The Iguanodon

Self-described blogger

2008-12-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

One brief note here on the (still ongoing) Greek riots.

Why do so many news reports use the following construction about some of the protestors: self-described anarchists.

It implies either that the anarchists are just kidding, that they're fibbing (maybe they're really commies or neo-liberals in balaclavas?) or that they're in some other way not really anarchists.

Alternatively, it could be an attempt to discredit them. You know, maybe they didn't fill out their Anarchist Youth League membership cards properly. Maybe they didn't send the forms off to be approved by the Official World Anarchist Federation.

Or maybe it's one of those reporter tics that get used once and prove infectious. If I had to guess, it started in 1999 in Seattle, when anarchists showed up on the news after a couple of decades of absence. Reporters used the phrase "self-described anarchists" because they were baffled that anyone would use such a descriptor. They had no idea what it really meant. And then it spread, a stupid meme.

Reporters write fast, and we're particularly prone to this kind of crap. Still, it saddens me that after two solid weeks of protest and riots in Greece, I still haven't seen anyone do anything in the mainstream media that goes much beyond the depth of "self-described anarchists."

But can it do the New York Times crossword?

2007-02-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

So, it turns out that the big, scary quantum computer? Was used to do Sudoku puzzles in its first trial run.

Yeah, the code-cracking apocalypse may have to wait a while.

Faith, what is it good for?

2007-02-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

So the Israelis and Palestinians are at it again, at the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock/Al Aqsa Mosque/whatever again this week.

The Israelis are building a new ramp to their site, the local Palestinians are pissed and... ah, you've heard this story before. Riots, rocks and firebombs, stun grenades and bullets. It's a fucking mess, as usual.

An imaginary man in the sky tells two tribes of people not to worship graven idols. Several thousand years later, it's understandable that they would express their ~~idolatry~~ deep faith by trying to kill each other over a few square meters of dirt and rock. The Palestinians - who within living memory have seen homes bulldozed and swiped - are naturally suspicious of any Israeli construction project next to their stuff. The Israelis - who within living memory came from all over the world and resurrected a dead language to create a new nation on what they consider holy land - are naturally mystified that anyone would be so concerned about a mere place.

This time, I'd love to make an atheist's pilgrimage to the site. I want to get within sight of the whole mess and put up a billboard, and this is what it would read:

Dear Assholes,

You are all retarded by choice. If the invisible man in the sky tells you to kill and die over a scrap of land not fit for keeping a goat on, He is evil, and not worth listening to. Go home to your families.

Quantum Leap!

2007-02-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Actually, there might be a functioning quantum computer working by next week. A firm in my backyard, in Burnaby, B.C., claims it will demo such a computer next week. If it works, it could mean the end of a whole lot of things.

For example, all Internet commerce.

Theoretically, a functioning quantum computer will be able to perform so many calculations per second that it will be able to (for example) factor very large prime numbers in seconds, instead of in years. Very large prime numbers are the basis for encrypting all the credit card numbers that you and me and everyone we know uses to buy stuff from Amazon. Factor the numbers and you can decrypt all the credit card numbers.

Plus, the computer games would be wicked cool.

The professional nerds on Slashdot are all excited about this. They also know far more than I will ever know about computing, and are spending much time arguing about what it might mean. I say we wait a week.

Tory/Liberal attack ads, crazy old ladies

2007-01-31T19:01:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, the Tories showed off their newest attack ad.

Two nights ago, I almost ran over an elderly woman, probably homeless, definitely confused, who was walking in the middle of the road at rush hour, in the dark.

These things are, believe it or not, connected by our political system.

Let me explain.

In the beginning, was representative democracy. This was the idea that people would choose their own leaders, instead of having leaders chosen for them by violence, heredity or religious superstition. It was a major leap forward in human society. Because it is a human institution, it almost immediately began to reveal its own set of flaws.

One of the chief among these was the system of parties. The west's first modern representative government, the United States, actually tried to avoid the party system for some time. It was referred to as "faction" and was seen to be a bad thing, an undermining of the basic system of democracy. But, people being people, they clubbed together based on mutual beliefs and interests. Parties and factions are probably unavoidable in any political system, but their influence may be greater or lesser.

Here in Canada, it is definitely greater. Because of the first past the post electoral system, and for historical, cultural and financial reasons, it is a hell of a lot easier to get elected as a party member than in any other way. So anyone who wants to be a political ruler has to join a party. And the parties compete with one another for votes.

This is not, I should add here, because the party members are uniformly cynical, venal, bad people. Unlike some folks whose political orientation, like mine, is outside the norm, I've met a lot of politicians, at the local, provincial and federal level. Most of them are, or were, very idealistic. They have lofty goals, and they genuinely want to make the world a better place. Some of them are stupid, or venal, or nuts, but they're drawn from the sometimes stupid, venal or nutty mass of humanity.

For example, they want to do something about homelessness. They would all agree that it is bad that an increasing number of people live on the streets, and sometimes wander into traffic. They have solutions they would like to put into place. But first, they have to get elected.

Getting elected is hard. It takes money. You have to convince a justifiably cynical electorate, or around 50 to 70 per cent of it, anyway, that you are not a total asshat. You have to deal with grotty local reporters and the national media, and annoying, whiny bloggers. You have to shake so many hands that you will certainly get every cold and flu bug going around.

Then, once you are sure you are going to get elected, you have to make sure your party wins. It's no good to just be out in the wilderness, with 10 or 20 seats out of 308. You've got to sweep at least half the fucking game board! More money. Leadership conventions. Internal party politics. Many people have to compromise, and special interests have to be appeased. And that's all before you take power.

Once you go through this for months, maybe years or even decades, you might still remember that you got into politics because you wanted to end homelessness, but you've spent most of your resources, your time and your effort doing other things. Fighting partisan battles also tends to become all consuming. It even seduces other people who aren't even members of the parties with its spectacle. Reporters and bloggers and political junkies. We all get consumed with the game. And we forget about the real-world consequences of the game.

So this is the game: the Tories and the Liberals, the NDP and Greens and Bloc, they all want to help that old woman out of the street. So they raise money, and form national organizations, and hold meetings, and strategize and scheme, and hate one another, because they all know that their plan to help the old woman is much better than the other guys' plans. They run hugely expensive campaigns and viciously undermine one another. And the game is never over. You just keep going around the same board, over and over and over.

Fuck the game.

Humans need systems to get along with each other, sure. But we might want to consider that this system does not work, at least not any more, not for the 21st Century. It's like trying to thread a needle while wearing 20 pairs of gloves. To get at the problems we face, to bring the whole weight of our society behind some great endeavour, we have to go through this bizarre process, which has acreted over the years.

I say, tip over the game board, and start again. Let's make up some new, simpler rules. More direct. More open.

Because I'm tired of living in a world where an attack ad has anything to do with old women in traffic.

Arar's money

2007-01-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

Maher Arar just got $10 million from the Canadian government in compensation for the horrible tortures he suffered in Syria for no apparent reason.

The irony? It comes in the same week that the US Ambassador David Wilkins again refuses to let Arar off the US no-fly list, and again says that the US has its own reasons for that. Said magical mystery information was apparently shown to Stockwell Day, and it didn't convince him. I'm pretty sure you could fool ol' Stock with a game of three-card-monte that was two cards shy, so the info must not be that persuasive.

Wilkins, a ~~waste of carbon~~ ~~utter asshat~~ seasoned diplomat, must have his reasons for this. It would be nice if someone would tell us proles what those reasons are...

Dead dinos and property rights

2007-01-17T08:24:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you just can't rely on the market to do the right thing.

A big fossil controversy, one that will rival the $8 million sale of Sue the Tyranosaurus rex, has sprung up again in Montana. This time, a private collector has found two fully articulated dinosaur skeletons preserved together. The carnivore appears to be a Gorgosaur, a smaller relative of Tyranosaurus. The herbivore is a certopsian, related to Triceratops, but it may be a previously unknown species. There is also a chance that the Gorgosaur was either preying on the ceratopsian or scavanging its remains when they were buried.

So what's the problem? From the AP story.

Mark Eatman, the Billings floor salesman who first spotted the new fossils last summer, says he and his team have deep respect for the science of paleontology.

They also have a bottom line.

"We all went broke digging them up," said Eatman, who hopes to sell the specimens to a major American museum.

The profits would be shared among Eatman, his two digging partners and the ranch couple that owns the fossil.

The problem there is that scienctific journals won't accept papers based on fossils held in private hands. There is no way to guarantee future access to privately held bones, and therefore no way to trust the data. If a future scientist can't re-examine the same bones and write his or her own paper, there's no scientific freedom.

This scientific current of absolutely open access to data and samples sends scientists paddling against the current of Western property law. Scientists, as everyone knows who has spent time with them, are pretty damn socialist and even communalist when it comes to their work. Sure, just like everyone else, they would like to get paid well and have nice things. But the system of scientific openness that is essential for progress is about as profit-driven as a monastery.

Paleontologists would be best served in their work by a property system that used either strict usufruct or some kind of community ownership - in other words, by a libertarian-socialist system. Under usufruct, samples could pass from hand to hand, as one research team was finished another could take possession. Most likely, samples would wind up in public institutions because it would be easier than moving the damn things around all the time. Under community ownership, they would be considered an asset to humanity in general, and the community would have a responsibility to either protect them for science or to give them to some organization that would undertake that job.

Many amateur fossil hunters, those who don't need the money, already abide by the philosophy inherent in the idea of community ownership. Anything that is scientifically important, they give away to museum or university researchers. They are giving it not to one institution, but to science itself.

Whether those property systems would support any other kind of enterprise so well - or whether we'd be able to support any science without a present-day or Lockean property system - is a debate for another time.

I'm a loser

2007-01-16T07:16:00.001-08:00

For the second year in a row, I did not win the 3-Day Novel Contest. This year was worse, however, in that I wasn't even shortlisted like I was last year.

To a certain extent, this is easier than getting a rejection letter from a magazine publisher. You can look at the absolute number of people who submitted stories (more than 380) and the winner, and maybe get some kind of idea of what the judges were looking for.

Last year, the winner was a comedic series of vignettes about misplaced monsters called Day Shift Werewolf. So the editors of the year were surprisingly open to fantasy and science fiction, it would seem. My place on the shortlist isn't that surprising.

This year, the winner is The Convictions of Leonard McKinley, a coming of age story/comedy about a 13-year-old boy in a small prairie town. Now, I'm not going to run down that book, especially having just reviewed King Dork so favourably. There's a place for comic coming of age novels. But it's possible the judges who really like that kind of thing might not like a book in which, say, humans absorb the power of gods, there are swordfights, bank robberies, magic, frog-sex cults and fights to the death between giant ground sloths.

I'm just saying.

I'm a loser

2007-01-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

He stole my title!

2007-01-12T18:54:00.000-08:00

Not the title of the book. I'm saying this could have easily been my high school nickname. Could still be, really.

I just finished Frank Portman's (aka Dr. Frank) very fine book, King Dork. If you haven't heard of it yet, you soon will. Runaway hit, movie rights, blah blah blah. Don't let that turn you off. It's actually very good.

King Dork is the first-person tale of Tom Henderson, who is 14 years old, a near-total social outcast, the subject of constant mid- to high-level bullying, a rock and roll nerd, and the most virulent critic ever of Catcher in the Rye.

The plot is almost inconsequential, even though it ostensibly deals with the mysterious death of Tom's cop father, a mystery girl he meets at a party, and the bizarre behaviour of everyone from Tom's mom to his high school principal to his best (and only) friend.

It is one of the funniest books I've read in years. If you've ever wanted to know whether milk can come out of your nose, get yourself a tall glass right before the scene where Tom's band plays at the school's talent show.

The only thing that confuses me about the book is the fact that it's being marketed as Young Adult, and shelved as such in our local library. Seriously, there is a difference between a book about a young adult and one that will only appeal to a young adult. Usually, young adult books are notable either because they are badly written, or because they are preachy, moralistic and badly written. There wasn't this much oral sex and casual drug use in YA books when I was Tom's age, that's for sure.

Which makes me think that this was not written with a YA readership in mind. Rats Saw God, an excellent novel by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, is another mature (ie, sex that isn't presented as a Lesson) book that was marketed as YA. Thomas has commented in the past that he didn't actually intend the book to be YA, it was just the story he wanted to write.

That's not to say that young people (especially young, bullied, nerdy people) should not read King Dork. I would have loved this book when I was 14. So if you know a geeky, outcast kid, buy him or her a copy today. It'll hit a nerve.

Cory Doctorow: King of Interviews

2007-01-05T12:06:00.000-08:00

In my Real Life, I interview a lot of people. Why can't I have an excuse to interview this guy?

Selected snippets from Doctorow's interview with SFRevu:

On peer to peer sharing of info.

But even if it turns out that P2P is the death knell for $300 million movies and artists who earn a living from recording, so what? Radio was bad news for Vaudeville, too. Today's recording artists can earn a living because radio and records killed the careers of many live performers. If bands have to be more like Phish to survive, that's how it goes. Particular copyright business models aren't written into the Constitution; technology giveth and technology taketh away.

P2P is enabling more filmmakers, more musicians, and more writers and other creators to produce a wider variety of works that please a wider audience than ever before. That's the purpose of copyright -- to enable maximal expression and cultural participation, even if it costs us Police Academy *n-1* and payola-driven boy-bands.

On copyright and SF:

The pulps today pay $0.02-6/word; it's pretty much the word-rate Hugo Gernsback was paying in 1928. Yet people continue to write and submit, even though tuppence doesn't go nearly as far in 2007 as it did during the New Deal. Note that the compensation here has NOTHING to do with copyright. You could give writers a million years of copyright and the right to behead people who infringe their rights and it wouldn't change the word-rate at Asimov's.

On the American lifestyle (see below, re Vegas):

SFRevu: I've heard varying numbers on how many planet Earth's it would take to provide everyone with an "American" standard of living, ranging from 10 to 20 or so. That's always seemed bogus to me since a) Americans suffer from over-abundance and b) information doesn't consume resources to be replicated. Mostly. What's your take?

Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."

The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.

America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.

Read the whole thing.

Back from the Weirdest Place on Earth

2007-01-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

No blogging recently as I spent much of the holiday season in Las Vegas/dealing with family medical emergencies/being lazy.

I've been to Vegas twice now, both times solely to visit family. I seem to have absorbed that tight-fisted Scots virus that infects so many Canadians, and the idea of gambling more than $1 at a time makes my teeth itch. I eventually managed to go up to a grand total of US $3, which I played on penny slot machines at five cents a spin. I won a net total of $4.40 playing the awesomely bizarre Alien Vs. Predator slot machine. I was the only person playing this game, even though there was a whole bank of about half a dozen of them. I don't think the oxygen-tank-sucking retirees who were the bulk of that casino's patrons really got it.

Other Vegas notes:

- The first thing you see when you walk out of your plane into McCarran Airport is a row of slot machines.

- The ad board over our baggage check advertised The Gun Store. "Shoot a real machine gun." The accompanying image was of a busty blonde woman holding an assault rifle. This is a good intro to the level of subtlety Vegas upholds.

- There are wild quail living in the suburbs. Presumably they inhabit the same ecological niche as crows, but they're much cuter.

- The plants around Vegas are the product of millions of years of evolution to deal with a dry, high desert climate. They have waxy needles or leaves, twisty trunks and a shrunken look. They are obviously ready to survive privation and extremes. This makes them an odd contrast to the massive 24-hour excess binge around them.

- In suburban Vegas, there is so much gambling money sloshing into the municipal tax coffers that they just pave everything. You will never see such nice roads again in your life. A medium-density suburb will typically be serviced by four-lane roads, with left turn bays at the corners and double-left turn suicide lanes down the middle. Of course, they still have four way stops because there isn't enough traffic to justify signal lights yet...

- You almost never see anyone walking anywhere.

Ye Gods, I've Been Linked!

2006-12-22T07:23:00.000-08:00

Welcome, those of you who have arrived here from Langleypolitics.com in the last couple of days. I'm sure there is much here that will make you think I am completely insane.

I'm afraid, however, that there will never be any Langley news, analysis or snarky commentary. I keep the blog seperate from my job as a reporter, so it's international, national or provincial, but not local issues that come up here.

Also, I spend a lot of time thinking out loud about weird, alternative political systems. And dinosaurs.

So again I say, welcome, and enjoy your time here at the Iguanodon.

Trustees, guns and money

2006-12-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

Sharon Gregson, New Democratic Party member, COPE Vancouver school trustee and gun enthusiast, has been getting a bit of attention over the past few days.

I suppose that's only to be expected when you loudly announce that women need concealed guns to protect themselves. The NDP is widely (and only somewhat inaccurately) seen as the most anti-gun of all the major parties. And Gregson hasn't just spoken out on this, she's gone and gotten herself a concealed weapons permit in the United States, bought a couple of handguns, including a Colt .45, and taken up target shooting. Gregson says she wants to start a debate.

"I don't think we should be embarrassed or ashamed of the fact that we're legal gun owners who enjoy a sport and want to talk about protection issues particularly if they apply to women."

Her opponents - who were political friends of hers until a few days ago - are taking a different line.

"There is no evidence whatsoever that arming women makes them safer," Cukier said. "In fact, the evidence is quite the contrary, that more guns results in more deaths and injuries."

But Gregson said she's not advocating that women run out and buy guns.

"What I'm advocating for is, at least, a discussion in Canada about where we want to be in the long term around guns, so that we are formulating our public policy based on research and experience, not on an automatic knee-jerk reaction that guns are bad."

Cukier argues that discussion isn't necessary.

"I don't think we need to have a wider debate about carrying concealed weapons and handguns for self protection. It runs contrary to Canadian traditions and it certainly runs contrary to Canadian law."

Eccchhh, evidence and research. Everyone wants more of that, thinking it will back up their own position. I have my doubts that it will, and not just because there's so much bad research out there. Look at John Lott and his much-criticized research methods, his bizarre "Two per cent" assertion and his fake Usenet persona to boost his own side.

I like to think of this as the Switzerland vs. Somlia issue. Switzerland and Somalia both have lots of guns. One is a miserable, war-ravaged country where warlords killed one another until they achieved a kind of nasty detente, and got thrown out by fundamentalist Islamic judges. And that was an improvement for most people. Switzerland also has lots of guns, and is a peaceful, prosperous and boring place. The difference isn't just in the number of guns. It's in the level of prosperity, culture, history, geography and a host of other factors. You can't just magically either take guns away and make people peaceful, or give them lots of guns and, um, make them peaceful, as folks like Lott have suggested.

The most disturbing thing about this Gregson-inspired debate for me is that it seems to be about the bogeyman of the random rapist. I know that women are randomly attacked and raped, on the streets, in their homes, places of work, and schools. But first, how often will they be able to get a gun quickly enough to defend themselves? I have no doubt that if all women were armed, some rapists would be shot in the head. But I also have no doubt that some accidental deaths would result, and that some women would see the guns turned on them.

It also does nothing to deal with domestic violence against women, in which the vast majority of victims find themselves complicit in covering up their abuser's crimes.

The problem is not primarily that women are defenceless. There will always be people who are defenceless, whether because they are children, elderly, disabled or simply unwilling to carry a gun.

The problem is primarily that there are men who prey on women. The gun debate is about a symptom, not the cure.

Tommy Douglas, Enemy of the State

2006-12-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

The news that CCF/NDP leader Tommy Douglas was a target of RCMP spying for 30 years doesn't really come as a shock to me. The RCMP, then and now, has its own idea of what makes someone a good citizen and what makes someone dangerous. And those ideas aren't necessarily under the control of the government, or the courts, or the general public. If Douglas were alive today, he and Maher Arar would have a lot to talk about.

As someone who was raised by a Saskatchewan-born, farm-raised NDP supporter, I'm always going to have a certain affection for Tommy Douglas. Universal health care is probably the best thing a government can do for people. The fact that Douglas's programs were seen by the police of the day as essentially a communist plot looks pretty strange from a modern perspective.

The other question this brings up is, who are the RCMP watching today? We know that activists like Jaggi Singh have been under intense scrutiny at times, (Singh has been practically kidnapped by cops to keep him from attending protests) but what other public figures are the target of spying?

If you've ever said anything weird on a blog, there might be a file on you.

Maher Arar, what's he got to cry about?

2006-12-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Hi y'all! I'm professionally folksy US Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins, and I'm taking over this here anti-American blog today thanks to a little help from the good folks at the NSA.

Now I know some of you are as mad as a skunk who's lost his stink about this here Maher Arar fella. I'm sure y'all recall how he was flyin' back to Canada from overseas and he got yanked off his plane in New York, extradited to Syria. And our brave intelligence officials may have stamped "Al Qaeda agent, enemy of Syria" on his forehead along the way.

You fine folks have had yourselves a little commission of inquiry into this, and one of your judges said all that stuff about Maher Arar being a terrorist was a bunch of bunkum, no evidence for it whatsoever. (I think it's just real adorable how you've got your own judges and courts and such up here! Just like real ones!) So if this here Maher Arar was just an engineer with a couple of kids and a mortgage, why did he need to be repeatedly tortured and beaten across the soles of his feet with metal cables for nigh on a year?

I'll tell you why. Because we were right. He is a terrorist scoundrel, a sneaky, enemy-of-America with a diploma from Osama-U. And I don't need to tell you that the pep squad from that institution of higher learning wears dynamite belts! I know you're going to say that your Mounties have admitted to making up a lot of bunkum, and to making up some more to cover their serge-covered backsides. But they were still right, even if it was only by accident.

Yep, we've got information that Maher Arar is a nasty, bad man, and that's why he won't be allowed to enter the United States.

I'm sorry, what was that? I don't hear so good since I got kicked in the head by my best mule. You want to know what that evidence is? Well, I'll tell you, it's the finest evidence there is. I have not seen it, but I have read briefing reports written by people who spoke to the people who say they have it, and that is something you can take to the bank.

My real point is not whether there is or ain't any evidence, or who we beat at Gitmo until he implicated Arar, my real point is that we were right, and you were wrong. And that we won't tell you what we know or how we know it, 'cause there's only one place at the big kids' table.

So I ask Canadians to take heart, and breathe deep of the heady free air that washes across our borders and into your benighted land! The United States is the greatest country in the world, and such a great country could never arrange for the horrible torture of an innocent man without a damn good reason. And we've got one. Maybe I'll tell you what it is someday.

O Brave New World, That Has Such Worker Safety Regulations In It!

2006-12-12T07:41:00.000-08:00

From cbc.ca.

Nearly five Canadians die every day in workplace-related deaths, an unacceptably high level, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study, Five Deaths a Day: Workplace Fatalities in Canada, 1993-2005, says the number of workplace deaths is on the increase in Canada. In 2005, there were 1,097 workplace deaths in Canada, while in 2004, there were 958. In 1993, the total was 758.

"Canada can do much better," the study concludes.

No shit. Hey, let's do a fun thought experiment! We'll imagine that the death rate will be the highest in the poorest places, where people are most desperate for work. I wonder if that's true...

According to the study, Newfoundland in 2005 had the highest rate of workplace deaths of all 10 provinces, with 11.7 deaths per 100,000 workers, a rate that is nearly double the national average.

Hot damn, it is true!

The Centre for Study of Living Standards, an Ottawa-based non-profit organization that put together the study, looked at workplace fatalities from 1993 to 2005, analyzing the numbers by jurisdiction, gender, age group, industry, occupation, event, nature of injury and source of injury.

I would have liked to also know the difference between union and non-union shops, pay rates, and the average length of employment at sites with fatal accidents versus the national average. I'm guessing there might be a few correlations there, too.

The article goes on to state the obvious for a while, and then:

Andrew Sharpe, co-author of the study, said there is no question that the numbers of workplace deaths in Canada can be reduced through an increase in emphasis on worker safety.

"By definition, if you had a death, something went wrong — lack of proper equipment, or sometimes it's just freak accident. But the more awareness, the more there can be a reduction in the number of fatalities," he said.

You know, the people who get killed are usually aware of the problem that kills them. They're either too afraid to tell their boss, or they do tell him and he does nothing. The problem might be a power imbalance more than "awarness," Sharpe.

My favourite bit is at the end of the article.

The centre seeks to contribute to a better understanding of trends in and determinants of productivity, living standards and economic and social well-being.

Productivity doesn't have much to do with employee well being unless it drops below a variable threshold and their employer goes out of business. Rising productivity does not bring rising gains (the tide does not lift all boats as much) so why worry about it as the first portion of a living standard trinity?

Harper on Chemicals

2006-12-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

Let's not be too hasty with the happy-pills, here. Yes, it's better than their pathetic clean-air efforts. And, anarchist principles aside, if the government is doing something I'd rather it was environmental than, say, giving more subsidies to oil and gas firms.

But the website for their plan is weak on short-term specifics. And the "public consultation promised could become a talk-shop for industry to argue for its favourite carcinogens.

Let's keep an eye on this one. Personally, I'd like the results of the seven-year chemical review turned over to the public in full, along with the right to sue any and all companies damaging personal health or the common environment.

That would mean corporations would either have to put warning labels on cancer-causing pajamas, ie "May cause Little Timmy to get the Big C" or they'd be liable for fraud and little Timmy's death.

If the damage extends beyond individual users, let us launch unlimited class action lawsuits.

At least it wasn't Iggy

2006-12-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

You know, months ago I thought to myself, Stephane Dion, he could be a good compromise candidate for the Liberals. He's got cabinet experience but without the extra baggage of the front runners.

And then I stopped thinking about that and decided that Bob Rae would win. So I don't get to say I told you so. Nuts.

The recent furor over Dion, and the talking heads babble about Dion vs. Harper has me wondering why people are willing to put so much faith in one man (always a man) to solve their problems. Like there's one magical guy out there, see, and he can fix everything! We just haven't found him yet.

This meme, the nastiest meme in representative democracy, must be stopped. I think I'll call it the Kennedy Disease.

I'm back, and so are the Neanderthals

2006-11-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

Whew, that was a long break. I haven't posted in a while largely because I now write a column for my paper. When you write your opinions every week, along with the odd editorial and a dozen or so stories, you get a little burned out on opinion piece writing pretty quickly.

Hopefully I'll do some more blogging in the future. For now, let's all the just marvel at the fact that scientists are sequencing the Neanderthal genome. I would have said this was very likely impossible about 10 years ago, and so would most scientists.

