce Robbins, ed., Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-32.

Geist, Michael (2005). “Dangers in ISPs’ Bid For New Tolls,” in Toronto Star, Toronto: December 19, 2005.

Habermas, Jurgen (1989:1962). “The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 141-180.

Lessig. Lawrence (2004). Free Culture, New York: The Penguin Press.

Negt, Oskar and Kludge, Alexander (1988:1972). “The Public Sphere and Experience: Selections,” October 46: pp. 60-82.

How did we end up in this mess of an economic meltdown?

The answer is pretty simple: too much cheap credit, and no regulation of derivatives.

Probably more than any other individual, Alan Greenspan is to blame for both. He was Clinton’s and then Bush’s wizzard Fed Reserve Chairman, who waved the wand of reduced interest rates to keep the economic pump primed. Basically, Greenspan was the rich daddy who kept replacing junior’s maxed out credit card with a new one, but never really paid off the old ones.

And hence we are where we are.

Today, a mea culpa. Reports the New York Times:

Facing a firing line of questions from Washington lawmakers, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman once considered the infallible maestro of the financial system, admitted on Thursday that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight.

A fervent proponent of deregulation during his 18-year tenure at the Fed’s helm, Mr. Greenspan has faced mounting criticism this year for having refused to consider cracking down on credit derivatives, an unchecked market whose excesses partly led to the current financial crisis.

Although he defended the use of derivatives in general, Mr. Greenspan, who left office in 2006, told members of the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform that he was “partially” wrong in not having tried to regulate the market for credit-default swaps.

And:

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
[more...]

It’s easy to be popular when you keep handing out money. Not so easy to be popular once you’ve run out, when you have to admit you bankrupted yourself, and everyone’s been expecting more.

I wrote my political platform the other day, with Health being one of my ten planks. One of the problems with Health is that it’s in provincial jurisdiction, so my federal platform would have difficulty really affecting health here in Quebec.

This province has the lowest rate of citizen access to family doctors, which you would think would be a priority problem for the government. It’s not. Having access to family doctors is the best way to keep healthcare costs down, by providing true preventative medicine that catches problems before they spiral out of control. Having health issues dealt with in the Emergency is the most expensive way to run a health system. (I suspect the government has a better economic equation: just letting people die is the cheapest course of action).

Why do we have so few family doctors in Quebec? Here’s one reason:

Medical students from out-of-province are REQUIRED to sign an agreement saying that they will leave Quebec after their residency. If they choose to stay, they must pay a significant fine.

So one of the reasons that we have a lack of doctors is that doctors who have gone to medical school in Quebec, and trained in Quebec medical residency programs, all at taxpayer expense, but come from other provinces are REQUIRED to leave when they are done their training in Quebec.

Make sense?

Here is my platform that I undertake to implement as Prime Minister of Canada. Please vote for me on Tuesday.

Broadly, I will:

• Make Canada a recognized global leader in communications technology, and energy technology
• Increase regulation of financial markets
• Address climate change
• Strongly articulate the Canadian Vision to the world, one that focuses on our success at integrating a multiethnic population, based on shared values of a strong social fabric. [NOTE: this sounds a bit bullshitty, but I strongly believe that in these very troubled times in the world, Canada seems to have negotiated the difficulties of the 21st Century remarkably well: we should use this to our advantage].

Specifically, here’s what I will do:

1. Economy (Part 1: Financial System)

Things are bleak, and I have to admit I don’t know how to fix it. The real terror here is that maybe, just maybe, the very basis of “growth” as the fundamental driver of economic and social policy might have been stretched to it’s limit, and broken. If that’s the case, we’re in trouble, because we don’t even know how to talk about anything else. The short term problem is that there is very little Canada can do about it: we are at the mercy of a global economy, and a neighbour that looks to be in disastrous trouble. At the very least, Canada should:

• develop better regulation of national and international financial transactions and systems, no more unregulated asset classes
• implement stricter control on the sale of key corporate assets to foreign buyers (it’ll be less of a problem now that credit has dried up, but what better time to work on this)

But that doesn’t deal with the current crisis, so we better focus on that. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts, roll up our sleeves and work very hard to navigate the coming storms.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t have any answers yet, but I promise you, this will be the top focus for the government. I think anyone who says they have solutions right now is lying – it’s hard to even know what the problems will look like.

2. Economy (Part 2: Innovation)

Communication technologies will continue to be the dominant transformative force in the world, economic melt-down or not. Canada needs to position itself to be a true world leader in this sector, instead of the pathetic laggard it’s become in the past decade, notwithstanding RIM and Flickr. This means a few things, including:

• implement policies that make Canada’s mobile space competitive with the world, for consumers and developers
• commit to broadband for all
• massive investment in hackerism in our education systems

In addition to commitments to leadership in communications tech, we’ll identify two other sectors where Canada is a high performer, and target a global ranking in top 3 by 2013. One of them will be energy: massive investment in developing new energy technologies, exporting energy, and/or exportable expertise.

3. Arts

Arts. This is a tough one. Can I level with you? I’m not sure that all this government Arts funding & grants results in very good art. A lot of what Canada produces is, let’s face it, mediocre. Maybe a bit of hunger and global competition would help the Arts more than hinder it. But, don’t worry I won’t be too radical. There will still be a big pot of money, but I’d like to explore new ways to fund arts in more interesting ways. This is a dodge, I know, but I have to be careful with how this one plays in Quebec.

Oh: I will strongly support the CBC, the NFB, the NAC and a few other similar institutions, but in order to get a cent of funding they have to put everything on the web for free. And CBC is not allowed to make any more TV series set in the 1800s in the Maritimes. Also, production of other kinds of schlock will not be encouraged.

4. Environment

Climate change is going to be a doozy, if we aren’t careful, and we are running out of time. There is a reason Kyoto was signed in 1998, without commitments until 2008-2012: To give us a decade to adapt our economy. Instead we pissed that decade away, and didn’t do a thing. So let’s try this again, starting in 2010, all major polluting companies will have to bring down their GHG emission by 1%, 2011 2%, 2012 3% and 2013 4% … and then we’ll see how things are going. We’ll make a carbon trading market, with strict criteria on what acceptable credits are (none of this tree planting bullshit). We’ll integrate with other international markets (EU and the state-lead initiatives in the US); but only 30% of purchased credits to meet obligations can come from international markets, the rest will have to be internal reductions or Canadian-based credit purchases. A 2% tax will be added to all transactions, to go into a federal climate fund, that will fund R&D and adaptation. As the market develops and matures, we’ll start adding requirements on vehicles to either meet new GHG standards, or to be sold along with a stream of pre-purchased carbon credits that will offset a portion of emissions caused by the car. This means that business and consumers will all share the brunt of this. I’m sorry, people, but that’s the point: it is going to be more expensive (though maybe offset by efficiency improvements). If no one had to sacrifice anything, we would have dealt with this years ago.

5. First Nations

It struck me today for some reason that we need to make a serious effort to solve, or move towards solving, the problem of the First Nations in Canada. Question: as you’ve been gloating about how amazing it is that racist USA might just elect a black president, have you wondered how likely it is that we’ll elect a Native Prime Minister in our next election? That says lots of different things, all of which we should seriously try to address. The problems with First Nations are complex, with blame to go all around: you can probably shovel as much of it onto the doorsteps of Native leadership as on the front yards of all the major political parties, and Canadians in general. But finding out who is at fault isn’t worth a thing. Finding out how to solve the problems is. So, as Prime Minister I will commit to sitting down with Native leadership, to define the three most serious issues facing First Nations. Then we’ll start figuring out how to solve them. No bullshit proclamations, I mean really implement serious changes. For some reason, I feel like this might be crucial to Canada’s successful future. No idea why, but that’s how I feel about it.

6. Defense

Afghanistan is going to cost us $16 billion by 2011, and only this past year did the military investigate the history of the Russian involvement in Afghanistan. Jesus Christ, guys. I don’t even know what to say. Turns out we’ve made all the same mistakes as the Russians. Look: we need to define the goal or get out. I would not commit to immediate withdrawl, but someone damn well better be able to articulate a decent vision of “victory in Afghanistan” that has a chance in hell of actually happening. And if no one can do that, then let’s get out. I’m willing to talk on this one, but I tell you I am leaning heavily to: Get Out. My only hesitation is that, love em or hate em, we have to play nice with the USA, since they are our neighbours, and we are tied to them whether we like it or not. Oh, and by the way, when I do cut the Afghan mission, I’m not going cut military spending, I’ll just focus it better on military infrastructure and domestic needs, including the Arctic. I think the Canadian military has been starved of funds, and I just don’t think that’s a good idea.

7. Copyright

This might seem like a niche issue to some, but to me copyright law is the legal framework that underpins how we create, use and share information. It is the legal basis for the intellectual life of the country. We will implement a modernized law, that takes into account the Internet, drops criminalization of personal use and doesn’t have any of this damned anti-circumvention crap in it. We’ll consult with New Zealand, and Israel, who apparently have recently come out with new laws. Michael Geist will be my special advisor, and we’ll do a wide consultation before committing to law any stupid legislation that might screw up Canada for a generation.

8. Transparency in Government

First, we will ditch Crown Copyright, and commit to making taxpayer-funded datasets available to citizens for free, in accessible formats. We’ll start with StatsCan, and work out from there. In addition, we will actively support grassroots initiatives that build on government datasets. In addition we’ll work to have government decision-making processes opened up to more scrutiny on the web. Everyone in my government will sign the I Believe In Open Pledge, and maybe we’ll pass it into law.

The first dataset we release will be the set of postal codes tied to electoral districts.

9. Education

We’ll tie education in with #2, innovation in the economy, with lots of money for educational hackerism, and for wonky abstract arts too, since that’s where so much innovation comes from, even if it takes a while to trickle back to the rest of the world.

We’ll increase commitments to funding post-secondary education.

10. Health

Health. God, what a mess. Whatever we are doing, it is not working. Things are getting worse and worse. We will:

• Define specific Canadian health priorities (with a focus of preventative medicine – not the fake kind that gives everyone drugs for diseases the might get later)
• Better manage drug costs, with a Canada-wide drug insurance plan (provinces that don’t want to play can go on their own, and when studies show the Canada-wide durg costs 25% lower than the independent province costs, they can let their populations decide what they want to do)
• Examine 4 healthcare models (Australia, France, UK, Canada), match outcomes with our health priorities, and then model Canada’s new health system on the best practices from those countries
• Level with Canadians and tell them that our healthcare system is broken and getting worse, and that we already have so much private stuff in our system, that we just have to face up to the fact that it’s going to be part of the solution.
• Get more nurses on the job, and shake things up so that nurses and Doctor’s assistants can do more of the routine work
• Prioritize on increasing numbers of family doctors

In 2000-2001, I worked in New York for an interdealer broker (a financial broker to banks and other big institutions) Prebon Yamane, now Tullett Prebon, setting up their Environmental Products division. I worked with a few former investment bankers, putting together structured financial instruments to help big energy companies hedge against the multi-million/billion dollar risk of Kyoto Protocol ratification. Kyoto ratification would mean that companies would be forced by their governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to buy carbon credits, or do both. Our financial instruments were, more or less, derivatives: they were carbon credit futures contracts, packaged up as insurance. On one side we would have big energy companies paying insurance on the risk of Kyoto ratification; on the other side of the transaction, we would invest in large greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world that would create a pool of credits that we, along with our partners, a big investment bank and a big reinsurance company, would undertake to guarantee as “Kyoto Compliant.”

But as the Vice President of Sasol, the South African energy & chemical giant, told me when we met in Johannesburg in early 2001, “I spoke with Dick Cheney last week, and he told me the US will never sign on to the Kyoto Protocol.” He was right out of Lethal Weapon 2, and he was dead on. Despite campaigning on regulation of GHGs in 2000, Bush scuttled Kyoto. And that (along with September 11th) was the end of my involvement with Prebon and the world of fancy financial derivatives.

Prebon Yamane did lots of business with Enron. Tthey were hated by everyone, they were arrogant and abusive, which is par for the course in the financial business, but they were the worst. So I had a front row seat as Enron imploded that year, from more or less the same sickness that is now afflicting our global financial markets.

In short: complex financial derivatives had abstracted financial worth very far away from the underlying value of assets. This enabled magic “creation” of extraordinary wealth, built on manipulation and trading of the abstract derivatives, but not the asset itself. At it’s height, Enron generated $111 billion in revenues, with hardly any assets. Fortune magazine called them America’s Most Innovative Company six years running. In the case of Enron, there was a whole pile of fraud as well, as things started to unravel, but the *real* culprits were:

• regulators, who closed their eyes because too much money was being made, and the “free market” was king
• rating agencies, who gave positive ratings to institutions whose actual financial health was based on vapour
• accountants/auditors, who stopped doing their job, which is to verify the financial soundness of the numbers provided by their clients.

And the problem was, and continued to be that so many people were making so much money, that no one wanted to upset the apple cart, even if there weren’t any apples in it to begin with. The system was “working,” meaning lots of people were getting rich, and you and I were living in prosperous times, relatively comfortable and happy. Who’s going to put a stop to that and still get elected next year? Well, it turns out: no one.

The same can be said today, and we’re going to face the consequence of a decade or two of fantasy.

Enron collapsed, and that should have been a warning that the modern financial markets were a disaster waiting to happen. Instead, interest rates were slashed through the late 90s and early 21st century, cheap credit flooded the market, and deregulation increased, rather than decreased.

One of Prebon’s most profitable businesses, even in 2001 was the credit default swap desk. Billions of dollars went through that desk.

Credit default swaps are insurance against someone defaulting on loans, bonds, or other financial obligations. Which makes sense. Except people started betting on likelihoods of defaults, buying default insurance on someone else’s assets. And then trading them on an open market, betting for or against defaults that had nothing whatever to do with them.

In 2007, there was something like $60 trillion (yes, trillion) worth of credit default swaps out there, based on an underlying asset value of about $5 trillion. The abstract “value” created by the magic of these derivatives is 12 times the value of the underlying assets … $60 trillion.

To put that in perspective, the world’s GDP in 2007 was $54 trillion. So outstanding credit default swaps are worth more than the entire world’s economic output. Make sense? Yeah. (Ps, sorry for the bold italics, but perhaps it’s justified here?)

This is, essentially, a colossal pyramid scheme, roughly the size of the entire wrold’s economy.

Credit default swaps have been completely unregulated, meaning no one in the financial business even knows who is exposed to what risk, because no one has to report their exposure anywhere.

For those counting, the $700 billion bailout is 1/85th of the exposure in the the credit default swap market, and who knows what other fancy financial eggheadery there might be out there.

Fasten your seatbelts.

[I highly recommend This American Life's latest episode for a better explanation of what's happening and why it matters].

[Inspired by a conversation with Ian Rae, and an email exchange with John Beckmann]

From the NYTimes:

Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night, in what is by far the largest bank failure in American history. [more...]

Jennifer Bell, of Visiblegovernment.ca has launched a new site, ibelieveinopen, asking candidates to take a pledge for openness:

I believe candidates should:

• Support reforms that increase government transparency and accountability.
• Make campaign promises specific and measurable, and report progress on promises and their metrics at least semi-annually.
• Publish the content of his or her daily schedule, including meetings with lobbyists and special interest groups.
• Support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institutions.
• Support reforms that make it easier for Canadians to obtain government information they have a right to know.

As of today, there are 51 candidate pledges (about evenly split between the Greens & the NDP, with 1 Libera)l. I’ve emailed all my candidates to ask them if they will be taking the pledge, except Sebastian Dhavernas, who does not have an email address listed on the interweb!

Here is the little email I sent, if you would like to copy it:

Hello,

Will [Candidate Name] be signing this pledge?
http://ibelieveinopen.ca/

51 candidates have done so already.

Hugh McGuire
Outremont

Washington Post reports, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office warns that the bailout could cause things to get worse. Why? Because it might expose how bad things actually are under the hoods of the world’s financial powerhouses:

During testimony before the House Budget Committee, Peter R. Orszag — Congress’s top bookkeeper — said the bailout could expose the way companies are stowing toxic assets on their books, leading to greater problems. [more...]

From Harvard professor of economics and former IMF chief economist, Kenneth Rogoff, in the Financial Times:

Were the financial crisis to end today, the costs would be painful but manageable, roughly equivalent to the cost of another year in Iraq. Unfortunately, however, the financial crisis is far from over, and it is hard to imagine how the US government is going to succeed in creating a firewall against further contagion without spending five to 10 times more than it has already, that is, an amount closer to $1,000bn to $2,000bn. [more...]

From the Washington Post:

From the rescue of Bear Stearns to the takeovers of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and American International Group, all the key decisions have been made by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York…

As they chart a government response to the crisis, the stakes could hardly be higher. If they succeed, they could tame the economic downturn and orchestrate a restructuring of Wall Street with minimal collateral damage. If they fail, the toll could be millions of jobs, trillions of dollars in lost wealth and a crisis of confidence in global capitalism. [more...]

Meanwhile, on Planet Mars:

At a rally in Ohio on Tuesday, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told the crowd that she’d head up energy policy in a McCain administration.

“John and I, we’ve discussed some new responsibilities that I’m going to have as vice president,” Palin said. “First, I’ll help to lead the mission of energy security.” [more...]

Fasten your seat belts.

On Saturday mornings we make scrambled eggs, read the Saturday Globe and Mail, and listen to the podcast of On the Media, the best American current affairs program out there.

This week’s episode has a really interesting piece (starting at 37 minutes), about print-on-demand web t-shirt company CafePress. Fred Durham, co-founder, claims that political t-shirt designs and sales are better predictors of political outcomes than polls. You can follow the data here: CafePress Meter.

Apparently Obama is the front-runner in the election, though last week Obama’s sales went down by 2.67%, and McCain is up 2.86%. However, Obama is selling 60-70% of candidate shirts, to McCain’s 20ish %.

I’ve been saying for a long time that one of the problems with the Left/Democrats in the US is that they have been attacking Republican/Bush policies for the past 8 years on the wrong front, questioning the morality of what the US is doing. The problem with that tack is that morality is abstract, and there are a good number of people who just don’t agree with the Dems positions on what’s moral and what’s not. And moral issues aren’t the sort of things voters change their mind on. Either you think torture is immoral, or you think it can be justified, but telling the guy who thinks it can be justified that he’s immporal isn’t going to win his vote.

The more convincing argument from my point of view is not that the Republicans are immoral, but that they are coming dangerously close to wrecking the country. They are foolish and irresponsible and careless, and possibly immoral. But the nice thing about 1, 2, and 3 is that you can point to example after example and say, you see: Foolish. Irresponsible. Careless.

Without making the appeal to morality, you can make the case, based on any in a great number of examples (Katrina, subprimes, Iraq/Afghanistan, gitmo, Gonzales and the “Justice” Department, tax cuts, climate change, Iran, Georgia, the list goes on and on), that the real problem with the Republicans is not that they are “immoral,” but they are just plain dangerous. That if you reelect them, we all might just see the USA driven over a cliff.

This is a substantial debate, and there’s a pretty good body of evidence that really the last 8 years have been pretty catastrophic for America, and another 8 years could well finish things off.

