The Magical Money Trees.

This story is a prime example of why I couldn’t go into politics without killing selected people in the interests of improving the net IQ of the human race. That rash statement out in the open, it occurs to me that most of them making these sorts of ivory-tower statements aren’t having a lot of kids anyway.

Let’s start with a most basic question: from whence do governments get “their” money? Your answer on this will likely determine which of my hypothetical lists you go on…

Snarkasm aside, the answer is US, WE, YOU, and ME, however you want to slice it. All the money that governments have for anything, they have but one way to get it: taxation. Income, Goods and Services, Value Added, Sales, customs fees, etc, they are all taxes because they’re not voluntary.

I am personally of the opinion that any government that posts a large surplus from year to year should be impeached on the basis that the taxpayers are being fleeced for no good reason. Balancing a budget on that scale is tricky business, and of course I would prefer a surplus to a deficit. If times are good, take that opportunity to pay down the debt; people will accept that as long as their taxes don’t rise to make it happen.

Opposition Leader Stephane Dion said, "yet in two years they destroyed the framework (left by the Liberals). Was this their plan all along, so they can cut government services?"

Government House Leader Peter Van Loan responded: "(The Liberal Party) likes big surpluses because they like high taxes."

The Tories accused the Liberal leader of refusing to cut taxes, specifically the GST.

"(Dion) wants to increase the GST -- one per cent for social housing, one per cent to reduce corporate taxes, one per cent for the child tax benefit, one per cent for other things," Van Loan said.

Liberal Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff shot back that the Tories appear to have a deliberate strategy to cut government services.

"The prime minister's mentor, Tom Flanagan, has talked openly about tightening the screws on the federal government ... Is this the government's secret agenda," asked Ignatieff.

As far as I can tell, this is what has been done for the last few years, and talking openly about it hardly makes for a "secret agenda". Harper’s gang being the Conservative Party, it stands to reason that if they’re true to their name, they are against big (read: bloated) government. There is a lot of fat that can be cut from the bureaucracy once you get your head around the idea that not everyone and their pet cause deserves MY tax money. The government has managed to post surpluses while lowering taxes, and I defy anyone to come up with a logical economic argument against that.

Think about the money and where it comes from. I will not cry if because the government decides not to allow a tax credit for some really questionable “art” I have less trouble feeding my family as I have more money left each week after taxes. If special interest groups are that concerned about their pet projects, let them find the money the old fashioned way, not at the public teat.

I have no problem at all if the bleeding hearts have bakes sales to finance whatever they want to see that is not in the broader public interest (as long as it’s legal, of course), and with lower taxes all that extra money could be spent on all the consciousness raising and minority cultural centres they want.

As for why the Public Service and the bureaucracy can use a cull from time to time:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

We have plenty of government, and being selective about what the taxpayers have to fork over to support is (in my books) responsible governance.

Who's top of the food chain again?

This happens all the time, and it just shows the level of delusion that a lot of people (who should know better) have about wild animals.

I don't care if you raised it by hand, bottle feeding it from infancy, animals which have never been domesticated are, well, wild. The link is about a grizzly effortlessly, casually killing a guy during something the bear has done without incident dozens of times before. Just ask yourself how many times you've heard of some large predator (famous or otherwise) mangling one of its' handlers (Siegfried and Roy, anyone?).

Not everyone is so clueless however. Knut the "cuddly" polar bear has grown up, and by some (but not all...) accounts is a "psychopath". At least that zoo has the brains to recognize what they're dealing with, even if they ignored the opinion of Knut's own mother and animal behaviour specialists by keeping him alive in the first place.

Off my beaten track I know, but I need a break from the dismal big picture, and I'm sure you could stand one too. If you're really lucky, you'll get my paranoid rantings about why my attempts to reinstall XP on my desktop giving me fits (hint: it's a Microsoft conspiracy, I tells ya!).

If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.

This gaseous expulsion from YouTube was brought to my attention, so I felt the need to share.

This clown makes what I hold to be a totally inexcusable move; he claims his argument is irrefutable. I will leave it to you to pick up most of the problems with it, but the upshot is that he contends that the irreducible truth is that we have but one option, and that is to plunge the world into penury to avoid any possibility that the same thing (plus a drought/flood or two) arrives.

So, knee-capping the global economy and imposing an even more crushing level of government (presumably via some global agency) is to be done to avoid the social, political and economic disaster that would accompany the worst case of global warming. The only difference between his absolute worst case (which assumes everything the Gore-ians would have us all assume) and his best case is weather effects.