Of course, now there will be a whole bunch of stories about how this could be like Jurassic Park, cloned Neanderthals, etc. Stupid media, he said self-consciously. Aside from the obvious ethical conundrums of bringing back what is likely to be a sentient, but possibly less intelligent being, the technical challenges would be huge. Don't look for it any time soon.

Beating up another word

2006-06-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush popped up on my TV this morning, and declared twice in as many minutes, that Abu Musab Al Zarqawi had been brought to justice.

Now, I would never want to contradict someone whose every utterance comes with a stamped and signed guarantee of truthfullness (Mission Accomplished!) but I think he misunderstands something about the nature of justice.

First, Zarqawi was killed. By two 500 pound bombs. Before he was arrested, tried or convicted of anything.

When I think of people being brought to justice, it involves courtrooms, impartial judges, juries and the introduction of evidence. There are a wide variety of justice systems in the world, each flawed in its own way, but by and large they do not begin their processes with the launching of weapons from F-16 jet fighters.

Do I have any doubt that Zarqawi was guilty of horrible crimes? Very little. I’m even pretty certain that he deserved to die, although I would add that I don’t believe anyone had the right to kill him, if there was another alternative available.

So when Bush claims that Zarqawi was “brought to justice,” he is misusing the very meaning of the word justice. What happened to Zarqawi was a military assasination. Men in uniforms and suits decided he would die, and killed him. The fact that no one cares very much that he is dead does not mean that it was justice.

If the warhawks want to justify extra-judicial killings, there are arguments to be made on that score. Just don’t take the word justice and try to tack it onto a military assault.

Hero Stories

2006-05-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

A strange blog item appeared the other day on New World Notes, and will be little noticed by the world at large.

In the online Snow Crash-inspired world of Second Life, a volunteer group of guards has appeared.

They have spontaneously joined together to protect a charity organization: a group that has been using an island in the game to create a simulated refugee camp in Darfur. The group is trying to raise awareness and funding for the refugees. Unfortunately, people on the Internet, seemingly rational adults, sometimes behave like assholes. Someone has "griefed" the site repeatedly, trying to crash the island's simulation, throwing the volunteers around with "push guns."

The guards are now patrolling the area, asking anyone suspiciously hanging around what they are doing there, and trying to prevent future acts of griefing.

The guards? They're the Green Lantern Corps. A bunch of Second Life residents who have been role-playing as members of an alien police organization from DC Comics. They wear green spandex outfits and glowing rings, and they have created little bits of computer code to give themselves special effects related to their comic book alter egos. Now they are playing hero in a tangiable, albeit still virtual, way.

The power of stories is something often commented on, but little understood in the practical sense any longer.

It is not hard to see why not. The sweeping narrative poems of the ancient world are only studied in schools. Shakespeare is admired and revered more often than felt and loved. The didactic stories, the Boys Own tales of the Victorian era, are regarded, by those who know them, as the cheap struts that held up a hypocritical empire.

(Socialists even have a rigid taboo against storytelling. There is a refusal there to imagine future socialist worlds of any kind which I find appalling, but that is a post for another day.)

What is the power of stories? It is ultimately the power of making people find in themselves what they wish to find. If you hold a story inside, you learn from it. Fiction is ultimately a shaping force on the human mind. How many knights rode into battle with the Song of Roland's words ringing in their ears? How many Greeks entered the phalanx thinking of Homer's Achilles? How many American soldiers went to war thinking of Davy Crockett at the Alamo?

Stories, as the above examples indicate, can lie to us, send us cavalierly into combat, make us sell our lives for lying politicians. But they have also inspired some of the noblest actions of human history. Yet when I look around at modern literature (that's capital L literature, books that Matter) there aren't a lot of stories that stir the soul to greatness.

There are a lot of things to be said for modern literary fiction, and the boundaries between that genre (yes, it's a genre) and the fantastic and adventurous ones is thinner than those on either side imagine. But the division is usually seen, by the partisans of each side, as one between fascistic, juvenille power fantasy (SF and superheroes) and carefully studied middle class misery posing as realism (Literature). The raw, inspirational stuff has been left to the genres considered less serious.

The Second Life Green Lantern Corps is not going to save the world. They may get bored with their guarding job next week and wander off. They might never stop another griefing attack. And all in all, it's a pretty insignificant conflict, as we are reminded by the presence of the real Darfur.

But the very fact that it was the Green Lantern role players who stepped in makes me hopeful for the power of story. There are a lot of role playing groups in Second Life, everything from air pirates to furries to vampires. It doesn't surprise me at all that none of them stepped in before the super heroes did. The tales of a bunch of green-clad aliens may not seem very important to the world at large, but to the people who first picked up those comics at the age of ten or twelve, they could be as powerful as the Song of Roland. Those 22-page books taught kids, for the purpose of separating them from the cost of a comic, that the defenceless should be protected, that the good should sacrifice themselves for a just cause, that might does not make right. The fact that they have stepped in to help the Darfur volunteers showed they have internalized that lesson to an extent.

So have we all. Every one of us had an experience like the Green Lantern Corps. We have all read noble, cheap fiction. Maybe clumsily worded, but filled with high ideals.

Warren Ellis is a writer who has made something of a career of stripping comic book archetypes down to their essences. He wrote a brief story in his Planetary series that summed up the Green Lantern ideals: "Be the kind of policeman who works, not for laws or authority structures, but for finer worlds."

We can all do this. If we have ever read a hero's story, we have heroes inside of us. When we play the hero's role, it doesn't matter to the world at large if we are insecure, full of doubt and hidden torment. Think of the stories, pretend to be the hero, and let the fiction become reality.

Quote of the Day

2006-05-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

"Actually, if you just went and hired and assembled every bureaucrat who fled in disgust from the Bush Administration, they might make a pretty good government."

- Bruce Sterling, from his blog.

Mercer: Man's got a mean streak

2006-04-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

Rick Mercer posted his first blog-rant in quite a while, and it's a doozy. "Priority Six: We are a bunch of pricks" takes aim at the Tories for not lowering the flag to half mast on the Peace Tower to mark the death of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.

I'd love to throw in some profanity about this latest Tory blunder, but repeated typing of f-u-c-k-y-o-u-H-a-r-p-e-r is going to give me repetitive stress injury if I keep it up much longer. So I'll just say that it's the height of hypocrisy for the Tories to get on their high horse about a debate on Afghanistan and then do this.

They've claimed that any Parliamentary discussion or vote on the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan would hurt soldiers' morale. But apparently, ignoring their deaths and doing nothing to commemorate the return of their bodies to Canada is perfectly acceptable to soldiers. Their fatuous toad Lewis McKenzie has been shilling for them on CBC already, saying it's better this way, it's back to the way it was, that lowering the flag for the other slain soldiers before was an aberation.

Maybe so, but I say we should be reminded that our so-called leaders are sending others to die for them, and for that flag. Every time a soldier dies, let it come down.

Jane Jacobs, RIP

2006-04-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

I remember reading The Coming Dark Age after reading a positive review of it in the local paper, and with no previous knowledge of who Jane Jacobs was. It struck me how much thought had gone into such a slim volume - almost a lifetime's worth, it turned out.

Ms. Jacobs passed away yesterday at the age of 89.

She talked about creating livable cities before it became a buzzword, was a self-made expert who rejected academic titles, and was generally my favourite kind of powerful person: one who simply spreads powerful ideas.

Second Life Radicals!

2006-04-21T13:48:00.000-07:00

I just signed up for Second Life, even though I can't play it from home, as I don't have a high speed connection.

But I couldn't resist. I was checking out the sign up site, and I noticed the last names currently up for grabs include Marx and Proudhon. Someone at Linden Labs must have a sense of humour or a radical background.

Other names currently available include Mill (as in John Stuart, I hope) and Ricardo.

Mat Proudhon, signing off.

Harper's Top 5 Blunders!

2006-04-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

Nobody really knew what to expect from Stephen Harper as PM. Not only has Canada been under 13 years of Liberal Party rule, but Harper's Conservative Party is a new political entity. Merged from the purified and slicked-up remnants of the prairie-populist Reform Party and the dregs of the wallowing Progressive Conservatives, it has never held office before.

What most of us weren't expecting was a series of massive blunders in the first four months of government. The latest (number four on the list) has prompted this little exercise. Grab your popcorn, kids, it's time for the highlight reel.

#5: Internal media controls.

Harper has famously sent out directives that none of his cabinet ministers or top bureaucrats can speak to the media without his permission. No straying from the government position, either. This will be a good strategy in the short term, bad in the long term. With a minority government, there might not be a long term, however.

#4: Getting Schooled by Lyin' Brian.

From the Ottawa Citizen (hat tip to Battlepanda):

Mr. Mulroney plans to hold Prime Minister Stephen Harper's feet to the fire, urging him not only to put environmental issues on his government's list of five priorities, but to put them at the top of that list. His message: leadership trumps process when it comes to saving the planet.
Although Mr. Harper's commitment to the Kyoto Accord has, thus far, been vague, Mr. Mulroney intends to sound the alarm on the subject of global warming and the issues -- including the threats to Arctic sovereignty -- from the melting of the polar ice cap.
If that's not enough to make Mr. Harper squirm, the main course is sustainably harvested Arctic char, and the environmental groups behind the gala have printed their top five environmental priorities on the evening's menu.

Holy mother of Jebus!
You know, growing up in the household of a life-long, Tommy Douglas worshipping NDPer, some words are pronounced differently. Social Credit Party is "goddamned Socreds." Progressive Conservative Party becomes "fucking Tories." And I doubt Brian Mulroney's name was ever pronounced without one descriptive adjective or another tacked on either, back when I was a wee Iguanodon.

When the most hated man in Canadian politics is taking you out behind the woodshed, and teaming up with greens to do it, you should start to worry.

#3: Censoring bureaucrats outside office hours.

This one is really going to hurt him. From CP:

A scientist with Environment Canada was ordered not to launch his global warming-themed novel Thursday at the same time the Conservative government was quietly axing a number of Kyoto programs.

The bizarre sequence of events on the eve of the Easter long weekend provided an ironic end-note to the week in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced his first piece of legislation - aimed at improving accountability and transparency in government.

The day began with what was supposed to be the low-key launch of an aptly titled novel, Hotter than Hell.

Publisher Elizabeth Margaris said that Mark Tushingham, whose day job is as an Environment Canada scientist, was ordered not to appear at the National Press Club to give a speech discussing his science fiction story about global warming in the not-too-distant future.

"He got a directive from the department, cautioning him not to come to this meeting today," said Margaris of DreamCatcher Publishers.

"So I guess we're being stifled. This is incredible, I've never heard of such a thing," she said.

Hey, Stephen: fuck you. You do not get to tell people who work for you what they can or cannot do in their private lives. If you think anyone should have that power over anyone else, you are in for a shock when my "Force Harper to wear a French maid uniform" petition reaches Ottawa.

Of course, the government tried to cover its ass and say they only censored Tushingham because he didn't follow "due process," and that because he was identified as an Environment Canada scientist in his press release, he should only speak to the government position.

Nope, still sounds like stupid, autocratic bullshit to me. (The fact that he's going after an SF author really pisses me off. That's MY tribe, you bastard!)

Way to smooth relations with the bureaucracy, the scientific and academic communities and the environmentalists, there.

#2 US relations.

This one came pre-screwed. Harper has no good way to deal with the US. He came in on a promise to fix relations, and obviously he and his supporters believed the nasty Liberals had just fucked everything up, and the Bushies would welcome him with open arms. He is just now realizing - as we get nothing on passports, softwood, anything - that the Bushies have no intention of dealing fairly with anyone. They don't have to. They have nukes.

Harper now has two options: he can copy the Liberals and bad-mouth the US publicly while doing nothing that is really radical, and keep negotiating and using courts to deal with trade problems. Or he can meet the Americans more than halfway, and look like another lapdog.

#1 L'Affaire Emerson.

This one seems to have gone away. It didn't show up much in the polls outside of areas that already hate Harper. But like a dead fish in the furnace vents, the smell is just going to get worse over time. Now, with reports (strongly denied) that Emerson is unhappy with his Glorious Leader, it is coming back again. And it'll keep coming back, every few weeks or months, until the next election.

Poor, poor T. rex...

2006-04-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

The big guy gets more competition every year now. This time it's Mapusaurus roseae, a close relative of Gigantotosaurus, which knocked T. rex of its pedestal back in 1995.

This now puts T. rex fairly far down the list of "biggest meat eaters of all time." The current champion, as of a few weeks ago, is Spinosaurus, an early Cretaceous critter from North Africa, featured in Jurassic Park III. Then we've got Mapusaurus and Giganotosaurus, both of which hailed from Argentina in the late Cretaceous. The two giant meat eaters probably used pack tactics to hunt down the mighty sauropods that roamed the plains of Patagonia. Which of the two was bigger? Not sure, but they're both bigger than T. rex.

And both of Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus were members of the Carcharodontosaur (shark toothed) family of meat eaters. Their African relative, Carcharodontosaurus, may have been as big, if not bigger, than T. rex as well.

So the best case scenario right now is that T. rex is the fourth or fifth biggest meat eating dino ever discovered. Still, he had a 90-year reign at the top. From discovery in 1905 to being dethroned in 1995 is a pretty good run.

Yes, Please Do Bomb Iran

2006-04-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

Because oil has spiked towards $70 a barrel already, based on the fact that Iran's halfwit fundamentalist leader (resemblance to US fundamentalist halfwit leader purely coincidental) is mucking about with a bit of barely-enriched uranium.

So yes, please go ahead and bomb the shit out the place. Bomb them with tactical nuclear weapons, because the spectacle hasn't yet achieved the heights of irony I expect from BushCheneyCo. Kill tens of thousands of them, because after all, there might have possibly, according to the best (super secret) intelligence and fuzzy satellite photos, have been a chance that once upon a time the leaders of Iran were photographed shaking hands with Bad People. And from there, we can play Six Degrees of Osama bin Laden, with complete built in post-invasion deniability.

Who knows what could happen if thousands weren't massacred? There might be another terrorist attack! And in the international calculus of grief, the death of one white North American is worth approximately two hundred and seventy four dirty ragheads. So let the bombs fall! We're still thousands short in the Never Forget 9/11 Revenge Super Spectacular, on your favourite channel just before Dancing with the Stars!

And then we can all sit back and drink our beer and watch the carnage on CNN, and we'll maybe feel a little twinge as the international aid workers pull charred things that used to be children out of the smoldering, radioactive wreckage. But before long we'll just switch over to Desperate Housewives again.

It's okay about all those horribly mangled kids, of course. They're not like us, they don't feel pain the way we do.

Killer turkeys and sauropod snouts

2006-04-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Two big dino discoveries this week, one of them much commented on, the other less so. I'm fascinated by both.

The first is the discovery of a seven-foot oviraptosaur in Utah. This critter is both bigger and was found farther south in North America than any other known member of its lineage. So far only a hand and foot (both articulated!) have turned up, but they clinch the identification. It would have been nice to have a skull, too. Oviraptosaurs are notably bizarre in their skull and beak shapes.

The second bit of info is a new study on sauropod skulls and nostril shapes. Paleoblog, as usual, has the info.

Most people don't know that there has been an ongoing, low level debate about whether or not sauropods actually had small trunks. Yeah, like elephants or tapirs. The argument was that the shape of their nostril openings, combined with their browsing habits, would have made trunks both possible and useful.

The new study's short answer: nope, probably not.

This second discovery is actually more interesting to me, in my guise as an SF writer. I've written one (unpublished) story involving time travel and dinosaurs, and I'm likely to write more. It's nice to know that I'm on safer scientific ground if my sauropods don't have trunks.

Still, the field is changing so fast that it's impossible not to get stuff wrong, at this point. Anything you write may be perfectly accurate the day the manuscript goes in the mail, and thoroughly disproved by the time it reaches print.

Jurassic Park is actually the worst victim of this constant revisionism. When Crichton wrote the (execrable yet compulsively readable) novel, there had been a swing in the battle over dinosaur nomenclature. The dinosaur named Deinonychus had been lumped in with it's smaller cousin, Velociraptor. By the time the movie had come out, the Deinonychus had won it's proper name back. So those "velociraptors" in all three movies are actually supposed to be Deinonychuses. Which doesn't really roll off the tongue like "raptor."

Then, just as the first movie came out, the Utahraptor - a bigass sickle-clawed killer - was discovered. So they could have retconned the velociraptors into Utahraptors, but they didn't bother. And we're about 99 per cent sure now that raptors, all of them, had feathers. When Gregory S. Paul and a few others were drawing feathered predatory dinos in the late 1980s, at the same time Crichton wrote his book, they were considered gonzo mavericks. Now, we know that they're giant killer turkeys. Much like the critter dug up in Utah.

At least Jurassic Park III got the Spinosaurus right. In the past month, it has been firmly established as the biggest predatory dinosaur ever discovered, and Paleoblog has pictures of the original specimen up on his site. The story of the original speciment is a sad one - it was destroyed in Allied air raids on Germany. It's discoverer, Ernst Stromer, had argued that they should be removed to safer locations. But for reasons of Nazi war propoganda (the Allies will never succeed in bombing us!) they were left in a Munich museum, which was reduced to rubble.

Too depressing for words.

2006-03-31T11:20:00.000-08:00

No comments on this one, from P.Z. Meyers on Pensacola Bible College.

Just the link.

Alternate Economics: Bizarro World is Here

2006-03-31T10:40:00.000-08:00

You know, I'm going to kick in the teeth of the next person who tells me global markets are getting more competitive. This hypothetical person is either A) deluded or B) a lying shithead. Which I know, because unlike said shithead, I have actually read a little bit about economics, including books 1-3 of The Wealth of Nations.

Now, what would Adam Smith say about this?

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- U.S. corporate profits have increased 21.3% in the past year and now account for the largest share of national income in 40 years, the Commerce Department said Thursday.
Strong productivity gains and subdued wage growth boosted before-tax profits to 11.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2005, the biggest share since the summer of 1966. See full story.
For all of 2005, before-tax profits totaled $1.35 trillion, up from $1.16 trillion in 2004 and just $767 billion in 2001.
Meanwhile, the share of national income going to wage and salary workers has fallen to 56.9%. Except for a brief period in 1997, that's the lowest share for labor income since 1966.
"It's a big puzzle," said Josh Bivens, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. "If this is a knowledge economy, how come the brains aren't being compensated? Instead, the owners of physical capital are getting the rewards."
Despite the flood of cash coming in the door, corporations are investing comparatively little in expanding their operations. Capital spending has been below average, especially considering the strength of the economy, the level of profits and the special tax breaks given to boost investment.

Now, I may not remember too clearly, but in a competitive labour market, aren't profits supposed to fall? In fact, shouldn't they fall until the owners of capital have to manage it directly, as a full-time job? I'm sure there's some bullshit excuse people can come up with to explain the ever-increasing wealth disparity in the west between the workers and the owners, but I'm not buying it.

Could there be an explanation for soaring profits while real wages remain stagnant or fall? Could it be that big businessmen are colluding with one another and with their buddies in the government to create a favourable business climate (read: oligarchy of rich bastards).

On a related note, I just finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed, about working crappy low-wage jobs and trying to make ends meet. And this morning on CTV, I saw Jan Wong interviewed about how she tried a similar project, getting a job as a maid in Toronto and trying to live on $20 a day, for all expenses after rent, with her kids. They started getting faint from lack of protein, in case you were wondering. Her series of columns on the experience starts running tomorrow in The Globe and Mail.

Which, ironically, is part of a big media conglomerate with CTV, and which no doubt pays its own janitors such crap wages that their kids feel faint from hunger. Not that anyone will appreciate the irony.

We are all such fucking idiots to let this go on.

Book Review: StormWatch: Change or Die

2006-03-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

A superhuman flys over New York City, alighting in front of the United Nations building. Tearing the flags of every member nation down, he burns them while television cameras roll.

"Consider this symbolic of our greater intention," he says. "Do please film this."

It's the defining scene in what is one of the best anarchist storylines in mainstream comics history. Yet because the words "anarchy" and "anarchism" are never spoken, it has passed without the notice given to it's more famous counterpart, V for Vendetta. I should warn readers that numerous spoilers will now follow.

The storyline, Change or Die, was written in the late 1990s by Warren Ellis for the conventional superhero comic series, StormWatch. It capped off the first segment of Ellis's run on the series, and was a key precursor to his much more famous series, The Authority.

The story is essentially a tragedy. Two groups of heroes face off against one another, while cynical manipulators from among their own ranks sabotage a chance for peace, and possibly utopia.

StormWatch was a comic created during the mid-1990s, and was one of many Wildstorm company titles which, frankly, were pretty derivative of each other and of Marvel's many mutant X-team books. StormWatch was slightly different, in that its heroes were employees of the United Nations. As superhuman blue helmets, they hailed from many nations and fought superhuman terrorists, alien invasions and so forth. When Warren Ellis, a thoroughly insane British comic scribe took over the title, he revamped it thoroughly. Many of the superfluous team members were axed, and Ellis began creating his own strange characters. The oddest was Jenny Sparks, a London-based superhero with the ability to transform into and control electricity. Born at midnight on January 1, 1900, Sparks is the "Spirit of the 20th Century." There was also Jack Hawksmoor, a man who could communicate with cities, and Rose Tattoo, a beautiful, mute female assassin.

At the storyline's beginning, a masked vigilante tries to assassinate Jenny Sparks. She survives and demands a meeting with StormWatch's leader, Henry Bendix, the "Weatherman." Bendix is busy with his own crisis, however. The High, a former superhero who has been sitting motionless on a mountaintop for a decade, has vanished. Bendix believes The High plans some kind of attack.

The High has in fact joined a group of like-minded superheros for a major project. They want to end poverty and government at a stroke. Tired of fighting the same problems over and over, they want to strike at the root of what is wrong with society.

His message is simple, and not only needs to be heard, but needs to be incised into the Earth -

"Think for yourself and question authority."

And if you can think for yourself, what do you need authority for?

Comic book enthusiasts might not have recognized the underlying ideology of the story, but they recognized The High and his compatriots immediately. The High has all the powers, and a similar origin to Superman. His allies include the vigilante Blind (Batman), Rite, a female warrior (Wonder Woman), The Engineer, a nano-tech specialist who can make anything (Green Lantern) The Doctor, a shaman (Dr. Fate) and others. All are recognizeable comics archetypes, and together, they mimic the Justice League of America.

Ellis uses the comparison to both satirize the JLA (whose members have never questioned the authority of the world's governments) and to contrast the outsized idealism of Golden Age superheroes with the realpolitik of the StormWatch team.

The High and his league announce they will give away their power and knowledge - handing over the ability to make anything with nanotech, teaching magic and sharing new ways of living. Bendix, an idealist long since turned authoritarian, sends his team after The High's on a killing mission. Things go badly despite the efforts of some of the StormWatch team to defy their orders and ally themselves with The High. Rogue members of both teams have committed atrocities to reach their goals. In a violent confrontation, heroes are killed and the knowledge and promise The High offered is lost.

There are a few plot holes and artistic gaffes that mark the book. Ellis seemed to lose track of what some of the characters thought about Blind, in particular, and whether or not The High expected him to use torture. It's still worth reading. StormWatch: Change or Die is collected in the trade paperback collection of the same name.

I have no idea whether Ellis considers himself an anarchist or not, but he definitely has an anti-authoritarian streak that resurfaces again and again. Check out his Transmetropolitan stories too, they're the best thing he's ever written.

Update A quote attributed to Ellis, about Transmetropolitan (from Wikiquote): I have attempted to reflect this in TRANSMET: the understanding that the world can be neither perfect nor doomed. But that it can be better. And the people who get to decide if it's going to be better or not are the people who show up and raise their voices.

In which the godless commie throws in his lot with the capitalist running dogs

2006-03-27T14:31:00.000-08:00

I've just added my name to an open letter to the people of France over at Brad Spangler's blog.

Spangler is supporting the students who have been demonstrating for the past few weeks, over a new proposed law that will allow employers to fire workers with little or no reason given during their first two years of employment. In France, job security is government-mandated, but getting a job in the first place is bloody hard. The idea of the new law is to encourage more hiring, because firing will be easier if a situation changes for a business.

Obviously, a lot of employers are going to abuse this law, by hiring and firing people within the two-year limit, then hiring again. It will save them having to keep the employees long term and give them little things like proper benefits and pensions. Hiring lots of new employees is also a tactic widely used everywhere to stave off unionization drives.

A few things of note: I consider myself a socialist, Spangler is an anarcho-capitalist. The letter encourages genuine free-market reforms and revolution in France. So why is Spangler supporting the students and workers on strike? Why sign on?

Here's a bit of the text of the letter:

Students and Workers of France,

Professor Roderick Long once wrote:

“When Marx called the French government ‘a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth’ on behalf of the bourgeois elite and at the expense of production and commerce (’Class Struggles in France’), he was only echoing what libertarians had been saying for decades.”

France and all other nation-states remain so today. You and we live in a world where freedom and economic opportunity exist only at the sufferance of a political class that allows us only some small amount of them for sake of their own convenience and take the rest from us by force and coercion for sake of their own parasitism.

Under such circumstances, state-sponsored market liberalization is a cruel joke. The legislation you protest and rebel against seeks only to increase the latitude given your overseers, while maintaining the overall restrictions on your own liberty that, if abolished, would empower you to seek your own prosperity. We believe you and we would be very good at that, mixing both cooperation and peaceful competition, if we were not slaves.

Spangler insists he is a capitalist, but he's of the agorist school of anarcho-capitalism, the one that has managed to work its way almost back into individualist anarchism. Along with many of the signatories, Spangler is a self-proclaimed member of the Movement of the Libertarian Left, which has been reaching out with an olive branch to the Old and New Left for several decades now. So, in the spirit of solidarity, I have signed his letter.

Which leads to the perfect opportunity to write something I've been thinking about for a while: my socialism includes capitalism.

In a free world, there will be people who choose to compete for their daily bread, and those who choose to cooperate. I am one of the latter, but I categorically refuse to aim a gun at anyone's head and insist that he or she join me. I would prefer to rely on non-market means of acquiring my food, shelter and health care, not because I think markets are inherently evil, but because I don't particularly trust them. If others wants to put their well being at the mercy of the invisible hand, that is entirely their business, and I wish them luck.