That’s a *real* debate, and one worth having. Some Republicans will disagree, but I’ve said here numerous times that the people I think who bear the brunt of the responsibility for the past 8 years are not the Democrats (they’ve been useless), but those on the Right who have watched this band of fools run roughshod over a couple of hundred years of experience running a law-based constitutional democracy, and perhaps the past 2,000 years of military and foreign affairs wisdom.

The Bush Republicans have been brilliant politicians, but they’ve been dismal at governing.

I still don’t quite know what to think of Obama, but he sure is one hell of a breath of fresh air. Instead of the same old pap and mush that you hear from the usually-spineless Democrats, here’s a guy who stands up and calls a spade a spade. He scoffed (as he should have) at Hillary’s stupid attacks on him. And he’s made McCain look like a fool. The guy knows his stuff, and he has an amazingly rare gift of not mincing his words. So it was refreshing to hear the tone of his speech, which I’d call inspiring indignation.

He conveys the sense that I’ve felt over the past 8 years, which is: “You’ve got to be joking. Come on, we’re better than this. This just isn’t good enough.”

Instead of whining, as most Democrats seem expert in, he does this funny thing of demanding more. Of his opponents. Of the country. Of all of us. From his excellent speech (text, video), this was my favourite line, and why I like Obama:

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

It’s powerful because even if you are a Republican, other than the most rabid, I think most people agree that whatever happened in the last 8 years, it just was not great. Just not good enough.

When was the last time you remember thinking a politician was demanding more out of us all? Not just saying the words, but actually having the moral force behind the words.

I don’t remember that ever, and that I think that’s the power that Obama has.

Whether he’d be a good president or not, I just don’t know, but I like the idea of having politicians who demand that we all, all of us, pull up our socks and start acting like adults.

For some reason, I got contacted by Liberal Marc Garneau’s campaign (he’s running against Anne Lagacé-Dowson in a federal by-election in Wesmount-Ville Marie). They emailed me because I occasionally write political stuff on this blog, and invited me to an event. I said, probably not, but what does Marc think of the Conservatives new copyright bill, Bill C-61? They said, why not come have a meeting with Marc, and you can talk about it. So I said yes.

The interview got off to a slow start but Mr. Garneau did say this was his, and the Liberal’s policy:
-C-61 should be scrapped
-public consultations should be done
-and a brand new Bill should be drafted
-”personal use” should have more protection

But he told me something interesting: He has had more mail and communication from constituents about C-61 than any other issue in the election.

And so I wondered, Why, if copyright is the topic that he has heard more about than any other, is there not a single mention of C-61 on his web site? I emailed him afterwards to ask that, and, Lo, here is his statement:

The government’s new copyright bill, introduced on June 11, 2008, is a very important matter for the student, business and cultural communities in Canada. The effects of any major revision of our Copyright Law will be far reaching and serious for both communities. With the stakes so high, it is critical that the right balance is found.

Does Bill C-61 strike the correct balance? Should it be approved by Parliament?

These questions cannot be answered without first holding extensive consultations with stake holders, and in this case, all Canadians are stake holders. All Canadians have a stake in the outcome of the examination of Bill C-61, either as creators or as consumers of intellectual property…[more...]

UPDATE: Which, as Daniel points out below, says little about what the Liberals think the legislation should be, or where it’s major flaws are. And god knows their history on Copyright isn’t stellar.

We went on to talk about technology and innovation, and that’s where Garneau got animated, and convincing. He’s been an astronaut, the head of the Canadian Space Agency, and lead author of the Report on Science and Technology, written for the Liberal Renewal Commission.

I particularly pressed him on information and communications technology, where I feel that Canada has dropped dismally by the wayside in the past 15 years, compared with, say, Finland, which has gone in the other direction. He got excited talking about Nokia, and excellence, and defining a clear set of objectives and getting all of Canada behind them. That gave me some hope. Garneau is an tech guy, and he gets it.

Mind you, Anne’s got Corey.

[Incidentally, what the hell is wrong with the Liberal party's web design team? What is this, 1996? How hard would it be for the Liberals to provide a decent site template for all their candidates instead of this dog's breakfast design with a static html "blog," no RSS, and numerous other crimes against the Internet. Reminds me of that line from Sate and Main: "It looks like Edith Head puked, and the puke designed that website." UPDATE: seems candidates make their own sites, so the question is: What's wrong with Marc's design team?]

From NY Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners….

[more...]

I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about the disconnect between the “wealth” of the West in the past 30 or 40 years, and actual “reality.” I argued here that our wealth is a fantasy because: it is based on unsustainably cheap credit (most famously the subprime mess, but endemic throughout the economy), and “exporting” poverty and cheap labour/manufacturing to other countries, notably China. And my larger point was that the fundamental principle of our modern economy, limitless growth, can’t be viable in the long term. I don’t know what that means, but it’s scary.

There has been some work done that establishes the geographic footprint of the average North American, that is, the amount of land (including land for water, food, energy etc) needed to support your average North American life. This data suggests that in 1900 the average was about 2 acres per person, by 1950. 5 acres per person and in 1995, 12 acres per person. I’d be willing to be that in 2008 we’re up around 18-20 acres… does anyone have any recent data?

One thing I notice just in my family is how little value things have compared to when I was a kid. We buy things now with the intention of throwing them out; that wasn’t the case 25 years ago; certainly not 50 years ago. So what’s changed? Culture plays a role, but the underlying reason for the cultural shift is that the relative cost of “things” compared with our incomes has been dropping steadily. Part of that has to do with better technologies, the efficiencies that come with global trade, but just as significant is the cheap credit and exportation of poverty/cheap manufacturing that’s been fueling our economy recently.

That got me thinking about the people behind all this. And I have a question: how many people work full time to sustain the average North American individual.

That is, given, say a yearly income of, say. $70,000, what is the equivalent number of people working around the world to produce all the things that such an individual buys in the course of a year?

For instance:
-Joe buys 10 shirts, 5 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of shoes, and one jacket a year.
-For each item, what is the total number of human hours of work that went into the item that he buys?

This includes a number of stops along the production chain. For one shirt that would be: cultivation and shipping of cotton, manufacture, dying and shipping of textile, design and manufacture of shirt, shipping of shirt, storing and selling of shirt, and the taxi Joe takes to and from the store.

So for the purchase of one shirt, probably something like 8 people (and likely many more) would be involved in getting that shirt from cotton seed to Joe’s closet. But Joe’s shirt would be only a tiny fraction of their yearly work. If you talley up all those fractions, for each of Joe’s shirts, and all his pants, shoes, and all the food he eats and TVs he buys and trips in the car he makes and furniture he purchases etc etc…

So, add all that up, and what would be the total hours of human work that went into sustaining Joe’s life? What is the equivalent number of people working full-time to sustain Joe’s lifestyle?

I bet it’s much higher than you’d expect, and here’s the question I ask: is Joe’s contribution to the world valuable enough that he should be able to (effectively) employ a full-time staff of X people?

Has anyone seen any numbers like this? I’m curious to see what they look like.

You know one of the problems about this whole copyright debate is the massive conflict of interest in reporting it in our media companies, which also happen to be our ISPs. Canada’s top 6 ISPs, in order of customer base, are: Bell Sympatico, Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Vidéotron, Cogeco. Looking at what these companies do other than provide your Internet:

• Sympatico is owned by BCE, which also owns a big stake in CTV Globe Media, representing: Canada’s biggest private TV network (CTV), Canada’s biggest national newspaper (Globe and Mail), and 35 radio stations across the country.
• Shaw – mostly a tech company.
• Telus – mostly a tech company.
• Rogers owns magazines (including Maclean’s and Canadian Business), TV stations including CityTV and RogersTV.
• Videotron is owned by Quebecor, which owns scores of newspapers across the country (including Journal de Montreal and the Toronto Sun) numerous magazines in Quebec, the TVA television network, Archambault record stores, Videotron video rental stores, and a number of book publishers.
• Cogeco – mostly a tech company.

So between them, UPDATE: the owners of Bell Sympatico, Rogers and Videotron, probably own three quarters of Canada’s non-CBC news media; the balance owned by CanwestGlobal (which owns Global Television, the National Post, and, of course, Dose Magazine).

All in all not very healthy. The Canadian mania for, and regulatory approval of, consolidation not just in the media business, but in merging media and technology, means that our ISPs are our news providers. So any discussion of Net Neutrality and Copyright will be filtered through the lens of Big Content Providers.

Which, I guess, just means that we have to keep getting the word out.

Canada’s copyright Minister Jim Prentice will be on CBC’s Search Engine this morn, at 11. If you miss it, you’ll be able to listen by podcast (I’ll post a link).

UPDATE: here is the mp3. Have not listened yet.
mp3.

Here is the best primer on the issues I’ve seen yet, from Brendon Wilson.

Also: There is another meeting tonight at Station-C tonight about this:

Date: Thursday, June 19, 2008
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Station C
Street: 5369 Blvd Saint Laurent
City/Town: Montreal, QC

Once again I can’t make it – Thursdays don’t work for me.

This looks pretty important: CRTC, Canada’s communications regulator, is doing a consultation on “New Media Broadcasting.” Here is a CBC story on it. Here is the consultation overview doc. Here is the e-consultation site.

[via Michael Geist]

OTTAWA–The federal Conservatives have quietly killed a giant information registry that was used by lawyers, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to hold government accountable.

The registry, created in 1989, is an electronic list of every request filed to all federal departments and agencies under the Access to Information Act.

Known as CAIRS, for Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, the database allowed ordinary citizens to identify millions of pages of once-secret documents that became public through individual freedom-of-information requests over many years…

Alasdair Roberts, a political scientist at Syracuse University in New York, built a version of the database by requesting the CAIRS electronic records through an Access to Information Act request, and updated the site monthly.

CBC journalist David McKie took over the work in 2006 using another publicly accessible website (http://www.onlinedemocracy.ca)…

[more...]

An Open Letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos, By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Daily News:

Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because – like many other Americans – I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” – especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another – tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight – your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters – you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I’m a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues – trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space – and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited – to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues….

[more...]

I posted something on Twitter about this, but that’s a stupid place to write about something as complex as the subprime mortgage problem, so I’ll do a little run-down here. In particular, I am struck by the (lefty) media spin, which is, roughly:

The government will bail out the big banks, and leave ordinary homeowners with their pants around their ankles, suffering foreclosures etc.

Or:

Good news! The Fed has reduced interest rates, to encourage more irresponsible lending and borrowing which is what got us in this mess in the first place.

While I have no doubt that the government will protect their rich banker buddies, and leave the ordinary people out to dry, this sounds like: “if only the government would help out ‘regular homeowners’ everything would be all right…please find a way for us to keep buying expensive houses that we can’t afford.”

Basically the media is saying: “Everyone should have a house, why can’t the government fix this stupid subprime thing so that everyone can have a house again?”

And the problem with that is that the mess starts in the first place from the government fixing things so that everyone can have a house, by crafting policies that encourage banks to make bad loans to bad credit risks; which further encourages people to buy houses that are too expensive, which drives the market up, so everyone’s happy until the bottom falls out of the whole thing. It’s nice for everyone to have a house, but the irony is that this whole mess is kind of like a right-wing version of socialism, where through low-interest rate policies, bankers all got rich as sin, people got to enjoy houses they couldn’t afford … and in the long run, as with any kind of expensive social spending, the whole economy might get trashed in the process.

[Here is a great web comic that explains the surface details of subprime mess].

The past 2 decades really haven’t seen anything significant in the way of recessions (1987 was the last serious one, and the dotcom bust of 2000 hardly had any long-term impacts on the economy in general). Generally the economy has kept growing, life has appeared more prosperous for many, and inflation hasn’t been much of a bother. How was that achieved?

Policy makers usually have two economic factors they try to balance: growth (good: meaning more jobs, more profits etc), and inflation (bad: meaning less buying power). Generally interst rates, growth and inflation have a strange feedback loop: Low interest rates => high growth => high inflation => raised interest rates to curb inflation => slow growth. You need to balance the two to keep the people and businesses happy, and in the past 2 decades we’ve seen unprecedented growth, coupled with insignificant inflation.

That’s strange, because big growth is usually coupled with inflation.

So how did we manage to have lots of growth (that is, continue getting much richer) with almost no inflation? There are two answers:

1. growth was driven by tons of cheap (ie low interest rate) credit (due to a low interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve, plus the government borrowing tons of money from China). When interest rates are low, you borrow lots of money to fund businesses and to buy houses.
2. inflation was kept down by tons of cheap goods imported from elsewhere (again, primarily China).

This has meant that we’ve become accustomed to more wealth and more purchasing power than ever. Wealth seems to be increasing all the time (for the big swath of upper middle classers, at least). And as for economic activity/jobs, much of that was fueled by a red hot housing market: build build build and sell sell sell means lots of people working and getting richer.

But it’s based on a fantasy: debt that allows us to buy cheap goods from elsewhere. The debt levels (personal and governmental) are unprecedented. And the reason the debt is unprecedented is that it’s a bad idea. Fueling economic expansion with major debt whether the socialist kind (government borrowing & spending) or the right-wing kind (citizen borrowing & spending) breaks down eventually.

And then what happens?

So while the subprime mess means people will lose their homes, and that sucks, the really scary question is about how you keep the US economy going at all in the long term. Especially if we plan to keep the sort of wealth we are accustomed to. It’s not at all clear. And if we can’t keep it going, what sort of turmoil is in store?

UPDATE: If you want to get depressed, read this (though do note, it’s more or less an ad for his book).

I wonder why I am so obsessed with the torture issue in the US (and elsewhere of course). I think it’s because of how quickly mainstream US society (and I guess to a lesser degree Canadian society) just accepted the change from being a country that abhors torture as a categorical evil, to a society that thinks: “You know what? Maybe torture isn’t so bad after all, as long as the good guys are doing it, for good reasons.” It’s a remarkable moral turn-around, one unimaginable 15 years ago … but here we are. It, along with many others similar fundamental changes in official public morality (ie doctrine of preemptive war), seemed such an easy switch to flick.

And it seems to me that, given people’s conception of what is morally acceptable is so easily flipped, the more effective argument against torture is that it just doesn’t work all that well. (Which doesn’t change my moral opposition to torture). In the clip below:

Former FBI Interrogator Jack Cloonan explains that regular interrogation tactics work well on even the worst terrorists, that there’s no such thing as a “ticking timebomb” scenario, and that waterboarding has done much more harm than good.

I think from Taxi to the Darkside?

And it seems to me that shadowy terror orgs would be smart enough to make sure there is all sorts of phony information in the heads of people likely to get caught and interrogated anyway … so torture, really, is a form of punishment and terror, rather than a useful interrogation technique. I’m no expert though… Jack Cloonan seems to be.

I wonder if we could see some evidence that torture really is a good interrogation technique?

[via boing]

UPDATE: 37 Short Essays about Torture, written by, among others these people (random selection):

Brigadier General Steve Cheney, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), served nine years on the Marine Corps’ two Recruit Depots, including a tour as the commanding general at Parris Island. He was also the inspector general for the Marine Corps. Brigadier General Cheney retired in 2001; he is now the president of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, and is on the board of directors for the American Security Project.

Kenneth M. Duberstein is chairman and CEO of the Duberstein Group, an independent strategic planning and consulting company. He was chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. Richard Armitage is president of Armitage International and served as deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. Both Duberstein and Armitage are members of the board of the American Security Project.

John Hutson is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, attorney, and former judge advocate general of the Navy. He is the current dean and president of Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.

William J. Perry was the nineteenth U.S. secretary of defense.

Thomas G. Wenski is the bishop of Orlando and chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.), was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He is now the Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.

Well worth checking out.

One Nation Under Google: Citizenship in the Technological Republic

A public talk by Professor Darin Barney
Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship, McGill University.

Friday, March 14, 2008
Arts W-215, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, McGill University
18h30, free

Does more technology equal more freedom? While the nuts and bolts of technological progress – computers, cellphones, internet access wired and wireless – become accessible to more and more people, the promise of increased civic engagement enabled by these gadgets seems to have eluded our wired society. There’s a lot more to technology, and to democracy, than wires and buttons, and it has a much deeper affect on our lives than simply being tools we can use well or badly.

In Dr. Barney’s words, “technology is, at once, irretrievably political and consistently depoliticizing. It is at the centre of this
contradiction that the prospects for citizenship in the midst of technology lie.” Presenting a range of examples from YouTube to the
hidden networks of food production and government bureaucracy, Barney contests the common notion that technology necessarily leads to enhanced freedom and improved civic engagement. One Nation Under Google examines the challenge of citizenship in a technological society, and asks whether the demands of technology are taking over the practice of democracy.

Presented in collaboration with CKUT 90.3FM

[ps, godshdarn it, ckut has a frustrating web site]

QUESTION: How can you hold the “Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship” and not have a blog?

By designing for the poorest people in the world, the One Laptop Per Child has developed a green machine with no peers. Radically lower power consumption, much less toxic crap. Here’s Mary-Lou Jepsen talking about it:

I had a conversation last night with my neighbour, who tells me that 80% of food production in the world is still done by bio power: horses, oxen, humans etc. But that there has been no innovation in tools for this kind of farming (ploughs, harrows etc) in about 100 years. Why? At least in part, because big agribiz companies want to control agriculture from seed to sale, and want as few farmers making decisions as possible. So: make farming expensive (machinery), and design farming technology (patented seeds, expensive fertilizers & pesticides) that help big companies control agriculture; not so that farming is better for farmers or people.

In a conversation two nights ago with some other friends, we were talking about the inherent conflict in the pharma business: between: the fiduciary responsibility to increase profits every year; and the public good. These are not mutually exclusive; but neither are the aligned, and making money trumps public good, by definition, in publicly traded companies. That’s how they work – to run them otherwise is actually illegal. So we were just postulating: what if a new kind of pharma “company” came along, with public good as its mandate, rather than profit?

How are all these things related? OLPC is a non-profit project that may have developed the most revolutionary advance in the technology of personal computing we’ve seen in years, and it did so in a non-profit model, by developing for the poorest.

The poorest people in the world use farm technologies no one is spending much time developing improvements to; agriculture R&D goes to: biotech, pesticides, herbicides, and probably a little bit to machinery. What happens if a non-profit effort develops around making ancient farming tools and techniques more efficient?

And for pharma, same question: why can’t we think of organizing our drug system in a way that prioritizes health, rather than profit? What would it look like? What would the results be?

Am I a crazy communist? Well, these guys are pretty good at making encyclopedia, and if you want to buy a tent, I’d send you, without a second’s hesitation, to these guys.

Kids in a school start building Legotown. Eventually, powerful Legotown figures emerge, and inequalities surface. Some kids are excluded from Legotown, some control the enterprise, some struggle against each other; trading markets develop for various pieces. Teachers get nervous. Eventually, Legotown gets destroyed by external forces, and teachers ponder what they’ve wrought, and start a number of “experiments” to see how the kids react to changing rules.

Why We Banned Legos: Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom, by Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin. A wonderful and thought-provoking essay/report.

[I should note that I am glad I was not in this class as a kid, with these somehow-creepy-social-engineering teachers]

All of it applies somehow to the “open” world of the web, in some ways I have not quite figured out yet. Here are some choice paras:

The nature of power:

During the boom days of Legotown, we’d suggested to the key Lego players that there was an unequal distribution of power giving rise to conflict and tension. Our suggestions were met with deep resistance. Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like “Some-body’s got to be in charge or there would be chaos,” and “The little kids ask me because I’m good at Legos.” They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

What does power look like?:

We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.”