Sure those could be bad if you allow your imagination to run amok, but there is still NO REASON to think that any of these environmental "worst cases" have any foundation in reality. There is no PROOF that we can do anything more than poison ourselves with our byproducts, and economic and technological prosperity are our best defences against that known threat.

On this topic, out of idle curiosity I looked up the Environment Canada data on climate norms for my area. I won't spoil it, and I only looked up a couple of places, but I challenge you all to find a spot in Canada (since I trust EnviroCan to report the facts) where the majority of record warm temperatures fall later than the 1970s.

Anyway, watch clownboy's "Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See", and you will understand why I drop the gloves about respectful forms of address for this case. And don't ever tell me what I can't find an argument against; that was this guy's mistake.

When you stare into the abyss, the abyss says "hey, hold on there..."

There has been a smattering of reporting on how the average Chinese sees the Western portrayal of their country, but China is big, strong and proud, so it should be of no surprise to anyone that they are not impressed with us.

An official Chinese Communist Party newspaper urged China's citizens to express patriotism in a rational way as anti-Western protests spread.

Of course I won't go into the likelihood that the Chinese government in some concealed way is sending a message by allowing Carrefour to be picketed. Not a lot of high-profile stuff happens by accident in a place like China...

As may be evident by now, I'm not about to hop on the "Human Rights" bandwagon at China's expense. They still have their problems, but the system is evolving, and in any event you can't keep a place the size and heterogeneity of China together with rainbows and happy thoughts. As for Tibet, anyone who remembers Tianamen Square in 1989 will notice that there was not a tank to be seen in the recent protests.

Yes, I'll say it; the authorities in Tibet exercised (after extreme provocation) great restraint in suppressing the violent protests. Whichever side of the Tibet fence you're on (I'm on the "it's none of my business" one) it has to be recognized that the protests had turned into an anti-Han pogrom by the Tibetans.

Now, you may say "good for them, it's about time" (or not) but if the same sort of disturbances broke out in any other country, Canada included, the reaction would have been the same. There were riot police and paramilitary forces in reserve, but no tanks or carpet bombing, so in all a measured and largely appropriate use of force.

Back to the point, however. China is an increasingly BIG DEAL on the world stage, and that's something that a lot of the West seems slow to grasp. Despite the censorship, there are a lot of Chinese who have web and satellite access, and don't take kindly to us decadent hairy barbarians telling them their business. There have even been protests in Ottawa and a few other places in Canada with a significant Chinese population to protest media treatment of the motherland.

Putting the Olympics in Beijing was never a good idea, but it's done now. Hopefully their anti-smog measures will be adequate to make it at least non-injurious to the participants, but in the end this whole episode has the potential to make both sides more aware of how the other sees them. After that it just remains to see if that's a good thing...

Necessity is the mother of exploitation

This isn't a new idea, I've certainly heard of it, but like a lot of other, probably more desirable ideas, high (conventional) hydrocarbon fuel prices are making it possible. Be careful what you wish for, Greens...

Japan is growing ever-more desperate to secure its energy, as once-reliable suppliers - such as Indonesia and Australia - have begun either to cut back exports of natural gas and coal or charge crippling prices.

Its direct interests in vital global energy projects, such as oil drilling in Sakhalin and Iran, have also been whittled away by politics and diplomatic rivalries.

The potential of methane hydrates as a source of natural gas has been known scientifically for some time, though how much was lurking off the Japanese coast has been confirmed only in the past couple of years. Methane hydrates are believed to collect along geological fault lines, and Japan sits atop a nexus of three of the world's largest.

In 2007 the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry declared that there were more than 1.1 trillion cubic metres (39 trillion cubic feet) of methane hydrates off the eastern coast - equivalent to 14 years of natural gas use by Japan at current rates. Academic studies suggest total Japanese deposits of 7.4 trillion cubic metres.

There's much more to this, but the upshot is that a world of scarcity is not a Kyoto Accord-friendly place. In the parts of the world where the enviro-left is not a significant presence (e.g. most of it) they don't give a rat's ass for anything the Gore-ians have to say, their inconvenient truth is that they are too heavily populated and invested in an industrialized standard of living to allow themselves to be de-industrialized by the Greens.

My personal hope is that the ability to exploit this sort of thing will stop the rampant speculating and gouging in the oil and NG prices, but that's asking a lot. High oil prices giveth (push for innovation, reduced consumption) and they taketh away (high prices for food and, hell, everything else). Burning hydrocarbons of some sort is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and I'm of the opinion that the real crisis is yet to come.

