But can it do the New York Times crossword?

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?

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

He stole my title!

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

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!

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

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

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

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

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.