As children finished their drawings, we gathered for a meeting to look at the drawings together. The drawings represented a range of understandings of power: a tornado, love spilling over as hearts, forceful and fierce individuals, exclusion, cartoon superheroes, political power.

On being powerless (in one of the post-Legotown trading games):

When the teaching staff met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, “I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up.” In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt.

On system unfairness vs. individual unfairness:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.” They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity.

On ownership (which, by the way, illustrates the radical and difficult departure that projects like LibriVox force us to confront, and why public domain – renouncing ownership – is so much more radical than creative commons – which just defines new rules of ownership):

In their reflections, the children articulated several shared theories about how ownership is conferred.

* If I buy it, I own it:

Sophia: “She owns the lavender balls because she makes them, but if I buy it, then it’s mine.”

* If I receive it as a gift, I own it:

Marlowe: “My mom bought this book for me because she thought it would be a good reading book for me. I know I own it because my mom bought it and she’s my mom and she gave it to me.”

* If I make it myself, I own it:

Sophie: “I sewed this pillow myself with things that my teacher gave me, like stuffing and fabric. I sewed it and it turned into my pillow because it’s something I made instead of something I got at the store.”

* If it has my name on it, I own it:

Alex: “My teacher made this pillow for me and it has my name on it.”

Kendra: “If I put my name on it, would I own it?”

Alex: “Well, Miss S. made it for me… but if your name was on it, then you would own it.”

Sophie: “Kendra, don’t put your name on it, OK?”

* If I own it, I make the rules about it:

Alejandro: “I own this computer, because my grandpa gave it to me. I lend it to my friends so that they can play with it. But I make the rules about it.”

Teachers impose the Bolshevik Revolution, to build New Legotown:

We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we’d been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

Kids start sounding like zombie-versions of Newt Gingrich’s worst nightmare:

From our conversations, several themes emerged.

* Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

* Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

* Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

* Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

Teachers get excited by the raw clay of Hobbesian childhood they have molded, through idealism and power structure management, into paragons of Rawlsian enlightenment:

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants.

Paradise, built and achieved:

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

*All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
*Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
*All structures will be standard sizes.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

A fascinating story, and one I need to think about more. It’s very relevant to life in places like LibriVox, I think, and I’m not sure why I am reacting with at least some negative cynicism. Maybe because one power-structures not examined is the relationship between kids and teachers? Maybe because the kids didn’t choose to participate in this experiment? Anyway, why do I not celebrate this experience, which mirrors in some ways the collectivist-do-goodness that underlies a project like LibriVox? To ponder more.

Hmm, maybe I am just having a bad day? Any thoughts on this from yon readers?

[this comes via mike migurski]

Mmmm, Danish:

[via: ernietheattorney]

This looks like a tide-turning event: National Post’s editorial on copyright reads:

For Canada to introduce DMCA-style legislation now would do nothing but encourage nuisance lawsuits. There is nothing wrong with tough rules against copyright infringement, but criminalizing behaviour that might facilitate copyright infringement only incidentally is the wrong approach. If that road had been taken when household videotape machines came onto the market – and the movie industry tried very hard in the courts to steer the law in that direction – no one would be allowed to own a VCR.

There’s more…

[via: Michael Geist]

Wired reports:

A 23-year-old student journalist in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for downloading and distributing a report that is critical of the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh (at right), who is a journalism student at Balkh University and a writer for Jahan-e Naw, was sentenced last October after downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women. Kambaksh was arrested after someone filed a complaint against him. He is accused of blasphemy for distributing the report to other students and teachers at his school.

He was tried by a sharia court (which oversees Islamic religious law) and was not allowed legal representation, according to news reports. The Afghan Senate passed a motion this week supporting the sentence, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

Other journalists have been warned that they would be arrested if they protested in support of Kambaksh.

[via boing]

So, what I don’t get is this: if you think waterboarding should be legal, then say so. If you think it should not be legal say so. But this non-answer stuff, I find objectionable.

Here, on DemocracyNow!, is US Attorney General Michael Mukasey paddling around and around in circles, at the Senate Judiciary Committee:

> Audio (starts at 9:45)
> Reaplayer (starts at 9:45)

When I worked in New York in a financial brokerage house in 2000-2001, my colleagues (I think it was Manus, a short funny Italian from New Jersey; and Bill, my office-mate, from Texas; and probably a few others) told me that in the banking/finance business – at least their end of it – “Canadian” was a code word that actually meant “black.” I had the impression the term had been used like that for years.

I think we were at lunch, and they were all talking about someone or other, and Manus said, “Oh, he’s Canadian,” and I perked up and said, “Oh really, where is he from?…” and of course they all laughed and told me it meant black.

I guess it was so you could say nasty things about “Canadians” without anyone getting pissed off.

I totally forgot about that, till I just saw this in the Boing:

The Canadian National Post looks on with mild horror as American linguists report on the growing trend in the American south to use “Canadian” as a masking euphemism for black people, so that white racists can say socially inappropriate things without tipping listeners off about the cancer in their souls.

I would point out to Cory Doctorow, though, that (I hope) he’s got his definition of euphemism wrong. Since a euphemism is: “the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt….”

I can buy that the term “Canadian” is mild, indirect, & vague; but I think that calling “black people” offensive, harsh or blunt … is not what Cory meant. Presumably he meant Canadian as a euphemism for more offensive words for black people (you know, like the n-one we’re not allowed to write).

But even there, it’s not really a euphemism, but rather a way to disguise direct racial insults, eg. “Oh, don’t work with him, he’s a Canadian.” Etc.

Anyway funny when little quirks of language pop up 8 years later in the newspaper as “new” linguistic habits. Funny in a sickening sort of way.

Parag Khannan has a compelling piece in New York Times Magazine about the passing of America’s sole superpower moment, and the new multipolar order, with China and the US vying for a share of the global pie, with EU playing both off against each other in the middle, and cashing the checks:

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

and …

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

and…

America’s global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, I’ve spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet — the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in “coalition of the willing”), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.

[More...]

So, what’s Canada going to do? Should we lobby to join the EU? I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but I bet Quebec would get behind that project!

Heh.

[via Patrick]

It’s funny, I was thinking more or less this, sorta subconsciously when I heard that great speech. It was under the surface, but it was there:

am I now the only person left on the planet who finds Barack Obama a little bit dull? Every time I listen to him, I start off thinking I’m about to wet my pants, but a minute-and-a-half later find my mind wandering, asking itself things like: ‘What does “the challenge of hope” mean?’

Yet I turn and look around and everyone is shouting and screaming. Obama chants: ‘Something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it’ and there’s a collective swoon from grown pundits and hardened reporters, all of them tearing off their shirts and pleading for Obama to sign their chests with indelible marker pen.

[read more from the Guardian ...]

He might be inspiring, but he doesn’t really say anything, does he? He just says it really well. More from Armando Iannucci:

It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: ‘See that chair. You can sit on it’ when you can have someone like Obama say: ‘This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl’s behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America’s huddled arse.’

Which I guess is Hillary Clinton’s point about him.

[heh funny, one has to be careful writing about Obama & Clinton. First black man; first woman running for pres ... tricky].

I doubt if I’d like most of Ron Paul’s fiscal policies, but he sure as hell talks a good line. Check out his response when a very smarmy-looking debate moderator asks him about his: “electability … do you have any, sir?” (which spurred laughter from his opponents). In the video he gets a huge cheer from the crowd for a neat bit about borrowing money from China in order to finance a dictator in Pakistan so that we can bring democracy to Iraq. I keep thinking that it’s the right that needs to be asking questions of Republicans, not the left. And Ron Paul claims (with some basis) that he is the most conservative candidate in the running:

Blogger & podcaster BarakBarack Obama wins the democratic caucus nomination in Iowa, with 38% of the vote, beating out #2 John Edwards (30%), and #3 (!) Hillary Clinton (29%).

Video of his victory speech. Text of his speech.

Meanwhile, Chuck Norris fan, and creationist (from a non-pastafarian sect), Mike Huckabee took the Republican nomination with 34% (Guiliani got trounced, with just 4%). Video of speech. Text.

This was good, even if I didn’t recognize 50% of the people. As Patrick notes, the best of the most loathsome was … us:

9. You

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism — it’s nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears’ children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you’re going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can’t spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don’t want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy’s doing well. You’re an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn’t get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn’t cover. You deserve it, chump.

I’m batting around this idea, maybe you can help articulate it better. Here’s the basic idea:

The (monetary) value of something is defined by what you can’t do with it; not by what you can do with it.

I’m thinking of this particularly wrt to digital media, and the music biz. The “value” of LP records was defined not by what you could do with it (ie play music), but what you couldn’t do with it: copy it instantly and share it with all your friends. The LP is valuable because it’s scarce: you’ve got one, I don’t … hence it has value. Ditto tapes and CDs.

Thought experiment #1: imagine that in 1888 someone invented a cheap little device that recorded sounds and that also broadcasted sounds to the world; anyone who had such a device could catch those other sound broadcasts and record them … and the device also had infinite storage. If that were the case, how do you think the music “business” would have evolved?

Thought experiment #2: what if our memories were so good that we could hear a song and remember it exactly, and replay it in our minds exactly as we heard it the first time? would musicians go out of their way to try to prevent individuals from hearing their music?

With audiohijack pro I can copy any sound that passes thru my computer, if I so choose. Regardless of any DRM or whatever else you try to stick on your media. Further, I consume 90% of my media on my computer. So if you want me to hear it, I will be able to record it.

I know this is all old news, but I am reminded of my discussions at PodCamp boston with the founder of Select Records (one of the first indie hip hop labels). He was a good guy, an indie trench warrior who worked for many years trying to get little bands popular. But like many record execs sees P2P etc as “illegal downloading.”

But the point is, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Ditto for Sony and all the rest. (Same for people who complain about Wikipedia… it doesn’t matter if you think Wikipedia is a bad idea, because it’s what people actually use).

It’s just too easy for me or anyone else to copy music. There’s nothing that can be done, it’s over.

Speaking of which, Galacticast did a great little DMCA.ca vid.

Question: Do you want it to be legal for you to copy your cd into mp3 format, and put it on your ipod? Or should that result in fines, jail time, beheadding?

If you do wish to copy CDs to mp3 to stick em on your computer/player then tell your government that you will be pissed if they pass legislation that turns you into a criminal. See some more info here.

If no, then you will be happy to hear that the RIAA in the USA is suing people for doing just that.

Also: check the Galacticast DMCA.ca video.

From Boing:

The Washington Post reports today that the FBI is launching a $1 billion project to build the world’s largest database of individuals’ physical characteristics. The effort would give the American government unprecedented abilities to ID people here and overseas.

[more ...]

from BaghdadBrian in the twittersphere:

Alive in Baghdad correspondent Ali Shafeya was killed on December 14th, details are still coming in. He was 24, survived by mom and sister.

and:

but is that worth even one human’s life? We are still not 100% sure its not the assignment we gave that killed him.

and:

We’ve raised $90, can anyone else help Ali’s family pay for the funeral? his brothers and father are all dead. survived by one sis & mother

and:

you can make a donation to suport his family to smallworldnews@gmail.com via paypal, please note that it is for Ali’s family.

for more details, see:
* alive in baghdad

UPDATE: Following brian’s posts on twitter over the past 18 hours or so has been pretty intense. Blow-by-blow of a guy both updating as the info comes in, and struggling with the hard reality of death all around the amazing citizen journalism project that he started in a war zone. Further, he’s been wondering whether the investigative assignment that Ali was on may have been the cause of his death (he was shot 31 times by the Iraqi National Guard). He’s considering closing the project down.

I can’t even imagine. I keep thinking about the safe little projects I work on, imagining what it would be like to have a web project where people started dying. It’s so easy to start good web projects. But it takes so much courage to continue in the face of reality this bloody.

I met Brian briefly at Podcamp Boston. I wish I had met him sooner – I was just leaving. I would have loved to talk more with him – of all the projects at that conference, his is – to me – by far the most important. AiB is exactly why the web changes things – even if it has been mostly ignored.

Jesus these Conservatives are a little over the top on their performance at the Climate talks in Bali, no?

Canada hosted an event called “Turning the Corner on Climate Change” apparently about Canada’s climate plan, with Environment Minister John Baird speaking. Instead, a number of Canadian companies spoke about their products. Baird apparently poked his head into the room, in his flip flops, and then left. He didn’t speak at all.

Whatever you think of Climate, that’s not very classy.

If you’d like to know what I think about climate change, here are a couple of things I’ve written:

* Climate Change & Blogging
* Climate: Point-Counterpoint

Oh and if you feel like signing a petition, here’s one.

Finally, why not send a note to Environment Minister John Baird to tell him what you think:

John Baird, Minister of Environment
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Telephone: (613) 996-0984
EMail: BairdJ@parl.gc.ca
Web Site: www.johnbaird.com/

Michael Geist reports that the Canadian copytright bill is expected to rise from the dead:

There are rumours in Ottawa this evening that Industry Minister Jim Prentice has decided to forge ahead with the Canadian DMCA with the bill to be introduced tomorrow morning.

I have two model letters that you could send (along with addresses):

* The short letter.
* The long letter.

Report is just playing on CBC radio news.

Boing Boing reports that Industry Minister Jim Prentice is having an open house about copyright tomorrow (Saturday). If you are in calgary, head on over, if you are not in Calgary, then why not send an email that says this:

Dear Minister Prentice:
I don’t like your copyright legislation. You are making a big mistake.
Best regards.

Send this, or similar messages to:
Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca

Tracey posted this over at Datalibre.ca …:

There is an excellent article in the Toronto Star about why we have little understanding about the social demographic situation in Canada! Bref! No one can afford the research! In the article Truth carries a painful user fee; Carol Goar tells it like it is right now in Canada when it comes to access to our public data:

The United Way of Greater Toronto had to pay the agency $28,000 for government data showing that family poverty deepened in Toronto between 2000 and 2005, while low-income households made modest gains everywhere else.

It had to spend its donors’ money to prove that Toronto has the lowest median income of any major urban centre in the country.

It had to dip into its charitable givings to marshal evidence – already collected at taxpayers’ expense – that a one-size-fits-all poverty strategy won’t work for Toronto.

Sent, via email (letter is better, but what can you do?), to a number of people, including Jim Prentice, the Minister of Industry, responsible for the Copyright Act in Canada, and my MP – Thomas Mulcair NDP – Outremont. Please feel free to use, adapt, copy etc this letter and do with it what you would like. I hereby renounce all copyrights on this text.

Dear Minister Prentice:

I am disturbed by the Government’s announcement that a new copyright bill will be tabled in December, without any public consultation. Copyright is a crucial issue for Canadian competitiveness – in education, science, business, and culture. All indications are that overly restrictive copyright laws stifle innovation, yet this is exactly what the Government appears to be tabling. A restrictive copyright bill could have disastrous effects on the future of the country.

The most important problem is that the Government is tabling a bill without consultations with Canadians, so that a full range of voices has not been heard. This means that the best decision cannot be made, and instead narrow interests of those who *do* have the Government’s ear are likely to trump what is good for the future of the country.

The bill, apparently, is likely to include anti-circumvention provisions (digital locks on machines so that using the things Canadians buy, the way they wish to use them will be illegal). These provisions have proved to create significant harm to education, privacy protection, security, research, free speech, and consumer interests.

The bill does not address crucial issues such as protecting parody, time shifting, device shifting, and the making of backup copies. Further, it does not address outdated and innovation-stifling crown copyright, or restrict statutory damages awards to cases of commercial infringement.

The government last consulted Canadians on digital copyright issues in 2001. The Internet and technology use have changed dramatically since then, yet the Government has done little – that I am aware of – to find out what implications these changes have on Canadians. On businesses, on teachers, on regular people.

As a small web business owner, I am shocked that the Government would charge ahead on such important legislation without doing the work required to understand the implications properly, without doing the work required to find out how it will impact Canadians, and what it is that Canadians actually want.

Please reconsider this dangerous approach.

Best regards,
etc.

If you want to send something to him:

Jim Prentice Constituency Office
Suite 105
1318 Centre St NE
Calgary, Alberta T2E 2R7
403 216-7777
Fax 403 230-4368
Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca

And if you’d like to find your MP, to send to him/her, plug your postal code in here.

Check out the comment section of CBC’s Search Engine show on the Feds’ expected copyright proposal.

Michael Geist writes a worrying article about how the web is starting to look more and more like cable.

Until recently, the Internet was precisely the opposite [of cable], offering unlimited user choice, continuous interactivity, and technological capabilities to copy and remix content. That is gradually changing as broadcasters seek to re-assert greater geographic control over their content, ISPs experiment with cable-like models for prioritized content delivery, and some creator groups lobby the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to adapt Canadian content regulations to the Internet.

one thing that’s starting to happen more and more is geographical blocking:

…NBC and Fox recently unveiled Hulu.com to some critical acclaim, while Comedy Central created a new site for the popular Daily Show that features a complete archive of eight years of programming.

Canadians, alas, are generally locked out of these sites due to licensing restrictions. Canadian broadcasters have been scrambling to buy the Internet rights to U.S. programming, both to protect their local broadcasts and to beef up their online presence. U.S. broadcasters may eventually decide it is more profitable to stream their content on a worldwide basis and to remove longstanding geographic restrictions, however, for the moment they are parceling up the Internet as they would a broadcast destined for multiple cable markets. This geographic bordering extends beyond just blocking streamed content. The new Daily Show site is off-limits for Canadians since the U.S.-based Comedy Central recently took the unprecedented step of redirecting Canadian visitors to the CTV-owned Comedy Network site.

I don’t like the sound of all that. But what’s even *worse* is that cultural groups – in the name of “protecting Canadian culture” are thinking along the same lines. If commercial broadcasters in collusion with ISPs (who sometimes are commercial broadcasters) can shove their content at us, and keep us away from other content, then can’t we make sure that “Canadian culture” (chosen by us) gets precedence too … that is, can’t we start deciding what you watch and read again, all the better to *improve* our bottom line and country?

Uck.

And in other news youtube launches a Canadian version, Youtube.ca (which redirects to ca.Youtube.com)… Oilman has some complaints, for instance about this sentence from their blog: “In developing territory-specific YouTube sites, we wanted to bring YouTube to you, in your language, while making local talent more visible and getting closer to our users around the world.”

The rest of the complaints there seem to miss the point, ie he wants Youtube Canada to be more representative of Canada – bigger flag etc. Why? Why would you want Youtube Canada any more than … oh … say Sympatico Video (shudder). What’s wrong with just leaving the Internet as it is, (mostly) borderless?

[Incidentally, why do Canadians have to be such a bunch of insecure whiners? See the comments on Oilman's post].

From one end, Youtube.ca doesn’t make much sense, as good content on youtube should win the good old fashioned way, because it gets linked to and people like it. Youtube.ca probably makes it harder to find good stuff, tho maybe all these geo-youtubes will feed into the main youtube.com site? Hope so.

But putting Geist’s article together with Youtube.ca – it’s obvious that they want to do more geographically-targeted advertising. Just like TV!

I already find it annoying that google searches search differently on different computers – depending on, for instance, where you are and what language your browser is set to. I don’t want Google to filter searches “just for me” based on where I am etc… I want to know what’s at the top of the listing.

But now it looks like the rest of the web is shifting in this direction too.