[Later the same day...] This seems to back that last paragraph up:

The Associated Press

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- A deep-water exploration area off Brazil's coast could contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil, the head of Brazil's National Petroleum Agency said Monday. That would make it the world's third-largest known oil reserve.

It goes on to talk about Saudi having 260B bbl of proven reserves and Canada 170B or so, so it seems evident that we're not going to run out of oil, even if it'll cost us a lot more. Everyone forgets that we went through an oil crisis 35 years ago, one which holds many parallels and lessons, were we inclined to draw such things from history...

There will be a lot more belt tightening for all concerned in the near future, with the price of oil staying high regardless of how much hydrated methane we pump out. The real pinch in food prices is around the corner; the one thing I hope from that is that it stops poaching of our agricultural land for development as farms become more profitable, but there are a lot of variables in that equation so no predictions there.

I'm on the fence about this methane thing being good or not (insufficient data at present), but I will say that good, bad or ugly, now that we know that it can be done, it will be.

You (apparently) can't handle the truth!

As was depressingly predictable, the current Canadian government has conceded that their public can't stomach what actually needs to happen in Afghanistan, and from here on they will sugarcoat our mission accordingly.

The mantra almost from the time the Conservatives took office had beent [sic] that Canada had a responsibility to ensure Afghanistan didn't revert to the status of a failed state that could serve as a launching pad for terrorist attacks against North America.

That rang hollow in the ears of many Canadians, a fact that Harper has apparently come to appreciate.

"What we've actually found is: when you argue our self interest, that's actually less appealing to Canadian public opinion than the argument that we are actually concretely helping the Afghan people with their lives," he told a panel discussion of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, an American policy group, in Bucharest. [my emphasis]

It didn't help that former defence minister Gordon O'Connor once told an Edmonton audience that our presence in Afghanistan was about retribution for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. (CTV News 7 April 2008)

I kept that last bit because I like it, being true and all, but God forbid anybody should say such a thing. Since then of course our reasons for being there have blurred a bit, something the big boys have obviously noticed.

The bold section I delineated underscores the whole problem of the Western democracies: we no longer (if we ever did) have any idea of our self-interest, let alone what might be in it, even less the intestinal fortitude to do what might be necessary to further or protect it.

Not a lot else really to say about that at the moment, but I thought it was an excellent example of why very little ever really gets done without a huge hue and cry from various self-interested groups (if it gets done at all). Canada has no sense of it's own direction, purpose, identity, etc., so we're hijacked by any mouthy crew with an agenda.

It also necessitates that our government insult our intelligence with pap, because that's all the chattering classes can take. There's no room for independent thought in politics and little in the major media outlets, but it's my self-appointed job to pick up that slack for them. As the fancy strikes me of course...

The World According to Gorep

I linked to this blog because I was absolutely aghast at their smug assurance that they are right and everyone who doubts them is an idiot. I'm nearly speechless about the whole thing, and I encourage you to have a look for yourselves.

"Nearly" is not "completely" of course, and I do have a few things to say. My even looking at this paean to all things Al Gore was triggered by this opinion piece in today's Ottawa Citizen. This bit in particular started me twitching:

Finally, a surprising 52 per cent of respondents think that there is still a legitimate scientific debate over whether human activity is making the planet warmer. [emphasis mine] When you consider that every major science academy in the world has stood in agreement on this question - and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has assigned it a certainty level of more than 90 per cent, this public misunderstanding again suggests that important information is not getting through. The IPCC also says flatly that ignoring this problem invites catastrophic consequences. And the former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, affirmed in a 2006 report that we could take action economically.

Heaven forbid that half the population (according to this questionable poll) still have minds of their own to see that in fact nothing has been definitively settled by anyone. There are some references to polar sea ice, and all of my (quick and nasty in this case) research suggests that while ice is declining in the Arctic, it's INCREASING in the Antarctic seas.

There was this last month: http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm
and this from last week:
http://www.dailytech.com/UN+Global+Temperatures+Will+Decline+in+2008/article11389.htm

In this case I have posted the whole addresses as a link, as they tell the story. When even the UN starts to back off, you know that things are in fact far from settled. A key bit from the latter article agrees with my personal experience of unusually cold winters in normally hot places:

Regardless of the cause, many are hoping the cooling ends soon. The past year saw dozens of nations struggle through record low temperatures and massive amounts of snowfall. If the trend doesn't reverse quickly, next year will be even more bitterly cold.

So, even a cursory look around the web will find plenty of (credible) sources to dispute the joint gospel of Al Gore and his "disciple" (not my word) David Suzuki. I guess I'd be in that 52% as well...

Democracy, one party style.