I'm hoping to expand on this in a future post. But next up will be a review of what I consider the other great anarchist comic book series.

A Wedding Toast

2006-03-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

Today I raise my glass to my friends John and Kirstin, as they prepare to walk down the aisle. I know they will find happiness with each other, and I hope their happiness is accompanied by good fortune, good friends and long life.

To Kirstin and John!

Saint Ralph, and the story of the little oil-based economy that could

2006-03-24T14:44:00.000-08:00

Yay! Thanks to the Alberta Advantage(TM) and the totally coincidental fact that there are 180 million barrels of proven oil reserves beneath it's territory, Alberta is well on its way to another massive budget surprlus this year. The Globe and Mail has the details.

Already it is projecting a record surplus — $4.1-billion, but government officials admit that figure will likely climb as oil and gas royalties flood into provincial coffers. Last year's budget finished out with a surplus surpassing $10-billion.

Awesome! Wow, I guess if every province adopted Alberta's economic formula, they would enjoy equal success! What's that, you say? Manitoba has no oil? PEI is made of sand, clay and compressed layers of Anne of Green Gables figurines which contain little to no petroleum reserves? The Canadian Shield is three billion years old rock, and notably deficient in tar sands?

Quitters! Did Albertans quit when the price of oil shot up past $60 a barrel, imperilling the finance minister's life with a tidal wave of cash? No. Did they quit when Hurricane Katrina drove prices even higher, and exports from Canada to the United States were permanently increased as a result? No. Did they quit when Stockwell Day was their finance minister? No!

Even the National Energy Program couldn't make Albertans quit. It just turned them into constant whiners, who apparently believe they live in the only part of Canada that was ever fucked over financially by the federal government. That's right, Albertans launched their own Quiet Revolution, but unlike those small-thinking types in Quebec, they dispensed with the culture, the gay-friendly society and the excellent music scene. Who needs that when you have a western alienation-based party to start!

And now that party is in power. What can we expect from the federal government, now? More Alberta Advantage(TM)! So our best information about the future of the country will be found in the Alberta budget. What'll it be, Globe and Mail?

The bulk of the tax cuts in the budget are for business, with the province cutting the general corporate rate to 10 per cent, costing the provincial treasury $265-million this year and $300-million after that. Alberta currently has the lowest corporate tax rate in the country.

Personal tax cuts are minimal — $10 a person from an increase to basic personal deductions — although Alberta is raising the income threshold for health-care premiums, a break for low income earners.

Well, there you have it. You'll be $10 richer, and your boss will have a shiny new car. Maybe he'll let you wash it someday, and you can surreptitiously smell the fine leather interior through the sunroof. That's the Alberta Advantage(TM).

Congratulations and thanks

2006-03-24T14:39:00.000-08:00

First, to Harmeet Singh Sooden, James Loney and Norman Kember, rescued this week in Iraq after spending months as the hostages of a group of militants and/or gangsters. I'm not only pleased that they were rescued, but that it resulted in no loss of life to anyone.

Second, to the people of Hartley Bay. The fishermen of the tiny native community pulled the victims of the Queen of the North sinking from the water, brought them into their homes and literally gave them the clothes off their backs in some cases. The disaster has also left an oily slick on the water that may damage the seafood stocks that are their livelihood. I can only hope the government, owner of the ferry, will do the right thing and compensate them for any losses.

What I Did On My Spring Vacation

2006-03-20T15:43:00.000-08:00

Well, I read a lot. I obviously didn't post anything for a week. I spent a lot of time with my girlfriend, She Who Is Both Wise and Beautiful. I saw the Brian Jungen exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which was fascinating, and suffered through the explanatory tour of the exhibit, which was not.

The exhibit was great. It gathered together all of Jungen's Prototype for a New Understanding pieces. These are the famous masks he made out of Nike Air Jordan sneakers, starting in the late 1990s. Jungen created items that, from a distance, look like authentic North West Coast aboriginal masks. The black, white and red Air Jordan colours and the round and oblong shapes of the sneakers lend themselves to coastal-style artwork.

Along with the masks, there were three whale skeletons made from plastic lawn chairs, a birdhouse made from IKEA magazine holders (with finches in residence) a teepee made entirely from 10 "skinned and dismembered" leather couches, and some cargo pallets handcrafted from cedar planks.

All of Jungen's work seems - to me - to be kind of funny. Making masks out of sneakers? Great joke! Teepee from sofas? Hilarious! I think the best one of all is the cargo pallets, lovingly varnished and joined together without visible nails.

Is any of this humour acknowledged by the VAG? Nope. Not a damn bit of it. I know there's a very serious subtext to everything Jungen is doing here. He's deliberately conflating Native stereotypes with consumer junk, or rebuilding cheap Canadian Tire furniture into works of fine art. But as far as I can tell, it's actually supposed to be funny. (Most of it, anyway.)

Look at the lawn furniture-whales. They are actually the least funny part of the exhibit. First of all, they are amazingly crafted sculptures in their own right. It takes a real craftsman (I prefer craft to art 90 per cent of the time) to take a pile of lawn chairs and envision them carved up and rebuilt into a skeleton. Instead, they are at first elegant. When you realize what they are constructed from, they are both funny and all the more impressive. Jungen has drawn beauty out of a pile of plastic junk. It's really worth seeing.

The museum spiel is all about consumerism and the natural world. And yes, I agree that you certainly can see it that way. But it's also possible to look at the whales as an object of great beauty, and to marvel at the materials used for its construction. Hell, maybe Jungen is trying to make us see what can be created from the detritus around us if we can see with fresh eyes. I'd like to ask him some day.

(At this point, there will be a brief digression for ranting. In a nook near the whale skeletons was a "kids corner" that contained a glaring scientific error. It was a series of ideas for discussion with children about the exhibit, which said that whales die, fossilize, and then their fossils turn into oil, which can then be turned into plastic, for example, lawn chairs. No, NO, NO! First of all, most animals don't fossilize at all. Second, the process of fossilization is one of mineralization. The matter composing bones [or skin, feathers, leaves, bark, fur, etc] is removed and replaced by minerals. Fossils of this type are made of stone. They do not, at any point, magically turn into oil! Most oil comes from microscopic animals and plants that decay and are compressed under seafloor sediment. Coal is composed mostly of trees. To the VAG: learn some fucking science, you goddamn arrogant liberal arts majors!)

The essence of many jokes is the sudden and unexpected juxtaposition of two unrelated, concepts. If one of them is scary or "unclean," even better. That fits what Jungen is doing perfectly. My first reaction when I see his stuff is to laugh. And then to think. But it's the laugh that draws me in. Without the humour, it's just another pretentious museum exhibit.

The Power of the Mind!

2006-03-20T15:35:00.000-08:00

Clearly, this is the most amazing thing going right now. Forget all the advances in materials science, in nanotech, alternate energy, computer networks, all of it.

This is awesome.

For those of you too lazy to click the link, it's an article in New Scientist about the latest mind-controlled computer. These things have been around for about a decade now, in increasingly sophisticated versions. This one is just the latest in the phylogenetic tree of mind-machine interfaces, but it looks like the one that could break out into wide use. It allegedly takes 20 minutes to acclimate to a user - watching what areas of the brain are trying to control a cursor - and then is fully operational. The system could allow people to type, operate games or click through the net without touching a thing.

The major use for the tech at first will be for individuals with severe paralysis - spinal cord injuries at the neck, motor neuron diseas sufferers and so forth.

But how much would you like to bet that everyone from fighter pilots to game console geeks owns one of these helmets within 20 years ?

Some Clarifications, for Peter MacKay

2006-03-08T10:28:00.000-08:00

From CTV.ca:

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay says the government stands behind Canada's troops in Afghanistan and won't do anything to cast doubt on that support.

"The last thing that we want to show is any wavering or any backing away from the commitment of our Canadian troops," MacKay said on CTV's Question Period on Sunday.

"We have to be 100 per cent behind them. We have to demonstrate in every way that we support the important work that they're doing. And to that extent, this government is 100 per cent behind our troops and appreciative, incredibly appreciative of the effort that they're making."

MacKay was responding to critics who suggest Canada's commitment to Afghanistan should be taken to a parliamentary vote.

It seems Mr. MacKay has some misconceptions about when a debate would or would not be appropriate on a military deployment. Let's clear this up right now. When is it the right time to debate a life and death military mission?

Always.

It is always appropriate. To debate the nature of a military mission, to examine whether circumstances have changed, to talk about what the role of Canadian troops is or should be, about what resources they have or need, about the effect they are having on the daily lives of Afghans, about what long-term psychological impacts the mission is having on the troops themselves. We can't solve a damn thing without first talking about it. We can't even know if there are problems if we don't talk about it.

To hide behind "supporing the troops" is cowardly. Calling for the troops to come home could be supporting them. Calling for more money, more troops, new training, better gear, a change in mission; all these things can be legitimately supportive of the troops. Leaving a bunch of guys in the desert half a world away, with no public political discussion of why they are there is not supportive.

But wait, there's morale! What if talking about the mission, maybe even raising serious doubts about their ability to impose peace on a fractious landscape (one with the British Empire twice failed to subdue, followed by the Russians, followed by the Americans) weakens their resolve?

What is morale, anyway? It is the common spirit of a team, and its members willingness to do their tasks. So yes, I can see how actually talking about their chances of success might damage that crucial element of readiness.

If we were talking about a T-ball team, that is.

These are soldiers! They aren't six fucking years old, people. They're grown adults who chose a profession that involves being shot at. They've been attacked with roadside bombs, mortars, grenades, by the friendly fire of their allies, and most recently, with an axe. We expect them to take daily danger, harsh living conditions and seperation from friends and family with equanimity, but a little bit of talk about why they're there will have tears pouring from their eyes? Give me a goddamn break.

You know what would be good for their morale? Giving them some input in the debate. Bring soldiers who've served in Afghanistan and let them speak to Parliament, directly to the MPs. Let them talk about what they really need, what they think the mission is, what they believe in. Let's listen to the privates and corporals and the front line officers. Let's hear from their mothers and fathers, and their husbands and wives, too. Let's hear from Afghans, not just the ones they've helped, but the ones who want them the hell out of their country.

And then, let's have that debate.

We can let Peter MacKay sit this one out. He wouldn't want to be seen wavering, after all. I'm sure total, blind-eyed ignorance is the best way to stand behind the troops.

Book Review: The Cassini Division

2006-03-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

The Cassini Division was the first Ken MacLeod book to be published here in North America, so I suppose it's strangely appropriate that I'm reading it last, out of all of his so-far published novels.

The Cassini Division is one of the four Fall Revolution novels MacLeod wrote, and is the only one of the four that is a direct sequel. It follows directly on the events of The Stone Canal, in which a pair of uploaded humans on anarcho-capitalist New Mars travelled back down a wormhole path to the Solar System. Those humans - Jonathan Wilde, aka Jay Dub, and his artificial intelligence wife - get a walk on at the beginning of the novel, then vanish. The torch is passed to Ellen May Ngwethu, a 200 year old leader in the titular Cassini Division. The elite of an egalitarian future, the division guards humanity from what is left of a civilization of superhumanly intelligent uploaded minds that fell into the atmosphere of Jupiter during the events of The Stone Canal.

While this kind of thing - superhuman AI and uploaded humans, threats from godlike posthumans, wormhole travel - are relatively familiar to SF fans, the milieu isn't. The Solar Union that Ngwethu fights for is a communist utopia, in which the state really has withered away and humans are prosperous, free and happy.

MacLeod is, by his own admission in many forums and interviews, a long-time socialist and former Trotskyist. He has taken the various criticisms of central planning made by people like Mises very seriously, however, and the Fall Revolution books never shrink from alternate political points of view. Indeed, Ngwethu is probably the least political of his protagonists in the series. Jonathan Wilde, of Stone Canal, is an individualist anarchist shit-disturber, Myra Godwin of The Sky Road is a Marxist politician, and Moh Kohn of The Star Fraction is a Trotskyist himself, living in a libertarian enclave. Along the way in MacLeod's various other books, everything from anarcho-syndicalism to agorism to various forms of townhall democracy show up, often in wild combinations.

The communism of The Cassini Division is presented both very sympathetically - I wouldn't mind living in such a system - and with its few flaws readily apparent. Although 30 billion people live under the Solar Union, there are a fringe of "non-cooperators" or "non-cos" who live in a grubby free-market society on Solar Union fringes. The Solar Union mostly ignores them or co-opts their best people. In a typical American SF novel, the non-cos would be the heroes, fighting against the monolithic Solar Union. Here, it's a lot more complicated. (There are jokes about this, of course. A solid gold statue of Mises stands in the chamber the Solar Union once used for central planning meetings.)

Ngwethu, like Clovis in The Sky Road, is a character who seems to be living in one of the times when humans have convinced themselves that history, per se, is over, and the right side has won. As is always the case, she is proved wrong. The Jovian intelligences have become more active and organized, and Ngwethu is convinced they are a threat. She enlists a famous non-co physicist to try to solve the mystery of the wormhole the Jovians created, then travels through it to the other side. The anarcho-capitalists of New Mars begin to flit back across, looking for new markets - something that is anathema to the Solar Union.

Meanwhile, the Jovians have resumed contact with humans, and claim they are no longer hostile. Ngwethu wants them exterminated anyway, saying beings that think and live a thousand times faster than humans can't be trusted to keep agreements. Only life can hold a real consciousness, she believes, never a machine.

Many reviews of the book have found it dissatisfying, and I've seen it ranked frequently as the least interesting of the Fall Revolution series. I have to disagree. Except for the ending - which seems to go against everything MacLeod was aiming at - I found it very gripping. The milieu is fascinating, and is one that I don't think has been seen much outside of hopelessly utopian political fiction. It was a lot better than The Sky Road, which never really came together as a coherent whole, and which I felt left dangling plot threads all over the place.

On the politics of the book, I'd say that it was long past time that someone started writing science fiction in which socialism matters, whether it's triumphant or simply at the margins. (Kim Stanley Robinson can't do this alone!) I've seen people argue that The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress created more libertarians than Atlas Shrugged ever did, simply because it's a better book, and because it's lessons go down easier with a nice coating of adventure, fun, and likeable characters. Similarly, I'd love to know how many people will find their attitudes to socialism changed by The Cassini Division. The Solar Union is attractive enough that a vast majority of humanity has joined, but it is flexible enough to allow dissidents and outright criminals to avoid it. It has no laws and is fundamentally a huge, voluntary organization. But MacLeod is honest enough to point out the flaws of his vision - it's a bit dull and parochial, and its people carry around prejudices that they don't often recognize as such. The Union also has a "might makes right" approach to solving external problems: there is the unspoken assumption that if the non-cos ever became powerful enough to be a threat, the Union would have few qualms about wiping them out.

The book has also added a few phrases to the Standard SF Quote Lexicon. The most frequently repeated is the one about uploading being "Rapture for the nerds." My favourite, though, is MacLeod's description of humans as "fish wearing space suits."

My last word is: read The Stone Canal first. Despite the fact that it uses MacLeod's dual-track narrative, which drives me crazy, it is the better book of the two. And it will help you understand what happens in the second half of Cassini Division.

A better blog than mine...

2006-03-03T16:07:00.000-08:00

Most of the blogs I frequent are political, scientific or science fiction-related. This one is not.

It's the ongoing story of a superhero called the Velvet Marauder, who lives in a suspiciously Seattle-like Evergreen City, where he fights crime, has a crush on a co-worker and shares his unique insights into life, superpowers and everything. It's well written, often funny, and feeds my need for superhero related stuff. I'm slowly working through the massive backlog of entries, in chronological order, as it tells an ongoing story. Will he ever get together with Margo, his attractive co-worker? Will the Exploder return to blow up another one of his cars? Are his bosses really supervillains, and what is their diabolical plan?

In between saving the world (well, not the world, but the greater Evergreen City area), Velvet Marauder drops in little nuggets of superhero info like this one:

When you've got mid-range super strength like me, it affects your entire physiology. I weigh a good thirty pounds more than a normal guy my height and build, because I've got thick bullet-resistant skin and dense muscles. A lot of people don't think about this, but when you've got super-strength, every part of your body is super strong. You see where I'm going with this? For instance, if I want to I can pee a good twenty, thirty feet. Seriously, I can piss from one side of my back yard to the other because of my powerful internal muscles.

The main page of the blog is here, but I recommend you start here, with the first post.

Someone, get this man a comic book writing job!

Dear Albertans, what is wrong with you?

2006-03-02T16:53:00.000-08:00

Why do you re-elect this man over and over and over again?

Premier Ralph Klein has apologized for throwing a booklet at a teenaged page in the legislature during a debate yesterday over Alberta's health-care reforms.
The 17-year-old page, Jennifer Huygen, had delivered a soft-covered, 80-page booklet of Liberal policy proposals to Klein's desk in the assembly, when the premier grabbed it and tossed it at her. It wasn't clear if it hit her.
Klein was heard to say, "I don't need this crap," referring to the Liberal booklet. Klein later rose and apologized to the page and to the Liberals for calling the booklet "crap."
The incident occurred during question period, in front of a packed gallery of schoolchildren.

It's not like you have't had enough excuses to kick him out in the past. Like that time he drunkenly yelled at a man in a homeless shelter. Let's repeat that: He drunkenly yelled at a homeless man. And yet I think this one has actually topped the old record for Crazy Ralph's antics. The presence of the schoolchildren pushed it over the top for me. It's a definite winner if it hit the girl.

Are you worried that you will see your economy take a sudden downturn? You sit on a fucking lake of oil! It would take an army of fuckwits to ruin your economy! In short: what is wrong with you? Can't you even find a Conservative more competent than this moron?

Up next: Alberta wants in, the rest of Canada wants you to shut up.

Three Political Cultures

2006-02-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

The David Emerson screw up has done something interesting - it has revealed the three primary strains of Canadian political culture. Not mere party politics, but the ways in which people relate to their government and their elected officials, the way they expect those institutions to operate, and the ways in which they believe democracy should work.

Emerson's traitorous jump has revealed this, both in those calling for his ouster and in those defending him. Let's call them the Political, the Representative and the Tribal responses.

The Political attitude is the view that is probably shared by most actual members of political parties. This is the view that people are elected not just on the strength of their own personal character and experience, but because of their party and its platform. Political voters weigh the records of each party and pick the one that they feel will do the best job of governing the country, whether on moral, economic or justice grounds. Note that this means that people who vote for the Tories because they oppose gay marriage, and people who vote Liberal or NDP because they favour it, are essentially in the same class here.

Political voters have been quite angry at Emerson because they expect their politicians to advertise their allegiance beforehand, and to stick with it as closely as possible afterwards. Broken promises are especially hated by this group.

The second group, the Representative voters, essentially favour a kind of direct democracy. They want their MP to do whatever the majority of the voters in the riding want, essentially as a remote-controlled representative of their collective will. This is the purest, democratically speaking, of the three schools. It's actually fairly close in philosophy to the anarchist ideal of recallable delegates, who would essentially have no ability to change their minds without consulting with the group they represent. It was the old Reform Party which upheld this view, although it hasn't been tested until now because of their status as an opposition. I suspect it will crumble under the heady influence of governing.

The Representative voters tend to have a fair bit of overlap with the Political voters, and many people, of course, believe in a bit of both. Most Political types would probably veer into the Representative camp if their MP did something that really offended the sensibilities of a large fraction of the community.

The final category is the only one for which I have no sympathy. The Tribal voters just want someone to bring goodies back to their riding, and don't give a shit what party or person is in power. It's naked pork barrel politics at its worst, and not surprisingly, these amoral opportunists have been Emerson's staunchest defenders. They say that having an MP in cabinet, regardless of party, will be good for the riding, for Vancouver or for British Columbia. There are usually then defences about the 2010 Olympics, about job growth and similar garbage. This type of voter can just crawl into a corner and die, for all I care. All they want is for the government to hand them goodies, and damn any principles along the way.

The Liberal voters of Ontario and the Maritimes have been accused of being this type of voter by many Conservatives over the past 12 years. Those crooked easterners were clearly just voting in a corrupt party so they could cash in with new infrastructure, federal agencies and Employment Insurance weighted toward their industries, the Tories said. Now that tribalism benefits the Tories, the shoe is on the other foot, of course. Many candidates, of all parties, openly campaigned along these lines, promising that if they were to be in the coming government, everyone in their riding would wake up after election day to find themselves living in the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

And that is probably the sickest part of the whole deal.

2006-02-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

Look! I'm not a complete waste of carbon!

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Of course, I did get one wrong. And frankly, there were two where I really wasn't sure, and now I don't know in which direction my ignorance lies. Damn, that's frustrating!

I'm a Carnivalista!

2006-02-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

My post on math education (below) has been linked from the Carnival of Education!. Thanks to the Education Wonks.

All posters are now on notice: teachers are present. Bad spelling and grammar will get you slapped across the virtual knuckles with a digital ruler!

Out, out damned spokesman!

2006-02-21T16:32:00.000-08:00

And now, a special announcement from Mount Tory. From CTV.ca:

William Stairs, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's director of communications, has been replaced about two weeks into the new government's mandate.

It's not clear whether Stairs has been terminated or whether he voluntarily left.

Now, as a reporter, I know that the person who wrote this story can't outright say what we all know. So I'll just provide a helpful translation here: He got the boot. He isn't saying anything because he is a loyal party hack but... boot. Big time.

A statement from Harper's office said Stairs will be replaced by Sandra Buckler, who served as a spokesperson for the Conservative party during the election campaign.

Stairs declined to comment when contacted late Monday.

"William played an important role in the creation of the Conservative party and the recent campaign," Harper's chief of staff Ian Brodie said in a statement.

"Sandra brings a wealth of communications experience to her new post."

Brodie also says that he is looking forward to working with Stairs as he moves on to new opportunities, CTV's Rosemary Thompson reported Monday night.

It's unclear, however, what those new opportunities entail.

"Don't worry, Billy, we'll find you some cushy lobbying job, maybe land you on a Bay Street board of directors. Want to be a consultant? All the cool kids are doing it!"

Stairs, a fluently bilingual Nova Scotia native with a PhD in political science was a longtime presence on Parliament Hill.

Read: future potential party leader. Harper is well rid of this guy, he was about two terms away from planting a knife in his dear leader's back.

e became Harper's chief spin doctor last year, and had previously held the same role for Peter MacKay under the now-defunct Progressive Conservative party.

The shake-up follows complaints that Harper has avoided the media since being sworn in as prime minister on Feb. 6.

"I think what this means is obviously that the prime minister is recognizing that they have had some communication problems in the first couple of weeks of his mandate, and that's why they are making a big change at the top of their communications staff," Thompson said.

"Hey, maybe we should have said something about that whole David Emerson fuck up? Other than that the people who were complaining were shallow? Maybe."

Several Conservative aides, including at least five from the media-relations wing of Harper's office resigned or were forced out over a period of several months last year.

In August, 2005, Stairs insisted the departures were not a sign of dissension in the ranks.

"This is a high-turnover business," he said at the time.

"When people do decide to move on, to pursue careers elsewhere, they usually choose to do it in the summer so that (new) people can move into their jobs with a minimum of disruption."

"Bitter recrimination goes down easier with cool lemonade, and after a few hours playing on the Slip & Slide, you'll hardly remember the bloody political battles that ended with you kicked from the halls of power! Hey, everybody, it's the Night of the Long Knives, Nerf-style!"

Now back to your regularly scheduled government, already in progress.

On Math Education

2006-02-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

Yet again, I long for a time machine, in which I could travel back to talk to my younger self. Not to save myself from embarassment or pain, but to deliver a simple message, just a few words long.

It's my Grade Eight self who needs to hear this message. He's about to completely slack off and send me (us?) into a spiral of lower and lower math grades, culminating in flunking Math 12, avoiding Chem 11 and 12 and Physics 11 and 12. And for no reason at all, besides laziness and apathy.

Well, there is one more reason. No one, not one person in high school, ever told me that math was fun. That's the message I'd take back, if I could.

My girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) has recently started a math course, as one of the prerequisites she needs to get a teaching degree. When she signed up for it, she was worried, because she had always thought she was bad at math. I assured her that she was bright in every area, and of course, I was proved right. She has flown through the course so far, and is getting a mark in the mid ninetieth percentile.

The course is essentially every type of math you might teach in elementary school, from basic addition and subtraction to algebra, factoring and geometry. It includes not just what the students have to know, but the basic ideas and concepts behind the elementary school lesson plans. The entire course is crammed into one semester.

I've been following along in the textbook, so she'll have someone to study with. It's made me realize some things about the way I was taught math, and where I went wrong.

When I was a kid, I consistently did well in every elementary school subject, As and Bs predominating on every report card. When I was in Grade Six, I was plucked out of my regular class and with about 15 or 20 other kids, I was tossed into an advanced math class, the only class taught by our principal. He was a great math teacher, a man in love with the subject, and that love was infectious. I did pretty well, although I was far from the brightest kid in the group. Two years later, most of my advanced math classmates and I went to high school and jumped straight into Grade Nine math.

This is where I started to falter, and it was almost entirely my own fault. I'd done well in just about everything in elementary school, but I'd known since I learned to read that words were my first love. History, English and especially writing was where I could really shine. And everything else was boring. I started to slack off in math.

Again, I was lucky enough to have a teacher who loved his subject. He really encouraged everyone to take math all the way to Math 12, and Calculus, even though neither is required for graduation or even (back then) for entry into university in some arts programs. But I didn't care at the time, so my grades slipped and slipped, until I was failing a subject in which I'd once been considered gifted. My teachers deserve none of the blame, and the majority certainly rests on my shoulders.

My teachers, of course, tried the usual tactics to get me to do better and stay in the course. They told me about how many jobs need math, about how hard it is to get into some college courses without certain courses and grades. The thing is, I knew it didn't matter. I had decided by Grade Eight that I would be a reporter. It involved writing, and it would only require a two-year diploma, and then I could be out there working instead of sitting in another classroom. And my plan worked perfectly, in fact. I've been working full time since I was 19 years old. And no, I didn't need the higher math I missed out on.