Security Guard: What is in this tube?
Me: Prescription skin cream.
SG: What is it for?
Me: ?
SG: What is it for?
Me: … Um… a skin condition.
SG: Did a doctor prescribe this?
Me: Yes.
SG: Do you have a note from the doctor?
Me: The prescription label is on the tube. Right there [pointing].
SG: So you don’t have a note from the doctor?
Me: The doctor’s name is on the prescription label.
SG: [reading] …
Me: [waiting] …
SG: Do you need this cream?
Me: Yes.
SG: So you are saying you need this cream?
Me: Yes.
SG: But the prescription label says: “Apply to affected areas twice a day *if* needed.”
Me: [silence]
SG: It says, “If needed.”
Me: Yes.
SG: So do you need it or not?
Me: Yes.
SG: You need it?
Me: Yes.
SG: OK, but next time get a note from a doctor.

Press conference question:

Q: What’s your definition of the word “torture.”
The President: Of what?
Q: The word “torture.” What’s your definition?
The President: That’s defined in U.S. law and we don’t torture.
Q: Can you give me your version of it, sir?
The President: Whatever the law says.

Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C, Section 2340, of the U.S. Code says:

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under
the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical
or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering
incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his
custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged
mental harm caused by or resulting from -
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of
severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened
administration or application, of mind-altering substances or
other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly
the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be
subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the
administration or application of mind-altering substances or
other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly
the senses or personality;

(see NYTimes)

Somehow this doesn’t seem right:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been working on a secret project to build a $2-million government-controlled media centre, a newspaper reported Monday…

The new briefing centre would supplant the 47-year-old National Press Theatre, a venue where government news conferences are moderated by the executive members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery Association, a group of newspapers, broadcasters and other media outlets who report on Parliament Hill…

Not knowing much about press on Parliament Hill, I wondered, “what could the reason for this be?” One answer:

One document obtained by the Star stated that the new centre is part of efforts to “put in place robust physical and information security measures to protect the prime minister and cabinet.” …

Paranoid, but, OK, maybe reasonable. (Then again, what exactly is “information security” as it relates to the PM’s press briefings?) More:

According to documents, the new centre could give the government control over which journalists attend news conferences.

Ah. Now that, it seems to me, should be illegal. It’s certainly undemocratic.

The government would also have the ability to do its own filming at the events, and could provide the footage to journalists, instead of letting them film the events themselves, the Star reported….

They could even do their own interviews!

Also reported in the article, Harper “has only made one appearance at the National Press Theatre, on Oct. 3.”

Interesting.

[via publicbroadcasting.ca]

The Green Party, reports Michael Geist, put out it’s policy document.

Have not looked thru it yet, but there’s support for network neutrality:

Supporting the free flow of information

The Internet has become an essential tool in knowledge storage and the free flow of information between citizens. It is playing a critical role in democratizing communications and society as a whole. There are corporations that want to control the content of information on the internet and alter the free flow of information by giving preferential treatment to those who pay extra for faster service.

Our Vision

The Green Party of Canada is committed to the original design principle of the internet – network neutrality: the idea that a maximally useful public information network treats all content, sites, and platforms equally, thus allowing the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application.

Green Solutions

Green Party MPs will:

* Pass legislation granting the Internet in Canada the status of Common Carrier – prohibiting Internet Service Providers from discriminating due to content while freeing them from liability for content transmitted through their systems.

and free/open source software:

Open source computer software

As computer hardware improves, it is important that software programs are readily modifiable by the people who buy and use them. Developing alongside the proprietary software sector is Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). This software is generally available at little or no cost, making it very popular in the developing world. It can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction. Businesses can adapt the software to their specific needs.

Under the free software business model, vendors may charge a fee for distribution and offer paid support and customization services. Free software gives users the ability to work together enhancing and refining the programs they use. It is a pure public good rather than a private good.

Our Vision

The Green Party supports the goals and ideals of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and believes that Canada’s competitiveness in global information technology (IT) will be greatly enhanced by strongly supporting FLOSS.

Green Solutions

Green Party MPs will:

* Ensure that all new software developed for or by government is based on open standards and encourage and support a nationwide transition to FLOSS in all critical government IT systems. This will make Canada’s IT infrastructure more secure and robust, lower administration and licensing costs and develop IT skills.
* Support the transition to FLOSS throughout the educational system

I’d say it would be worth asking them what they think of civic access to canadian government data.

This is why multiple sources for news is important … then again, who you gonna believe?

• As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates: Violence Rises in Shiite City Once Called a Success Story
  Washinton Post, August 7, 2007
• Basra violence increasing as British leave
  UPI, August 7
• British exit from Basra has led to drop in violence, says General David Patraeus
  Times (UK), September 19, 2007
• Surge in Basra killings may force British back to city
  Independent (UK), September 26
• Iraqis say Basra quieter after British troop pullout
  Reuters, October 1, 2007

Here’s an interesting description of Europe (which I guess you could say of Canada too), from the Washington Post:

Europe is more of a “workfare state” than a welfare state. As one British political analyst said to me recently: “Europe doesn’t so much have a welfare society as a comprehensive system of institutions geared toward keeping everyone healthy and working.” Properly understood, Europe’s economy and social system are two halves of a well-designed “social capitalism” – an ingenious framework in which the economy finances the social system to support families and employees in an age of globalized capitalism that threatens to turn us all into internationally disposable workers. Europeans’ social system contributes to their prosperity, rather than detracting from it, and even the continent’s conservative political leaders agree that it is the best way.

[link...]

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been thinking lately about conservatives and progressives, and the problems of our current climate of political debate, heightened exponentially by cable news pundits in the USA. I have a trip to Saskatoon coming up, and I was thinking of contacting a few Sask bloggers, and Small Dead Animals comes pretty high in the search. It’s well-known right-leaning mostly-political blog from a woman in Saskatchewan, and a couple of the posts I read were … well they really turned me off. They seemed so pointlessly hostile to the “left.” And I landed on a couple of other Sask blogs, and had the same reaction (later I found some more comfortably lefty-like Sask blogs).

And yet much of the stuff on the lefty blogs is the same sort of thing (here too, probably): juvenile name-calling etc. But it steams us when we disagree; when we agree, it’s usually pretty funny stuff.

And further, I betcha if I met Kate of SDA, we’d probably get along fine, even if I don’t like her politics, and she doesn’t like mine, she’d probably not an idiot* (see below), and we’d probably have a fine discussion about healthcare or terrorism without wanting to punch each other.

We have some friends, Bruce and Michelle. Bruce is about as far at the other end of the spectrum of my political beliefs as you can get – and every time I read his political blog posts, I get all red-eared. Yet when we meet, and even when we talk about politics, I realize how close we are about our various frustrations with the state of the universe. We just have different explanations, often, for why things are messed up (I blame evil corporations; he blames corrupt governments; I blame the Conservatives, he blames the Liberals … we’re both right and we’re both wrong).

And I’ll bet you that most of us, lefties and righties – the non-idiots, at least – want more or less the same thing: a healthy country/planet, where we can leave things better for our kids, and where everyone gets a fair shot at having a decent life, where the rivers run clean and everyone’s got a job that lets them get the stuff they need; where the chances of getting killed by SARS or cancer or car crashes or corrupt police or terrorists or nuclear explosions are minimized.

On just about any issue (health care, security, environment etc), most non-idiot lefties and righties want the same sorts of outcomes.

And the real problem is not so much that we all want different things for the planet, but rather that we have some fundamental disagreements about how to get there, and what sort of impacts the different decisions about our course of action will have. Which are, sort of, testable differences: that is, some of them work and some of them don’t, and over time reasonable people should be able to look at policies, and outcomes, and decide based on the outcomes (rather than the philosophies behind them) whether they’re good or not.

Oh, one other thing I find strange about the political left-right split is that a belief about one subject is often directly correlated to a belief about another totally unrelated subject, eg. War on Terrorism, and Climate Change … and the other strange thing about those two threats in particular is that both sides use the same logic to argue one, and discount the other: climate change is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves; terrorism is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves. Yet no one on the right *wants* climate disaster, they just don’t believe we can or ought to do what’s being proposed; and no one on the left *wants* the “terrorists to win,” they just don’t believe what we are doing is the right strategy to deal with the threat.

Anyway, I think there are a couple of big problems: righties and lefties don’t talk much together about what they do want for the world, and the reasons they think actions A are better than actions B to get there. And further, the discussion between left and right is mediated – more in the US than here, but here too – by people who *are* idiots, and are paid to be idiots, because that makes people mad, and that sells advertising.

*All this brought to you by a quote from Marjane Satrapi (via Matt):

‘The only real divide in this world is between the idiots and non-idiots.’

Amen.

Interesting story about bin Laden, the net, and a bungle.

Apparently, a private US security company, SITE Intelligence Group, breached Al-Qaeda’s internet system a couple of years ago. And in September they intercepted that video of bin Laden (before it was public)…and passed it along to US intelligence services, with the warning: don’t make it public till the video comes out, or the breach will be found.

But the video was leaked to press, and George Bush was talking it up in speeches. Perhaps coincidentally, General David Petraeus was about to give testimony to Congress about things were going in Iraq (”well,” he reported).

Al-Qaeda apparently shut down the breached internet channels immediately afterwards, realizing that there were security holes in their system.

From the New York Sun:

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”

See details: washington post, attytood.com, New York Sun.

[cross-posted at datalibre.ca]

The Guardian UK Tech Section has an ongoing campaign to free UK government data, with an associated blog: freeourdata.org.uk/blog.

Their campaign inspired a response from the Ordnance Survey titled:
These maps cost us £110m. We can’t give them away for free. The response argues that the maps cost money, that the OS needs money to operate, and that by charging for the maps they can continue to provide a valuable service. Among other things:

It cost Ordnance Survey £110m to collect, maintain and supply our data last year, but we are not “paid for by taxes”, as the campaign often claims. Instead, we depend entirely on receipts from licensing and direct sales to customers for our income – we receive no tax funding at all.

If we are successful, we can cover our costs, encourage widespread licensing through partners, and stay focused on providing value for users. Under licence, there are many examples where our data is free at the point of use. This does not mean there is zero cost.

[Interesting to note that the OS's clients, much like statscan clients, are "users," not citizens].

The Free Our Data people responded to response in their blog, noting the key reason for their campaign:

We believe [making OS data and maps free] would set off an explosion in private-sector use of the data, and lead to more companies which would create more jobs and generate more taxes. That would offset any extra taxation required to fund OS. Making the data free would also get rid of onerous and inefficient licensing schemes that tangle up central and local government departments, which wonder if they can reuse something or even display it on the web. (Search this blog for NEPHO.)

And that was followed by further response from Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo, the authors of the Power of Information, who say:

The key issue about charging is whether the UK would benefit more in net terms from the more vibrant information market that more open information would bring than it would lose through having to find an additional £60m per year. This is a serious question that the Treasury is currently looking into, having accepted the recommendation in the independent review we co-authored for the government earlier this year.

[link to complete letter].

Which garnered some further feedback from the Free Our Data.

And in the end this is a compelling case, perhaps the compelling case: a case that ought to convince you whatever your political leanings, right or left or circular. There are moral and social and philosophical reasons to support free government data. But the one that’s most likely to win converts is the case that free data makes for more innovation. The innovation can be commercial, social, socioeconomic – touching on health, environment, planning, equality etc, but also just good old-fashioned economic vitality.

But all of it, we’d argue, will “make Canada a better country” not just morally, but in our ability to solve important problems, and, yes, make some people more money in the mean time. Which means, in the end, more tax receipts, which means that it should offset any lost revenues Statscan and other Canadian agencies now receive for excluding all but big companies and institutions from their datasets.

A campaign to raise funds for cash-strapped Canadian cities has been contemptuously sabotaged by the federal government, who are demanding thousands of dollars in royalties for use of the “copyrighted” image of a Canadian penny and the phrase “one cent.”

[link from the Boing]

UPDATE:

The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign phone number (416-ONECENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters. (The Mint has come to this amount by taking the total number of materials printed divided by the approximate population of Toronto, and then using a percentage of that number to arrive at a dollar figure.)

[link from tmcnet]

Web sites:

• onecentnow.ca
• royal canadian mint

UPDATE: IP lawyer Howard Knopf writes in Excess Copyright that:
a) the design for the current Canadian penny was done in 1937, by G.E. Kruger Gray, who died in 1943. In Canada, copyright expires 50 years after death of creator, meaning the penny is public domain as of 1993.
b) claiming copyright on the words “one cent” is absurd.

A court in the US has ordered a woman to pay $222,000 (£109,000) in damages for illegally file-sharing music.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay for offering to share 24 specific songs online – a cost of $9,250 per song.

[link...]

UPDATE: Here is the playlist:

* Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle”; “November Rain”
* Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last”
* Janet Jackson “Let’s What Awhile”
* Gloria Estefan “Here We Are”; “Coming Out of the Heart”; “Rhythm is Gonna Get You”
* Goo Goo Dolls “Iris”
* Journey “Faithfully”; “Don’t Stop Believing”
* Sara McLachlan “Possession”; “Building a Mystery”
* Aerosmith “Cryin’”
* Linkin Park “One Step Closer
* Def Leppard “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
* Reba McEntire “One Honest Heart”
* Bryan Adams “Somebody”
* No Doubt “Bathwater”; “Hella Good”; “Different People”
* Sheryl Crow “Run Baby Run”
* Richard Marx “Now and Forever”
* Destiny’s Child “Bills, Bills, Bills”
* Green Day “Basket Case”

I hope all these artists are ashamed of the companies they work for, and it would be nice if some of them said so publicly.

Just reading about Alive in Baghdad’s funding woes (a project of Small World News). They are a news video service, that gets close to issues no one one in big media cares about: for instance, how car bombs actually affect Iraqi families and individuals.

So why is it so hard to get funding for good projects? We’re having a similar problem with the Atwater Digital Literacy Project.

There are a number of micro-pay philanthropy sites now, and alive in baghdad, for instance has paypal subscription buttons … to try to get people like you and me to support them.

But it’s not really taking.

What could we do to make this easier for those of us who want to pay, and those in need of financial support?

I’ve often though about something like my Internet Support Bank Account – with an easy button. So I put in, say, $250 at the beginning of the year to my “micropay account”, and as I surf the web, finding projects I like, I drop, $5, 10, 25 or whatever to the cause. Until I run out of money.

In order to make this work there would have to be some kind of standardized payment system – that could work for instance on different platforms. I guess paypal works something like that – but I want something more dedicated to this idea, less corporate.

Probably there has to be some fun component too? I’m not sure.

I pay a couple of bucks a day for coffee, and i’ll buy a pint of beer without thinking twice. Why so hard to support projects I care about I wonder?

[tipped off by twitter Julien]

Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article about plans for military strikes against Iran is up on their site, dealing with various intelligence opinions about what Iran’s up to in Iraq, and US Administration plans.

You can find it here:
Shifting Targets: New Plans for Iran.

Truthout.org is a lefty news agreggator, and a non-profit org. They send out newsletters and the like to subscribers. Recently, apparently, AOL and hotmail have stopped delivering truthout emails to hotmail and AOL email users – or have labelled truthout.org as spam, so the emails are not going thru. Says truthout:

While AOL has been largely evasive and silent about their reasons for blocking communications, our server logs and complaints from subscribers illustrate a clear pattern of interference. Microsoft-Hotmail, while not being forthcoming about their actions to the subscribers involved, have stated to our administrators that they are in fact “throttling” and “blocking” our communications. Further, the Microsoft-Hotmail administrators inform us that they are blocking our communications to Truthout subscribers on their systems due to what they describe as our “reputation.”

For some reason, Truthout has not published the specific correspondence from the services, which would be helpful. Right now the reports on Truthout seem a bit fishy.

Anyway, this is something I’ve never heard of before: an email provider apparently blocking emails from a politically disliked site. Anyone know other instances of this?

Laurence Dunbar and Christian Leblanc were commissioned by the CRTC to write a report and recommendations for on the Canadian broadcasting regulatory environment. Geist is happy, concluding:

The authors remain optimistic, however, concluding that “the solutions to this issue lie not in imposing new regulatory restrictions on Canadian companies as some stakeholders have suggested – but rather in encouraging them to stake out territory on the Internet. . .to regulate Canadians, while the rest of the world competes in an open market, would in our view be counterproductive.”

The message is clear – broadcasters must adapt by shifting from their reliance on protective regulations and inexpensive U.S. content to instead competing on the unregulated global stage with their own, original Canadian content delivered to an international audience on conventional and Internet platforms. This should dramatically alter Canadian content production from one mandated by government regulation to one mandated by market survival.

[link...]

The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, says Geist, is upset with the recommendations, worried that it will help to erode the solid foundation of Canadian culture they have built, the cherished productions that have made Canadian broadcasting the darling of international critics, shows like Corner Gas, Air Farce, Wind at My Back, Pit Poney … etc. etc. etc. The list of their achievements is indeed long, as is the pantheon, if you will, of Canadian TV culture, the dizzying pinnacles of creativity and cutural importance that CTV and Global and CBC TV have nurtured and cultivated in the past 20 years. Littlest Hobo, Beachcombers. Street Legal.

The internet is scary, and must be stopped, lest we lose all that our broadcasters have worked so hard to build.

Sy Hersh is the best writer on what’s going on in the US gov’ts war rooms (hint: they plan to start a war with Iran). There’s a good interview over at Jewish Journal, and check this gem, from a guy who started writing for print in the 1970s:

There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism.
I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ‘93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded. So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.

See his latest big piece here: The Redirection

And always good for the students of history, and those who don’t buy Hersh’s hype, here are a couple of pre-Iraq war pieces that laid out in detail exactly what transpired over the next year in the lead-up to the invasion in 2001-2002: The Iraq Hawks (December 2001) and The Debate Within (March 2002 – ABSTRACT ONLY!).

All this data we are putting into the web – say, into our blogs and into facebook and elsewhere, could be used for much more than just figuring out what kind of sneaker ads we’re likely to want to see.

If you have a big enough and powerful enough database, and you felt like tracking more complex things than ad click-thru rates, you could start figuring out how different cues actually affect decisions, actions and opinions of specific people or groups of people. Let’s say you had a captive portal where all sorts of data about an individual (oh, say, interests, education, religion, location) and relationships (the people in that person’s network) and actions (causes they support, pictures they comment on), AND further more sophisticated content started going in there (say, blog posts – even a feed from a blog), then you could (and probably would) start analyzing what a person actually does.

And you could start correlating profiles with actions. Which in effect is what pollsters do, but with tiny bits of bad data from surveys and focus groups, from a discrete moment in time, and without any way to measure how responses correlate with actions. Whereas the net – and places like facebook – are enormous databases of detailed info about specific people, tracking not just static points of what they like or don’t like, but also some of the things they actually do on the net, over weeks, months or years.

And that means, if you have access to that database, you might have a good platform to craft a strategy to make people do what you want them to do.

While that’s a bit creepy when you think about Facebook and Myspace etc, let’s face it: as the semantic web evolves (linking content with context), as bandwidth and database processing power grows, the web itself might as well be considered a captive portal, and we *will* continue to put all this data into the system. Much that you might wish to know about me, including my opinions on various political issues and the news that inspires my outrage or laughter, can be found on my personal blog, for all to see, catalog, measure and track. Probably it’s a bit early for databases and modeling systems powerful enough to manage this kind of complex data – but it’s coming.