Mugabe has managed to ruin a country with significant potential, likely making more than a few blacks of his generation think that they were actually better off under Ian Smith's racist minority regime. I have no numbers for that of course, but it's unavoidable with the mess that Rob and his cronies have managed to make.

That aside, it's obvious to all that his time is up, and assuming (a bold move at this time) that he will not call out the army to crush his opposition, an exit strategy is in order. In this era of war-crimes trials and international tribunals thereof, the exit strategy of tyrants of all stripes is no small matter.

If you know that you won't be allowed to fade away to Switzerland or wherever, instead being arraigned and at least jailed if not executed, why would you give up gracefully? When the votes are rigged or the results denied by the incumbents, some sort of revolution, more or less violent, is the only way to go.

Getting rid of Mugabe will require some sort of deal if he's not to end up as compost in Tsvangiari's garden (not that I think he would do that). There was a lot of denial that any such thing was in the works, but I doubt anyone on the ground there is fooled by it.

The real point here is the limits of the democratic process in practice. If the results of the voting won't be honoured, it's not a democracy in any way shape or form. If you want to re-introduce democracy after an extended period with a Mugabe, Pinochet, etc, you'll have to be prepared to be pragmatic and offer a deal to avoid the necessity to pry power from their cold, dead hands.

I use Pinochet as an example of this being more or less successfully done; there was no bloodshed (or smothering!), he stepped down, and there has been a successful transition to a democratic government in Chile. Of course Pinochet did a much better job of managing the country he violently took over than Mugabe has, but the general principle applies.

As I write this (9 April 2008) the mess in Zimbabwe continues, and my off-the-cuff feeling is that transition from one-man/party rule will require an actual revolution more often than not. which doesn't augur well for the roots of that democracy, but nothing's perfect.

It's our Economy, stupid.

As a species we face many challenges, and in the long run I'm pessimistic for our comfy technological society, but things don't have to descend into a new dark age because the crude runs low.

This is neither an endorsement nor a review; I haven't read any more to do with this book than there is in the CBC article I linked to, but it does address some things that I've talked about before.

Things like bio-fuels (ethanol in particular) are losing their glow, and the whole warming thing is neither proven nor necessarily inconvenient to all (I live in the northern part of the Northern Temperate Zone with a lot of other people), but there are some things that face us that are not so debatable.

Overpopulation is with us already, but I believe that Nature will correct that even if we don't. Hand in glove with that however is resource scarcity. Really, without some sort of scarcity it's not overpopulation, just a lot of somebodies, but you get the point.

The key to any wealthy advanced society is energy. With sufficiently accessible and cheap energy we can do anything we need to do should we put our minds to it. I think that's one of the things these book guys are talking about.

"Electricity is the perfect energy carrier for an uncertain future because it's a carrier; it's not a source of energy," Perl said.

Hydro, tidal, geothermal, wind, ethanol and, yes, coal and nuclear all can feed into the grid during the transition, Perl and Gilbert write.

With the exception of ethanol (NOT efficient or cheap) I couldn't agree more. They don't mention natural gas, which we still have a lot of, and there is an interesting idea that it is created by non-organic geologic processes, but coal is abundant and we can scrub it well. Nuclear power is coming back, a trend which I predict will continue (with some hiccups) as the stakes become more obvious to the average person. Risk assessment is an ever-changing game as priorities shift, so maybe "Please, in my backyard!" will become more common...

One word: plastics. IT ALL COMES FROM OIL. It's not the first thing most people think of, but as Jerry Pournelle keeps saying (although I'd figured it out too), oil is too useful/precious to burn. Seems an odd way to look at it at first, but we can get energy other ways. However, synthetics of all types and a lot of lubricants are not so easy to come up with without oil.

Progress to me means that life gets BETTER, not that tracts of bland housing and strip malls take over all of our agricultural land (another issue...). I do not agree with taxing any necessity to discourage consumption, but here's an idea for a stick-and-carrot tax that might do the job.

1. Put a surtax on our income tax instead of a consumption tax.

2. Set up or better still encourage some companies that research the stuff that we need; more efficient solar power, supercapacitors/batteries, whatever.

3. Make investments in those companies tax-deductible.

The net effect is still a loss of income, but at least with some hope of a return. The tax lawyers might pick this apart, but it has to be better than just having more of our money sucked into the black hole of government via a "Carbon Tax".

So, we need sound ideas and action. Of course people are lazy as long as things are cheap, but that's changed with oil, so we have to change too. Adapt to survive; that's what humans are best at. We can do this the (relatively) easy way, 'tho there's always that economic collapse into a new dark age to fall back on...

