Excerptcize

Archive for January, 2010

That’s what Justin Beach is suggesting over at his blog. Justin is a great writer who also happens to run a fantastic Canadian Music News blog, North by East West; I don’t know where he finds the time (NxEW does have a great pan-Canadian team). Justin doesn’t just provide insight and analysis in his postings, he’s usually also contributing ideas on actual ways to enact change. Just the other day he was noting that that Canadians are clearly frustrated with the continual tactical leveraging from Prime Minister Harper, and states:

[...]this seriously begs for electoral reform and Parliamentary reform. The current system is totally and completely broken and there is no sign that there will be another majority Government of any stripe for the foreseeable future and it comes at the worst possible time.

We have serious problems to fix.

As I’ve noted before I also believe that Parliamentary reform is in order, both for the House and Senate. Electoral reform should be a natural partner to that as well. That prompted me to ask in comments “Are there any functional tools that Canadians can employ to attempt to undertake some electoral and Parliamentary reform? Can these things only originate from the House itself?” Today Justin has a post up that begins to answer that oh so important question, what can be done?

[...]the broken Parliament has been an ongoing issue for me and many others. It’s not just the proroguing of Parliament. That’s just the most recent symptom of an ongoing disease. The uniting of the right combined with the fragmenting of everyone else (and Liberal infighting) have allowed 30% of the population to run the country.

There has been talk in the past about ‘uniting the left’ but that’s easier said than done [...] what about the Liberals and the Greens?

[...]the Liberals have ‘the establishment’. They have infrastructure, money and names (and a party logo) that Canadians know [...]What the Liberals do not have is ideas.

[...]The Greens do not have ‘establishment’. Other than Elizabeth May people at large don’t know who they are [...] What they do have is street cred and ideas, lots of ideas. (see GreenParty.ca for examples.)

[...]In the last election the Liberals and the Greens did work together to a small extent. The Liberals did not run a candidate in Elizabeth May’s home riding and at one point and Elizabeth May at one point urged strategic voting to defeat the Conservatives. She also supported the idea of a Liberal/NDP coalition – so I think it’s safe to say that the door is open if Ignatieff has the courage to walk through it.

I like the idea on the merits, but am skeptical about the viability of this coming together; I suspect the Liberals will be inclined to stay in a holding pattern, railing against the Government when they can, holding off an election as long as possible and hope that circumstances such as bigger and continuing budgetary deficits eventually change electoral fortunes back to at least a Liberal Minority. I can appreciate where Liberals would take a stance like this from a strategic standpoint, but I do not respect it. Ideas being floated by people like Justin is at least a start on some change; we as a nation most certainly need it.

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The turning of the calendar from December to January will always bring out any number of lists that vary in their usefulness. One that I will happily pass along is a retrospectus of the decade that was 2000 through 2009 in

Grantius Augustus Lawrencius - Ensuring that Canada sparkles with amazing homegrown music

Canadian Independent music from CBC Radio3‘s Grant Lawrence. And what a seminal decade it was! This week and the next’s episodes of Grant’s extremely successful podcast feature his picks for the best Canadian Indie songs from 2000-2009. One of the first things Grant notes is how the great success of Canadian musicians both at home and abroad this past decade has allowed for vehicles like Radio3 to not only be formed, but thrive. Without further ado, here is the first half of the list, starting at number 20 (and get the podcast!):

#20 – The Wet Secrets – Secret March from 2007. You can purchase their album from Six Shooter records here.

The rest of the list is after the jump to avoid spoilers for any who might be interested and would like to simply listen to the whole podcast.

I suppose the whole notion of declaring a ‘War on Terror’ demonstrates that you have not really grasped how to effectively deal with the extremist tactic of terrorism in the first place, but baby steps are still a good thing.  Fareed Zakaria is driven to have to write the obvious in one of the State’s biggest papers:

The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.

It’s shameful and disappointing that this needs to be pointed out. At least in the year 2010 there are easily accessible tools that allow for the dissemination of this basic point. You don’t have to go to far back in time to get to a place where the garment rending of scared neo-cons is all that one can hear.

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How long until this goes on tour in the summer? Perhaps it already has? There’s a March opening in New York. Advice to any ‘Dude’ that is timeless:

Now thou seest what happens, Lebowski, when the agreements of honourable business stand compromised. If thou wouldst treat money as water, flowing as the gentle rain from heaven, why, then thou knowest water begets water; it will be a watery grave your rug, drowned in the weeping brook. Pray remember, Lebowski.

Go watch this clip (it’s not embeddable) and then check out the alternate dialogue after the jump:

hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve never been a fan of tasers. Way too many people have already died directly from these devices or were killed in an event that involved their use. They have been adopted very quickly by law enforcement (both in the US and Canada) with very weak and lackadaisical guidelines, and it seems these guidelines are breached quite frequently with little to no disciplinary action. I would even be so bold as to say that they’ve been a force that is responsible for elevating lazy police work. Digby, writing at her fabulous blog Hullabaloo is always on top of these terrible accidents as they happen and if this is an issue that concerns you and you want to follow it I’d suggest adding her site to your daily blogroll. Here she is writing about one of the stories I linked to above:

[...]the man had done absolutely nothing wrong, presented no danger, had made no threats. The officers merely thought he might be mentally ill. And he screamed in agony when they shot him full of electricity five times in two minutes before he finally complied. (Of course, by “complying” I mean dying.) Therefore, they said they shouldn’t be held liable for killing him.