I did, eventually, learn to miss the fact that I hadn't taken the math courses more seriously. I'm a science fiction nerd, and sometimes I knew I was missing things when I read SF or popular science books. I've picked up the odd mathematical fact here and there, but nothing systematic. Not until my girlfriend (who is both wise and beautiful) started her course.

Now I've discovered the joy that comes with getting it. The pleasure that comes from finding a solution to a seemingly unsolveable problem. I'm enjoying math in a way I haven't since I was in elementary school. (The fact that I can hash out the solution to problems with a loved one does not hurt at all, but I suspect it isn't strictly required.) Why am I discovering this now, and not then?

Because no one is forcing me to do it. Because I'm not being given purely utilitarian reasons for doing it. Because I can yell at the textbook when it deliberately obfuscates things, because I'm free to ask why a certain problem should be done a certain way.

While my teachers are not to blame for my failures, a part of the blame has to rest with the system they find themselves in. The entire high school educational system in Noth America is geared towards producing either basic high school graduates or college entrants. The requirements for both are basically arbitrary, at this point. The courses you take are either completely unneccessary for the unskilled, low wage jobs at the bottom of the barrel, or they are inadequate for the high-skilled jobs, which will require either technical or academic training at another institution. Everyone involved, from teachers to students, knows this. As students, we know there are a set number of hoops to jump through. You must have X, Y and Z courses from the humanities stream, and A, B and C from the sciences side, to graduate at all. Add in D, E and F courses to qualify for your postsecondary stream of choice, whether it's a trades apprenticeship or a university entrance. Our teachers, the better ones, try to get us interested in the course material for its own sake, and we take a course we like when we can, but mostly we're just trying to get to the next hoop. (I never took English Lit 12, either, because it conflicted with another course I needed more, but enjoyed less.)

Most importantly, I don't remember anyone ever telling me that math is fun. It was suggested that it was needed to make me a well-rounded individual, that it would be useful for so many, many careers. But those strictly utilitarian arguements don't work on students who already have their own utilitarian plans for graduation and career lined up.

I'm not dismissing utility in education, of course. But we expect life to be more than the mere utility of eating, sleeping and passing on our genes. We have the best toybox in the history of life between our ears, and math is one of the toys inside. It's criminal not to tell students that, at least once. At least then, the system and the teachers would have tried.

Others have noticed that something is wrong with the way we teach and learn. A system that is supposed to teach us skills, doesn't. A system that desires to make us well rounded doesn't ask us what "well rounded" is. A system that should show us the pleasure of learning offers only dull utility as an explanation for all its courses.

Progressive Review has this story about the roots of the modern American education system. Kevin Carson has commentary on that article on his Mutualist Blog and on this article on a similar theme.

Meanwhile, over at Pharyngula, P.Z. Meyers is plenty pissed about a Washington Post column that suggests no one needs math for a fulfilling life, and that algebra might just be too hard for people. The comments section vigorously defends math, with mostly utilitarian arguments again. But some of the posters are questioning the way students are taught in the first place, which is a good start.

So funny... it hurts...

2006-02-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

Still holding my sides in. But it's a good hurt.

Joss Whedon.

Warren Ellis.

Comic/science fiction/comedy gods. Together, for the first time.

Go read it. Now!

And then start the petition to have them do this as a talk show, five nights a week.

Take that Emerson!

2006-02-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

It's nice to see the Liberal Party has taken my suggestion so quickly, and are asking David Emerson to repay the $97,000 they spent on his election campaign.

Emerson, of course, is just digging his hole deeper by saying he earned lots and lots of money for the party, so why should they complain that now he's thoroughly betrayed them? I guess the theory is that if you pay off someone, you can use, abuse and then dump them. Another famous Tory once put it thusly: "There's no whore like an old whore." It's good that we can look back to such great statesmen as Brian Mulroney in times of political turmoil like this.

Meanwhile, in today's Vancouver Province, Emerson is complaining that his kids are the target of taunts at school because of his actions. I do feel bad for the kids - it's not their fault their dad is an asshat - but what the hell did Emerson think would happen?

The right wing blogosphere and pundits remain divided, although the bloggers and streeter interviews are much more critical of Harper. It's just a few court eunuchs who are supporting this, and the appointment of Harper's campaign manager to the senate is even worse in many estimations.

I've revised my estimate of how long this government will last sharply downward. I give it less than a year, now.

Crested killer

2006-02-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

The oldest relative of Tyranosaurus rex has been discovered in Jurassic strata in China. Check out this CBC page which has not only a pretty good description of the critter, but a nice artist's rendering.

They're wrong about it sharing the trait of being three-fingered with T. rex, though. T. rexes were famously two-fingered.

Have A Tall, Cool Glass of Links

2006-02-07T12:54:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm slightly calmer about David Emerson (urge to kill receding...) I thought I'd put up a few links to some of the best stuff of recent days.

First, Pharyngula's P.Z. Meyers is threatening horrible violence to a Bible unless people link to him. I really don't care that it's a Bible, per se, but my book-protecting genes are kicking in. Don't do it, P.Z.! Think of the binding!

If it was a copy of a new China Mieville novel, I'd be even more upset.

Then there's my good friend Mr. Misanthropy, who has a Danish-Canadian perspective on the recent Mohammadtoons mess.

Meanwhile, Kevin Carson has two delightful posts up, which tear apart a pair of corporate management books. They're about how to feel good about being a downsized, overworked or frustrated drone. I for one welcome our new corporate overlords... Wait, you mean they've been screwing me all along?

And back to Emerson (urge to kill... returning!), I'm pleased to see that quite a few Tories are pissed about this. Babbling Brooks is mad as hell, and so are all his blogging right wing friends. Of course, they're just regular right wingers. They actually have morals, unlike their leaders.

Emerson: What the #@*!

2006-02-06T15:06:00.000-08:00

Hey, Dave, remember this?

"I'm going to be Stephen Harper's worst enemy. We're going to stir the pot and you better believe we are going to make a heck of a lot of noise."

-- David Emerson, on election night [Jan. 23, 2006], when he was elected as a Liberal.

Here's a pithy quote for you, Emerson: Fuck off.

Why am I so mad about this? After all, my ideal world is an anarchist one, without elected representatives, just direct democracy. But at the same time, I've always, before I ever had any anti-state leanings and since, been a strong advocate of voting. In the absence of a workable anarchy, a constitutional democracy is the next best thing, and within that framework, some governments are clearly better than others. Many, if not quite all politicians are moral, well meaning folks. People should vote, if only to elect the party that won't try to screw them over. If everyone with a progressive agenda withdrew from voting, we'd be abandoning the levers of power to people who believe that gays and adulterers should be stoned to death.

But now, I'm considering not even voting in the next election. Emerson has really brought it home for me just how fucking miserable some politicians can be, how easily they'll betray everything they supposedly stand for. He's the latest in a recent string of defections from every side of the political spectrum.

Ujjal Dosanjh, former NDP premier, runs for the federal Liberals.

Belinda Stronach, former Tory, turns Judas for a Liberal cabinet seat.

Keith Martin, who jumped from Alliance to Liberal.

Scott Brison, Tory to Liberal in one easy step.

Bob Rae, another fromer NDP premier, of Ontario, rumoured to be seeking the Liberal leadership.

Notice something about that string of defections? Every one of them (except Rae) was toward the immediate centre of power, which for 12 long years has been the Liberals. Your basic backbench MP can't just jump from party to party either, they just have to sit tight and do what they're told. They're the toiling class of the politicians, just trying to scrape up enough patronage to get another community centre or highway overpass built in their riding.

Above them are the political elite, the literal ruling class. They are marked out by wealth, influence and charisma, and they feel free to jump from party to party, always seeking power and influence. Stronach, a silver-spoon sucking millionaire who hung out with Bill Clinton, engineered the merger of the Progressive Conservative and Alliance parties into the new Conservatives, and then switched sides when she didn't find herself on the winning team, is the classic example. She's even managed to get re-elected after that stunt. These high-class pols always claim to have the best interests of the country in mind, of course. I'm sure that they think they do. But the effect is that they dilute their own ethics, or show that they had none to begin with.

I'm not writing this rant because I'm a fan of the Liberals, but because I get angry on behalf of the voters in Emerson's riding.

He ran as a Liberal. He ate their salt, and then he stabbed the party in the back. But worse than that, he assumed that he knew better than every single person who marked his name on a ballot. Without asking them, without consulting, without a meeting or a poll, he has invalidated their decision of just two weeks ago.

Some of those people who marked their X next to Emerson, David, voted for him because they liked him. Some were voting strategically, to keep out another party they didn't like. And the majority voted because they supported the platform of the Liberals themselves, because they had weighed the platforms and the records of the various parties, and found the Liberals the least wanting. Now, he'll be supporting the Tory platform, the Tory party line and the Tory cause.

Until they're out of power, presumably. If the Liberals win with a minority in the next election, they'll let him right back in, all forgiven. The need for collective power and the need for individual power feed off one another, perfectly incestuous.

Meanwhile, the voters have no power.

Not all is lost. There are any number of ways we can return more power to the electorate, short of burning the constituency offices of every MP in the land. Retiring NDP MP Ed Broadbent suggested a package of corruption fighting reforms that included a ban on switching parties in mid-stream. Any MP who wanted to change his or her colours would be forced to step down and fight a by-election. It's a good start.

Another good idea would be very tough recall legislation. We need a way to pull these guys out of there when they get out of hand. And the requirements need to be easy enough to make it a meaningful threat. If even a few thousand people think the bum should go, he should go.

I'd also suggest that every time there's a defection like this, of a sitting MP, that the party he or she left should sue the living shit out of the traitor. Sue for every dollar they invested in lawn signs, newspaper ads, hot dogs at the party fundraisers. And every volunteer should join a class action lawsuit, to sue for the time they invested as volunteers. Does $30 an hour for their time sound good to you?

Finally, we badly need to reform the way we elect these people in the first place. Some form of proportional representation (I'm a fan of the Single Transferrable Vote, but I'm open to other options) is badly needed.

None of those reforms would make it a perfect democracy, but we'd be a bit closer. The high and mighty need to feel some anger from the voters, and they need to feel it now.

And to Emerson, once more: Fuck you.

Who the heck is left?

2006-02-03T13:07:00.000-08:00

John Manley won't run.

Frank McKenna won't run.

Brian Tobin won't run.

Now, Allen Rock won't run either.

The Liberal leadership race is staring to look rather sad. It's like a seventh grade dance, with everyone lined up against the wall, refusing to take to the floor. (Fears of complete social humiliation are appropriate for both settings.) If someone had asked for a list of the top five Liberal leadership candidates a year ago, those names would have been four of the top five, with maybe Sheila Copps rounding out the list. I'm guessing that at least some of these guys actually would like to lead the party (I'm looking at you, Brian) but they want to let the flames of political scandal consume some other sacrificial leader first. They'll come back to "save" the party eventually.

The odd thing is, this has left us with a pack of highly unlikely "frontrunners" right now.

The CBC's website has a list of possible leaders, and three of them are turncoats for other parties. I know the Liberals are supposed to be a "big tent" party, but this is ridiculous. Scott Brison, Belinda Stronach and Bob Rae! The only remainder is Michael Ignatieff, who has spent most of the past two decades in the US and England.

My two pennies?

Stronach hasn't got a hope in hell. In fact, given that she was one of the major behind the scenes people who created the current Conservative Party, which just tossed the Libs onto the Opposition bosses, I'm surprised they even talk to her. Plus, she jumped ship in exchange for a cabinet post and a chance at more power, whatever she claims. I doubt she'll even launch an official leadership campaign.

Ignatieff was in favour of the war in Iraq. In favour of that mess - that sort of damages your credibility. The nasty little apologist for US imperialism is probably the frontrunner just because all those other long-time Libs have already dropped out. Sad. Just sad.

Brison is in a better position than Stronach despite the fact that he also defected from the Tories. He was a red Tory of the old Progressive Conservatives, who refused to join the new Reform/Alliance dominated Tory caucus because of their views on gay rights (as he is a gay man). A principled stand like that is at least better than a naked power grab, but a lot of Liberals are more than a bit homophobic themselves, and so are their voters.

And then there was Rae. Seriously? Bob Rae? What the fuck happened there? I suppose he's my preferred choice to win... Better than the warmonger.

Hail, Lord of Iguanodon!

2006-02-03T13:04:00.000-08:00

It's a big day here at the Little Iguanodon, as it is the birthday our Our discoverer and namer, Dr. Gideon Mantell. From Paleoblog:

Mantell, a physician of Lewes in Sussex in southern England, had for years been collecting fossils in the sandstone of Tilgate forest, and he had discovered bones belonging to three extinct species: a giant crocodile, a plesiosaur, and Buckland's Megalosaurus. But in 1822 he found several teeth that "possessed characters so remarkable" that they had to have come from a fourth and distinct species of Saurian. After consulting numerous experts, Mantell finally recognized that the teeth bore an uncanny resemblance to the teeth of the living iguana, except that they were twenty times larger.
In this paper, the second published description of a dinosaur, he concluded that he had found the teeth of a giant lizard, which he named Iguanodon, or "Iguana-tooth."

Yes, those grinding teeth were the beginning of the acknowledgement by humans of possibly the noblest, wisest and certainly pointy-thumbdest dinosaurs to ever roam the Mesozoic landscapes.

King Arthur, not a racist?

2006-01-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

Fred from Montreal had this to say in the comments on my Ones to Watch post, about Andre Arthur.

First thing is that there really were students at the Laval university sent their by their parents from africans country who happened to be either the dictators themselves or high ministers for dictatorial regimes. These students were given special treatments because of the money their parents transfered to the university, it was a local scandal when all of this came out. And the cannibal comment came from that, not from the act of eating human flesh, but rather as a reference to the way these regimes were eating up the ressources of their own country while their people died.

It was an outraged comment on a situation where the university was accepting money that was cannibalized by dictators from their own country.

So, to set the record exactly straight, let's see the entire quote, from Wikipedia.

"All that aside, we're always saying how global we are and taking in foreign students in Quebec at the university, especially students from North Africa. Laval University is one of the biggest universities in North Africa.
The problem is, people forget that in Africa, in Muslim countries and countries in Black Africa, the ones who are sent abroad to study are the sons of people who are disgusting, the sons of the people who own the country so that they can govern it better. They're the sons of plunderers, cannibals who control certain Third World countries and can afford to send their children to Quebec to go to school, if it's not outright corruption by companies that want to get access to natural resources in Africa and will pay to have the sons of the disgusting people who govern those countries study in Quebec.
But they're still proud in Laval to accept foreign students. They forget to say that those foreign students, by definition, with some exceptions, are all children of the most disgusting political leaders in the world, people who are sucking their countries dry, people who kill to gain power and torture to keep it. People we call cannibals, people who are extremely cruel."

On further reflection, is the statement still racist? I think not quite, but it's skirting the line pretty close. Not in condemning the university for accepting and coddling students who are the offspring of dictators, but in tarring virtually all African students with the same brush. That's obviously a gross oversimplification of the issue. Africa has a lot of petty dictators, but it has more than a few democracies as well. So I'd say that Arthur can't be directly judged as racist purely on the contents of this quote, but he can be judged as pig ignorant about Africa and Africans. And that kind of ignorance does inflame and encourage existing racism.

Should he have been censored? I believe in absolute free speech, so I'd say no. Should he have been elected to public office? Fuck no.

Ones to Watch

2006-01-24T11:28:00.000-08:00

First, I'd like to note all the areas where I was wrong in my pre-election predictions. The Liberals had a lot of strength that was undiscovered by pollsters. I suspect this was due to many people who said they were undecided, or simply refused to talk to pollsters, parking their votes with the Liberals. It's probably hard to say out loud: "Yes, I know some of them are corrupt, but I still want to vote for them."

I was too cynical about the NDP and Liberal chances here in B.C. I forgot that we left coasters are completely, amazingly insane, and will buck any trend we see coming. Tory government? Let's elect fewer of them. I would have been happy with 24 or 25 NDP members, I was pretty shocked to see them with 29.

I completely missed the Quebec breakthrough by the Tories. I figured they would simply get an increased vote count in safe Bloc seats.

Now, on to the MPs who will bear close watching in the next few months.

The Independent

The last independent member was Chuck Cadman, from Surrey. He started as a member of the Reform/Alliance, then was bumped during a nomination battle in his own riding. He ran anyway and won on his immense personal popularity. While he was a bit hawkish on crime for me (no surprise, he got into politics because of his son's murder) he was well respected across the political spectrum. He had a reputation very much as an ordinary guy, very approachable to every one of his constituents. He sadly died of cancer.

Now, we have Andre Arthur, the newest independent. From a riding outside Quebec City, he's an ex-shock jock with a penchant for making racist comments. From CBC.ca:

Arthur, 62, had an outspoken style that spawned many lawsuits, including legal actions launched by former Quebec premiers Lucien Bouchard and Daniel Johnson. His mainstream radio career ended just before Christmas, when his employer did not renew his contract.

He once said that African students at Laval University were the children of dictators and cannibals. That remark was one reason why the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission decided to strip Quebec City radio station CHOI-FM of its licence in 2004.

I'm assuming he won based on a two-pronged strategy. First, scoop up the protest votes of disatisfied Tories and Liberals who just want to punish Ottawa but aren't happy with the Bloc. Second, he captured the under-utilized fuckwit vote. Your basic Canadian fuckwit likes racist jokes, porn, oversized trucks and the company of his fellow asshats. He doesn't usually come out to vote at all, and sees electing his morning drive hero as a knee-slapping joke. "King" Arthur is likely to make news, but no serious policy.

The Libertarian?

Dr. Keith Martin won again in his Vancouver Island riding. He's an interesting case: a Liberal who defected from the Alliance caucus and sat as an independent for a while. There are several ex-Progressive Conservatives in the Liberal tent (Scott Brison, Belinda Stronach) but few former Reformers.

Martin might be the closest thing to a libertarian, of the right-leaning variety, in the House of Commons right now. A medical doctor, he has called for private health care, but he clashed with his former Reform colleagues over euthanasia and abortion. He might prove an asset to NDP-sponsored civil rights issues, but will likely be able to speak out more strongly for his free-market values as an opposition member than he ever was as a Liberal.

Whether he is a classical, Lockean liberal, a near-libertarian or a vulgar libertarian remains to be seen. As any of those, he might prove a spoiler in the upcoming Liberal Party leadership race.

The Sock Puppet

Nina Grewal just squeeked back in to her Surrey riding. Her husband Gurmant, of course, wasn't running after his bizarre behaviour after he taped Liberal MPs allegedly offering him incentives to cross the floor. Both during and after that fiasco, Nina Grewal had very little to say. The fact that she is likely still being run by remote control by Gurmant didn't quite disuade voters. While she might melt down spectacularly, I really expect her to just fade away as an MP. Worth watching, to see if we can spot the strings.

The Wicked Witch

Belinda Stronach won, amazingly, after defecting the Libs from the new Conservative Party she helped bring into being. She'll never lead the Liberals, but with her experience at backroom leadership deals, she'll be a factor in the leadership contest. She seems like a classic "The Economist" type: socially liberal as much out of disinterest as anything, fiscally conservative but a believer in firm government. Probably should have been a Liberal all along.

The Tories will never forgive her for crossing the floor. I was at a Tory candidate's campaign office as the results came in (I was working), and she was booed every time her face appeared on the TV. She'll be a constant target even now that they've won.

The Power Couple

Jack Layton and Olivia Chow are finally together - and he displayed some genuine emotion in a morning press conference when he talked about how happy he was that they'll be together in Ottawa this time.

I dislike couples who run in seperate ridings (see above, re: Grewals), because one of them is by definition a parachute candidate. I also have some fears about Layton trying to drag the NDP too far from its populist-labour roots into some kind of Tony Blairish Third Way nonsense. Those worries have been assuaged by his last term. He seems to be trying to desperately merge the rural populist and urban social-rights elements of his party together into a workable whole. The populists are generally pro-gun (Layton astutely stayed away from the Liberals' gun policy during the election), believe in cooperativism, the social gospel and are skeptical of big business. In B.C. and Ontario, there's a strong labour element as well. They want the government to provide an insurance policy for tough times through health care, EI and social programs. The urban contingent includes a lot more environmentalists, gays and lesbians, students, teachers and civil libertarians. They are suspicious of big business too, but are a lot more comfortable with big government.

Layton has to deal with a caucus that is almost evenly split between those two factions.

With Chow, he'll have disproportionate influence with his own caucus to put whatever policies he has onto their agenda. If his fusion is successful, and not just a watering down of both sides, it could bring a new element into parliament.

My hope is that the urban-rural NDP combination might really come together, as something with a libertarian socialist tinge. Probably not, but you never know.

Addendum I forgot about The Warmonger, but Larry Gambone at the Porcupine Blog has nicely taken him apart.

Perhaps even worse than Harper’s partial victory, is Michael Ignatiev’s victory as a Liberal candidate. This member of the US War Party is being touted as a possible future Liberal leader. It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The Neocons are attempting to capture both parties for their war plans and reproduce as closely as possible in Canada the situation in the US - two parties with identical viewpoints except for minor shadings and all other views marginalized. Here is where the anti-war movement can have a political impact and derail these fiendish plans. The Ig should not be able to make a public appearance without being surrounded by demonstrators who denounce him as a Gringo stooge and warmonger. Make him a political liability, rather than a (pseudo) intellectual asset.

Found Satire

2006-01-22T16:33:00.000-08:00

From a Starbucks cup:

The Way I See It #53

Be exceptional. Make tremendous efforts to be extraordinary. What a privilege to be here on the planet to contribute your unique donation to humankind. Just make sure you do so...

-- Shelby Lynne
musician

This is the author's opinion, not necessarily that of Starbucks. To read more or respond, go to www.starbucks.com/wayiseeit.

Nothing more to say to that, except to add that if you think I'm putting up the link, you're crazy.

Fearless Election Predictions!

2006-01-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

In ancient China, soothsayers would heat an iron needle until it was red hot, then press the tip against the shell of a turtle (presumably, the turtle had already been removed). The pattern of cracks that radiated out from the point of contact was then interpreted by the seer to give guidance on the future.

This is obviously a crappy way to predict Canadian elections. Everyone knows the best future-readin' comes from looking at the entrails of a shepherd killed by lightning on a remote hillside! Happily, your correspondent at Little Iguanodon has an in with Zeus, and I've arranged for just such a shepherd-slaying. The results were somewhat ambiguous, but I can narrow the results of Monday's vote down to a few options.

Most Likely: Tory minority. I think it will be a bit bigger than the currrent Liberal minority, maybe as high as 140 seats. It all depends on whether they get any traction in Toronto, and so far the polls (I mean, entrails) are no help to them there. They'll scoop quite a few more seats in suburban Southern Ontario, maybe grab a few more in the Maritimes. There aren't enough western seats left for those to make a big difference.

Second Most Likely: Tory majority. A slender one, I think, of barely more than 160 seats. If he scoops up some Toronto ridings and crushes the NDP near Ottawa, in Winnipeg and in BC, it's possible. The Liberals could be reduced to vying with the Bloc over official opposition status.

Unlikely, but possible: Total Liberal collapse. The Libs could lose the way the post-Mulroney Tories were wiped out in '93. They might be reduced to a rump of seats in Toronto. If this happens it will be because many Liberal voters simply stayed home. The NDP and Bloc would do well out of such a scenario, but the Tories would have a crushing majority, maybe 200 seats.

Leats Likely: Liberal minority. If (big, big if) it happens, the entrails say it will be an even smaller one than before.

What about British Columbia? Well, the Tories have already self-destructed in one seat (Thank you, Derek Zeisman) but they're still as strong as before everywhere else. My guess is that the Liberals will be largely squeezed out, the NDP might gain one or two new seats, and the rest of the province will be Tory blue.

The Tory minority I'm predicting won't last long, probably not as long as the last Liberal government. But I have hopes that it could at least accomplish a few things. Electoral reform would be the most valuable, and one of the few ideas they share with the Bloc and NDP. Whether they'll be eager to move to an STV or mixed proportional representation system with the scent of a majority still fresh in their nostrils is debateable.

Now, let's all sit back and watch me be spectacularly wrong!

Five Weird Things About Me

2006-01-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

I was blog-tagged about a week back now by Brad Spangler (I didn't even know he'd read my blog) with one of those nasty blog memes. It's not that it's taken me this long to think up five weird things, more like it took this long to whittle the list down to something this short.

1 - My nickname at work is Little Penguin. Long story.

2 - I am obsessed with dinosaurs, as this blog's name itself indicates. Even stranger, I didn't pick up this obsession at age six like most kids. I loved dinosaurs when I was a kid, sure, but like most people who don't grow up to be paleontologists, I left it behind for years. Then in my early 20s, I rediscovered it. I have a collection of plastic dinos, dozens of books, DVDs, videos... I've even rewatched the execrable Jurassic Park II just so I could see the pachycephalosaurs and stegosaurs again.

3 - I'm 27 and I've never been drunk. I'm not a complete teetotallor, I don't avoid it for any particular religious reasons. I just don't see any reason to drink that much. Plus, I don't like the taste of beer or wine.

4 - I can deconstruct television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost as though they were Classics of English Literature. My girlfriend (She who is both wise and beautiful) and I do this for fun, teasing out strands of character development, plot and dialogue to analyze how they create the program, for better or worse.

5 - Even though my musical tastes usually run to punk, alt-country and old country and art-pop, I really like Meatloaf. Especially the Bat Out of Hell albums. And not in an ironic way. They're just good!

For the end of this meme, I'm supposed to tag five other people. I'm going to blatantly break this rule and just tag one - my friend Mr. Misanthropy. Because I know his list would be entertaining, and because he should blog more in general.

Machine Logic for Stupid Human Disputes

2006-01-11T11:01:00.000-08:00

This is fascinating. A European company has created an online tool for dispute resolution and arbitration:

The e-Dispute system, which has already been successfully piloted at the European Court of Arbitration and the Emilia-Romagna Chamber of Commerce in Italy, is now being trialed at a number of hospitals in the UK where it is being used to assist with claim resolution.

Using e-Dispute, claimants and respondents can put their case before an independent online arbitrator (or "robot agent") who having reviewed the case will then set up a meeting between the two parties via chatrooms and video conferencing, at which possible binding settlements can be reached. Arbitration is a well-established alternative to contentious courtroom litigation for the resolution of commercial disputes. In general, it is quicker, simpler and incurs lower costs without disadvantaging the parties. The idea behind having an online arbitration system is that as well as being relatively inexpensive it allows organisations involved in international disputes to find a neutral venue in which to air their problems.