Immigrant Song and dance.

Canada is known to be one of the most desirable places in the world to live. Countries don't get like that without some management of people who do and want to live there, and as far as I can tell the latest proposed changes to the IRPA do just that.

The changes, which amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, were included in the budget bill, making them a confidence matter. If they're passed, the changes would speed up the processing of applications for skilled workers, but they would also throw other claimants to the back of the line and reject others outright.

There is the usual eyewash about this all being a way to ethnically cleanse the immigrants to this country, but I'm not entirely clear who it is these naysayers think will be kept out by this. I see nothing racist about merit-based entrance to Canada, and I'm of the opinion that those screaming "racism" the loudest are the ones who protest too much.

If I say we need more educated/skilled immigrants and less of the tired, poor huddled masses, I am tarred as a racist (it's happened). Although at no point (then or now) did I say anything about what colour or extraction those desired immigrants were, my antagonists assumed I was talking about northern Europeans.

India alone has an educated, English-speaking middle class which outnumbers all of the "white" Dominions, the UK included, and I have no intention of keeping them out if they have what we need to keep the country economically viable. I use India as an example, but the lefty paternalist assumption that "skilled" means white is quite an insult to people from any corner of the globe who worked their ass off to get a good education and make themselves more attractive as potential citizens.

If you're hiring, don't you look for those with the best credentials? Well you do if you want to stay in business, and Immigration policy is just HR writ large.

There are ongoing problems with recognizing the credentials of immigrants, and there are at least noises about addressing that. I think letting more professionals in whose credentials won't be honoured is putting the cart before the horse, but maybe the politicians will surprise me and co-ordinate these efforts. If not, at least someone is planning to do something to actually screen would-be immigrants with an eye to who the country needs and who wants to be here for the right reasons.

As for the fact that the government tagged it onto a budget bill that would trigger an election should it fail, so what? It's a tactic, sure, but if this "new" policy is so horrible, all the opposition parties should unite to defeat it, damn the torpedoes. My conclusion from that is that the Immigration proposals are not so odious after all, and/or Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition (and hangers on) lack the moral fibre to follow their moral compass. That would make them hypocrites, not a character trait I'd be looking for in a citizen. Anybody want to trade some slightly used politicians for some doctors or electrical engineers?

Somehow I don't see too many takers...

Maybe it IS a war; the French want no part...

I had the intention of using this space to tell my small world to stop calling what we're doing in Afghanistan a "war". That was before I read the results of that French poll quoted in the linked article. To whit:

In a speech in Britain last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to bolster France's troop strength in Afghanistan, saying he would confirm the offer during the NATO meeting in Bucharest, which will take place April 2-4. Sarkozy did not specify a number, but news reports have said the plan would add 1,000 troop reinforcements.

But more than two-thirds of people questioned in a French poll published Tuesday say they oppose Sarkozy's plan to increase the number of French troops in Afghanistan.

Sixty-five per cent said that the United States and its allies are wrong to lead a war in Afghanistan against fighters linked to the former Taliban regime and members of al-Qaeda. Seventeen per cent said they support the effort.

Now I won't get into this CBC reporter's math (since when is 65% "more than two-thirds"?), but numbers like that are a good indication of general attitudes despite the manipulation that is possible, indeed likely on a question like this. Semantics about exactly what word is appropriate aside (I'd use "insurgency", myself), if you're not in favour of a war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, why even bother with an Army?

Again, I have no idea how this question was phrased, but I suppose "Are you in favour of Bush's imperial hegemonic war in Afghanistan against the freedom fighters of al Qaeda and the scholars of the Taliban?" is possible. Even if this (admittedly extreme) question wasn't exactly what was posed, the widespread association between Afghanistan and Iraq is troublesome.

Afghanistan was under an extremely unpleasant government which was actively assisting training and hosting a terrorist organization responsible for various bloody attacks against Western targets. Those targets were mostly American, but everyone should remember that the bad guys would get around to us lesser "Satans" eventually too.

That support is a casus belli by itself, and the Americans were 100% within their legal and moral rights to invade to knock them out of action. The fact that they (and we) are trying to put the place back together is a good thing.

Enough of that. I've been of the opinion for some time that NATO needs a purge, and this doesn't change my mind. Let France, Germany, Spain and Italy go their own way (since they aren't team players anyway) and bring the Poles and other more motivated countries in, and then at least we'd be able to make realistic plans knowing our allies were the real deal.

Reapeating myself, I know. I also appear to have been incorrect about Canada pulling out by 2009, but a lot of stuff can happen between now and then, so don't count my fearless predictions out yet.