So the worries about privacy and your data are much bigger than just targeted marketing … there are much more sophisticated uses for our information.

Oh, and while I’ve been thinking this for a while, the spur that kicked me to think about it again, was the “about” page on Justin Hall’s website that says:

The web and video games are merging. All of information space is a shared multiplayer adventure. I am working to make that merging happen faster by developing “Passively Multiplayer Online Games” where your history of web browsing defines your online character.

Check the website of the research project: passively multiplayer.

Cool for vid games. But useful, and worrying, for all sorts of other applications.

UPDATE: check also wefeelfine.org and imagine the other sorts of text-strings, say, governments would like to track with such a pretty tool. (For instance: “I hate Bush”).

Another Canadian corporate giant gets sold off, this time steelmaker Stelco goes to American company US Steel.

I’ve written about this before. Pretty soon, we won’t have any big companies left in Canada – tho the recent economic turmoil caused by bad subprime mortgages, means that cheap capital will be drying up, and we’ll see fewer billions floating around financial markets for big corporate buys.

In any case, long term, though, things don’t look good for the Canucks.

Says the NY Times:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

I’ve got a lot of activist friends who tell me that when peaceful protests get violent, it’s usually undercover cops *pretending* to be protesters who start throwing the rocks at the cops – which gives the cops just the excuse to come in with batons and break up the protest with teargas and violence and arrest the protesters etc. It seemed logical to me, but I’d never seen any proof – and there *are* some crazy anarchist groups out there, the Black Bloc, who are violent.

Anyway, here’s a vid capturing a bunch of undercover cops (agents provocateurs) in masks trying to start a riot so that a peaceful protest gets broken up; and a union guy confronting them, realizing they are cops, and sending them on their way.

Next is a CBC report about the cops admitting that the masked men with rocks indeed were cops. There to “find and shut down violent protestors.” Sure. Take a look at the videos. (And here is the Surete du Quebec response … including a video of a press release … 2+2=5 … 2+2=5 ….2+2=5).

So, is this legal? Should it be?

The raw vid:

And the news report about the police admitting the guys were cops:

(Thanks to Dan for the tip)

UPDATE: from the police statement (pdf):

Concerning the video broadcast on YouTube, as we confirmed yesterday, the three people in question were indeed Sûreté du Québec police officers performing their duties. They had the mandate to locate and identify non-peaceful demonstrators in order to prevent excesses. They therefore joined a group of demonstrators that contained extremist elements. Those elements identified our police officers, who could not pursue their mandate. It was when leaving that group that they found themselves in a group of peaceful demonstrators. They then asked the police officers assigned to crowd control to leave the premises. Since those officers did not recognize them, they wrestled the Sûreté du Québec officers to the ground and handcuffed them in order to take them aside to confirm their identity. That intervention was never considered or presented by the Sûreté du Québec as an arrest. Furthermore, at no time did the officers in question engage in provocation or incite anyone to commit violent acts. In the framework of the Montebello summit, as after each large-scale operation, the Sûreté du Québec obtains complete feedback on its interventions. If there are methods or procedures to be changed or adjusted, you can rest assured that will done. The goal is always to improve our practices in order to carry out our mission effectively and in keeping with the established legal framework.

Michael Geist is optimistic:

Jim Prentice, Canada’s new Industry Minister, has been on the job for less than a week, yet his appointment has already sent a buzz through the business community. With a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s inner circle now at the helm, promoting Canada’s global economic competitiveness promises to become a core priority on the government’s fall agenda. While some political commentators maintain that the issue rarely translates into voter support, my weekly Law Bytes column (Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) argues that the good news for Prentice is that reforms focusing on digital issues represent both good policy and smart politics. By prioritizing three issues – communication, copyright, and consumer confidence – he has the opportunity to establish a forward-looking framework that can serve as a model for other countries and provide a payoff at the ballot box.

[more...]

If you want to figure out what is all the fuss about subprime mortgages and the economic turmoil they seem to be inflicting, BBC’s Robert Preston has a good extensive summary.

Here’s the bottom line: for the past few years, Wall Street has operated a giant machine for turning mind-boggling amounts of US home loans – which are hugely vulnerable to losses from fraud and the inescapable cycles in interest rates and housing prices – into supposedly risk-free investments for risk-averse investors in Asia, the Middle East and (as it turns out) for Europe’s big banks.

He doesn’t explicitly mention hedge funds, but these are behind much of the complex debt restructuring, slicing & dicing mentioned here.

Zeke talking about his troubles, and put in a larger context.

(via Michael Geist, and produced ?transferred from the idiottube to ourtube by Libelchill.ca).

From the Pessimism file:

I’ve always been skeptical of hedge funds and sophisticated derivative products. In theory these financial instruments protect against risk, by playing potential movement of the market in one direction, off of movement in another. It’s high-powered math stuff, and it’s made many many people truckloads, billions of dollars. But I don’t really understand it – though I was tangentially involved in the derivative business for a while. And it’s always seemed to me that hedge funds, at their base, are about getting money for nothing. That is, getting money without accomplishing anything. Still the house that Enron helped build has gotten bigger and bigger, and has become to some extent the underpinning of the entire global economy. Basically, it’s flooded the world with lots of cheap money. That sort of thing, eventually causes problems, because the laws of physics will always beat out the laws of the market.

And, according to Steven Pearlstein in the WaPo, the whole thing might come tumbling down.

As it all unfolds, we are learning several painful truths about the new global financial system, which until recently was widely lauded for its ability to price and spread financial risk to investors willing to accept it.

One lesson is that the sophisticated strategies employed by bank and investment funds to “hedge” risk may not be as reliable as had been thought.

In recent years, for example, banks and hedge funds created elaborate investment strategies built around the presumption that Bond A would always go up when the price of Bond B went down, effectively limiting potential losses. But in recent weeks, many such strategies began to go awry as markets for mortgage securities dried up and fund managers began selling whatever they could to raise cash to pay lenders. As a result, Bond A and Bond B began moving in the same direction, creating losses on both.

Another popular way for sophisticated investors to hedge their bets is to buy insurance against the possibility that a particular company or set of mortgage holders will default on their loans. But in some cases, this insurance policy, known as a credit swap, has been issued by hedge funds that themselves had taken on similar risks. If things go bad, a hedge fund may not have the money to uphold its side of the insurance bargain.

and:

Australian analyst Satyajit Das makes the point that the main achievement of the new financial architecture has not been to spread risk so much as it has been to expand risk by vastly increasing the amount of borrowed money. Making loans to buy bonds secured by packages of other loans makes for big fees and exciting work for bankers. But as Das predicted last year in his book, “Traders, Guns & Money” — and as we all discovered yesterday — if the supply of credit suddenly dries up anywhere in the system, the elaborate new structure they’ve created can come crashing down on itself.

And chances are you and I will get caught under that crashing system, one way or antother.

Scary stuff.

KOS hosts a yearly convention for progressive political bloggers. This year most of the Democratic presidential candidiates attended. If you are sick of the crap that passes for debate in mainstream media, have a look at where all the biggies in the Dem field stand on the issues, courtesy of the KOS event, and PoliticsTV:

Daily KOS Presidential Forum (videos).

Notes:
-a blog brought together all the heavy Democratic presidential candidates for a useful debate. That’s impressive.
-in the long run, I think more and more citizens will seek out this kind of information
-MSM doesn’t want to sell substance like this, but the politicians do … and maybe the net is the only place where we’ll find it
-will the Right have a similar event?
-I was impressed by Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards … Clinton and Obama seemed pretty light-weight, and the other guys up there (Kucinich and someone elseMike Gravel) are probably too far out of whack for the US, but I agree with most of what they have to say.

By the way, the right-wing blowhard Bill O’Reilly, I guess worried about the influence of the YearlyKOS convention, calls KOS “a hate site worse than the Ku Klux Klan.” Watch an edited vid of Bill’s greatest hits. (Oh, and even Michelle Malkin agrees!).

I’m a public radio addict, and I theoretically love CBC Radio, except that most of it is total shit. Some of it is fantastic. (By the way, this is why I started Collectik.net, so that instead of listening to crappy radio punctuated with the occasional great show, I could listen to the stuff I want to listen to all the time).

Anyway, it seems CBC needs a new president. There’s a great blog written by a pseudonymous CBCer, mostly about the CBC, called teamakers. “Ouimet” is the writer, and s/he is snarky, tough, and sometimes unfair, but generally has his/her head screwed on as straight as they come about CBC.

Anyway, s/he’s thrown his/her hat into the ring for prez, by sending an email to the selection committee (or at least pretending to) with nice paras such as:

Our current President is a bureaucrat, by his own admission. This means that he spends a lot of time kissing the asses of politicians, trying to get more money for the CBC. He’s turned his back on his employees. Between you and me, I don’t think he’s too keen on the Canadian public either.

But you and I both know that all of this didn’t get us one single dollar. We’re left with a President no politician respects, the employees hate, and we’re still broke.

and:

As for remuneration, I have no idea what the job pays but to show you I’m serious, I’ll take half of it. The other half we’ll use to bring on as many contract workers as we can, full time permanent.

Considering that Stephen Harper appoints the prez, chances are things are going to get a hell of a lot worse around the ceeb.

(PS as I write this I am listening to the dismal Afghanada, a radio drama about Canada’s “grunts on the ground” in Afghanistan … if there is anything worse than CBC writers and actors pretending to be “grunts” by dropping g’s from their Havergal & UCC accents, I don’t know what it would be).

I first heard about Canada’s new Bill C-47 when I was printing off my artwork for this year’s graduation exhibition at the Emily Carr Institute. My artwork, the Transit Shelter Project, focuses on the current debates around the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and homelessness. As my artwork ran off the printer, the technician asked, “You know that these are illegal?” I replied that I had used different pantone colours and computer fonts so I wasn’t infringing upon any copyright laws.
“What I mean is VANOC has copyrighted the number 2010,” he added. I was completely floored and asked how anyone could copyright a number.

[more..] [via Geist]

For those of you who think Net Neutrality is an important issue … here is the antidote:

Hands off the Internet, which is:

… a nationwide coalition of Internet users, manufacturers and network operators united in the belief that the Net’s phenomenal growth over the past decade will continue if government does not attempt an unwise effort to regulate a market that is otherwise working to give consumers the choices, freedom, prices and diverse experiences they desire in the new age of the Internet.

Supported by these guys.

I found HOTI when reading a funny quote from Craig Newmark:

Imagine if you tried to order a pizza and the phone company said AT&T’s preferred pizza vendor is Domino’s. Press one to connect to Domino’s now. If you would still like to order from your neighborhood pizzeria, please hold for three minutes while Domino’s guaranteed orders are placed.

Which I saw on Dan’s blog, which got a long comment from HOTI.

(PS don’t you just love an industry-funded “grassroots” organization with an acronym that sounds like “hottie”?)

The Canadian press is all over the brutal mobile data rates Canadian carriers charge (compared with reasonable rates elsewhere). An editorial in the Gazette; an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, now a big article in the National Post.

I agree with them, and I’ll wager that CanWest (who owns all three papers) has some big business plans involving mobile data.

Or maybe the editorial boards just *really* want iPhones.

I’ve been following the Gonzales scandal pretty closely. Turns out, one of the complex parts of the growing (and worrying) scandal is government data mining (NYTimes, reg required probably).

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

[more...]

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

From NY Times’ Paul Krugman.

More from Business Week.

Oh man, just watched this again. Check this quote out from Tom Delay (at 3:46):

If you don’t believe abortion affects you, I contend it affects you in immigration. If we had those forty million children that were killed over the last thirty years, we wouldn’t need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today.

where oh where does one start with that one?

vid by: Max Blumenthal.

The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) just released their Communications Outlook 2007 report, that gives an overview of member states’ communication (mobile, broadband, broadcast, telephony etc) infrastructure, usage, pricing, etc.

Michael Geist gives a brief review of the report, and extracts these key points:

• Canada ranked second last in the OECD for the total number of mobile subscribers. For medium mobile users, Canadian plans ranked among the most expensive in the OECD.
• Canada placed far behind other countries for innovation. For example, Bell Canada was the only Canadian telecom provider to obtain patents in the United States with four since 2003. By comparison, AT&T, British Telecom, NTT, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, and Korea Telecom have all obtained dozens (or hundreds) of patents in that same time frame.
• Canadian investment in telecommunications was average, trailing countries such as the US, Australia, Japan, and the UK.
• The OECD found that, on average, mobile revenue per subscriber dropped from 2003 to 2005 due to increased competition. In Canada, revenue increased during that period.
• The report reconfirms Canada’s sinking ranking in broadband subscribers along with its relatively high prices for broadband (18th in both monthly pricing and per MB pricing)

All are worrying, but I find #2 (lack of patents) the most indicative of long-term problems on the horizon in Canada.

And, in related iPhone news, Patrick links to an article that says:

Until Canadian companies can offer cheaper [mobile data] plans so that everyone will want one, iPhone won’t be coming to Canada.

The latest big Canadian company to get sold off to foreign interests is Alcan, the Montreal-based Aluminum giant. It’s hard to imagine any big Canadian companies left in a decade or so unless we change our policies. Among the big Canadian companies that have been sold off in the last few years: Four Seasons Hotels, Algoma Steel, Dofasco, Harris Steel, Inco, Falconbridge, Sleeman Breweries, ATI Technologies, Hudson’s Bay Company, Terasen, Westcoast Energy, Molson, Labatt, and MacMillan Bloedel. BCE was on the chopping block recently, but snatched up by the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund.

I read one report (can’t find a link, sorry) about the TSX claiming it has become a “ridiculous” exchange, slowly getting hollowed out of all the cornerstone, blue chip companies form the foundation around which smaller companies operate.

Lots of Canadians get very rich in these deals, especially shareholders and top executives … and in the short term, deals like this usually come with job guarantees etc. But in the long run, Canada loses control of the companies, and, importantly, the experience of running big successful corporations – since top decision-making gets exported elsewhere, even if, as in the case of Alcan, a nominal head office stays in the country. This is worrisome.

All this is especially important in the oil and gas sector (considering that, I think, we’re heading soon to peak oil) where we’ve sold off a huge percentage of ownership to foreign companies. Compounding that worry is our inability, under NAFTA, to exercise any national energy security policies. I gather no other major industrial country in the world has such a set policy of selling off control of the national economy.

A number of big names in corporate Canada are worried:

As Derek Burney, former CEO of CAE, has said, “virtually every country in the world, including the bastion of free enterprise on our southern border, has the means to review and block transactions in the name of national security or national interest.”

Other big corporate guys who agree include the CEO of Manulife, and, according to our pal Layton, others saying that the issue must be addressed include: Gordon Nixon (Royal Bank Canada), Gerry Schwartz (Onex Corp.), Peter Munk (Barrick Gold Corp.) and Dick Haskayne (former CEO of several Alberta oil and gas companies).

So what happens next?

Let’s get this straight:

• U.S. Congress investigates alleged wrongdoing to at the US Department of Justice, particularly undue political influence of the White House in firing a number of US Attorneys.
• Justice Department officials can’t remember who made the contentious decisions.
• Congress issues subpoenas to various White House officials, and others to testify under oath before Congress.
• White House claims of “executive privilege,” mean that those officials don’t have to testify.
• White House tells officials to ignore the subpoenas. (Which, by the way, is likely a felony).
• Congress threatens to find said officials, and the White House, in contempt of Congress.

So who is “right”? A conundrum, no doubt. So: who do you ask to rule on the issue?

Why not ask the very Department whose leadership is under investigation for wrongdoing…

In a broadly worded legal opinion, the Justice Department has concluded that President Bush’s former top lawyer, and possibly other senior White House officials, can ignore subpoenas from Congress to testify about the firings of U.S. attorneys.

[link...]

Or would that be a conflict of interest?

A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

WHEREAS Lewis Libby was convicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the case United States v. Libby, Crim. No. 05-394 (RBW), for which a sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment, 2 years’ supervised release, a fine of $250,000, and a special assessment of $400 was imposed on June 22, 2007;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, pursuant to my powers under Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, do hereby commute the prison terms imposed by the sentence upon the said Lewis Libby to expire immediately, leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release, with all its conditions, and all other components of the sentence.

IN WITNESS THEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of July, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.

GEORGE W. BUSH

[link]

For some concise context, see: Wonkette: And Justice For All.

UPDATE: More:

• Through the Looking Glass, Darkly
• Snow Plays Lawyer
• The White House’s Breathtaking Incoherence
• Bush Rationale on Libby Stirs Legal Debate

And for those of you worried about Bush in these trying times, here’s an extraordinary tearjerker about the philosopher king who runs the free world, from the Washington Post (you probably need to register). The best part was this howler:

“He does a very good job of keeping out the extreme things in his life,” Conaway, the congressman, said. “He doesn’t watch Leno and Letterman. He doesn’t spend a lot of time exposing himself to that sort of stuff. He has a terrific knack of not looking through the rearview mirror.”

Yeah. Given the state of the world, Leno & Letterman are “extreme.”

It’s a very strange article, which can be summarized thus: Bush solicits input from people to figure out why the world is a mess, and then doesn’t listen to any of them.

UPDATE: Another look at the Bush regime and their recent appeal to history textbooks: The History Boys.

As a parallel to the civicaccess.ca project, I just whipped up a new group blog datalibre.ca. Here is the about:

datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected using Canadian tax-payer funds, and we believe use of the data should not be restricted to those who can afford the exorbitant fees.

Anyone who would like to participate with the odd post or whatever, let me know.

Shawna was kind enough to make the header graphic for the project.

This presentation is not actually about podcasting, it’s about data…but it was presented at podcastersacrossborders, and LibriVox is the inspiration for these thoughts.

Yulblogger, podcaster, ilesansfiler, and art gallery/space guy Chris Hand, aka Zeke, has had his blog shut down (UPDATE: possibly permanently???) by a court injunction.

The Montreal and Canadian blogging, free speech, rational people communities ought to be up in arms. I urge everyone to at least write about this to get this info out. It’s a real danger to all of us who write what we think online.

The story, as I understand it, is this:

1. Radio Canada, National Post, and Le Devoir ran stories about alleged art forgeries sold to Loto-Quebec by a local art dealer whose name will remain unwritten, lest I too get sued …all links still live.

2. Loto-Quebec issued a press release about the incident … link still live.

3. Zeke, who runs a blog about art in Canada, wrote a number of posts about the incident, linking to the articles above (the posts have since been excised from the web – tho the articles he based his posts on are still up). Also, due to some vague language, suggesting that the man in question had been somehow affiliated with the mafia.

4. The fellow mentioned in articles (still available online) by Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, and Loto Quebec sued Zeke for $25,000 in damages.

5. Zeke was told to change the wording of the posts (he did).

6. Zeke posted about the threats from the other guy’s lawyer.

7. A court order required Zeke to take down the relevant posts (he did).

8. Zeke posted about the court order.

9. A second court injunction appears to have shut down Zeke’s blog altogether
UPDATE: it seems as if this injunction may only last “until after the next court hearing, June 21″

10. Zeke is no longer posting.

Here is a Globe and Mail article about the events.

Those who know Zeke know he’s loud, opinionated and something of a loose cannon. He’s also a stalwart of Montreal’s blogging/podcasting/art/arts scene, and a good guy.