"Robot agents digest all the information and make proposals to the parties. Once the arbitrator is agreed upon, the robot agent finds a suitable meeting date for everybody," said Jacques Gouimenou, managing director of Tiga Technologies, the company behind e-Dispute, speaking with ElectricNews.Net. "Our system reduces delays and costs. It is also very secure."

The current version of e-Dispute includes a number of online collaboration tools including video, audio, live-chat, e-forum, text and transcript capabilities with full case management, fact assessment, analysis, and weighted issue/interesting variables.

Aside from the fact that it could be a lot cheaper than paying lawyers, a lot less confrontational and lengthy than a court proceeding, this is obviously a situation where there can be no charges of bias on behalf of the arbitrator. It would be especially useful in situations where one or both sides can't find a trusted third party.

Obviously, it may not be so useful in resolving ethical dilemas. So judges need not fear for their jobs - yet.

Daycare subsidizes big business?

2006-01-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Stephen Harper recently announced the Conservative Party's daycare plan. Both the Liberals and the NDP have also promised childcare (well, the Libs promised it again) through publicly funded and run programs. The NDP in particular have been clear that it will be non-profit only daycare. Harper, of course, has a different idea.

He plans to dole out cash directly to businesses and non-profits that provide daycare spaces for employees children. Specifically, it's a $10,000 tax break/subsidy per childcare space created. That's a hell of a lot of money ($250 million a year). This is a bad plan on a couple of levels, but I'll just look at one here. That is the massive subsidy this will provide to large companies, while doing little for small firms.

It's worth quoting here from the Tory backgrounder:

A Conservative government will also help to create new child care spaces by establishing a Community Child Care Investment Program. The program will provide assistance to employers – both businesses and non-profit institutions – when they create new child care spaces for their employees and the surrounding community. A tax credit of up to $10,000 will be granted for each child care space created. The cost is estimated at $250 million a year. [Italics and bold mine.]

As a thought experiment, imagine two businesses. One is a Wal-Mart style superstore, the other is a coffee shop. The superstore has dozens of full time employees and many more part-timers. The coffee shop has perhaps a tenth the number of employees. The superstore is open from about 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., the coffee shop is open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. The superstore occupies a large area of land, the coffee shop is crammed into a small storefront space with a small storage room packed to the rafter with boxes. I've worked in both environments (a small, local coffee shop/bookstore and a large supermarket) and I think that's a pretty fair description of each.

In which do you think it will be easier to find space for some kids?

Even if the coffee shop owners are smart and work with other local small businesses, it will be harder for them to run such a daycare program. The coordination efforts and associated costs will be greater. Finding a site near enough to all the businesses will be difficult, and there will be problems sustaining the service if one or two of the businesses opt out or go broke.

The large business, on the other hand, will be able to either set aside existing space or to create a new space relatively easily. More pernicious, I suspect that with the economies of scale it can bring to bear; it will likely be able to actually make a profit off the $10,000 per kid. Remember, that money comes through whether you spend it all on the children or not. That will be a powerful incentive to warehouse the kids as cheaply as possible while keeping the rest of the money as pure profit.

Meanwhile, small business owners will be lucky if $10,000 a kid is enough to keep their systems running; they'll likely have to chip in a bit more.

And remember that bit about "and the surrounding community"? What are the odds that the big-box daycare program won't just offer to take in other kids, say, from nearby small businesses - in exchange for the owners handing over the $10,000 per child? Even more profit, the small businesses get nothing.

Why don't we just cut regressive taxes, especially those on the working poor? Or refuse to tax non-profit (especially cooperatively run) daycares and preschools. If you want flexibility, you can't get much more flexible than that.

We have some lovely parting gifts for you...

2006-01-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

Well, I didn't win but I didn't come in dead last.

The 3 Day Novel Contest winner was announced on the website this morning and it was not my name or my book at the top of the list.

Or in second.

Or third.

However, I was in the 14-book shortlist that followed. Somewhere in the top 17 out of 379 entries. Which is certainly better than nothing, and pretty much what I'd expected. It certainly won't hurt when I edit and flesh out the story and try to shop it around to SF editors.

I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall when the contest judges were debating the stories. The winner, despite what I have said earlier about a dearth of fantasy literature in the contest, is a horror/comedy story called Day Shift Werewolf, by Jan Underwood. It's about a werewolf demoted for being unproductive, and also features a claustrophobic mummy and distractable zombie.

Looking back at the previous winners, they veer unexpectedly from what sounds very much like earnest "capital L" literature to quirky stories, with a couple that are magic realism. No traditional fantasy, and definitely no standard SF. What on earth did they make of my story, or of the other serious SF and fantasy epics they no doubt received? Were they immediately shunted off to the side, with a few of the best left in the shortlisted category, or were they seriously considered on their merits for the top three prizes? I imagine it depends on the judge. And the fact that a comedy in the Terry Pratchet vein ultimately won obviously supports the idea that it came down to pure merit, with no genre restrictions.

I'll certainly buy Day Shift Werewolf, and I urge anyone reading this blog to pick up a copy, too. Support struggling authors! We need money.

I've already made a personal vow: I will win this contest, or die trying. I've just got to think up an idea for next year.

The Lion, The Witch and the Failed Christian Allegory

2006-01-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

I saw the movie version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe the other day, and I was left feeling that it was only so-so, and that it was a very accurate translation of the book to the screen.

The child actors were all competent-to-good, the CGI and special effects were even better than the Lord of the Rings series, and Liam Neeson made a pretty good Aslan.

One thing I certainly wouldn't have gotten out of it, if I had been 10 years old again, would have been any understanding that it was meant to be inculcating Christian values in me.

I read the entire Narnia series repeatedly when I was a kid, and some of them I re-read even in my teens. As fantasy children's literature, they hold up well, delivering the perfect wish-fullfilment story. Each book follows two or three of four human children from Earth (well, England) to a magical realm, in which they are hugely significant and heroic, interact with talking animals and mythological creatures, and learn valuable lessons. The last part is without a doubt the least important draw for most young readers.

However, they are also meant to be a Christian allegory. Aslan is Jesus/God - mostly Jesus. In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, he goes through a very brief via dolorosa and is then sacrificed for the sins of another. There's even a Judas figure: Edmund, who sells out his siblings for Turkish Delight.

I can't comment on how this allegory works for readers who were familiar with it from the start, or who regularly attend church and Sunday school before reading the books. I can say how it affects those of us who grow up in non-believing households.

Not at all.

I didn't realize there was any religious significance to the Narnia books until years after I'd read them all, when I read about it in another book. So, while the Narnia books may have some meaning for children who are already Christians, they are worthless as a missionary tool. The allegory is just too far off the mark to get across.

Think about it. The first time we meet Aslan, he's marshalling an army composed mostly of fauns, centaurs and talking animals. He's a big damn talking lion, who advises Peter on how to clean his weapons after killing a wolf. How is this anything like Jesus? Later, when he gives himself up to save Edmund's whiny little butt, Aslan is shorn of his mane, tied down and sacrificed by the figure who represents the Devil, the White Witch. She doesn't tempt him - indeed, Aslan is presented as entirely divine throughout the books, with no human qualities aside from an occaisional tendency toward rage. (Not at moneychangers, though. Currency exchange and temples are left out of the books entirely.)

Having been resurected (both book and movie make his resurection seem more like a magical trick than a divine miracle) Aslan goes back to being a ferocious general. If I had to pick a god similar to the big kitty, it might be Odin, Thor, Mithras, Thoth or I could even compare him to the cult of Adonis. Those were figures who either died and returned, or represented both healing and war. And they would have been entirely appropriate to surround with giants, ogres, centaurs and other European mythical bric-a-brac. Even King Arthur dies with a prophecy of later return.

I was a mythology geek when I was a kid, devouring books about Hercules and the Knights of the Round Table. The Bible, on the other hand, was something for people who were forced to go to church on Sunday. If I had been forced to make a comparison between the Narnia books and what I knew of religion, I would never have drawn the conclusion that it was a Christian allegory. This is what happens when you're a second-generation atheist.

One final note: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is probably the closest Biblical allegory except for The Last Battle, which tells the story of the end of Narnia. The books in between are mostly simple quest and adventure stories, with children set on their way by Aslan, but aided considerably less. I always liked those books better, especially The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The first and last books left me a bit bored, and The Last Battle I actually found confusing, unsatisfying, and a bit depressing.

Layton on Natives

2005-12-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

I saw Jack Layton talking about his promises to implement the Kelowna Accord with First Nation Peoples this morning on Newsworld.

The most important part is pretty well summed up by this quote from the NDP website:

“These platform commitments are different than many election platform planks,” Layton said. “They are not promises about what New Democrats will do for you. They are what New Democrats will do with you.”

No grand plan, no big centralized reforms. Layton emphasized that the First Nations have a lot of problems, but they are already coming up with their own solutions. Government's role is just to help out in whatever way the First Nations want, even implementing different plans in different areas. I'd add that staying the hell out of their hair if that's what they want would also be a good committment to make.

This is probably the best idea a non-Native leader has suggested in a while. Too many people on both left and right have grand, social-engineering proposals they want to implement on status Indians across the board. Privatize reserve land, no, regulate its use better, change the way band councils can spend money, cut them off altogether. And nothing has really worked.

Trying to protect First Nations people from themselves is a paternalistic, insulting and ridiculous strategy doomed to fail. My father once told me a story about a Native farmhand he knew in Saskatchewan in the early '60s. Every year this guy went to the Calgary Stampede, like a lot of other people. And he'd come back and everyone would say "Hey, what did you see at the Stampede?"

And he'd say, "Oh, not much, I spent pretty near the whole day in the bar."

And everyone would laugh. They knew he was kidding. Because back then, Indians weren't allowed to drink in bars in Canada.

Give them back more land, more control over their natural resources, and let them do what they want with it.

Good News in Health Care

2005-12-19T11:41:00.000-08:00

I'm tempted to just make this lead from CBC.com the entire post:

Patients who normally would have waited an average of 47 weeks for an orthopedic consultation were treated in under five weeks.

But it doesn't tell you the how of the this story from Alberta, and the how makes all the difference. For years we have been pounded (especially by Albertans) with the message that efficiency can only be reached through competition between free-enterprise health providers. Public health care is a doomed, bureaucratic mess and will never be redeemed.

Well, kiss my ass, capitalism. It turns out that focussed efforts by people who understood the problem worked, and incredibly fast.

The Edmonton Journal reports that several factors were key to the improvements. The number of surgeries performed in each operating room was raised to three or four, instead of just one or two.

As well, surgeons worked with a team of nurses and physical therapists to move patients through the system quickly and get high-priority cases done first.

Alberta's Health Department contributed $20 million, mainly for additional staff and operating rooms. The speedier surgeries did not result in other health services being delayed or cancelled.

When the project was announced last year the health system was disconnected, with "silos" of services – like diagnostics and orthopedic surgery – being designed around that particular service, rather than around the patient.

...

The average wait times seen within the pilot project are even lower than the new national standards announced by provincial and federal health ministers last week.

By creating a flow-through process based on what the patients needed, the care got faster. I know a lot of people who have waited around for various surgeries, ranging from cancer to joint problems, and it's always a story of lurching from your GP to a specialist, to a variety of waiting lists. With this program, everything needed for a specific problem is hived off, and you just jump from diagnosis to imaging to surgery on a quick little timetable. That diagnosis-imaging-treatment series can easily be applied to many other procedures too, no doubt.

Good news all around, no matter what kind of health care you want.

Thoroughly Disturbing

2005-12-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

Reading Pharyngula, I discovered this link to a posting about a truly immoral crossbreeding experiment. Apparently, a Soviet biologist artificially inseminated several chimps with human sperm in an attempt to create hybrids. Supposedly, this would prove that men and apes shared a common ancestor, and thus deal a blow to religion, a.k.a. the opiate of the masses.

Of course, if Christians had been breeding horses and mules together, I'm not sure why a human-ape hybrid would cause more doubt. And during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed that women who gave birth to deformed and mentally challenged infants had slept with animals. There are several famous "calf-people" and "sheep people" from the history of England, who usually came to tragic ends at the hands of their ignorant peers. It seems like the question of whether a humanzee would be significant to anyone's religion would rely more on the particular theological interpretation given to the hybrid.

Fortunately, none of the inseminations produced a child, and attempts to find a human female volunteer willing to carry a humanzee child to term also came to naught. The entire experiment has the stench of Leninism, the notion that individual humans (or humanzees) are just interchangeable parts who may be sacrificed for the greater good of International Socialism. Considering that it would only be a few years later that the entire Soviet Union would be forced to reject genetics in favour of the worthless Lamarkianism of Lysenko, it's only surprising that the entire episode hasn't been erased from history.

The reason why Arthur Jermyn’s charred fragments were not collected and buried lies in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind—quite shockingly so. Detailed description would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be told, for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn’s African expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the ape-princess. The two particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket about the creature’s neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M. Verhaeren about certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled face applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife. Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed.

H.P. Lovecraft

Battle of the Tax Plans!

2005-12-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

In the opening stretch of the federal election campaign, it looks like tax cuts, or the lack thereof, are being set up as one of the big issues.

In the blue corner, we have Stephen "No Charisma thanks, I'm an Economist" Harper, weighing in at about 99 MPs, maybe less a few right now. He's offering to cut the GST from 7 to 5 per cent across the board. This would, of course, be good for the poor. At least a little bit. Consumption taxes hurt people with less money far more than they hurt upper income earners. When I was making less than $30,000 a year, I still had to fill up the gas tank of my car, paying that seven per cent on every litre. The guy next to me at the pumps, filling his $100,000 pick up with dual rear wheels and a hemi, had to pay the same, of course. But it hurts less when it comes out of a $150,000 annual salary.

In the red corner we have Paul "Foreign Registered Companies" Martin, offering cuts in income tax, particularly in the form of a hike in the basic exemption rate. Most of the Liberal tax cuts over the past six or seven years have been targetted at (for lack of a better term) the middle-middle classes and the upper middle classes. This one is aimed at the lower middle classes - also known as the people who haven't seen much good come from the Liberal government as it cut the hell out of housing and social programs over the past decade.

In the orange corner (oh, how they longed to get Red as their colour!) we have Jack "I Have a Nifty Moustache" Layton and his plan, which is: no tax cuts. This is probably the hardest to sell, but he's proposing to dump that money back into health care and the above-mentioned slashed social and housing programs.

So which one is actually the best plan for Canada, keeping in mind that I'd really rather see the entire economy overhauled for the benefit of the poor.

Harper's plan seems pretty good at first, because the GST is a regressive tax. But poor Canadians who file income tax, the working poor, already get GST rebate cheques four times a year. So there's already some built in tax relief for the lowest levels of society there, leaving out the homeless. The Liberals are yelling about how their plan is better because you get the money back whether you spend money or not, which isnt' exactly the point. Anyone who works has to spend money on basic goods, many of which are taxed under the GST.

The Liberal plan is slightly better. Of course, they've added in a package of corporate tax cuts as well, which the NDP forced them to drop during the last session and switch to spending the money on social programs.

If I were an economist, I could probably work out which plan would leave the "average Canadian" with more money in his/her pocket at the end of the year. But I favour the Liberal over the Conservative plan slightly because it isn't designed to directly encourage spending. There's a psychological element at work here. If things are ever so slightly cheaper (and two per cent isn't much of a savings) you hardly notice, and live your life much as before. If you get a nice hefty rebate on your taxes next year, and you pay less in the next year, you can consider what to do with the lump of money you suddenly have. Save or spend, whichever you like. And Canadians really need to save more money. Hopefully some would choose that.

However, I ultimately go with Jack Layton's plan, in the short term. Barely. Tax relief for the poorest working Canadians is something the NDP should seriously consider for the future. But for now, there's a hell of a lot that needs to be done on the social front. My home town, of barely more than 115,000 people, has seen the number of homeless jump from about 17 to 54 in the last three years. And that's just the official numbers. That's directly linked to cuts in social services, housing and welfare. For years, the provincial and federal governments have skewed the economy to benefit the biggest mass of voters, the middle aged home owners of the middle and upper-middle classes. They've done very well. The economy is roaring along. Unemployment is very low.

Imagine what they could do for the poorest, if they tried?

Alternative Economics: Usufruct Zones

2005-11-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back, I wrote a brief piece about how usufruct could/should work in a society with a different conception of property law. I made the assumption that it would be some sort of anarchist society, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

There are currently hundreds of millions of people around the world who live their lives by the unwritten laws of usufruct property. They're squatters. For the most part very poor, they live primarily in slums around the major cities of the world's poor nations. They have no land title. They have no deeds. And they don't have the kind of political power that allow them to manufacture such evidence of property. Remember, every title deed we now have is, essentially, a fantasy given force by a mixture of commonly held custom and government force.

Some economists have recently suggested that the best thing we could do for squatters (some of whom have built entire fairly nice squatter cities) is to give them title to their land. It would give them the ability to borrow against a new source of capital and help them to better themselves. This is, in fact, a good argument. But consider an alternative.

We could designate some areas as usufruct zones. Outside, normal property law would hold, thus pacifying the property-owning powerful. Inside (on land that nobody else wants anyway) usufruct would be the law of the land. With usufruct recognized by governments, the occupiers would have the advantages of ownership, including the ability to borrow against their new property. More important, they would have much greater security than they now enjoy.

This idea could have its greatest impact in the poor world, but don't discount the benefit it could give to people in the west, either. Remember, there are squatters aplenty in every western city, but they tend to take over vacant houses rather than building their own. Remember the people who work full time but have to sleep in their cars because they can't even afford rent. Or the homeless people, pitching tents and building shacks in ravines, being moved along constantly by the police.

We would have to give up a lot of control over usufruct zones to make them work. Building codes would have to be lightly enforced, if at all. But remember, well-built structures are in the best interest of the inhabitants. They'll get there eventually, if we give them a chance and time. And if we don't, then they'll still be living in tents in ravines, or sleeping in their cars. Which would you rather have, someone with a solid, if tiny, home of their own and clear ownership through occupancy, or someone who doesn't dare to own more things than he can carry in a shopping cart, and who doesn't know where he'll spend his next night?

What's Black and white and going to court?

2005-11-18T12:04:00.000-08:00

Eight criminal counts.

Up to forty years in prison.

Conrad Black in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons.

I'm so happy I could almost cry.

There are few people on earth who need humbling more than Black, and I'm actually confident that he will go down for this. David Radler has copped a plea and will testify against his old buddy. Radler knows where all the bodies are buried, in the mess that was the Hollinger shareholder robbery scheme.

Not only is Black a thief, but he and his wife are two of the biggest aristocratic robber barons of the modern world. They openly despise those lower than them in the social and economic hierarchy. Reading a number of Black speeches and essays back to back, you see the word "envy" appear startlingly often. Black seems to believe that any criticism of him, whether of his business practices, his editorial policy, or his literary endeavors, is motivated by envy of his wealth and position.

For the record, I do not envy Conrad Black his wealth, his lifestyle, or his silly ermine-fringed red cape and title. I dislike his politics intensely, I despise his arrogance, and I am repulsed by his grasping need for public adulation.

I want nothing from Black, except for him to go away, and shut the hell up.

Elegant Decay

2005-11-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

I admit, I'm strange in a lot of ways. There's the weird politics, the dinosaur fixation, the thing where I write SF and fantasy. But those are shared with a lot of people, including at least a few I know. My fascination with decaying and abandoned human structures doesn't seem to be that widely shared.

So I was excited to find the featured entry on Wikipedia today is about Dogpatch USA, an abandoned theme park in Arkansas. It was based on the Lil Abner cartoon characters, opened in the late 1960s and initially did well. It started struggling soon, went through ownership changes, bad management, and eventually was killed off by competition and the fact that kids don't know about Lil Abner anymore.

There's something really beautiful about nature reclaiming human structures. The dead buildings are haunting as they slowly merge back into the landscape. Check out these pics, apparently taken by a couple of urban explorers who braved the terrifying No Trespassing signs to take a look.

I've never explored abandoned places, beyond a few empty lots near my home. I'd like to someday.

In other news: Not all US congressmen are morons

2005-11-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

The ridiculous Kelo vs. New London decision has just been gutted by the US House of Representatives. This is some of the best news that has come out of the states since, well, since Scooter Libby was indicted. Or since Bush's approval rating dropped again. It's been a good week.

Background: The Kelo case was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision handed down earlier this year. Mrs. Kelo owned a house that was, I believe, former Army Base housing she had bought years earlier in New London, Conneticut. It wasn't big or fancy, but it was bought and paid for.

The New London civic government decided they wanted a big pharmaceutical plant to be built on the site to generate jobs/tax revenue. They tried to kick Kelo off her land to complete the package and give the land to the developers. The developers and government (hereafter refered to as "the asshats") dragged the case all the way up to the Supremes, who decided that community betterment (read: tax revenue and corporate profits) trumped any rights an individual might hold. Nice one, guys. Way to fight creeping totalitarianism there.

But the House has ganged up on the decision. From SFGate.com:

Conservative defenders of private property and liberal protectors of the poor joined in an overwhelming House vote to prevent local and state governments from seizing homes and businesses for use in economic development projects.

The House legislation, passed 376-38, was in response to a widely criticized 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court last June that allowed eminent domain authority to be used to obtain land for tax revenue-generating commercial purposes.

That decision, said the House's third-ranked Republican, Deborah Pryce of Ohio, "dealt a blow to the rights of property owners across the country."

The bill would withhold for two years all federal economic development funds from states and localities that use economic development as a rationale for property seizures. It also would bar the federal government from using eminent domain powers for economic development.

It now goes to the Senate, where Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has introduced similar legislation.

I love the fact that it's bipartisan, and I suspect both sides aren't as far apart as private property vs. protecting the poor. If the poor actually managed to get a little bit of private property, it damn well needs to be protected.

Cyborg Eyeball!

2005-11-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

Well, not quite. But it is pretty damn nifty. Via Future Feeder, an implantable miniature telescope has been developed and is in phase two and three trials. That's human volunteer trials.

The device is designed for people with age-related macular degeneration, in which the centre of vision is degraded and only the peripheral vision is left. From the rather scanty information on the website, it looks like it's not anything like a complete cure. You get one telescope implanted in one eye, to give you back some centre-of-field vision. The other eye is left alone to provide peripheral vision (is it damaged in the eye with the telescope?).

This implies an interesting stage somewhere between a disability and a complete cure. I imagine that with so many other small, implantable devices, like cochlear implants for the deaf and camera/brain implant combos to provide a version of sight for the blind, we are entering a new stage.

The rather awkward phrase "differently abled" has been tossed around for some time to describe people who used to be called disabled or handicapped. It might be more appropriate for people in this new middle ground of technology-mediated ability ranges.

Alternate Economics: Usufruct

2005-11-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

It sounds like an artificial sweetener (Mmmmmm. Usufruct (tm) has all the great taste with just half the calories!) but it's actually a different way of looking at property rights.

Most people never think about where property rights come from, and when we have an alternative view of property slapped in our faces, it can knock us right down. Think about the stereotypical hippie character in some bad '60s movie screaming "Property is theft!" What the hell does that mean?

I always thought it was a socialist/Marxist thing until I started reading about anarchism a year ago, and discovered the phrase sprang from the pen of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist. He also wrote that "property is freedom," because he knew about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.

What he was getting at, in those simple little phrases, was that he, and most anarchists and socialists since him, don't agree with the way property rights exist in our current society.

Thought experiment: You own one (1) acre of land. By what right do you own it? Well, you bought it from the guy who owned it before you. And he from the person before him, and so on. But in North America, those chains of ownership aren't very long. Eventually, we find someone who settled empty land, or actively swiped it by kicking out/killing the natives. And in Europe or Asia or Africa, you see the same chains of ownership, interupted by occasional theft by men armed with rifle, musket, matchlock, halberd, broadsword, gladius or pointed stick, as appropriate to the era. All land occupied by humans was stolen from other humans at some point or another, and the paperwork was filled in later to make it look like a legal sale. It hardly seems like a reliable basis for a system of ownership, does it?

To replace this system, usufruct has been suggested. Simply put, it means you own what you use. When you stop using it, you cease to own it. If you find unused land or resources, you can start using them yourself. Murray Bookchin, an eco-anarchist, put it this way:

"the principle of usufruct, the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by the virtue of the fact they are using them. . . Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used. Function, in effect, replaces our hallowed concept of possession."

Usually, radicals like to scream slogans like "Property is Theft!" without explaining what they would replace our current system with, which is just bad public relations. If you think about usufruct, it doesn't seem that bad. You live in your house, play lawn darts in the back yard, plant a little garden? You own it, and the community will support your ownership of it, either through some sort of free-market court system or a voluntary jury. The same goes for your car, your wristwatch, your iPod, your dog, your socket wrench set, your collection of small bits of string in the junk drawer.

If you rent an apartment or a basement suite, congratulations! You now own a portion of the building, and are essentially a member of a condo association or part owner of a home. If you are a landlord, you are SOL. If you're lucky, the new owners will hire you as the maintenance guy.

But how do you establish a claim? How long does it last after you wander away? What if you want to go on a six-month trip cataloguing butterflies in Brazil, and when you come back you find that some dirty hippy has moved into your house, because you weren't "using" it? This is one of the thorniest problems of usufruct, and I suspect it could only be worked out, somewhat imperfectly, by trial, error, and the creation of widely-acknowledged custom or common law.

Probably the easist way would be to estalbish community claims offices, like the offices that monitored and licensed gold panners in the 19th century. If you find a vacant house, the first thing you do is wander down to the office. Is it really vacant, or has the owner just forgotten to mow the lawn, or gone on vacation for a few months? If it is vacant, register your claim and move on in. To cement your claim, you should, as Locke urged and old American common law had it, mix a bit of your labour with the land. Fix the place up a bit. Mow the lawn. Plant some carrots or tulips. After a week or a month, the claims officer will wander by, see what you've done, and put a check mark next to your name. Home filled, usufruct-owner in place. (Anarcho-capitalists would no doubt see the claims office as a free-market, for-profit business, possibly with several competing officers, and the collectivists would much rather see a community effort to register property use/occupancy, but it amounts to the same thing in the end.)