But regardless of Zeke’s personality, and given that:
a) the articles Zeke linked to, and based his posts on, are still on the net in the public sphere, and
b) Zeke is now under threat of $25,000 in damages, and
c) Zeke’s blog has been shut down by court order

how do you, as a reader of blogs and citizen of Canada and Quebec, feel about freedom of speech in your country?

Chris, what can we do to help?

MORE UPDATES:
- Heri’s take
- Fagstein’s review

if you love facebook, you’ll love this:
http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/

After seeing this, I decided not to import my blog into facebook anymore. I prefer not to give them unlimited and total rights & access to everything I write on my blog, thanks.

UPDATE:
cf. zura’s comment below, i am careful about what I would or would not put in facebook, but the main issue I have is with this clause:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

see: Facebook Terms of Use.

The man who commanded US-led coalition forces during the first year of the Iraq war says the United States can forget about winning the war.

“I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will – not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat,” retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez said in an interview.

Sanchez, in his first interview since he retired last year, is the highest-ranking former military leader yet to suggest the Bush administration has fallen short in Iraq.

“I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time,” Sanchez told AFP after a recent speech in San Antonio, Texas.

(From Agence France Press, via Truthout)

Unprecedented, I am sure. This makes 3 top commanders in Iraq (all retired), saying, essentially, that Bush & Co. are bad news. I bet they’ve all read Yingling’s article, which I wrote about earlier.

And, on a related note, here is a fascinating (and scary) meditation about what happens when a country builds up a mercenary force of combat soldiers, with a little history tour of Rome.

The privatization of war hands an incentive to American corporations, many with tremendous political clout, to keep us mired down in Iraq. But even more disturbing is the steady rise of this modern Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome was a paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse, and eventually plunged the Roman Republic into tyranny and despotism. Despotic movements need paramilitary forces that operate outside the law, forces that sow fear among potential opponents, and are capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors. And in the wrong hands, a Blackwater could well become that force.

Given that Blackwater, the biggest private security force in Iraq (and likely the world) is run by a hard-core Christian Right man … well, what’s there to worry about?

They may be paid by Canadian citizens, and they may work for Canadian citizens, and letting citizens know what they say may legitimately be considered an important component of a functioning democracy … but no no no, you can’t post to the net vids of Candian politicians talking in Parliament, without getting PERMISSION FORM THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS!:

Says Geist:

The Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) is the primary source for Canadian Parliamentary debate and discussions, including the House of Commons Question Period and Committee hearings. CPAC broadcasts hours of Parliamentary hearings each week, yet … it does not assert copyright over the broadcasts. Instead, the broadcaster maintains that copyright in the House of Commons Proceedings rests with the Speaker of the House, while the Senate of Canada owns the copyright in the Senate Proceedings.

(found at BoingBoing)

And, being the shit disturber that I am, I sent this to the Speaker Himself (email: SpkrOff@parl.gc.ca):

Dear Mr. Speaker,

Considering that Canadian Parliamentarians are paid by Canadian citizens, and that they work for Canadian citizens, and that letting citizens know what Parliamentarians say is an important component of a functioning democracy … should we citizens not be allowed, without the permission of the Speaker of the House, to post videos of Parliament to the internet when and how we wish?

How could Parliament reasonably argue that copyright should apply?

see:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1943/135/

Thanks,

etc…

For some reason, I am obsessed with the US Attorney Scandal. The best coverage is at TalkingPointsMemo, where I just read this statement, from Monica Goodling, former #3 (?) at the US Department of Justice, which has been deposed before Congress in their hearings into the matter:

…At heart, I am a fairly quiet girl who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way. I always knew I wanted to grow up and do something to serve or help other people. I went to public schools growing up, but chose Christian universities, in part, because of the value placed on service …

[more ...]

There is lots of context to this, but let’s just say it seems like an odd statement for someone who was a top civil servant at probably the most important department of the government – the one charged with enforcing the laws of the United States of America.

If Ms. Goodling was appearing before the school’s discipline committee for abusing her position as prefect and stealing from the grade 10 bake sale coffers, I could imagine such a statement. But from a top Justice Department official??

I wonder if ever in the history of the USA there has been such statements by retired military leaders about an acting President? I doubt it highly, but if any of you US history buffs know otherwise, let me know.

The President vetoed our troops and the American people. His stubborn commitment to a failed strategy in Iraq is incomprehensible. He committed our great military to a failed strategy in violation of basic principles of war. His failure to mobilize the nation to defeat world wide Islamic extremism is tragic. We deserve more from our commander-in-chief and his administration.
-Maj. Gen. John Batiste, USA, Ret.

and:

This administration and the previously Republican controlled legislature have been the most caustic agents against America’s Armed Forces in memory. Less than a year ago, the Republicans imposed great hardship on the Army and Marine Corps by their failure to pass a necessary funding language. This time, the President of the United States is holding our Soldiers hostage to his ego. More than ever apparent, only the Army and the Marine Corps are at war – alone, without their President’s support.
-Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, USA, Ret.

Could the Republican revolt be underway? Could Bush be forced out by the Right? I wonder if these fellows read this? Though note these guys are both coming, more or less, from a “more troops, more war” point of view; but still, that’s the point: Bush could never have gotten enough support from the American public to wage this war if it actually meant anything to everyday lives (ie, the draft); and the US military could not have prosecuted this war successfully without, several hundreds of thousands of troops (so said Gen. Shinseki, among others). That would have meant: draft.

Whether double, triple or quadruple the troops would have really made the difference is another matter; but it seems as if, whatever the thoughts there, more high-level military people are speaking up.

(UPDATE: Batiste apparently consults with Hillary Clinton … don’t know about Eaton, and not surprisingly, both have been long-time critics of the prosecution of the war. Not sure what they thought of the invasion itself).

Bill Moyers is a great old journalist from PBS who defends his vision of America in the face of iniquity; Jon Stewart is a young comedian who defends America in the face of absurdity.

See them talk.

Excellent article in the Armed Forces Journal, by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who has served two tours in Iraq, as well as tours in Bosnia and Desert Storm. Whatever you think of the morality or wisdom of the invasion of Iraq, few conscious mammals think it’s proved either a good idea, or a well-executed activity. Yingling blames US Generals for a lack of moral courage, and intellectual creativity. He also implies condemnation of Pentagon civilians leaders for ignoring good advice – and choosing generals who agreed with their rosy and naive projections about the invasion, especially on troop numbers; and Congress, for giving up its oversight role. The real implication though is, to me, the important one: if the US people had really been told what was required (essentially a 4x increase in US troop presence in Iraq, which would likely have required … the DRAFT), likelihood is that they might have reevaluated their passion for war.

Here are some choice quotes:

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory.

and:

For more than three years, America’s generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America’s generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation’s deployable land power to a single theater of operations.

and:

Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail.

[more ...]

I started writing about this ages ago, but have not finished yet… but in a discussion with Michael, the idea came up again, and I wrote a long comment there, which I’ll reproduce here (slightly redacted):

***
my theory of morality is this: moral ideas are cultural constructs that sink or swim based on their ability to “improve” lives & societies, where improve means: makes it easier for a bigger number of people to be well-provided-for, to solve problems they want to solve, and generally to be more happy.

here is a thought experiment: what if increasing individual liberty, abolishing slavery, providing public education (etc) resulted in: mass pandemics, death, misery, and a collapse in the economy. would we see liberty & public education etc as morally good? i’d argue no.

if you read the bible (and, I presume most religious texts), you realize that much of it concerns very practical rules of life (how to build things, how to eat things etc), in addition to more abstract spiritual things … those “rules” are helpful for keeping a society functioning smoothly, and well, and helps us continue to solve problems we want to solve.

so while making “moral” choices is important, to me the compelling argument (in politics) is that “moral” choices are actually ones that tend to improve lives, and be effective. (i think this is part of why the religious right is so strong in the USA: our “free” (and empty) society has resulted in people being unhappy … and a set of moral rules (work hard, be honest, help others, be true to your wife etc) helps you get better at doing the things that, over the past 3000 years, have proven to help make people happier, on balance).

Much of this theory comes out of watching LibriVox evolve, where free-form anarchy is employed only to the extent that it helps us make audiobooks, and not for abstract reasons. so when we decide on issues, we measure against making audiobooks, and not against abstract notions of freedom etc. This, i believe, is how societies and morality develop over time…rules of behaviour that are “helpful” become codified as morally preferable traits: honesty, courage, kindness etc.

regarding democracy & political engagement, my personal feeling is that i can accomplish much more outside of the political system right now. the political system is very rigid (like academia). it’s “better” than fascism, but it could/should become even more responsive to people’s needs, i think, by adopting more small-a-anarchist approaches to problems. i believe eventually i might become re-engaged in the system, i hope in ways that help the democratic system start playing with some of these ideas, to see what could be helpful, and what not. that is, i do not believe anarchist projects are good because they are anarchist, but only if they can be proven to help people do things they want to do (manage a health system, education system, environment etc).

civicaccess.ca is a perfect example of this: idea is: big groups of people with access to data over the net may be better at solving some problems than the government is, and the government should be responsive to exploring where these areas might be, and supporting movements/technologies/ideas that help bring decision-making tools into the hands of citizens, rather than keeping them in the rigid and compromised government systems as they exist now.

as for representative over direct democracy, again, i have no particular preference, except to the extent that one or the other can better address problems I see with the world; which includes protecting small groups from the abuse of big groups.

Interpretation of the data is to be discussed, but the data itself is … astounding:

from Maurizio.

Here’s Gonzales answering honestly:

White House spokesperson’s reaction:

Bush’s reaction:

and here is a wonderful Kubrickian remix of Gonzales’ chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson’s difficulties as well: Memory Gap.

I must say all the tizzy about the last Quebec election passed me by, and I wasn’t interested in the least – though I was surprised by the result. I expected a PQ or Lib majority, with ADQ also-ran as usual. But things are up in the air now. Still, I think Charest has proved himself unable to lead; Boisclair is completely vapid (and gratingly arrogant as well); and Mario Dumont has been a politician since he was a teen, which indicates to me a profound lack of character. Solidarity is a dreamy bunch, and the Greens offered nothing interesting (tho that’s who I voted for).

But rather than JUST complain about what appears to be the dismal state of Quebec politics, I thought I would list off some policy positions that would excite me:

1. replace “je me souviens” as a provincial motto.
[UPDATE #2: Turns out my (anglo) understanding of "je me souviens" is very different from other people's understanding of what it means. Still, the main principle is this: that Quebec has done extraordinary things in the past 35 years - totally changing the power structure of the Province... and that a collective, and serious, "Now What?" must be answered - so the backward-looking "Je me souviens" at least should be updated with something looking to the future.]

a motto should define the province … and what does our current motto say? it says: “we define ourselves as a province by celebrating our anger with the past, and our animosity towards defeat, betrayal, colonial oppression.” That is: “I remember the shit that happened in the past.”

Why not make it more explicit: “On est en calisse a cause de ce que vous avez faites?”

[UPDATE/ASIDE: I have always understood that "Je me souviens" refers to the Plains of Abraham ... that's what Anglos are told anyway. But it occurs to me that I might have that wrong, and perhaps there is a totally different interpretation on the other side of the linguistic fence... please let me know if so]

Or better yet, instead of having a motto that celebrates how pissed off Quebec is about the past, how about a motto that celebrates how Quebec will kick ass in the future? How about, “Bientot, vous en souviendriez aussi.” Or: “Doing better than you.” Or: “Looking forward to being an independent nation.” Or: “Unique in North America.” Or even: “Forget the past, we’re conquering the future.”

Whatever the political message, for God’s sake let’s make it a *positive* one looking forward, and not an official statement that says: “we are obsessed with, and pissed off about, the past.”

By the way, i have said this before: I don’t see my politics along the federalist/separatist lines: that political issue does not interest me nearly as much as what this place I love is like. Canada or Quebec is less interesting to me than: what are the policies of the government I am voting for?

2. official endorsement of net neutrality
I believe net neutrality is a core issue for a successful society. freedom of information flows means more innovation, means a more successful country in the long run. pls, guarantee free info flows on the net. see the canadian activists.

3. access to government data in open formats
One thing history proves: The government cannot be trusted to make good decisions. And the government makes decisions based on data they collect. But often you can’t see the data. So. Make the data open for all, in open formats, and let citizens make proposals based on the data. check out civicaccess.ca, and Watch this video.

4. proportional representation
why are we afraid of proportional representation? see fair vote canada. principle:

Current system: 49% of people in every riding vote for party A, 51% vote for party B. Result: Party B gets 100% of seats.

Proportional system: a certain number of seats are given to parties based on % of popular votes. My pal Andrew tells me PR transformed New Zealand politics.

5. healthcare – figure out global best practices, and build systems accordingly.
i feel so unequipped to figure out how to solve the healthcare problem. I am a longtime opponent of 2 tier healthcare, but my wife is a doctor: so much is wrong with the system. one thing I know: emergency rooms should all have management system studies done. they are inefficiently run … and that costs money.

but my main proposal: do a big study on health systems in the rest of the world, figure out our objectives, figure out best practices to meet those objectives, and then build policies and a health care system around that. get universities involved, and open source the whole thing.

it seems to me so much of our healthcare debate is completely blind and uninformed, and that;s no way to figure out how to fix the (supposedly) most important issue in our country.

6. climate change / kyoto protocol / energy
Actually do something. including:
-push forward on churchill falls II, the big hydro project. unpopular with environmentalists (like me), but being a producer of clean hydroelectricity is one of Quebecs great advantages in the world – environmentally and economically.
-mandate that Hydro-Quebec more actively promote energy efficiency in homes and businesses – give targets
-comprehensive urban planning strategy for montreal and quebec city, to reduce CO2
-increased funding for public transport (funded by increased gas taxes).
-push forward on the climate exchange at the Montreal Exchange

7. education
-improve education in the trades (carpentry, electric, plumbing etc). there’s tons of money in the biz, and not enough qualified workers
-increase uni tuitions. can’t believe i am saying this, but quebec has both the lowest tuition rates AND the lowest university participation in canada. so whatever we are doing isn’t working.
-free software in schools. make hacking & digital media production part of the curriculum.
-mandate that every quebec citizen be fluently trilingual (french, english, and one other language: spanish, chinese or arabic)

8. economy
-support small business… I don’t have any specific recommendations here, but would convene a group of successful small entrepreneurs and figure out better policies to encourage small businesses.

9. Defense & Security
I am a pacifist who believes that a country should have a strong agile military. so:
-Beef up army budgets
-withdraw from afghanistan – has anyone even defined what success would be there? anyone heard of benchmarks, measuring progress etc?
-take a stronger role in UN

10. Arts
-continue strong support for the arts – maybe take Ireland’s approach: no income tax on income from art.

That’s a start. Responses and condemnations welcome.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if Bush is going to be stopped from making a bigger mess (he has proved amply that he will make a bigger mess) … then he will have to be stopped by Republicans, not Democrats. Here’s what Lee Iaccoca, former Chrysler CEO, Bush supporter in 2000, and long-time Republican has to say in his new book:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged…. Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them — or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.

From carpetbagger.

Technorati Tags: book, fukayama, nonfiction

Interesting outcome in the Quebec election. The woeful centre/right liberals get a minority government, and the big news: the fresh-faced righties ADQ get official opposition, while the PQ gets a lickin. Patrick asks: who’s afraid of the ADQ (and why?).

We’ll see what happens. I don’t know what to think. I’ll have lots to complain about, but maybe this will shake Quebec up in some good (and certainly some bad) ways.

It seems to me that quebec politics has stagnated badly in the past … well … I don’t know how long. part of the “problem” is that politics & parties have been dominated by one central issue federalist/seperatism, which means that other important issues take a back seat. (probably less true in franco world).

but surely no one can be happy with the state of the province’s politics now, whether you are left/right or sep/fed. we have BOTH a crumbling health system AND the highest taxes anywhere in North America (I’d take 2 if 1 was a shining example of success, but it isn’t). Our eductaion system is a disaster, with 50%+ highschool drop out rate. universities choking with tuition freezes. we have the highest unemployment rates in Canada. the GDP is 54 out of 60 states/provinces in north america (wtf?)! smaller than arkansas.

we also have – in montreal at least, a thriving art scene, and a fantastic standard of living. partly due to a sluggish economy, that keeps rents low, which for my money is the best way to have a thriving art scene.

anyway: I’m as hard core lefty as you can get, usually, but I just cannot believe having 30% (? – not sure the number, but its twice ontario) of the population working for the government is a good thing.

I mostly hate the Harper conservatives, but i like our current federal minority set-up. the Conservatives are forced to do deals with lefties (NDP and bloq) to get things done, which is great. You get the hard-nosed approach of the right, kept in check by the left. good. (For instance, the Harper govt was pretty ballsy on the Income Trust issue, something the federal liberals were woeful on).

Here in que, though, the PQ was the big loser, so you’ve now got a centre-right Lib minority, with a right-wing ADQ opposition, so there will be a big shake up in quebec, one way or another. A big shift to the right in political power.

I’m not right-wing by any stretch, but I’m happy to see something that might shake up the political mud we’ve been in for the past decade or so. We’ll see where it goes. as usual, I’m cautiously unpessimistic.

SOME OTHER THOUGHTS FROM THE B’SPHERE (to be updated as they come in):

• MikeL
• patrick
• stépahne
  

Bush & Co. have made a hash of Iraq, that’s not news. It’s been called the greatest strategic blunder in American history – time will tell.

Whatever your moral feelings about Iraq, I don’t think there are many people left who claim it’s been a successful campaign.

That’s why I’m uncomfortable with the Dem’s move to set a specific deadline for pulling out. I would argue that the Bush team’s chronic stupidity and demonstrated incompetence (whether cynical or real) suggests that it would be imprudent to leave something as complicated as a pull-out from Iraq to them. Dangerous. They were terrible in their approach to going in; and even worse once they got in; one presumes they will be just as disastrous in pulling out.

Heads here and there have rolled in the Administration and military for various things, but the real head that has to go is the one at the top. No other organization (private company, beaurocracy, or, say, rugby club or church committee) would allow such a proven failure stay in charge after having been so wrong and so bad at getting things done so often.

The parliamentary system has provisions for a vote of no confidence that will bring down a government. The American governing system has no such provision, so the only way to get Bush out, if I understand correctly, is to get him to resign. Even impeachment isn’t enough. Clinton was impeached, but continued to govern (more popular than ever); Nixon resigned before impeachment.

The only way Bush will get the axe is if Republicans themselves apply the pressure (which is what happened to Nixon). I doubt there’s much chance of that…

So if I were the Dems I wouldn’t put a timetable on withdrawl as long as Bush is in charge. I think it’s too dangerous.

Barak O got flickr, but Johnny Edwards got twitter.

Hillary C got youtubed (ouch).

Meanwhile, none of the top dogs in the Bush administration uses email anymore.

With my renewed attention to the climate debate, I’ve been noticing a number of rhetorical tactics in the debate on the Other Side. Here are three of my favourites, offered as point-context-counterpoint:

1. The Political Scientists
Point:
“Scientists like David Suzuki are political propagandists” … or: “Al Gore, who is a politician and not a scientist would have you believe …” etc.