Practically, the biggest hurdle to usufruct is probably cultural. We are very used to seeing property as a concrete thing that can be picked up and put down, left alone, but which is still attached as if by invisible threads to its owner. The idea of property without an owner is frightening for some people. A few decades ago, some anarchists in Holland started leaving white bicycles around Amsterdam for anyone to use and then leave when they were done. The police kept seizing them as "stolen property."

The neo-conservative view that private ownership of every resource would provide a better degree of stewardship than any kind of government or communal ownership also rears its head in this discussion. I really can't say just how ridiculous I find this idea. Let's leave aside the fact that a corporation with a five-year financial plan could easily strip mine or clear cut land to fulfil short-term shareholder demands, and look at the example of public parks. I mean small, community parks, with swing sets and a few sports fields. Would you rather they were owned by a private individual for profit (lots of billboard ads, or pay parking, or even paid admission) or by the park users? Sure, there would be lots of free riders, but a community parks group could probably handle keeping things in order pretty well.

In my final note, I'll say that many right anarchists and libertarians believe in something much like the current property rights system. But without a government and police force to enforce property rights, usufruct would become the only method of property distribution. Any private security force that defended someone's right to forbid use of unoccupied land would be a de facto government. And any collectivist group that walled off a section of "their" community "for future use" and stopped others from encroaching would be doing the same thing. And don't think people wouldn't try it.

Alternate Economics and... The Apprentice?

2005-10-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

This is a quasi-rant based on something that has been bothering me since I caught the last few episodes of The Apprentice's first season.

The Apprentice is supposedly a paen to all-American capitalist entrepreneurs (you know, the kind the French don't even have a word for). But the way the show is structured betrays every ethos it supposedly upholds.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of bosses. For those who haven't seen the show, every season starts with two teams (men vs. woman, college grads vs. high schoolers, etc.). The teams are given a task, a deadline, and a budget or the materials to pull off their goal. They compete head to head, and the losers have one team member fired by Donald Trump.

Each team has a leader, the "project manager," who is selected from within. There are no real guidelines for how to select the PM, and in the past it has usually been a process of self-nomination. Typically, each team member tries to take at least one try at it, and a few times, I believe there has been a vote on who should be PM.

The PMs tend to act like bosses, whether good or bad. But they aren't bosses, obviously. They only govern by consensus. If it was a real workplace, they would have power over their fellow workers. They could fire them (can't do that here) could theoretically cut their wages or withold future raises (no one's getting paid), could demote them or put them in the smelly cubicle (but there'll be a new leader next week, no penalty can hold). In fact, the groups undertaking the tasks could more accurately be called (gasp!) cooperatives. They tend to be deficient because everyone is trying to act like a boss, however. They only really know how to behave hierarchically, and everyone is trying to demonstrate "leadership." On some teams, there is a real problem of too many Pizarros, not enough conquistadors. In general, the teams that have the least amount of power politics and personal clashes do the best.

The only power a PM has, even theoretically, is to bench a troublesome team mate for the duration of the task. However, they seldom resort to this, usually giving their more useless/irritating colleagues the scut work, like ordering lunch or sweeping up.

The teams tend to stumble forward because all the members share two collective aims. The first is to win the task of the week. The second is to find a victim to blame if everything goes pear shaped. More often than not, the PM of the losing team gets the boot for "poor leadership," which is sometimes obviously true, and sometimes less so.

Having demolished the notion that The Apprentice is organized like a real capitalist workplace, let's look at that Horatio Alger myth that is so prominently displayed in the advertising. The word leadership has taken such a beating on this show that it could stand in for Ed Norton in Fight Club. But none of the Apprentices are actually trying to become entrepreneurs through the show. They are trying to win a position below someone else - someone they'll likely never surpass in wealth and power. They're gutting each other week after week to reach the highest peaks of middle management.

I was going to refer to this as a kind of feudal system (King Trump, with his privy council of George and Carolyn) but what it really reminds me of is the system of patrons in 18th Century France and England. It was largely expected that to advance in life, one needed a wealthy and powerful patron. And once men rose to a high enough station, they returned the favour to those below them, often their children, nephews or the sons of their friends, creating a massive old-boys network. It seems that this system has returned to the land that spawned the self-made millionaire. Now, you don't make your money with sweat and innovation. You become successful by being close to success. That kind of elitism is more disturbing than any form of capitalism, which is why it's dressed up as "leadership."

One final note: I used to like The Apprentice. It's not that I'm a big fan of the economic system it (supposedly) represents, but I like watching people work together to do something in competition. In the first two seasons, most of the tasks were based on who had the most money at the end, a nice concrete basis for a win or a loss. Who sold the most ice cream? Who got the most money out of a mobile kiosk selling anything they could think of? Now, the show has devolved into product placement hell. All the challengers are public relations or ad based, and they revolve around creating some bullshit tie-in product or marketing campaign. The contestants, who may or may not be good business people, suck at these jobs, because by and large they aren't creative at all, much less for a living. Watching them make asses of themselves shilling for Dairy Queen or Best Buy is just sad.

The Rule of Law on the Final Frontier

2005-10-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

I've recently started watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD, and despite my early reservations (it is a remake of one of the cheesiest SF shows ever) it's actually pretty good. It's no Firefly, that's for sure, but the mini-series/pilot was pretty well written, very well acted in places, and it had some compelling fight scenes and space battles.

So yesterday, I rented the first disc of the actual series, and watched four episodes. The first two were quite good. The third, Bastille Day, was a bit of a dud. And it brought up an issue that shows up with alarming frequency in SF, and is usually handled badly. No exception here.

Bastille Day is about a prison riot. The fleet of about 50,000 people is running out of water, thanks to some sabotage in the previous ep. They've found an ice moon, but mining it will be labour intensive. They need workers. For some reason, the Commander Adama and President Roslyn decide that prison labour will be just the ticket. (The 40,000 or so civilians on passenger liners and cargo ships were busy, I guess.) There happens to be a transport ship of convicts that made it into the fleet. The labour will be voluntary, and the prisoners will earn "points" towards their release by participating. (Interesting aside: the prisoners were on their way to parole hearings. Some of them should, in all likelihood, already be released by this point. Nice of the powers that be to offer them "points towards release.")

When Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama and a few other crew and civilians go on board the prison ship to make the offer, they are ambushed and captured by the prisoners. The jailbirds are being led by a terrorist/freedom fighter called Tom Zarek. There is much bloviating among the cast members about which category he falls into, and it seems from their exposition he blew up a government building, with people inside. So I'd say he falls more on the Timothy McVeigh side of the ledger, whether he was standing up for his oppressed people or not.

(As a side note, Zarek is played by Richard Hatch, one of the stars of the original Battlestar Galactica. He couldn't act then, he can't act now. It's like watching a block of wood. Why, why couldn't they have stuntcast Dirk Benedict instead! Give us cheese!)

To this point, my response to this episode is "Eh." I've seen this plot, or a variation of it, several times before on SF shows and military/cop/politicial dramas. Star Trek: TNG and DS9 used the Maquis for this particular plot device, on Babylon 5 the Martian colonists sometimes filled this role. It gives the writers a chance to talk about when you cross the line from a just rebellion to terrorism.

Unfortunately, the writers almost always give in to the need to make things simpler. The lead bad guy usually turns out to be either A) a snake who only wants personal aggrandizement or B) an ideologue so warped that he is willing to destroy anyone and anything to get his way.

Bastille Day has it both ways. From Television Without Pity, here's part of the episode recap where Apollo realizes Zarek's "plan" just as commandos storm the prison ship.

In the control room, Apollo realizes, "You want them to storm the ship."

The Marines begin to cut through the hull of the Astral Queen.

Apollo continues, "You don't want elections, you don't want your freedom -- you want a bloodbath." He says that Zarek's been forgotten for twenty years, and that this is a chance to "go out in a blaze of glory."

The Marines enter the Astral Queen and move past a prisoner that they've already tied up and gagged. Before he could sound the alarm. Gee, that was lucky.

Zarek enters full-on crazy as he declares, "Once Roslyn uses Adama's soldiers to massacre the people on this ship, prisoners and hostages alike, the people in the fleet will never, never forgive them. The entire government will collapse." Yay?

Real world freedom fighters, even real world terrorists, usually have much more transparent aims than this. They're pretty up front about what they want. Even al Qaida openly acknowledges that they're trying to spark a big war between the evil, nasty, secular west and purified Islam. But in TVland, everybody's got some weird, psychological, hidden motivation.

Anyway, Apollo saves the day, interestingly, by saving Zarek from getting his brains splattered by a sniper. (Usually writers kill these terrorist characters off.) Apollo then promises free elections, and leaves the prisoners in charge of their ship, taking off the crew and guards. It's the first novel thing this episode has done. Then Apollo has to go explain himself to the higher ups, including his father, the military commander.

The Prez is stuck on the idea of holding elections within a year. Apollo notes that former President Adar's term is over in seven months, and according to the law, there should be elections then. Adama growls that Apollo sounds like a lawyer. Apollo clenches his jaw and says that he has sworn to defend the law, and that the law says there should be an election. He adds, "If you're telling me [that] we're throwing out the law, than I am not a captain, you're not a commander, and you are not the president. And I don't owe either of you a damned explanation for anything." And once again, I love their different reactions to this. The Prez looks rueful, but like she agrees, as she says, "He's your son." And Adama just looks infuriated as he rasps, "He's your advisor." He glares at Apollo for a second and says, "I guess you finally picked your side," before leaving. Which...yeah, I don't know. The side of the law? Stupid laws!

It's a better ending than I was expecting. The convicts will mine the ice, voluntarily. They're dependent on the rest of the fleet for food resupply and protection from the Cylons, so they have a powerful incentive to not attack anyone else.

But the final explanation of why Apollo did what he did left me cold. I actually think that you should do what's morally right regardless of the law. But this kind of thinking, that the rule of law should always trump everything else, shows up in a lot of modern culture, from the West Wing to Star Trek. It implies that all laws are just and wise, which history (and the present) shows is simply not true. And there is another undercurrent, as exemplified by the final scene, that also bothered me.

The Prez is reading the book she got from Adama when Apollo enters her quarters. Apollo wants to explain that he wasn't being disloyal to her, and the Prez says that she admires his principles. Then she asks him to sit down, and after a slight hesitation, she tells Apollo that she has cancer. She swears Apollo to secrecy, saying, "Whether or not I survive this, it is of great importance to me that there's a future for the people. And I fear that knowledge of my illness will erode hope." Apollo assures her that she can trust him.

An ongoing subplot, never shown, is that there are riots in the civilian ships over water rationing. The military characters mock the civilians for their lack of discipline. Then the president decides to hide her illness, because the common people couldn't handle that, either. And the higher ups are hiding the fact that the Cylons have human-appearing infiltrators. Zarek doesn't tell his own supporters about his ultimate plan.

The ultimate lesson seems to be that the mass of people are too stupid and panicky to deal with the whole truth. In television, where the viewer ultimately has the most knowledge, we are invited into this elite club of the powerful. We assume ourselves to be as wise and calm as the leader-characters we watch. When in reality, 99 per cent of us would be on the outside.

Ironically, this episode about democracy has become a powerful example of elitism and anti-democratic thinking. The most disturbing thing about this is the fact that I can think of a number of other examples of similar plots on a variety of television shows.

Compare and contrast that with the plot of Serenity, or with the X-Files. Mulder, Scully and the Lone Gunmen were always trying to fight against just this sort of top-down, authoritarian secret-hoarding. Just like we should be in real life. The masses are not that stupid. Arguing that they are is just one short step from thinking that they shouldn't be able to make any decisions for themselves - like who to vote for.

Lost without a plot

2005-10-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different.

My girlfriend (who is both wise and beautiful) sent me an e-mail a while ago mocking the first two episodes of Lost that have aired so far this season. I'm reposting most of it here, because it's too damn funny not to share.

Some background: we both loved the first half-dozen or so episodes of Lost. It has a great premise, fine actors, a novel setting and it set up some great mysteries in the first few episodes. One of our favourite scripts was written by David Fury, late of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and other fine shows.

Well, David left. The mysteries showed no sign of being resolved. Ever. The scripts started showing signs that the writers were actively resisting revealing any information. Characters concealed things from each other for no reason, didn't bother to question strange events, and otherwise began acting like morons. Executive producers JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof relentlessly hyped every disappointing episode like it was the second coming of Robert A. Heinlein. We, the viewers, became embittered by about episode twelve or fifteen.

Here, then, is proof that out of bitterness can come comedy.

JJ Abrams: Whoohoo, thank goodness we figured out was in the hatch before the season premiere.

Damon Lindelof: A scottish guy!!! Viewers will never see that coming, and it will totally change everything.

New writing intern: umm, guys! I’m sorry to interrupt all the back patting and high fiving, but I’m working on the script for episode two and I have some questions.

JJ: Fire away young apprentice! And remember, this year’s motto “Everything happens for a reason!”

DL: That motto is so great! With a motto like that people will totally be able to see why Lost is the best television drama ever!

Intern: Right. Well, it’s great that there was a Scottish guy in the hatch, and that he has some weird connection to Jack.

DL: Jack is the most heroic and admirable character you’ll ever see on television. Viewers will not believe the amazing twists we have in store for Jack this season.

Intern: So what the writing staff needs is a bit more guidance, like for example who is this Scottish guy, why is he in the hatch, and what affect or connection will he have with the rest of the characters?

JJ and Damon stare blankly at the intern. The sound of crickets chirping can be heard faintly in the background. After several awkward moments JJ burst out laughing and points at the intern.

JJ: Good one kid! You really had me going there, expecting “answers” to all those complicated “questions” Seriously, if we gave you that much information now, you’d have enough to go write four...maybe five seasons worth of episodes.

Intern (counting to ten in his head before speaking): Well what should I do for episode two then?

Sound of crickets...then finally...

DL: Episode 1 totally rocked. Viewers must have been completely on the edge of their seat when they saw it. Couldn’t you just make another one that’s like episode one only, you know, different?

Intern: I think the viewers might notice it’s the same.

JJ: No, no...I think Damon’s on to something here. What we should do is go back to the point when we blew the hatch, and then show all that stuff...Kate falling down the hatch, Locke going after her, Jack going after Locke, the big reveal when Jack confronts the Scottish guy...yeah, we’ll show all that stuff again...only...from a different character’s perspective. Yes, and we’ll cut it in with lots of shots of “Wet Sawyer” on the raft, cause that ladies like that kinda stuff.

DL: Me too! Er, I mean, “Wet Sawyer” that really brings in the ratings.

Intern: You mean you want me to make the Hatch plot exactly the same as last week, only show it from a different character’s perspective, and you want me to end on the same note of Jack recognizing the Scottish guy?

JJ: YES! Exactly! That’s what we experts in the writing world call parallel construction. You’ll understand when you have a bit more experience, kid

At this point JJ picks up one of the five emmys his show “won”, and wiggles it in the intern's face.

DL (unable to take his eyes off the statue): Oooh, shiny.

Intern: So which character’s perspective then?

JJ: Kate, the viewers love Kate.

DL: Kate is the best female character ever seen on television. The stuff that happens to Kate this season will totally change everything you ever thought you knew about her.

Intern (sighing): Do you think maybe I could throw in a polar bear attack or something. For umm, the audience members who are less interested in the hatch plot?

JJ: A polar bear? Like a real one?

Intern: Yes, like in the pilot. That episode totally kicked ass, and is the entire reason why I applied to work here.

JJ: And lucky you, after the hasty retreat of twenty other more experienced writers, your dream has finally come true.

DL: I just don’t understand why we can’t keep staff writers. Lost is the best show on television, we won five emmys.

JJ: Now kid, getting back to this polar bear idea. I’m thinking, no. No more “real” polar bears, but how about you throw in a stuffed polar bear somehow. That’ll drive all those loons out there that think we have continuity absolutely crazy. And we need the continuity nerds to keep waging war against the bitterness brigade, otherwise our entire fan base is going to be watching Veronica Mars by November.

Intern (very quietly): I like Veronica Mars. I hear the writers over there have a Show Bible.

DL: Oh, and throw in the numbers, people love the numbers.

Intern: Throw them in how? What do they mean?

JJ: Mean? Kid, you’ve got a lot to learn. The numbers don’t have to mean anything, people just have to think they mean something to give them meaning. Understand?

Intern: No, not really.

JJ: Well, just put them on something, or have the characters say them, it doesn’t really matter as long as they’re in there somehow.

Intern: All right, so just to summarize, I write last week’s hatch plot again, only from Kate’s perspective. I throw in some “Wet Sawyer”

JJ: Makes sure he breathes heavily a lot too. You know, like sex sounds, only have him making them for another reason.

Intern: Okay...and I throw in a stuffed polar bear, and the numbers. Is that all? It sounds like a very full episode, maybe we could drop the flashbacks for this week?

JJ (swinging his emmy menacingly) Kid, if yours wasn’t the last resume left in our selection pile I’d fire you right now for saying that. We are NEVER dropping the flashbacks. They’re our staple.

Intern: So, who should we flashback this week?

JJ (shrugging): Ahh, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter really.

JJ picks up a dart from his desk and throws it at a target on his wall that has all the Lost characters' names clearly marked.

JJ: Michael it is then.

Intern: What would you like the viewers to learn about Michael through the flashbacks?

JJ: Learn...through the flashbacks?? No, no. Just cover something viewers already know about Michael. If we introduce too much new information in one episode viewers will become confused. Oh, and you want to end on a high note so have something really exciting happen in the last five minutes. Don’t make it too obvious though.

Intern: Exciting, but not obvious?

JJ: Make it happen to Jin, off screen of course, and then Jin can come running up to some other characters and start babbling in Japanese about the exciting thing. The other characters, and the viewers, won’t have a clue what’s happening, they’ll just know it’s exciting!

Intern: Jin’s Korean, not Japanese.

JJ: Really? Huh. Well, whatever.

Intern (through gritted teeth): Great. Well this has been informative. Hey listen, you’re both big time Hollywood celebrities, would either of you happen to have Rob Thomas’s phone number?

JJ (pulling a card out of his giant rolladex): Of course, I know everyone in the biz.

DL: Are you going to call him and brag about how you’re working on Lost, the best drama that’s ever been on network television? Winner of five emmys and voted Entertainment Weekly’s choice for hottest drama of the year?

Intern (backing out of the office with the card clenched in his hand like a life preserver) : Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.

As the intern exists, JJ pulls out some silver polish and he and Damon get to work polishing their emmys.

DL: Are we going to work on the scripts for the sweeps episodes today?

JJ: Naw, let’s just shine our emmys.

Aw, shucks

2005-10-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

Blinkit has some nice things to say here about my writing and my chances of winning the 3 Day Novel Contest.

Thanks for the kind words, Barry. I'm hoping the zebra puts in a strong showing, too. Maybe if I can at least make the short list, it'll be easier to sell the story.

Only $10 million!?!

2005-10-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

For months, I've been jumping up and down like a little kid who needs a trip to the potty, waiting for the film version of Firefly to hit theatres. One of the worst things about the wait was that there were several opportunities to see Serenity early, and I missed them.

There were pre-screenings all over North America... but I didn't get to see any. My boss gave me a two-person pass to see the movie the Wednesday before it opened... but I couldn't make that, either. I gave it to my brother, and he assured me it was great.

Now, I've finally seen it, in a theatre full of Firefly and Joss Whedon fans. And it was damn good. If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading this and go directly to a movie theatre. It has almost everything a great summer movie should have, and that I didn't see in any of the actual summer blockbusters this year. It has great action - chase scenes, bar fights, acrobatics, kung fu moves, shoot outs. It has hilarious dialogue, some of the best, sharpest jokes Joss has written since... well, since Firefly was cancelled. It has a great cast, who are allowed those small, subtle moments of emotion that so few film makers bother to capture in this kind of a movie. How many action movies can you name where the camera lingers just a moment longer after the dialogue ends in a scene, to capture the sad quirk of a mouth, or for that perfect beat of comic timing that drives a punchline home? How many movies can you name where you not only liked the dialogue and the chase scene, you liked the dialogue during the chase scene?

From here on, there are spoilers. Consider yourself warned.

The film also has one of the better science fiction plots I've actually seen in a while. Most SF in film and television is mining from two veins: The Matrix and The X-Files. Even seemingly original shows like Lost can be summed up as "It's like X-Files meets Survivor!" Joss has gone back a bit and is working from the older vein of space opera, a genre that has been worked over pretty thoroughly by the Stars (Wars and Trek) and needed a good kick in the pants.

In Star Trek, the heroes are authority figures, military officials and scientists with ranks, government backing and rules to follow. In Star Wars, they are chosen ones, mystical warriors with destiny guiding them. Firefly goes completely against both grains, giving us a gang of bank robbers and smugglers, the losers and scum of human space, who nevertheless have functioning moral compasses. Well, except maybe for Jayne.

Here, it's the villain who represents authority, order and government. The Operative reminded me both of the Soviet revolutionaries and of hard-right American Cold Warriors. He has a bright future in mind, and he's given up on a conventional morality so he can make it happen. Every society generates people like this: willing to violate society's own ethical codes, justifying their evil as for a greater good. (In his use of a sword and careful diction, he's also the most Jedi-like character in the film. Not sure if that's a deliberate comment on Star Wars, or just because killing people with swords is cool.)

The central mystery and premise of the film is also one that is (for an action movie) remarkably well thought out. It also gives us the origin of the Reavers, about whom there has been much speculation among fans.

The ending, in which the Operative survives and (almost) changes sides, is also a typical Whedon touch. He loves to undermine our expectations, making us look at character and plot in a new way. It doesn't have to be the same as everything else you've seen, he seems to be saying. The fact that little is resolved, that the real power brokers remain off stage, and that the final victory is as much moral as it is actual, is also typical. You can't just fly in and blow up all the bad guys with one well-placed missile. Changing the worlds is, and always will be, a work in progress.

And there are the shocks. The death of Shepherd Book didn't surprise me much at all. The other death was quite a kick to the head. I sure didn't see it coming, and I had the classic moment of "that character's okay, right?" Even though having a six-inch thick spike through your heart usually does not denote good health.

Now, some minor quibbles. The relationship between Inara and Mal almost felt tacked on, and her appearance halfway through the film could have been confusing for some people who had never seen the televison series (although it had some damn funny dialogue). The change from a series of solar systems to one solar system in the film seemed like pointless retcon. And from a logical point of view, why didn't the Reavers trash the surface of Miranda, or kill the passive 90 per cent of the population? Why are they not all dead from fighting with each other? Why did they all go into space in the first place? But from the point of view of a two-hour movie, these are really very small problems. (War of the Worlds wishes its problems were this small.)

I think the movie will benefit from much re-watching, and I plan to start that later this week. Now you should go see it again too. After all, we can't let it stay at just $10 million profit!

Happy Birthday, Tyrant Lizard King!

2005-10-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Today it has been 100 years since the discovery of the first Tyranosaurus Rex fossils. I have to admit that I've never really been a fan of the T. Rex as much as many people are. I guess I'm just not as impressed with it's label as the biggest land predator that ever lived. I like the quirky, little dinos a bit better, like Troodon. And my favourite big theropod is probably the Ceratosaurus, with its three horns.

Check out the Hairy Museum of Natural History for lots more info, including the first published illustration of the beastie standing next to a human skeleton for scale. It's in the famously discredited "kangaroo" pose.

T. Rex is still pretty damn interesting, despite being passed in the biggest theropod sweepstakes by Giganotosaurus, and possibly by Charcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus. Researchers have just found what may be preserved soft tissue inside the bones of a T. Rex fossil. Whether this is really preserved blood vessels, proteins or what have you, or merely an artifact of the way the fossils were being prepared will no doubt be fought over for years, but it puts the big guy at the forefront of research again.

Alternate Economics and SE2

2005-09-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about alternate economics, and I’ve been meaning to write a bit about Georgism, which is one of those fascinating neither-right-nor-left ideas that appear up from time to time.

And then a few days ago an e-mail popped into my home in box that really reminded me of my favourite form of Georgism, the environmental kind. The e-mail was from my two-jobs-ago life as a reporter for the (sadly departed) Sterling News Service. It was from a city councillor in Abbotsford, reminding me that Sumas Energy 2 was about to appeal the ruling of a National Energy Board panel, and...

I can see you’re going to sleep out here, so let’s speed up. Sumas Energy 2 (aka SE2, aka the fucking thug polluters) wanted to build a big, natural gas fired power plant just south of Abbotsford, in Sumas, Washington State. It would pump out smoke, most of which would have drifted north across the line, and aggravated an already smoggy little atmospheric bowl, full of crap that drifted east from Vancouver.

Now, the SE2 fellows are wily capitalist running dogs. They bought cheap land that was too far north to connect easily to high tension wires anywhere in Washington State. But there were wires just a few klicks over the border. They’d run a power line across and connect to a B.C. Hydro substation, no problem. Hell, Abbotsford’s a real conservative town, full of free enterprise, gun loving Christians (and some Sikhs and assorted others). Surely they’d welcome a power plant!

Ummmm... it turns out that the thing conservatives are most conservative about is the health of their children. This was the result. (Note: I didn’t write that story for the National Post. I wrote it for Sterling, which supplied copy to CanWest, which owns the Post. Yay, convergence. And this was back when it was just a right wing rag, not a shitty right wing rag with no sense of shame or decency.)

So, in the saga of SE2, the intervenors finally won the day. The NEB decided that the costs of the project (smog, asthma, lots and lots of angry people screaming for their blood) somehow outweighed the benefits (a tiny number of jobs to build the power line, a trickle of tax revenue). Until the appeal started. At the Supreme Court.

What the hell, those of you who have stuck in this long are asking, does this have to do with Georgism?

Georgism (quick, possibly error-filled summary follows) is a single-tax idea created by the 19th Century newspaper editor Henry George. He noticed that when land was cheap for the taking, around San Francisco, there was a rough equality of wealth. When land became expensive, and was bought up by speculators, some became rich and others poor.

George decided that land was fundamentally different from other real property. As Georgists say, they aren’t making any more of it. You can own a building, an iPod, or a car outright because it is the product of human labour. But according to Georgists, the outright ownership of land is immoral. Land belongs to the community, and to future generations. The products of human labour belong to those who made them.

George therefore proposed that land be the only thing taxed, based on its value. Land could still be occupied and no one would be tossed out of their house or business, but anyone who hogged land would be penalized for it, financially. The proposal was aimed at penalizing anyone who tried to speculate in land, and at allowing the poor, with their apartments and small lots, to pay less tax and keep more of their income. In theory, it could largely side-step the rent-seeking nature of capital, and avoid Adam Smith’s dictum that rent extracts the maximum amount of profit from its tennants.

George’s books were a publishing phenomenon in the late 19th Century, and his ideas were incorporated, in a watered down form, into legislation in a few countries.

Over the years, Georgism has been expanded into other aspects of the world’s natural resources, everything from mineral rights to the radio spectrum. BC’s stumpage and logging tenure rights system was re-written during the Dave Barrett government of the 1970s by a left-leaning Georgist, and it reflects the principles reasonably well.

So why can’t we apply Georgism to, at the very least, environmental law? SE2 is an example of why it would be a great idea.

Currently, most countries impose limits on emissions of various compounds, such as sulpher dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter. You can spew as much as you want, as long as it’s below X amount. And a lot of firms, accidentally or by deliberate negligence, release more in the certainty that the fines will be less than the cost of upgrading or fixing the problems.

These compounds are not good to breathe, period. Imagine if we taxed industry based in large part on what kind of crap, and how much, they were dumping into the atmosphere and water? Two companies, side by side, each with the same number of workers and the same wages, could be taxed very differently. If one of them has smokestacks, it pays for the scientifically estimated costs of the lung diseases, asthma, emergency room visits and damage to the ecosystem it will cause. The other, zero-emission business pays nothing in environmental taxes, and is only taxed on the amount of land and water it uses.

With the taxes indexed down to the dollar based on emissions, there is no getting out of paying, no minimum level of pollutants. Stop polluting, you pay less, period.

A large part of the taxation system should be moved into the Georgist domain, to provide a spur to efficiency and green business. We’d all pay some of our Georgist fees for driving CO2 spewing cars, too. Switch from eight cylinders to four, pay less.

(The difficulty, of course, is in calculating the tax level. We would have to use the best science available, but it will no doubt be somewhat inaccurate. Companies and communities will need the right to appeal the taxation levels. But we also have to beware of junk science and paranoia. And should the money go the feds, the provinces, the cities, directly to the citizens or to a mixture of several?)

Switching to a Georgist system overnight would be an incredibly hard sell, but when you tie environmental costs directly to the taxation system, I think it would win easy acceptance from Canadians from both the left and right of the spectrum. It would certainly appeal to the conservative, free-market citizens of Abbotsford.

The Shape of Things to Come (Undone)

2005-09-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

A few predictions for the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the coming weeks, months and years. I expect to get fewer than half of these right, but I'm sure it will be the most cynical half I hit bang on.

1. Contracting scandals. These have almost started already, with more Iraq-style no-competition, guaranteed profit contracts handed out to the usual suspects, Bechtel and Halliburton. (The beauty of the Bush administration is that there is no longer a need for direct bribes to sway the government toward a particular course of action. The government and the kleptocrats are one and the same; they are two wheels of the same train, locked in parallel by greed and self-righteous ideology.)

2. A lack of mainstream reporting on the worst abuses. CNN and especially Fox News will ignore or downplay many aspects of the disaster. These strange stories - about people prevented from leaving New Orleans by armed police, about white British tourists being spirited out of the Superdome at night, about armed guards preventing the poor from "looting" food and water - will mostly appear, uncorroborated, on blogs and marginal internet news sites. There they will fester and become indistinguishable from the conspiracy theories and myths that have already arisen. The public will slip ever further into mistrust, paranoia and magical thinking. Eventually, some major American newspaper will confirm many of these tales in a serious investigative piece; it will win a Pulitzer and will be read by less than one tenth of the people who believe the dikes were blown up to kill blacks.

3. Americans will be completely unable to talk about the issue of class, using the word race instead. The word "poor" will almost always be followed by the word "black" in commentary on why there was no proper evacuation plan. There will be no discussion about how to amelitorate poverty, or about what this strange lack says about the American psyche.

4. There will be no serious attempt to clean up the environmental mess left behind during the current administration by either the state or federal government, unless it seems necessary for the convenience of developers.

5. Money to compensate those who lost their homes will be logjammed so thoroughly by the bureacracy that many people will sell their compensation rights to private corporations at pennies on the dollar. The speculators will reap a massive windfall when the feds pay up.

6. Most of the land in the poorer sections of New Orleans will be declared uninhabitable. The remnants of houses will be bulldozed and a massive, government sponsored effort to clean up the site will be made. After hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, along with billions more on improved flood control, the land will be sold for a fraction of its value to politically connected developers. New Orleans will, as Billmon has predicted, become a Disney version of itself, designed to suck in tourists. This time, the poor will have to live outside the city proper, on land that is not so well protected from flooding.

7. Refugees, especially the poor, will be treated as though they are idiotic, criminal children. The camps they have been dumped in will include curfews, lockdowns, searches and as many petty, humiliating procedures as possible to remind the inmates it is their fault they were in the path of a hurricane.

8. No one will be prosecuted for malfeasance. The worst offenders won't even lose their jobs.

I really, really hope I'm wrong.

Evil Monsters Savaging the Poor, Again

2005-09-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

I just read, via Lenin's Tomb, this first person account by a woman who made it out of New Orleans after being trapped there for several days. She was airlifted after armed police refused to let her and several hundred others walk out of New Orleans.

All week, I've been wondering why people simply didn't walk down that highway that leads past the Superdome. Doesn't that go out of town? Does it dip under water somewhere? The news anchors didn't even speculate. Apparently, the roads out were blocked off by the cops, who didn't want to deal with poor, black refugees in neighbouring counties.

If this is true - and there are enough similar stories showing up on BoingBoing and other sites for me to give it a lot of credibility - then the authorities have actually caused almost every problem since the levies broke. The crime, looting, starvation, dehydration, abysmal living conditions, the strange new refugee relief centres that are run like POW camps, all seem to have been made worse or actually caused by a desire for total control, at gunpoint, of the disaster.

Why on earth did any New Orleans cops, under the mayor's fucktard orders or not, stop saving people to shoot at looters? The city was fucking destroyed, is preventing someone from swiping ten pairs of Levis really going to make up for that? Here's the thing: private property does not trump human life, ever. Property is a damned illusion, saving the living is all that matters.

None of the people responsible for this idiocy will ever really be brought to justice. This is one of the days when it sucks to be an atheist. I can't even relish the thought of Bush, Cheney, the FEMA Horse-Twit, et al, burning in Hell.

Iron Man of Words!

2005-09-07T15:50:00.000-07:00

Woo hoo! I did it! I finished a substantial, coherent manuscript for the 3-Day Novel Contest! It's 37,500 words! It doesn't suck! I'm awesome!

I signed up just in time, weeks after actually printing and filling out the application form (those who know me, especially my wise and beautiful girlfriend, will not be surprised by this). Then on the day before the contest, I got more and more anxious. I couldn't possibly finish a novel. I could, but it would suck. It would suck and I'd be so tired I'd sleep for 24 hours after it was finished.

I was sitting at the computer, almost bouncing up and down in my chair for the last five minutes before midnight Friday, staring at the blank MS Word file. The my watch alarm went off and my fingers dove for the keys like starved weasels darting for scraps of rancid jerky.

For those who don't know it, the 3-Day Novel Contest has been around since 1977, and is therefore a year older than I am. It is based on the honour system, and anyone can enter, from anywhere in the world. The rules are simple: write a novel, on any subject, during the three days starting at 12:01 a.m. the Saturday before Labour Day, finish at 12:00 a.m. the following Monday. Outlines are allowed, and notes, and research, but every phrase in the novel has to be crafted during those three days.

I've so far only published two stories, but I knew I was capable of writing fairly clean first-draft copy, and of writing it fast. Speed, indeed, is one of my main talents, and I sometimes wish I had been born during the golden age of the pulps, when it was an asset that trumped style and characterization nine times out of ten. My outline was simple, just four sheets of paper on which I had scribbled the outlines of my main characters and a sketch of the first few chapters (and I lost the piece with the chapter outline before I started).

Still, it went amazingly well. The first morning, after 12 a.m., I wrote until about 4:30 a.m. and then staggered off to bed to sleep. I woke up at 10:30, started filling myself with tea and mini-Cokes and using caffeine to stave off the next collapse. That turned out to be a bad idea. The headache started around noon and faded in and out all day. By about 8 p.m. I'd fallen into an extended break from the writing that lasted until 11 p.m. I finally decided I just needed more sleep, or the writing wouldn't start again, or wouldn't be any good when it did. I set an alarm for 8 a.m. the next morning and slept almost nine hours.

I woke up, sans headache, and feeling a hell of a lot better. I kept myself to about half the caffeine ration of the day before, made myself some tortellini and vegetable soup around 2 p.m. and generally tried to act like it was a normal working day. My productivity was as good as when I had been panicked on day one, and I was able to look at my own work with a much cooler eye. By the end of the day, when I stopped writing at about 10 p.m., I had more than 20,000 words saved. Another night of decent sleep, up at 7 a.m. the next day, and another productive, pain free day.

From the middle of the afternoon on the last day, I knew I would finish with time to spare. The climactic chapter was finished by 2:30 or so, and I stopped writing for three hours. Then from 5:30 to 10:40, I finished the 1500 word epilogue and tackled the task of editing the whole thing, making sure there were no glaring errors or dropped plot threads. I also punched up the language and characterization where possible. This added about 1,500 words to the manuscript. I didn't get up during the last stretch except to go to the bathroom, and when I was done, my brain felt like mush. But it was triumphant mush!

In general, I have to say that the contest was not nearly as hard as I had expected. And it was a hell of a lot of fun. I love writing, and a long uninterupted stretch during which no one would bother me, call me or drop by to do nothing but write was like a blessing from the gods.

Now what? Well, it goes into the mail today or tomorrow to the judges. I apparently won't hear back from them until about December. (But I need feedback now!) The winning prize is a publishing contract, second is $500 Canadian cash.

I'm not going to get either. Let's be clear, by Tuesday afternoon (which I took off work) I was already thinking of all the things I could/should have done in the novel. But even if I had worked myself harder, had forsaken sleep, had jammed caffeine pills in my mouth, I don't think I'd have written a winning book.

The thing is, I'm a genre SF and fantasy writer. I don't write stereotypical stuff, I hate ordinary military space opera and elf-quests alike, but my work is strongly plotted stuff. I've tried to develop a strong style and to build up great characters, but what got me going on this book, as on any story, was a really cool central idea, one only possible in fantasy.

So, as I told my girlfriend (who is both wise and beautiful) I don't think it will get selected by a panel of non-SFnal judges. It's like bringing a zebra to a horse show. It may be the finest damn zebra there is, but that's not what they're looking for. There's never been a straight up SF or fantasy winner of the contest.

Of course, if by some miracle they do choose me, I'll be happy to eat crow.

Abandoned to live in the world's largest toilet bowl

2005-08-31T12:59:00.000-07:00

I put up - and quickly removed - a post this morning wherein I speculated that the main cause for so many deaths from Hurricane Katrina was that many Americans are too stubborn, mistrustful of authority and ill-educated to actually heed the warnings.

Surfing to a number of other Katrina-related blogs, I quickly realized I was wrong. No doubt a small number of people didn't leave New Orleans for those reasons, but they seem to be in the minority, judging by what relief organizations are saying. Apparently, almost everyone left in the city was too old, sick and/or poor to leave.

Check out a few websites with the evacuation plan for New Orleans. Listen closely for the voices telling you about the government buses taking people out of the city, about the evacuation efforts by the city, the state, the feds...

(sound of crickets)

The state trooper website for Louisiana contains numerous route maps on how to get out of town, but if you don't have a car, there are few options. Most of the people who faced the worst part of the storm were poor and a majority were black.

And now martial law has been declared to control rampant looting. Here's a recipe for civil order: take the poorest 10 to 20 per cent of the population of an already violent city. Add a major catastrophe. Take away electricity, drinkable water, and food. Add the fact that police are mostly busy pulling people off their roofs. Looting, you say? What a fucking surprise.

How much money does it cost to pluck people, one at a time, off of their rooftops with a helicopter? Compare total cost to the fuel, drivers and rental costs of using school, city and charter buses to offer anyone who wanted it a free ride out of the city. Not only is compassion better, it's a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run.

UPDATE:

Here's a link to the rescue-worker e-mail, referenced on a number of websites and reproduced at boingboing.net.

And speaking of buses, now that a significant portion of the city's voting public might drown in the Superdome, they appear to be available. From CNN:

In New Orleans, authorities prepared Wednesday to evacuate about 25,000 displaced residents who've been stranded since Katrina struck and transport them to the Houston Astrodome.

Texas officials offered to open the giant, mostly disused domed stadium as a shelter for people displaced by the storm. (See the video of the governor's plan to help the stranded -- 3:09)

Most have been staying at the Louisiana Superdome, another domed stadium which was designated a refuge for people who could not evacuate the city before the storm roared ashore on Monday.

The grasslands of Barsoom

2005-08-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

I've just finished rereading The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes. It was actually better than I remembered. As my girlfriend (who is both wise and beautiful) says, it's a great little action-adventure SF story. But I have one little nitpick, which is actually common to a lot of other SF, both of the hard and soft varieties.

A brief synopsis: A band of 200 colonists has travelled in cryogenic suspension to a nearby habitable, earthlike planet and established a colony on an island. They are attacked by a strange critter they call a grendel - built like a Komodo dragon, it can move as fast as a cheetah, bite like a shark and has tail spikes like a stegosaurus.

The colonists kill the first critter after losing some of their number, then slaughter every one of the creatures on their island. But they didn't understand the grendel reproductive cycle. The fish-like critters in ponds and rivers are actually immature grendels, tadpoles of a sort. By removing all the adult grendels, the colonists have sent a signal for every one of the thousands of juvenilles to grow up into fierce adults. And the final battle is on.

My nitpick doesn't concern the grendels, which are great creations. They can supercharge their blood with an oxidizer that lets them move like the Flash, but also overheats them, forcing them to stay near cold water. And their reproductive strategy is based on real Earth animals.

The problem is with the background biology, which is simplistic and essentially a rip off of Earth's.

The planet of Avalon has grass, flowering plants, bushes with berries and fruits and trees, small mammal-like critters and flying pterosaur-analogues. All of the plants are primarily green, apparently using chlorophyl to photosynthesize. But how likely is it that we'll find all those things on any planet?

How long has grass, that ubiquitous plant, been around on Earth? Maybe 30 million years. The producers of the Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts series have bemoaned the fact that they couldn't film anywhere with grass for any of the Mesozoic segments, and about half of the Tertiary segments. And grasses evolved from flowering plants, which didn't turn up until the late Jurassic, and didn't become common until the mid-Cretaceous.

There's a fabulous article that goes into all this in much more detail, along with the origins of a terribly addictive South American plant, here.

On another world, the notion that the gymnosperm to flowering plant to grass transition would happen exactly as it did here is fairly absurd. There would likely be whole plant-like species that wouldn't correspond to any known family. And why would they be green? If they struck on a molecule a bit better than chlorophyl (plants only convert about 2 per cent of the sun's light to energy) they would be dominant on their world - in shades of red, blue, orange or purple, perhaps.

So it's particularly galling to read a hard science fiction novel that so lovingly creates an alien animal, but ignores the other elements of the alien biosphere. Sure, it may be that Niven, Pournelle and Barnes just wanted to get on with the meat of their story, and who can fault them for that? But a few elements of the story betray a lack of understanding of the randomness of evolution.

In one chapter, a scientist character has trapped a few furry, mink-like critters, and decides that because they are fur covered and look like mammals, they most likely nurture their young with milk. But there's no reason to expect that on another planet, it won't be the scaly, lizard-looking creatures that give birth to live young and suckle them, and the furry ones that lay eggs and then run off, leaving their offspring to fend for themselves. A few advantagous mutations here, a bit of chance there, and wild combinations are possible.

I'm now looking forward to reading Beowulf's Children, the book's sequel. If I remember correctly, it includes a lot of interesting animals as the characters explore their planet's mainland.

Lucas, Scourge of Fans

2005-08-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

I had a terrible vision last night. I saw George Lucas, risen supreme and spreading his evil among other creators! The horror!

What evil? The suckness that was Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and (to a slightly lesser extent) Episode Three: Anakin the Whiny Child-Killer?

Those were bad, but not evil. If we had to denounce and hound people for being evil, Jerry Bruckheimer would have been thrown into a pit of molten lava years ago, and he would never have lent his name/cash to The Amazing Race, the only watchable reality show.

Nope, the evil (or perhaps EVIL) that emanates from Lucas is his obsessive recutting of his own movies. The first three episodes were famously "improved" for their second theatrical release just before Phantom Menace. Then he recut them again for release on DVD, adding in Anakin, Poster Boy for Infanticide, in the scene of Jedi ghosts at the end of Return of the Jedi.

Not as well known is that Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones were altered between the theatrical release and the DVD release. Minor changes, but Lucas couldn't even leave them alone for the six or seven months between releases. That's not a quirk, it's not artistic dedication, it's a pitiful addiction to an editing suite and CGI technology. I can clearly picture George peeling back his neck-flab-supporting turtleneck sweater to jam a coaxial cable directly into is spine. His nervous system connects to the edit suite and his eyes half-close in delicious, meddling bliss. "Yessss," he hisses, his voice soft as Jabba's skin, "where shall we add more flying objects and blobby alien critters today. You can never have enough background detail..."

Who could be infected next?

Quentin Tarantino: Spends next six years creating the directors cut of Kill Bill. After adopting some adorable orphans, decides it's "a little too violent" and replaces slicing sword noises with fuzzy animal squeaks. Blood recoloured green, blue and purple and edited to imply the movie is nothing but an extended Jello fight. Bill Cosby added to push Jello angle.

Joss Whedon: Instead of crafting new works, creates an extended re-release of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Because Buffy's outfits now look dated, hires a fashion design house to change her appearance, including hair cut and make up, to stay current. The project starts again every six months, resulting in a new re-issue.

The Estate of Jimmy Stewart: It's A Wonderful Life re-written to provide the happy ending at the 90 minute mark, because who wants to sit through the downer of the last 30 minutes before getting to everyone singing Auld Lang Syne? In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart's filibuster ends when he is stoned to death by Republicans. "How dare he attempt to block the appointment of righteous judges!" yells Bill Frist, in a newly added cameo. In Harvey, Rob Schneider added as the loveable invisible rabbit, making raunchy gestures and oggling Stewart's elderly aunt.

Steven Spielberg: After becoming a creationist, re-writes Jurassic Park to confirm with biblical chronology. "We're recovered DNA from creatures that went extinct in the Flood!" the scientists exclaim. Self-righteous mathematician is eaten early on (the only good change) and children defeat the velociraptors by praying to Baby Jesus. Then Spielberg removes all the guns from E.T., replacing them with walkie talkies.

No, that's too ridiculous to ever happen.

The Primacy of History

2005-08-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

I'm currently a bit more than halfway through Fitzpatrick's War by Theodore Judson, a much-praised new SF novel just out in paperback.

It's written as a regretful memoir by Sir Robert Bruce, an officer who takes part in the military campaigns of Consul Issac Prophet Fitzpatrick, an Alexander the Great obsessed military and political genius, in a strange, semi-feudal future. The world has reverted to steam after Fitzpatrick's people, the Yukon Confederacy, used EMP weapons to end the Electronic Age. The Yukons have technological superiority in the form of steam-powered fighter and bomber aircraft and the only working satellite network, their Chinese and Turkish Empire enemies have them vastly outnumbered. With war about to break out, it seems certain there will be a huge slaughter, possibly on both sides.

But the novel is also presented as a real historical document. It has an introduction and footnotes provided by a self-righteous and cranky editor, who gives us many of the insights into the Yukon culture. (Despite their name, they aren't from the modern Yukon. They are essentially the descendents of white, mainly Protestant North American farmers, and there is more than a little in their history that suggests they are descended from a militia movement.) The editor provides us with much of the exposition about the history of the period, which seems outlandish, and is definitely self serving. He is a defiantly unreliable second narrator for the book.

It also provides a pessimistic tone to the whole book: we know in advance that we can trust Robert Bruce more than the editor, and that Fitzpatrick is as much a monster as he is a conquering hero. But Judson lets us know that the future will gloss over those crimes, and see only the shining boy-emperor.

It's a brave narrative choice; essentially writing a future in which Hilter or Stalin has won and is remembered for centuries as a great and wonderful man.

I'm looking forward to see what happens next; we know that Fitzpatrick is assasinated, but when and why is a mystery.

Evolution: Threat or Menace?

2005-08-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

That might as well be the headline in the National Post today. The actual lead in on page one is "Relgious right's theory of 'intelligent design' has Harvard interested. A3" and in large block type, "Darwin Who?"

While I appreciate the quotes around ID, it's highly misleading, making it sound like Harvard is doing a serious investigation of creationist nonsense. The truth is the exact opposite, as the A3 headline on Steven Edwards column reveals: "Harvard aims to prove Darwin right." The university is launching a study on the origins of life - a subject that is not exactly the same as evolution, although obviously closely linked to it.

Edwards hasn't really written much of an opinion piece here, it's really just the same back and forth he-said she-said nonsense that most writers toss out when writing about ID versus reality. But at the end he takes a groundless shot at Harvard researchers.

Harvard, meanwhile, is confident of the results of its study even before it begins.

"We start with a mutual acknowledgement of the profound complexity of living systems," David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at the university, told The Boston Globe.

"My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention."

But statements like that can only open the door to further criticism from the Religious Right, which will surely argue that declaring the result in advance is hardly scientific.

Edwards, you are a goddamn moron.

Scientists do not perform experiments with no expectation. Roughly, the system goes like this: "X is a well-known fact, repeatedly proved. Based on that, I theorize that Y is also true, and will test it with an experiment." In other words, expectations (not "delcaring the result in advance," which is not what Liu said) are perfectly normal in science. The difference between scientists and others is that when the results are unexpected, they accept that their first ideas were wrong, and change their views.

Creationists and proponents of ID, on the other hand, attempt to fit facts to their preconceptions.

It's also noteworthy that if Harvard really were doing basic research into evolution - as the headlines imply - it would be the biological equivalent of going back to check if gravity really exists, and works the way thousands of physicists have already checked and documented. Yet this kind of work is now made necessary by the loud squealing of creationists and their pet politicians.

Other possible future headlines for the Post:

"Is Earth Round? Princeton profs meet with Flat-Earthers."

"The Four Humours Reconsidered. Oxford doctors taking medieval medicine seriously; leech stocks soar."

"Phrenology the new Kabbalah! Madonna endorsement convinces science that bumps = personality!"

Five Fun Tricks With Democracy

2005-08-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

It's back to school time, and somewhat later than that, it will be back to Parliament time for all those fresh-faced little MPs in Ottawa. They're so cute, with their slanders and partisan ranting! But in between their red-faced yelling matches and self-righteous scrums, they'll be thinking up new ways to improve our democracy and give Canadians more power over their lives.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

In case they actually want to improve things, here are a few suggestions I've been thinking over recently. In descending order:

Number 5: End land speculation with a Lockean property law.

Currently, we're in the middle of a construction and housing bubble. Don't deny it, you all know it's true. And one of the causes (and the effects) of the bubble is land speculation. There are a lot of properties sitting empty all over the Lower Mainland, where I live, because the owners are waiting for a rezoning that may or may not come, or because they're simply holding on to the land until the price hits their sweet spot.

This means that rents and land prices are driven artificially high because of the scarcity. So why not follow old English common law, which allowed squatters to take possession of any land they lived on for a year and a day unchallenged? We could switch that around, and say that if a property owner does not live on or improve his property for a year and a day, he forfeits title. The next person who improves the property (plants a garden, fixes up the house) would be the legal owner. Condos could revert to the ownership of the strata council. Let common law and the courts decide what constitutes "improvement." This would force landowners to either start developing or sell their properties before the year was up, cutting down on speculation somewhat.

Number 4: Take control of the GG's office away from the PM

Currently, there's some ridiculous controversy about whether the new proposed Governor General is a seperatist. Let's all take a deep breath and remember that, unless wearing a big Admiral Nelson hat and a jacket with lots of braid can sway thousands of voters, this does not matter very much. The GG has a few theoretically important duties to play in our goverment, but the last time one took part in a major way was in the 1930s. If we really need the post, let's open it up to the public.

There are a couple of ways we could do this. First, we could make it completely random. If you're on the federal voters list, your name goes into the (Admiral Nelson) hat, and if you are picked, you get a luxurious one-year stay in an Ottawa mansion.

Alternatively, we could hold a lottery, $10 a ticket, winner drawn in a national TV special, and the money pays for the official duties and mansion upkeep. (This option is my favourite.)

Or we could elect them directly. Boring.

Number 3: Give municipal goverments control of environmental policy

All politics are local, and all environmental issues, doubly so. I spent a long time, when I was with the now-defunct Sterling News Service, covering the biggest enviro issue of the last decade in Abbotsford. This was the infamous Sumas Energy 2 power plant proposal.

Background: Sumas Energy 2 (SE2) was an American firm. It wanted to build a gas-fired power plant just a stone's throw south of the Canada-US border. Because there are no high-tension power lines on the US side nearby, it asked for permission to run a line across the border and connect to the BC Hydro substation in Abbotsford.

The locals went absolutely batshit. The Fraser Valley is a big bowl, surrounded by mountains, which traps bad air. The SE1 plant had been bad enough, this was the limit. They organized mass rallies, protests and bus trips to speak to US regulators. When the matter came before the National Energy Board in Canada (who could control approval of the power line), they sent more intervenors than had ever registered, for the longest public hearing the board had ever held. The process was dragged out for years, and finally, the locals won.

By the skin of their teeth, by a decision by an appointed, quasi-judicial body that wasn't accountable to anyone. Why can't local goverments make decisions based on environmental issues? It's not that I trust local goverments to be greener than provincial or national goverments, but they are a lot easier to sway. Because they are a lot easier to toss out of office if they disobey the will of the people. And you can find them and yell at them in person.