Context:
David Suzuki has a PhD (in Genetics), but he is not an active scientist, certainly not a climate scientist. He is a journalist and a commentator, with a political agenda. Al Gore is not a scientist, his agenda is purely political. However, both of those people (as non-scientists) are quoting the mainstream scientific consensus. The debate is not about what Suzuki or Gore think – and they are irrelevant. The relevant question is: what do actual scientists think? And the answer, the famous consensus is:
1. climate change is happening
2. climate change is happening at an increased rate as a result of human actions
3. this is bad news
4. we should take action to a) stop the change and/or b) adapt to it

Counterpoint:
Forget Suzuki and Gore (they are just messengers). Forget, even, the United Nations (which is an considered with distrust by the right in any case). Instead focus on the joint statement signed in June 2005 by the National Academies of Science of the eleven most powerful countries in the world, which says:

The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.

Here is the full text (pdf). Forget the messengers, listen to the scientists.

2. There are still skeptics
Point:
There are still skeptics within the scientific community about climate change, and we should wait until the science is “settled” before we undertake any dramatic action.

Context:
The details of climate science are complex. Disagreements about one issue or another will always exist, in the same way that it does in any scientific area. But that there are disagreements about some areas of the science, does not mean that the fundamental principles are not agreed. The vast majority of scientists working in the field agree with the consensus view described above. And of course there are skeptics. There will always be skeptics, in any field of inquiry, especially one as complex as climate science. But the question is: how should you make your policy? I would suggest that you make policy on “best available evidence.” The best available evidence is reflected by the consensus view.

Counterpoint:
There is no such thing as 100% agreement in science. But policy-makers are bound to make decisions based on best available evidence, and the best evidence, supported by the vast majority of active climate scientists indicates we should do something serious right now.

3. Why Bother?
Point:
It is too late to do anything about climate change, so we should just go on the way we have been going and not worry about it. It’ll be too hard, too expensive, and too disruptive to do anything, and anyway it’s too late.

Context:
This is at once the most pathetic and the most powerful of arguments. If it is indeed too late, and cataclysm is nigh, then at the very least we should be spending some serious time, money and energy thinking about how we’ll deal with the consequences. Governments in Canada and the US have not even done that; so if you take this view you’re either logically obliged to lobby for action, or you are willfully irresponsible.

Counterpoint:
If you make this statement, you acknowledge that climate change is a massive problem. If you acknowledge that it’s a massive problem, then you acknowledge that something should be done. Plus, it just ain’t true.

For a more complete list, see: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. And for the best in-depth analysis of science, visit: realclimate.org

A while back (on the old dose), I wrote some climate change posts, that attracted the attention of a couple of commenters, who I suspected of being flacks. We had a detailed exchange.

My theory for which I have zero proof, is that some people are paid to go around making climate-skeptic comments on blogs. I met Nicolas Ritoux (through Evan), and we talked about it. He writes for La Press, did some more digging, and wrote a couple of pieces that are in the paper today:

• Des «éco-sceptiques» à l’assaut du Web
• Une campagne organisée?

Cool.

And here is an article, from NY Review of Books, about where we are on climate.

I’ve been thinking lately about evolution and politics. All this comes out of a revelation I had in the early days of LibriVox, that as an open project, the whole thing – the system – evolved like an organism, getting more complex in response to environmental challenges. More readers, more books, more languages, more projects required a slow evolution of a management from “Hugh collects the files and then uploads” to something very different. We currently have 338 active projects, representing probably 5,000 or more individual audio files – all of which must be collected, checked, named, assigned metadata, and eventually uploaded, and cataloged. That’s a lot of work. Point is that the management system, is very complex, and it evolved in a way that I expect looks a lot (on a small/sped-up scale) like how political systems evolve.

On the conservative/progressive split, there’s an old saw in US politics that the left thinks the right is evil, and the right thinks the left is stupid. Neither is true, of course, or not entirely true, and I think there’s an unwillingness, and sometimes just an inability to understand where the other side comes from. Maybe evolution is useful model to explain things.

Conservatives, generally, appeal to how things have been and claim that we shouldn’t change what’s worked in the past. There’s a sense to that, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Progressives, on the other hand, appeal to how things ought to be and claim we should change things to make it work better or differently. There’s a sense to that, that changing environments call for changed response.

By this nomenclature the Bush White House was filled with Progressives, in the sense that they decided to junk the past 50 years of diplomatic standards and wisdom – rule of law, international agreement, importance of history and understanding of the enemy, experience of occupying forces etc – in exchange for a bold new vision of transforming democracy. They thought the purity of the ideal would be enough to carry the day. While the liberals [what was left of them] argued for, essentially, a realist foreign policy approach, more cautionary, and more tied to past experience. The Bush Progressives were shown to be naive at best. And many other things at worst.

I am a temperamental conservative, and an intellectual progressive. Even within LibriVox (a progressive project, I guess), now that we have a system that works pretty well, I am always loathe to change many things substantially, since I worry about the unforeseen impacts changes might have. Because the system evolved through an unknowable cocktail of influences and reactions, I don’t like tinkering with certain of the intangibles, especially the ones whose influence is uncalculable. For instance, there has been a movement to change the disclaimer that comes at the start of our recordings (This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, to find out more or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org); I have resisted in part because I have an intuition that this disclaimer has had some kind of impact on the creation of the community that makes LibriVox succeed. Reciting it, in some sense, joins us all into a common cause, and that makes for a tighter-kint group – actually, some call us a cult!).

Slipping back to the evolutionary model: as the environment changes radically (say, political, economic, or ecological) there is tension between the conservatives and progressives. Conservatives look back and say: it worked before, it’ll keep working. While the progressives look forward and say, we must change! Without having much idea if it will work.

So I’d argue that a healthy society will allow for strong interplay between the two tendencies, the stabilizing force of conservatism, and the evolving force of progressivism. Balanced against the uncertainty of progressive solutions and the rigid inability of conservatives to change with changing circumstances.

Which is one of the reasons I think we need to find new ways to make democracy work. We need to open the process more, to put more of the decision-making process (and the data behind it) into the hands of the people. Our democratic system is very rigid, and does not change easily. One way to change that is to get the data out, to let people find solutions that might be better than the ones the paid beurocrats dream up.

Because I have a feeling – with peak oil, climate change, population growth, the rising power of china and india, political instability in the Middle East, and the newish digital universe – that we are in for a rocky road in the coming decades, and we’ll need to marshall new tools for addressing those problems. Open democracy, open data, is one way to spread the decision-making ability to a bigger, more complex, and more nimble system.

I was at the Montreal web entreprenneurs breakfast, and was talking with Robin, Alex Eberts, Sylvain, and a couple of others about language, the web, Montreal, and politics. It’s funny, though I am an Anglo born and bred, a Westmounter if you can believe it, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a typical Anglo when it comes to Quebec/Canada politics (not sure if typical Anglos exist anymore, at least not this side of the city). Maybe part of that grew out of my stint at university in Kingston. I enjoyed my time there, more or less, but I never quite felt at home in the Anglo Canada of Ontario. My allegiance was always more with the world of Montreal (the French, the English, the everything else) than it was for some idea of Canada. Of course when push comes to shove I’ve voted federalist in referendums, but given the choice of talking to a random Canadian stranger in Tokyo, I’ll feel more at home talking with a Franco-Quebecker than a Torontonian most times (not that I have anything against Torontonians). I’ve long had a certain intellectual sympathy for the separatist movement, partly because I have great respect for Rene Levesque and much of the social democratic vision the PQ had in the early days. (They have abandoned that vision, mostly, and I am not very interested in them as a result – though the rest of the clowns don’t do anything to inspire me either). Certainly as Canada moves more to the right, I am less and less interested in tying myself to the country of Canada as an idea, especially as the elements of the idea I do believe in are fast disappearing.

In the world of web that I live in now, though, the idea of national boundaries are mostly irrelevant. LibriVox, for instance, is populated by people from all over the world, a huge number of Americans, a tiny number of Canadians, and almost no Quebecers (that I can think of). In my commercial web life, I have a British partner in Sydney, and an American partner in Tokyo, and a billingual Franco-Quebecker partner here at home. On another brand new proto-project, LibriLinks, the one guy who has contributed so far is, I think, in England, but I’m not even sure. It doesn’t matter where he’s from.

The only relevant borders for me – at least online – are borders of interest. This is old news, but it’s interesting in the context of Quebec, and especially with the the explosion of new Web projects these days and the increased interaction at events. The ones I’ve been to tilt slightly to English, but the mix is pretty liberal. The money, love it or leave it, is in the US market, so the tendency will be for English. We’re peanuts in Canada, and 1/10 of a peanut in Quebec. As a for instance, 1.2% of the traffic for LibriVox (about 12k visitors a day) is from Canada; vs 32% from the US (the balance being mostly unresloved/unknown @ 26% and network (?) 32%).

English is (so to speak) the lingua franca of the net. No news there either, but the web world that I inhabit in Montreal is pretty bilingual on both sides of the table, and it has to be. Working together on various projects tends to erase the political misconceptions we might have had about each other. There’s not much choice about working together: Anglos have an in because English is our native tongue, and so we’re immediately comfortable in the space where much web action is happening; and it turns out that many of the people doing cool things are Francos.

Not sure what I am getting at, but it was inspired by this discussion chez Martine, and the idea that when you work together on a web project (really any project) with people, just about everything except for the work gets erased from your evaluation, and in the end political barriers break down. In the case of LibriVox something interesting happened. I came to trust and like people not for who they were, what they were (I had no idea of either thing), but for the concrete things they did in that open project. My friendships with those people was built entirely on their actions, and nothing else…And that, it seems to me is the best possible basis for a friendship – accross thousands of kilometers, across language, political, and national divides. There is an interesting web project in there – getting people from different sides of some heated politics to work together on a project with a common cause.

Michael Geist has a nice long bit on Canada’s take on Net Neutraity, and here he summarizes the Conservative position:

We think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don’t care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers. This is not – as some suggest – about letting freedom reign. It is about leaving Canadian consumers and the Canadian Internet vulnerable to a two-tier Internet and providing tacit approval to those telecommunications companies that actively engage in network discrimination.

Some time ago I sent out emails asking about positions on net neutrality to the Conservatives, Liberals (federal), Bloc, NDP, Liberals (provincial), and PQ. Here are responses I got:

Conservatives:

Dear Mr. McGuire:

The Office of the Prime Minister, has forwarded your electronic correspondence of November 9, 2006, concerning net neutrality to the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry. I am pleased to reply on behalf of the Minister and I regret the delay in relying to you.

The Minister of Industry is responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives through its regulation of the telecommunications industry.

The CRTC determined that the market for retail Internet access was sufficiently competitive to forgo economic price regulation. Nonetheless, the Commission has residual authority to address some issues of discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour with respect to such Internet services should they arise.

The issue of net neutrality is also being deliberated in other countries. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to determine the need for future domestic policy initiatives.

I appreciate your having taken the time to bring this important matter to our attention.

Yours very truly,

Leonard St-Aubin
Director General
Telecommunications Policy Branch

Parti-Quebecois:

Monsieur McGuire,

Au nom du chef de l’opposition officielle, je confirme que nous avons bien reçu votre message. Je vous en remercie.

Je me permets de le transmettre à Monsieur Daniel Turp, porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de culture et de communications, afin qu’il en prenne connaissance.

Je vous souhaite une agréable fin de journée.

Mélanie Malenfant
Conseillère politique
Cabinet du chef de l’opposition officielle
Assemblée nationale
418.643.2743
mmalenfant@assnat.qc.ca

The other parties (NDP, Liberal-fed, Bloc, Liberal-provincial) did not answer. Which tells you how high this issue is on their priority list.

(tip to patrick)

from patrick, chalk one up for the good guys.

UPDATE:
says mayor tremblay on the radio this morning: “I have learned that the opinion of citizens is important.”

glad to know such important lessons are in the process of being absorbed by our leading politicians.

Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada

Date and Location:
Tues, February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.

Moderated by:
Pippa Lawson: Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa

Panelists:

* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
* Bill St-Arnaud: Senior Director, Advanced Networks for CANARIE, Inc.

We seem to have reached a tipping point in public and policy opinion on climate change, which is something of a relief, but also very scary. Up until even the last few weeks, I felt that my tiny contribution to the debate was through occasional posts here, addressing some of the science as we know it, mostly in an attempt to make known the state of science. (In a previous life, I spent a few years working more directly on climate change issues, in policy, finance, and technology development).

But now that, in Canada at least, it has become politically untenable to deny climate change – the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are all climate believers; the Conservatives have just converted, either for political expediency, or after finally coming to terms with the science. There is no going back, unless the science changes. So the question is no longer: Is it a problem? or Should we do anything? but: What (the hell) do we do now?

The Liberals, NDP and Bloc have all come out demanding that the Conservative inplement policy to make Canada “meet Kyoto’s targets.” This is inane political posturing, and on the part of the Liberals, a little hard to stomach. The Liberals presided over the entire Kyoto era, and agreed in 1998 to GHG emissions reductions to 6% below 1990 levels; and in 2002 ratified the Kyoto Protocol (meaning those reductions became “binding”). As the Conservatives keep telling us (rightly) the Liberals signed and ratified the Protocol without putting in (or even proposing) one shred of binding policy, or any kind of serious plan to meet those targets. Under their dismal environmental stewardship, Canada emissions grew to something like 30% higher than the targets they agreed to as ratified (and is, by the way, twice as bad as the US that signed, but never ratified Kyoto). Stephane Dion may have a dog named Kyoto; and he may be serious about the environment, but his party sure as hell has not demonstrated any leadership on climate change in the past, except for ratifying an international treaty that binds Canada to reductions without giving any thought to how those reductions would be met. Which has one positive impact: it highlights in glaring blod face how much work we have to do.

Which is why the Libs/NDP/Bloc calling for the Conservatives to meet Kyoto targets is dishonest and laughable, though it does put the pressure on to come up with concrete policies (which, to their credit, the Conservatives have started to do, for all the criticisms heaped on their Clean Air Act).

To put it in context, to meet our Kyoto targets we would have to do several things (based on 2003 numbers):
1. make all Canadian houses 30% more energy efficient
2. make all Canadian cars 30% more efficient (or, say, make every Canadian take a bike to work two days a week)
3. make every business (including industrial manufacturing, mining, and oil production) 30% more energy efficient (or close them down for 2 days of the week).
4. shut down all thermal power plants (about 30% of electricty production in Canada, the balance being hydro 60% and 12% nuclear) and replace with nukes, or some other renewables, equalling a 4x increase in nukes, or a 2000% increase in renewable contributions, going from roughly 500 MW of wind to 10,000 MW of wind, an investment on the order of 10 billion dollars).

We should be doing these things, but the scale of change to our society needed is truly massive. All areas of energy use must change: housing, transport, food production, manufacturing, urban planning, oil and gas production. To make that happen the empty posturing of the Liberals and NDP and Bloc is perhaps politically useful (if disingenuous), but it does nothing to solve the problem, which transcends party lines.

What IS needed is a massive investment in time and energy to come up with some concrete and serious ways that we can address the issue in a reasonable way without throwing the country on its ear. The sooner we start the better. It would have been nice to start in 1998 when we first signed Kyoto, but for whatever reason – political or practical – that hasn’t happened.

I’m no great fan of the Conservatives, but they are in theory the hard-nosed pragmatic doers, not the political dreamers we lefties are supposed to be. That’s encouraging (though I said the same thing when Bush won the presidency on a CO2-regulation platform in 2000, and look where that got us). So: do the Conservatives have the political will to do something about climate change? Or are they just shifting their rhetoric in response to polls? We’ll find out.

Also, just an asside. What can the world of the web do to help address this problem in a serious, significant way? Anyone have any ideas?

So it’s registered and up and running: http://visiblepolitics.org/

VisiblePolitics is a project to create a complete listing of Canadian federal politicians, parties and ridings, with information about policies, funding, voting records, public statements, press, among other things. VisiblePolitics is a source of information; it is NOT a source of, or forum for advocacy of any kind.

A totally open project if anyone wants to join in to help out. Doesn’t have to be wiki I guess, but I just cant see another way to get the info in so easily. I guess project discussion should happen here: About the Project. There’s a short list of things that could use some help, but I didn’t think very long or hard about it. No idea if this’ll work or not…

The one thing I REALLY want is someone who can help me install/figure out how to use this:
XFeed-RSS Aggregator

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. Find out who your Member of Parliament is
2. Visit the site: http://visiblepolitics.org
3. Add some info about your MP (you can copy some stuff from Wikipedia, some from the Canadian Parliament website, and ideally from the mess that is Elections Canada’s financial info site).

OR:
4. Help with layout, wikiness, project direction, and tools (RSS aggregator in the wiki!!)

According to a recent Globe & Mail poll, suddenly, strangely, climate change has become the most important issue for the majority of Canadians (climate change topped the list for 26% of Canadians, followed by health & security). A curious and surprising event, perhaps an interesting result of the democratic system.

When the Liberals (as a centrist/left party, theoretically more enviromentally friendly than the right wing Conservatives) were in power, they did NOTHING on climate change. No policy, no effective strategy, no concrete action, and no results, except a 30% increase in CO2 emissions. But when the Liberals were in power, the official oposition was the Conservatives, right wing, oil-based, and hostile to policies addressing climate change (which will have a big impact on the oil industry and energy-intensive business). So agressive climate action on the part of the Libs would have resulted in strong opposition from the Conservatives. So the Libs did nothing.

Now, the Conservatives are in power, and they just got slaughtered (by the Libs, Bloc and NDP, and public opinion) for their weak stand on climate change in their recent Clean Air Bill (tho, in their defense, at least they tabled serious policies/laws with actual impacts on industry: the Libs never did). Stephane Dion is leading the charge, and in all the hooplah, climate change lands at the forefront of issues in the mind of Canadians. Harper shuffles his deck, and climate change becomes the Conservatives shiny new focus.

So, strike one up for Minority government as a good way to get things done that people actually want: those who pull the strings in power (the Conservatives) are forced to adjust their policies according to pressures from the other side of the spectrum. Which, theoretically at least, is a good way to ensure balanced government…And one hopes, a step in the direction of taking climate change seriously as a problem.

Hopping from government to media, interesting shift in the Globe and Mail this weekend too. Rex Murphy is the Globe’s shrillest climate alarmist-alarmist (he worries endlessly about the climate change propogandists and doomsdayers that run the National Academies of Sciences in all the biggest countries and economies of the world). He has spent the last 5 or 6 thousand years scoffing at, sneering about, and dismissing climate change, with few updates in his rhetoric for annoying things like the scientific advances. But even Rex seemed to back off in his weekly column yesterday. Well, almost. He presents a couple of examples of climate research gone wild (an Italian study linking suicide with climate change, and Al-Qaeda’s insistence that the US sign the Kyoto Agreement) as evidence that the rest of the scientists are single-minded fools. Yet he after all that silliness, he finally says:

“If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world’s experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world’s politicians are capable of fixing it.”

And concludes that their inability to fix potholes suggests they won’t be much good at fixing climate change. He might have a point there, who knows? But there was a subtle, grudging, shift, almost imperceptible, but present. A back-handed acknowledgment that maybe, perhaps, it’s possible that all those damned scientists might be worried about something worth worrying about. Even if he does not trust politicians to do anything useful about it.