And it was just ordinary people who fought SE2, not radical greens. I saw an incredibly embarassing sight during a big anti-SE2 rally once. A lawyer for the Sierra Club gave a very well-received speech, then tried to get the crowd to join him in a "There ain't no power like the power of the people" chant. They didn't get into it. It just sort of petered out. The crowd was just middle-class, mostly Conservative voting middle aged people. They didn't want to be identified as some sort of environmental crusaders. But they didn't want their kids breathing more smoke. Local issues can get people fired up in a way that ideology can barely touch. If local goverments could veto developments on environmental grounds, it would give enormously more power to citizens.

Number 2: Democratized Courts

We need to make it cheaper for people to reach legal agreements. With divorce, child custody and small claims matters, we could simplify people's lives a lot if we just let them reach their own settlements any way they wanted.

A lot of family-court matters aren't acrimonious, or need at the most a bit of mediation, but lawyers and expensive court time are still necessary. Why not simply have a system where a judge, justice of the peace or other court official could simply ratify any agreement brought to them by two or more parties?

If you've solved the problem on your own, you write down the agreement, swear before the official that all parties agree to the terms, then sign it. Done. Adversarial problems without an easy resolution could still use the court system. Outside the system, you could use your cousin Bernie as a mediator, or a private mediator.

For small claims, some lawsuits and even minor crimes such as vandalism, this system could work well.

Number 1: More Direct Democracy

There are so many ways we could do this, at the municipal, provincial or federal level. Probably the easiest would be to give the public a veto on any new law passed by the goverment. If enough signatures appear on a petition, a referendum is held on whether the law should be repealed. Or new laws could be passed by the same method - and not overturned by Parliament, but only if courts found they violated human rights.

To make things cheaper, we could hold the votes annually, say every October, rather than randomly whenever a petition passed the threshold. I suspect if people were voting for specific health care initiatives, to legalize pot, or to streamline gun control, turnout would be better.

And hey, it'd be a pretty good replacement for the senate. The "chamber of sober second thought" should be extended to the whole country.

Obviously, other people could come up with their own list of five changes to the way we govern, and every one of them would be different from mine. And I don't actually expect any of my recommendations to be accepted, at least not in my lifetime. But the important thing is that thinking about changing goverment something every citizen should do on a regular basis.

Our government is not set in stone. It is just a tool we use to guard our rights and keep ourselves healthy and prosperous. We should change it for the better.

Please give me some delicious FrankenRice!

2005-08-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Two interesting and seemingly unconnected news stories appeared this week, both to do with plants and genetics.

First, scientists with the Rice Genome Project have successfully decoded the complete genome of rice, the world's single most important food crop. This is actually far more important in the short term than decoding the human genome. Messing around with human genetics is both difficult and ethically dodgy, depending on what you want to do. Rice is just rice.

Unless it's... a Frankenfood! Oh no, we're all going to die! Evil, evil scientists are going to put weird GENES in our foods, and contaminate our crops, and we'll have weird allergic reactions and immune system failures and the Frankenfoods will run rampant, destroying the ecosystem and killing baby seals and selling crack to preschoolers!

Oh, and the second important news story? Apparently, the most famous "genetic disaster" ever, never even happened.

According to the National Post (yeah, I know they suck, but this is just a simple story) the infestation by man-made genes into Mexican corn crops has turned out to be a myth. One of the major fears of genetic engineering opponents has been that new genes will be cross pollinated from modified plants into neighbouring, unmodified plants, or possibly into completely different species. A paper in Nature apparently showed it had happened.

Now, a new Ohio State University study has found exactly nothing. From Science Daily:

Over the two-year study, the researchers gathered more than 153,000 seeds from 870 maize plants in 125 fields in Oaxaca . They sent these seeds to two commercial companies in the United States that can test for very low concentrations of transgenic material in maize seeds.

The researchers were looking for traces of two key transgenes – one or both of which are found in all GM maize crops. Test results showed no evidence of the presence of either transgene from any of the seeds.

So where did they go?

Transgenes that were present in Oaxaca prior to this study simply may not have survived, Snow said. Modern GM varieties may not be very hardy in Oaxaca, even if they can mate with local plants and gain a degree of hardiness that way.

Or they weren't there in the first place. Nature has apparently disowned the study that first showed the transgenes were there, and other studies showed transgenes, but haven't been published.

But watch if anyone ever admits to this. I fully expect the Oaxaca "transgene disaster" to crop up again and again Frankenfood literature for decades. Also note what is not present in any of these stories: a threat to human health. There is no mention that the genes harmed anyone who consumed the corn, even while they were allegedly present in the crops.

This is one of the few areas where the modern left and I really part company. I love science. I don't fear genetic engineering. Many people do, and for completely irrational reasons. There are a lot of ways we could screw things up with genetic engineering, but putting genes for drought resistance or extra vitamins in crops isn't one of them. In fact, genetic engineering could be one of the best ways to help the world's poor and malnourished, by boosting crop yields. If we made subsistence farming just 20 per cent easier, it would affect the lives of billions of people. We could start by preventing people from going blind with golden rice 2.

Even if we completely banned genetic engineering (which would be deeply stupid) we could still use the genome sequencing of rice to improve crop varieties. We could use it to identify and breed for specific genetic traits, and then clone large numbers of super-successful plants that include already existing genes for things like sumbergence tolerance or high yields. Even this, the Luddites will likely oppose. Because it has to do with genes, and genes should be left alone.

Nonsense.

Genes are just another tool we are learning how to use. We will, hopefully, learn to use it responsibly, as we have so many of our other tools. If we don't, it won't be the fault of science, but of human fallibility.

Maher Arar, abused again

2005-08-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Maher Arar has no rights in the United States, except possibly for the right not to be subjected to gross physical abuse. I'm sure this wonderful protection extends to all Canadians traveling south of the border.

Arthur Silber has a great commentary on the situation here.

When is a treaty not a treaty?

2005-08-11T16:26:00.000-07:00

When you don't have to abide by any of the rules, as long as you don't like them, apparently. I'd like to personally thank the United States for clearing this up for us. Rules are for suckers. Ignorance and pig-headedness are a viable substitute for good faith negotiating.

Why in the world do some Americans, and especially the badly misnamed Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, believe that they can simply ignore every NAFTA panel on softwood lumber? The Canadians won the final appeal Wednesday, so of course the logical thing to do is ignore this fact, and launch a constitutional challenge of NAFTA! Not that there's nothing in NAFTA I'd change if I had the chance, but if it fell all at once, it could seriously damage both our economies.

I believe this whole ignorant mess has something to do with a familiar psychological impulse: everyone thinks they are more righteous than they actually are.

In its mild form, this is no problem. People belive they are a little bit nicer and nobler than they really are, but can be reality-checked to within limits.

When it is inflated with ego and ideology, human beings can belive that their personal goals are exactly the same as the moral underpinnings of the universe. It's certainly not a viewpoint that's confined to Americans (Conrad Black comes to mind, along with some other historical Canadian figures). But it is the fashionable ideology down south right now. The Commander in Chief certainly believes it, along with his right-Republican comrades. It's a simple equation to them: We = Right. Anyone who is not We = Wrong.

Part of it is no doubt due to their misunderstanding of the BC stumpage system, a quasi-Georgist edifice that is actually a pretty good model of public land management. They probably think it's some sort of socialist weirdo experiment. Not nearly as noble and proper as their crony capitalist system, in which the US Forest Service builds logging roads for private, for-profit firms.

Now the Canadian goverment is suggesting (not even threatening - wimps) a trade war. They are targeting such things as newsprint, seafood, agricultural and wood products. Those are all made here in Canada, so that has the doubly attractive (for the Liberal Party) effect of buttering up several Canadian industries. And just before a winter election, what a damn coincidence! Of course, it'll drive up the prices of all those things in Canada, at least a little bit, but what the hell.

I suggest we hit them with something better. We should orgainze a boycott, one not linked to the goverment. Pick a firm that deals with both Canadian and US lumber firms and stop shopping there. Even if they only lose twenty or thirty per cent of their business, it will be a good reason for them to put some pressure on the US goverment, and buy us a few senators to end this mess.

Home Depot, anyone?

Get the target in the Google bombsights

2005-08-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

The target is a vast, sprawling edifice, shoddily built and ugly as sin. Its creators have attempted to camouflage the many flaws with a bright palete of paints and shiny, distracting doodads. But they cannot conceal the gaping holes. Yes, it's our old friend, Intelligent Design.

There's a campaign right now on among we godless evolutionists to link the words Intelligent Design to the National Center for Science Education (in the States) explanation of why ID isn't so intelligent after all. If there are enough links between Intelligent Design and the article, Google will move that link to the top of its list when someone googles the term. And hopefully, that will give better information to the genuinely curious than they are likely to get if the term leads them to the Discovery Institute, or some similar bunch of frauds.

As of this writing, websites advocating ID seem to be in the top two, followed by a couple of skeptical sites. The NCSE page is number nine.

Click the link. Release the bomb.

Intelligent Design

Bush Hates Science

2005-08-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

Not that I'm surprised by this, but George W. Bush announced earlier this week that he supports the teaching of intelligent design in schools. Public schools that is, not private ones.

Let me make this clear up front: I support the absolute human right of people to fill their own heads, or the heads of their young, impressionable children, with whatever Dark Ages crap they wish. I will, in fact, rush to defend the right to believe in/worship flying saucers, crystals, Odin, pyramids or a giant teapot. Deep personal stupidity is a right. As long as you are not harming children, physically or through psychological torment, the state has absolutely no right to stop you.

But if you're starting the class in teapot worship, which holds that all life was poured out of the great primordial pot by the Great Tea Maker, that is in some conflict with science. You cannot demand equal time for teapot worship at the local elementary school, because you don't believe in the scientifically arrived at theories on how the universe began.

Bush appears to disagree, as in this story, which I have copied from the excellent and outraged Panda's Thumb:

BY RON HUTCHESON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and “intelligent design” Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.

[…]

Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over “creationism,” a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. As governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.

On Monday the president said he favors the same approach for intelligent design “so people can understand what the debate is about.”

It's nice that Bush has cleared up some of the confusion right up front by mentioning creationism. Intelligent design is not scientific. It is not, and never has been, a science. It's partisans typically attack the existing body of biological knowledge, looking for gaps, then assert that whatever has not yet been explained is inexplicable. This feature, they assert, could not have arisen by mere chance! It must have been designed! It is irreducibly complex!

Intelligent design hasn't even been around that long, but many of the irreducibly complex structures it first attacked have, in fact, been explained by science, either in whole or in part. There is much that has not been explained, but we won't find out anything by throwing up our hands and saying, "Well, don't know how that little flagellum got there, must have been The Teapot."

Let us also be clear that ID is a religiously inspired viewpoint. It is inseparable from the broader creationist movement which feels that the Christian God actually made the Earth, and human beings specifically. There is no way to whitewash over the fact that intelligent design is not possible without a designer. Considering the movement's ties to Christianity, there is no doubt about which designer most of ID's adherents favour.

Even if you cut away all of that, and accept that ID's proponents really have no specific designer in mind, this idea still conflicts with some religious views, which do not assert that the world was created or is maintained by a higher power.

Bush has therefore advocated a violation of the US Constitution, which mandates that the government shall endorse no one religion. He has given his open approval to Judeo-Christian beliefs, above and over any others (say, teapot worship).

I don't know what this will mean, in the long term, for the culture war which still rages in the United States, but I'm very glad right now to be a Canadian. Here, the culture war is essentially over, the left won, and the mopping up stages are now in progress. In our last election, the Conservative Party's Stephen Harper had to assert, repeatedly, that he would not reopen the abortion debate. And he still lost.

But we are overshadowed by our neighbour to the south. They have been staggering to the right for some years now, and if the radical Republican grip on power continues, it could have serious repercussions, not just for Americans, but for the world. We don't want another Dark Age, but that's no guarantee that we won't get one.

If the west abandons science - and this is, and always has been a possibility, ever since the early days of the Royal Society - we are doomed. Our descendents could find themselves shivering in the dark, supplicating the unseen for warmth. We are far from this yet, and science still has powerful defenders. I've just been listening to Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World on tape, a fabulous defense of science and the power of experimentation to explain the world. But reason will always have to struggle with the demons of our credulity, of our need to believe in unreason. We must inoculate ourselves against this tendency every day of our lives.

Now, the most powerful individual in the world has said that no such inoculation is necessary. Unreason and reason are equal and should both be considered as explanations for how the world works. Both should receive the support of governments. The innoculation metaphor is apt. If Bush told people that innoculations against disease deserved equal time with prayer to prevent sickness, the rates of illness and death would skyrocket. Rates of ignorance may see a corresponding rise.

The west, the world, may turn away from science, and we may be watching the first days of that era. Do not let this happen.

Learn. Doubt. Rejoice in the things that you do not know, but that you can know, through reason and experimentation.

To take the language of the other side, choose the light, and turn away from the darkness.

Cute little dead baby dinosaurs!

2005-07-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

Big news from the world of paleontology on Thursday, as the oldest intact dinosaur embryos ever found have been described, and by a Canadian scientist.

The embryos are those of Massospondylus, a prosauropod that lived about 190 million years ago in the lower Jurassic period in what is now South Africa. The eggs were apparently dug up decades ago, but it was only recently that they were handed over to the University of Toronto and Dr. Robert Reisz to crack open.

There are plenty of pictures of the open egg around the internet, including one here, at the Chicago Herald's website.

Now, even if there was nothing special about these little guys, this find would be neat. It's not just the oldest dinosaur embryo ever found, it's the oldest find ever of any vertebrate embryo. But there is something special about the critters. They have big heads, short necks, no teeth and they seem to have walked on all fours. Adult Massospondylus definitely had teeth (nicely shaped for cropping tough Jurassic ferns and other vegetation) and probably walked on two legs.

This means we can infer a parental relationship between parent and offspring. From the Chicago Herald and Dr. Reisz: Some of the embryos were clearly ready to hatch, he said, but they have no teeth, “and that suggests to us that some form of parental care was required … not just protecting but active feeding.”

How the adults fed the infants, and how long, we may not know until the skeletons of infant Massospondylus in a variety of developmental stages are found. That will likely be never, given the paucity of the fossil record. But we can make some guesses, based on other dinosaur finds and the behaviour of living animals. And the speculation is almost as much fun.

Did the adults disgorge half-digested plant slurry for their offspring to lap up? Or did they create "crop milk," a kind of protein-rich goop that some modern birds use to feed their chicks? Did the young stay in nesting colonies, within the confines of a dirt bowl, or did they follow the adults like modern hoofed mammals?

It also has massive implications for the way we view sauropods. There have already been discoveries that indicated that ornithopods (Maiasaura) and theropods (Oviraptor) brooded their nests and took care of their young. But sauropods have been seen as more primitive. We know they didn't have feathers, because skin impressions of sauropod embryos have been found in Argentina.

But if prosauropods cared for their young, then sauropods certainly could have. But how? They grew larger than any other land animal, and their young hatched from eggs no larger than soccer balls. How did a massive Argentinosaurus, the largest land animal we know of, take care of something considerably smaller than its own head? Something it could crush, by accident, and not even notice?

I love science. So many fun questions yet to answer.

Here are some more Massospondylus images at DinoData.net.

In Celebration of Marsden's Vanishing

2005-07-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

I hereby declare a day of celebration. Rejoice, fellow citizens, the great beast that stalked the nation's newspaper, (no, not that one, the other not-as-good one) has vanished.

Lo, these past few months have been a trial for readers. Great was our fear as each Wednesday drew nigh, and we trembled like the Geats in the mead hall at the approach of the Grendel. For we knew that the morn's new light would bring no joy, but only another column by Rachel Marsden.

Yes, that Rachel Marsden. The one who claimed her swim coach raped her (he didn't) who stalked two other people, who worked for Gurmant Grewal, who posed for Republican Babe websites and calenders, who was a servant of the Dark One himself, the one known as O'Reilly.

But for two weeks now, her column has not appeared. The Canadian Cynic has noted her passing with glee, and the possibility that it had to do with this column, which appeared on her website but not in the Post. It's not really worth reading, as it's just boilerplate Muslim-bashing bullshit. The only thing interesting about it is that she seemed to think a paper, even one as right wing as the Post, would run the damn thing.

Perhaps we are premature. Perhaps Ms. Marsden has simply been put on the bench for a time by the Post, and she'll be back once she has moderated her venom output.

Or perhaps she is incapable of moderation. From the column in question:

Islam is a religion of peace. Right—and Paris Hilton is a virgin. But “moderate” Muslims—an oxymoron if ever there was one—would have us trying to reconcile the completely irreconcilable.

...

Evidence suggests that Muhammad was like the Courtney Love of prophets: Lacking Jesus’ crowd-pleasing talents, he resorted to the seventh century religious equivalent of microphone tossing to make a name for himself—picking up his sword and wreaking havoc on everything he could in the name of Allah.

Even after Muhammad’s death, his “peaceful” followers spent the next hundred years murdering their way to a geopolitical empire.

...

Western democracies have to wise up to the fact that “tolerance” of Islam is as much about "freedom of religion" as allowing your kids to trash your house while you're away on vacation. [Iguanodon interupting here. This sentence doesn't even make sense, really.]

Maybe Canada can start with deporting all the card carrying Islamic terrorists, rather than giving them asylum here.

Then before any new immigrants set foot in Canada, they should be required to correctly answer the following question:

What do you do with an infidel?
a) Kill him
b) Fidel? I thought this was Canada!
c) Make her the newest Liberal Cabinet Minister in charge of Democratic Renewal

As I've written before, Marsden isn't even a talented writer. Frum may be a poor choice for a columnist (would you respect as independent the columns of a guy who was actually on Bush's payroll? That's like hiring a Catholic priest to write objectively on religious issues and... oh, wait, they did that too...) but he can at least string a column together.

Marsden can't even follow the standard conservative pattern for Muslim-bashing. You're supposed to acknowledge that Christians haven't been without blame, that Europeans have in fact killed a lot of people in the name of their god too. Reading this kind of bullshit makes me want to smite someone with the jawbone of an ass.

But I should not be upset. Today is a happy day. For she is gone, driven out into the wilderness, where we can only hope she will starve. Or perhaps be arrested for stalking.

Again.

Cheap solar power

2005-07-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

I found this the other day, via Future Feeder. There have been a number of interesting breakthroughs recently in solar panels, but if this one pans out it could be the Big One. Because solar power has always worked, but this makes it cheap.

PYRON SOLAR INC., an R&D company in La Jolla, California, developed in cooperation with BOEING-Spectrolab a novel system to convert sunlight into electricity. This revolutionary design is a low-profile floating system with short-focal-length lenses concentrating direct sunlight by 400X onto photovoltaic cells. These advanced multi-junction cells produce 800 times more electricity than conventional non-concentrating cells the same size. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy confirmed 37.3% efficiency. With these modified space-age cells, PYRON developed a truly 21st-century, Earth-friendly generator, an innovative system with numerous positive implications for the sustainability of global-scale power and a solar-hydrogen economy.

Yeah, yeah, nothing special, just typical alternative-energy company press bumf. But farther down, there's an interesting number.

System Price: The extremely high efficiency and the low material requirements make the new system competitive with conventional power plants. For large Pyron power plants a calculation shows that the price for the high-tech parts including the cell and the material for the low-tech parts will be only $1.24 per Watt.

For comparison purposes, a website that describes and sells a number of currently available models gives this as a good per-watt price:

The best current deal on new 50 watt solar panels is about $4.25 a watt--$212 for a 50 watt panel, in quantity.

Interesting, and very hopeful.

Alternate Economics: Venture Communism

2005-07-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

I'm of two minds about the name of this idea. First, I have to say I really love the name. A name with that much cognitive dissonance wrapped up in just two words brings joy to my heart. "Yeah, I'm a venture communist," you can tell your friends, and enjoy their slack-mouthed gawping. Describe in detail how you have acquired capital and land for the people's revolution, how your wealth has increased based on your labour-currency, how sharp business practices will lead to the worker's paradise.

On the other hand, there are existing groups that could be described as venture communists. The first one that comes to mind are party officials in the People's Republic of China. You know, People's Army officers who run karaoke bars or munitions plants for their own personal aggrandizement and profit. Nasty bastards, in other words. Perhaps a new name could be found to distinguish venture communism from Chinese free-market dictatorship.

On to a quick analysis! Here's venture communism in the words of Dmytri Kleiner, who apparently invented it:

Venture Communism is an investment model designed to be a form of revolutionary worker's struggle. The Venture Commune is a type of voluntary worker's association, designed to enclose the productivity of labour and enable the possibility of the collective accumulation of Land and Capital, which, in the endgame, will eventually allow the workers to buy the entire world from the Capitalists.

I have to give him points right off the bat for not calling for a violent revolution. That has never been particularly successful for leftists, at least as far as avoiding horrible tyranny is concerned. Here's how he sees it working.

A Venture Commune is a joint stock corporation, much like the Venture Capital Funds of the Capitalist class, however it has four distinct properties which transform it into an effective vehicle for revolutionary worker's struggle.
1 — A Share In The Venture Commune Can Only Be Acquired By Contributions Of Labour, and Not Property.
In other words only by working is ownership earned, not by contributing Land, Capital or even Money. Only Labour.
It is this contributed labour which represents the initial Investment capacity of the Commune.
The Commune Issues its own currency, based on the value of the labour pledges it has.
It then invests this currency into the private enterprises which it intends to purchase or fund, these Enterprises thus become owned by the Commune, in the same way that Enterprises which receive Venture Capital become owned by a Venture Capital Fund.

I assume that, at least in the early going, this new currency will have to be in the form of stock, or otherwise translated into "real world" dollars. After all, it's unlikely that the commune will be self-sufficient right off the bat. Workers will still need national currencies to pay rent, buy food and gas, etc. Indeed, Kleiner seems to acknowledge that a bond issue will be necessary in his second point.

2 — The Venture Commune's Return On Investment From Its Enterprises Is Derived From Rent and Not Income.
As condition of investment, the Enterprise agrees to not own its own
property, neither Land nor Capital, but rather to rent Land and Capital from the Commune.
The Commune, unlike a Venture Capital Fund, never takes a share of the income of the Enterprise nor of any of its workers.[But isn't rent a share of income?]
The Commune finances the acquisition of Land and Capital by issuing Bonds, and then Rents the Land and Capital to its Enterprises, or an Enterprise can sell whatever Land and Capital it acquires through other means to the Commune, and in turn Rent it.
In this way Property is always owned Mutually by all the members of the Commune, however all workers and the Enterprises that employ them retain the entire product of their labour.

The last two points of Kleiner's strategy involve rules for keeping communes from exploiting workers: anyone who works for a commune must be offered membership (although he says nothing about whether people could refuse, I assume so, and thereby freelance) and notes that members get one share and one vote each in the running of the commune.

Will it work? Hell if I know.

Let me say that there are fewer obvious flaws with this system than with many socialist schemes. Through the fact that there can be multiple enterprises under a commune, and presumably multiple communes as well, the system has some elements of decentralization. That's good, because a heavily centralized system has problems determining prices accurately. But is there a danger of this if one enterprise within a commune is set up to support another enterprise? Possibly.

The bigger problem is: who would invest their starting capital in something based only on labour? Where do you start accumulating the capital, both physical and human, you need to make something like this work? Starting very small, with existing co-operatives of half a dozen workers or so would probably be the way to go. But that would result in a very small amount of "labour pledges" and a correspondingly small amount of investment power. And I doubt Warren Buffet is going to shift any of his money towards venture communism any time soon.

Another problem is the fact that the current capitalist system does provide some security for workers at newly-formed ventures. The capitalist's borrowed money is on the line, and if the business fails, the workers are unemployed, but at least they have the money they were paid. (Unless they're, say, Russian miners, and haven't been paid in months.) If a venture commune fails, the labour-based currency its members have accumulated is worthless, and can't be exchanged for national currencies.

Still, I'd like to see someone try it. It might crash and burn spectacularly, or it might actually work, at least a little bit.

There seems to be no one currently trying this system out. There's little info on Kleiner available on the net, except for the fact that he appears to be something of a troll.

Free as in speech AND beer

2005-07-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

Clearly, this is the greatest innovation in open source ever. It's free beer.

Well, the beer isn't exactly free. It's a beer recipe, created by a bunch of half-mad Danes (is there any other kind?) in Copenhagen. They call their new recipe Vores Ol, and they've got an English-language web page explaining what they've done and why.

Essentially, they picked beer for an open source experiment partly because of the famous "free as in speech, not free as in beer" quote. Now anyone can make their Vores Ol (Our Beer), including major international breweries. But, no one can prevent anyone else from making the recipe, and any modifications to the recipe must also be made open source. The whole thing falls under a Creative Commons copyright.

There's been open source software for years, but now the really exciting work is starting. Open source manufacturing has the potential to really change the way we make everyday items. Especially if you combine open source with rapid prototyping technology, also known as 3D printing and fab labs.

Ever seen Monster Garage or American Chopper? Have you noticed how those guys can modify or rebuild a car very quickly, given the right tools? What if the tools were cheaper, almost ubiquitous, and the designs and instructions for building the cars themselves (or dishwashers, toasters, CD players) were available for free as open source plans on the Internet? How would manufacturing change if any group of moderately skilled people with enough space and a little spare time could build their own consumer goods, cheaper than current market value?

We're still a long way from there, and there's lots of time left for this vision to fizzle and die. But if it comes even partly true, it means a real democratization of the making of things, of the industrial process itself. Probably there will be two major obstacles (beyond the technological) to this change. The first will be economic: will small scale production ever be able to outstrip the advantages enjoyed by major corporate manufacturers? I think, while we may not be there yet, the answer in the long run is definitely yes. The second will be one of personal choice. If people would rather buy something and have it simply arrive, they will never develop a culture of personal construction.

More likely is an intermediate world. Look at sites like Zazzle or the Make Blog. On Zazzle, you can simply buy t-shirts or postage stamps created by other people, but you can also create your own designs, and share them with others through the site. Make Blog has so many additions, of everything from software hacks to home-made air conditioners, that it's hard to keep up with all the stuff people are sharing. Most of the stuff on Make Blog comes in the form of mods, changes to existing mass-market products.

For now, let's all raise a glass of free beer, and hope for a future of personal design and manufacturing.