Margaret Wente is another of the Globe’s usual “climate change is bullshit” columnists. A sample of her headlines from the last few years (the Globe is subscription only, so you can’t read the articles): “Ice the ‘polar bears are drowning’ theory,” “Will we freeze or will we fry?” “Kyoto always was a fantasy,” “The collapse of climate ‘consensus’” “The Kyoto-speak brainwashers” … etc.

In an article in this Saturday’s Globe, Wente finally, finally, finally actually talks to some mainstream climate scientists, instead of the odd-ball guys she fished up in previous articles (it’s all good and well to say there are scientists who don’t agree with the consensus, but they are a small minority, and often not active scientists, and more often not regarded as very serious in their research).

In any case, her article in Saturday’s Focus section of the Globe, is titled “A Questionable Truth.” She has spun her argument something like this: Al Gore’s movie an Inconvenient Truth exaggerates the likelihood of bad effects from climate change. And mainstream scientists think the probability of catastrophic climate change is … uncertain. In fact, much of climate science is uncertain. So …

And here is the interesting thing. In the past Wente’s “So…” used to be followed by, “So the climate alarmists are a bunch of propagandists, and we should ignore them…”. But this time she ended (almost, as well as a swipe at Gore) with: “So what can a worried citizen do?” To answer, she quotes Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University, who answers: “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment … Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” Translation (I think): we have a problem here, and something should be done.

(Not content to leave it at that, however, Wente finishes with a swipe at Al Gore, “even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he’s going to win that Oscar anyway.”)

But when you read the text of her article, and what the actual scientists say (rather, what she decided to quote them as saying), it’s a funny thing. There is not one scientists there arguing that climate change is not a major problem worth addressing. Not one person saying: climate change is not happening. Not one person saying: humans have no impact on the climate. Not one person saying: there is nothing to worry about. Not one person saying: we should do nothing. The scientists she interviews, instead, are cautious, level-headed, and, like most scientists, uncomfortable with sensational headlines. Says one, “The probability of another metre of or sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn’t zero, but it isn’t 90 per cent either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn’t do that.” That is, there is a risk of serious problems, and scientists can’t pin down just what that risk is. Which hardly suggests: a) that there is no risk, or b) that we should do nothing.

Another interesting thing: Wente and some of her pals at the Globe (the paper probably has had a 50-50 split on the issue) have spent the last ten years pillorying the Kyoto Protocol. Yet when discussing how to address climate change in this article, she writes: “But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is to put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.” The Kyoto Protocol was a loose international framework whose objective was to a) get nations to agree to emissions caps on their national emissions, b) provide a timetable to try to meet those targets, c) provide some loose mechanisms to meet them. The Kyoto Protocol does not say ANYTHING about how any one country should meet their targets; that is left to countries figure out for themselves. (Which is why the “Made in Canada” solution trumpeted by Harper is hogwash: Kyoto’s objective is to get every country to come up with their own solution). Wente’s main expert’s opinion about how to address climate change suggests, essentially, that we should have started working within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol years ago. Wente manages make it sound as if she had just uncovered a sensible and innovative answer to this climate problem, a solution ignored by the hordes of rabid alarmists with Kyoto as their bible as they made their joyful march to climate apocalypse. That’s pretty disingenuous. The whole point of Kyoto was to do exactly what she seems to agree with here. And she has spent 10 years mocking Kyoto. At least, Ms. Wente, have the decency to utter a quiet little mea culpa. There is more dishonesty (intentional or accidental, I don’t know) in that article, but Rome was not built in a day. Ms. Wente has written her pivotal article on climate change, hovering on both sides of the argument, but she won’t go back to her old ways. She will continue to be distrustful of the enviros (which is fine), but I’d wager that she’s now convinced that things must be done.

I wonder: does the Iraq debacle Iraq have anything to do with this sudden turn-around in the public’s climate opinions? After all, those for the Iraq war tended to be, on balance, those against doing anything about climate change. And personally I always found it strange the dichotomy between the logic of spending billions on Iraq as compared to billions on climate change. Both threats (Saddam’s WMDs/climate chaos), according to their proponents, could have catastrophic impacts on all of us. Both would take massive amounts of resources, effort and policy will-power to address. Yet Iraq will gobbled up an estimated $1 trillion, with probable results of: destabilizing the Middle East, weakening the American position internationally, both among friends and foes, exposing the US as bad failed occupiers, stretching the military to the breaking point, and emboldening enemies (after all, the US can hardly make any military moves now, and Iran is the big winner in their blunder). All this sold by the same folks who told you not to worry about climate change (including Wente, including Murphy). So, maybe this is the effect of a little reality settling in. If the right was SO wrong about everything in Iraq, maybe it’s time to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong. Is the collapse of the Neocons and their grand vision for Iraq a chance for thier more moderate cheerleaders (in the press and public) to examine everything they sold with a new eye? After all, you only buy a lemon from a car salesman once. After that you steer clear.

It’s pretty hard to believe anything the current President says these days. It always was, for me; but it seems the naked emperor and his disastrous war has been revealed. So if you don’t have any more faith in the guy who is President, maybe it’s time to take a look at what the other guy, that guy who *could* have been President, has been parroting on about for the past few years.

I didn’t like the movie, and sure he goes too far in parts, and gets some things wrong. But hark: that’s the sound of Wente and Murphy reevaluating climate change. A good sign.

Splitting my previous climate post into 3 (since it was 3 separate ideas):

Interesting shift in the Globe and Mail this weekend. Rex Murphy is the Globe’s shrillest climate alarmist-alarmist (he worries endlessly about the climate change propogandists and doomsdayers that run the National Academies of Sciences in all the biggest countries and economies of the world). He has spent the last 5 or 6 thousand years scoffing at, sneering about, and dismissing climate change, with few updates in his rhetoric for annoying things like the scientific advances. But even Rex seemed to back off in his weekly column yesterday. Well, almost. He presents a couple of examples of climate research gone wild (an Italian study linking suicide with climate change, and Al-Qaeda’s insistence that the US sign the Kyoto Agreement) as evidence that the rest of the scientists are single-minded fools. Yet he after all that silliness, he finally says:

“If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world’s experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world’s politicians are capable of fixing it.”

And concludes that their inability to fix potholes suggests they won’t be much good at fixing climate change. He might have a point there, who knows? But there was a subtle, grudging, shift, almost imperceptible, but present. A back-handed acknowledgment that maybe, perhaps, it’s possible that all those damned scientists might be worried about something worth worrying about. Even if he does not trust politicians to do anything useful about it.

Margaret Wente is another of the Globe’s usual “climate change is bullshit” columnists. A sample of her headlines from the last few years (the Globe is subscription only, so you can’t read the articles): “Ice the ‘polar bears are drowning’ theory,” “Will we freeze or will we fry?” “Kyoto always was a fantasy,” “The collapse of climate ‘consensus’” “The Kyoto-speak brainwashers” … etc.

Wente finally, finally, actually talks to some mainstream climate scientists, instead of the odd-ball guys she fished up in previous articles (it’s all good and well to say there are scientists who don’t agree with the consensus, but they are a small minority, and often not active scientists, and more often not regarded as very serious in their research).

In any case, her article in Saturday’s Focus section of the Globe, is titled “A Questionable Truth.” She has spun her argument something like this: Al Gore’s movie an Inconvenient Truth exaggerates the likelihood of bad effects from climate change. And mainstream scientists think the probability of catastrophic climate change is … uncertain. In fact, much of climate science is uncertain. So …

And here is the interesting thing. In the past Wente’s “So…” used to be followed by, “So the climate alarmists are a bunch of propagandists, and we should ignore them…”. But this time she ended (almost, as well as a swipe at Gore) with: “So what can a worried citizen do?” To answer, she quotes Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University, who answers: “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment … Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” Translation (I think): we have a problem here, and something should be done.

Not content to leave it at that, however, Wente finishes with a swipe at Al Gore, “even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he’s going to win that Oscar anyway.”

But when you read the text of her article, and what the actual scientists say (rather, what she decided to quote them as saying), it’s a funny thing. There is not one scientists there arguing that climate change is not a major problem worth addressing. Not one person saying: climate change is not happening. Not one person saying: humans have no impact on the climate. Not one person saying: there is nothing to worry about. Not one person saying: we should do nothing. The scientists she interviews, instead, are cautious, level-headed, and, like most scientists, uncomfortable with sensational headlines. Says one, “The probability of another metre of or sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn’t zero, but it isn’t 90 per cent either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn’t do that.” That is, there is a risk of serious problems, and scientists can’t pin down just what that risk is. Which hardly suggests: a) that there is no risk, or b) that we should do nothing.

Another interesting thing: Wente and her pals at the Globe (the columnists are probably 50-50 split on climate) have spent the last ten years pillorying the Kyoto Protocol. Yet when discussing how to address climate change in this article, she writes: “But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is to put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.” The Kyoto Protocol was a loose international framework whose objective was to a) get nations to agree to emissions caps on their national emissions, b) provide a timetable to try to meet those targets, c) provide some loose mechanisms to meet them. The Kyoto Protocol does not say ANYTHING about how any one country should meet their targets; that is left to countries figure out for themselves. (Which is why the “Made in Canada” solution trumpeted by Harper is hogwash: Kyoto’s objective is to get every country to come up with their own solution). Wente’s main expert’s opinion about how to address climate change suggests, essentially, that we should have started working within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol years ago. Wente manages make it sound as if she had just uncovered a sensible and innovative answer to this climate problem, a solution ignored by the hordes of rabid alarmists with Kyoto as their bible as they made their joyful march to climate apocalypse. That’s pretty disingenuous. The whole point of Kyoto was to do exactly what she seems to agree with here. And she has spent 10 years mocking Kyoto. At least, Ms. Wente, have the decency to utter a quiet little mea culpa. There is more dishonesty (intentional or accidental, I don’t know) in that article, but Rome was not built in a day. Ms. Wente has written her pivotal article on climate change, hovering on both sides of the argument, but she won’t go back to her old ways. She will continue to be distrustful of the enviros (which is fine), but I’d wager that she’s now convinced that things must be done.

I wonder: does the Iraq debacle Iraq have anything to do with this sudden turn-around in the public’s climate opinions? After all, those for the Iraq war tended to be, on balance, those against doing anything about climate change. And personally I always found it strange the dichotomy between the logic of spending billions on Iraq as compared to billions on climate change. Both threats (Saddam’s WMDs/climate chaos), according to their proponents, could have catastrophic impacts on all of us. Both would take massive amounts of resources, effort and policy will-power to address. Yet Iraq will gobbled up an estimated $1 trillion, with probable results of: destabilizing the Middle East, weakening the American position internationally, both among friends and foes, exposing the US as bad failed occupiers, stretching the military to the breaking point, and emboldening enemies (after all, the US can hardly make any military moves now, and Iran is the big winner in their blunder). All this sold by the same folks who told you not to worry about climate change (including Wente, including Murphy). So, maybe this is the effect of a little reality settling in. If the right was SO wrong about everything in Iraq, maybe it’s time to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong. Is the collapse of the Neocons and their grand vision for Iraq a chance for thier more moderate cheerleaders (in the press and public) to examine everything they sold with a new eye? After all, you only buy a lemon from a car salesman once. After that you steer clear.

It’s pretty hard to believe anything the current President says these days. It always was, for me; but it seems the naked emperor and his disastrous war has been revealed. So if you don’t have any more faith in the guy who is President, maybe it’s time to take a look at what the other guy, that guy who *could* have been President, has been parroting on about for the past few years.

I didn’t like the movie, and sure he goes too far in parts, and gets some things wrong. But his point, that something must be done, is starting to sound reasonable even to the Wente’s & Murphys of the world.

Veeeerrrry interesting. I wrote a little post on Climate Change (a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail regarding Rex Murphy’s latest bit of climate idiocy). And I got two comments from people who have certainly never been to this site before. I presume there is a concerted blog/commenting effort, probably funded by PR companies, to troll through the blogosphere and make “grassroots” comments. I noted this kind of thing before on my Zune post a while back, and if I were a PR company, I would be doing this too. Good, cheap, and very direct way to get your message out. Even if you don’t reach the writer (in this case me) you might sow some doubt in other readers of the post.

I was going to answer these fellows in the comments, but it’ll take some links etc, so I’ll do it here instead.

First, Ken Ring from predictweather.com has explaned his position onglobal warming: here. He’s from New Zealand and predicts weather partterns using moon cycle analysis. Here is his comment, and my response below:

Instead of berating Murphy, how about listing the ACTUAL evidence that the world is warming. By the world I don’t just mean the tiny areas occupied by the cities, I mean the oceans, icecaps, swamps, craggy monutain ranges, deserts etc that comprise, without human habitation, 98.4% of the Earth’s surface. Oh bother, there aren’t any thermometers in those places. (Now aint that the inconvenient truth..)

Evidence coming, but first some propositions:
1. earth’s climate is a complex system
2. human civilization has developed in a period of relative warmth & climate stability (allowing for agricultural food production)
3. global temperature is directly correlated with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere
4. if CO2 concentrations rise, there is a good chance that temperature will rise too
5. if the temperature rises significantly, the complex system of the climate will be destabilized
6. if the climate system is destabilized, our ability to manage a global agricultural system will be destroyed
7. if we cannot manage a global agricultural system, human civilization as we know it is finished.
8. CO2 is rising, partly due to human emissions of CO2

Now for some evidence, the most powerful piece of data I have seen in climate change science, from the Vostok ice core:

Note CO2 concentrations follow temperature. Note also that the past 10,000 years (far right of graph, blue) have seen something extraordinary: relatively warm, stable temperature, also the period when human civilization developed.

Now perhaps doubling or tripling or quintupling C02 concentrations is fine. But if I were a betting man, given a graph like that, I would say there is 50% chance that rising CO2 will raise the temperature. And knowing a little about the history of the earth, I would say we don’t want temperatures to go up, and we should do what we can to make sure they don’t.

If you want some more evidence, in counterpoint to climate-denial, a good place to start is this article from Realclimate.org: Wall Street Journal vs. Scientific Consensus.

Regarding Ken’s other comment about measurement of temperatures out of cities, I’m not sure that’s even worth responding to, but satelite data, and the Vostok ice core (from Antarctica) are a good start. For more reading, see: NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. For less theoretical evidence (ie. the kind you can feel in your cold, wet toes) here’s an article about the melting Arctic.

I think that’s all for Ken.

Now for the other commenter, Jeff Jones, no URL. Here’s what he had to say:

Notice how the doomsayers claim, as the host does, that each year the scientific community gets more certain. Which scientific community? Certainly not the 19,000 who signed the Oregon petition.

It’s the kind of dishonest device that the Church used to deny Copernicus and Galileo.

Maybe you mean the scientific community made up of political scientists like David Suzuki whose goal is to destroy the corporate basis of Western democracy.

So, the famous Oregon Petition is widely regarded as bunk. There was no control on petition signers, no required proof of academic creditials, no stated affiliation with academic institutions. I did a cursory search through the signatories, and of 15 names I checked I was able to find three academics: Earl Aagaard, professor of biology at Christian creationist university; Arthur Ballato, an Electrical Engineer with the US Army; and Daniel J Cantliffe, a biologist at University of Florida. None of whom has any direct experience with climate science, as far as I can tell.

But rather than spend time on the discredited Oregon Petition, better to answer the question directly: Which scientific community does get more certain? Well, for one (sorry, for eleven) the National Academies of Science of the following countries: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK and the USA.

Say these Academies, in the following document (Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change-pdf):

We urge all nations, in the line with the UNFCCC principles, to take prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change, adapt to its impacts and ensure that the issue is included in all relevant national and international strategies.

As for scientific literature, Naomi Orseskes did a random study of 928 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, with the key-words “climate change.” Of the articles, about 75% of them deal with the question of causes of climate change, 100% support the view that a significant fraction of recent climate change is due to human activities.

And what exactly is the consensus? According to realclimate.org, the consensus is:

1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years)
2. People are causing this
3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate
4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)

So … as they say: who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

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I just sent this to the Globe and Mail:

To The Editor,

I have read Rex Murphy’s climate articles with a sort of wonder for ten years now. Each year the science gets more sophisticated; each year the scientific community gets more certain; and each year more effects predicted in climate models are coming to pass (demonstrating the robustness of the models, while also showing that we are moving faster along a dangerous path than anyone expected).

Yet each year Rex Murphy’s climate articles remain exactly the same: the thousands of scientists who study this issue are alarmists and politically motivated; and those who disagree with overwhelming scientific evidence (like Mr. Murphy himself), are oppressed, unjustly attacked, and deserve to be heard with the same seriousness as the people who actually spend their careers studying climate change.

So my question, for Mr. Murphy, columnist, pundint and human: could you please list for us the evidence that *will* convince you that climate change is real, and worrisome? So that when, in a year or two, we have crossed those markers, we can all agree that it’s time for you to stop berating us with these inane columns on scientific issues, where you display total lack of interest in science?

What, I wonder, did Mr. Murphy, Newfoundlander, have to say about warnings that the cod fishery would collapse?

If you are interested what Rex Murphy did have to say about the cod fisheries, watch this wonderful video from the CBC archives, 1994.

Some other general political thoughts – and a reference to open source & computer networks at the end. There has been a general tendency recently in the developing world to elect what could be called “anti-US” governments: Hamas in Palestine, and, say the sweeping leftism in South America: Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Bachelet in Chile, Lulu in Brazil, Vázquez in Uruguay, and maybe Kirchner in Argentina. There are likely more, elsewhere.

All of these are considered “worrying” by the policy-makers in USA; yet most of these elections were considered fair. The question worth asking is, why do countries in the South keep electing governments that the US is opposed to (publicly and privately)?

And I suggest that the answer is this: the policies that the US exports, and the governments they support, have not done a very good job of providing for their populations. So the global status quo (as defined by US and its allies) is not a very stable system – or at least it won’t be unless the Northern policies are adapted to accomodate the shifts in the south.

Something similar happened during and after the 1929-39 Depression in North America. The late 1800s to late teens of the 20th C saw a radical shift in industrialization; huge production, technological advances, etc twinned with terrible conditions for workers. To avoid revolution, and total chaos in our governing and social systems, we built a social safety net, worker safety conditions, worker rights etc. Which in fact either brought on, or at least paralleled the most prosperous era in the history of humanity. Is that a coincidence?

Capitalism, unfettered, leans towards massive exploitation – of workers and consumers – monopolies, and destruction. Unattended capitalism will tend to be very lucrative for a few, and very destructive for the rest.

Socialism, unfettered, leans towards inefficiency and unnecessary government intervention.

Somewhere between the two is a balance that’s probably the optimum for the global system (though the variables are changing: oil prices, and climate change being the two biggies, I think, which are likely to throw everything out of whack in the near future). We’ve seen a massive shift to the right in the US; and much of the rest of the world is shifting in the other direction. And I suggest that if the US starts creeping towards the centre the balances on the other side will too; but the US – being the powerful beast – needs to examine why the rest of the world is reacting the way it is, and where they need to change their policies, not just their communication strategies.

All this makes me think about (much less complex) open source systems – like LibriVox, or more obviously wikipedia – that are self-stabilizing through open input; and also extremely efficient at producing “useful work” from idle hours. I’m not sure what the connection is exactly, but I keep thinking about politics from an open source perspective: how to bring the efficiencies and stability inherent in open source systems to our political structures?

Anyone know the answer?