This is the logic that pervades the taser argument: The taser isn’t harmful so we shouldn’t be held responsible for killing people with them.

Recently the Abbotsford Police Department released the findings of an investigation into the conduct of the Vancouver Police Department during an incident this past summer that resulted in the death of Michael Vann Hubbard, a 54 year old homeless resident of Vancouver. The investigation concluded, amongst other things that:

The two police officers had reasonable grounds to believe that they were in immediate peril of grievous bodily harm or death, [...]After considering the totality of the circumstances facing the two police officers, notwithstanding that there was a tragic outcome, the officers were justified in using force that was intended or likely to cause grievous bodily harm or death.

Vann Hubbard was killed after being confronted by the two police officers in relation to a search for a purse snatcher. Video footage captured at the scene clearly showed Vann Hubbard brandishing an X-Acto knife and continuing to advance towards officers who had their weapons raised at him. Something that I have argued on this blog about other issues that is also relevant to the taser issue is that when enacting and enforcing any policy a cost/benefit analysis needs to be conducted and adhered too. As you may be able to tell from my opening comments, I feel the costs do outweigh the benefits that tasers present. Even with that being the case, why are law enforcement officers not doing a better job of demonstrating those benefits? My understanding of the deployment of tasers is that they are to be used to replace guns in situations they may have been used in before the development of the taser. This seems like it was one the more appropriate scenarios where deploying a taser would have been reasonable. Why was that not the case here? Isn’t this exactly the type of scenario that tasers were designed for?

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Something that I’ve tended to think about the current tenure of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is that although his government has pushed through (or tried to push through) much legislation that I personally disagree with (cuts to the CBC, cuts to arts funding, “tough on crime” legislation), by and large the government has been competent (there have been exceptions to this though too.) Being one who has never had much love for the media, Harper had made no public comments on his recent prorogation of the Canadian parliament until he recently deigned to sit down with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge for an interview:

At 5:24 into the piece, Mansbridge asks the PM about his decision to prorogue the current parliamentary session; in a very casual manner, and apparently doing his best to dissuade me of my belief in his government’s competency, Harper says “coming off an extraordinary year [2009][...]we want to take some time to recalibrate the government’s agenda, both on the economy and on some other matters.” What kind of government is not capable of evaluating what you’ve done in the past, realign goals for the future and govern at the same time? Not one worthy of governing in my opinion. Unfortunately this video clip cuts off without showing Harper’s comment that since the controversy about the transfer of Afghan detainee’s isn’t on Canadian’s radar at large it’s not something that his government is going to be concerned with. To see that as well as Mansbridge’s logical followup question “Just because it’s not an issue in polls, does that not make it important?” you can view the full clip here.

Something I find rather interesting is to compare our PM’s assertion that the government needs two months to ‘recalibrate’ and that they are focused on the economy, not silly little things like the rule of law and how we adhere to international treaties, with the constant criticism that President Obama faces in the US that he is not ‘focused’ enough for his decision to deal with the terrible legacies Bush left in the GWOT, healthcare, the economy, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan/Pakistan and whatever other issues an effective executive needs to deal with. The blogosphere in the States makes the easy analogy that one can walk and chew gum at the same time to illustrate that good governments needs to be multifaceted, as we are a multifaceted society. It’s a shame our PM either feels that is not the case, or crassly makes that case to defend his current politicking.

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I am quickly going through one of the excellent Christmas gifts that I received from my parents, Michael Specter’s latest book Denialism, and it is a very enjoyable and informative read. The subtitle is “How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives”! Some heavy stuff. One of the points that Specter makes throughout the book is how bad humans tend to be at calculating and understanding odds. Our brains are capable of a huge array of activities, and can perform many of them with great aplomb and very effectively. Intuition for how probabilities affect us is not one of those activities. While watching some TV the other night a perfect example of this was on display in, of all things, a Canadian Tire ad for wiper blades. In the ad, the spokesperson tells us how her thing is watching the weather channel, so when she had to go pick someone up and she knew there was “only a 5% chance of snow” and wouldn’t be reliant on her old wiper blades. She goes on to say that the forecasters “where wrong”, and we see a visual of her driving through snowy conditions having great difficulty seeing through the windshield. So a probability is put on a particular event of having a 5% chance of happening. This event then does in fact happen. Those who assigned the probability are wrong! The very meaning of probability has been missed. Any event with a low probability of happening eventually does happen. The human brain seems to instinctively find fault with the forecaster though. Specter does a nice job of illustrating how this kind of thinking (amongst other things) can be so problematic. Anyone interested in getting a taste of Specter’s writing can read through the first chapter of the book here. And the next time some poor schmo hits his one out remaining in the deck on the river card, it’s gotta happen sometime, and the game is most likely not rigged!

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Congratulations go out to the US Under 20 Hockey Team, as they defeated Canada 6-5 in overtime to win the IIHF World Junior Championships in a game for the ages. Some records are meant to be broken and others aren’t. Canada’s Jordan Eberle became the top all-time scorer for Canada with his two goals late in the the third period to tie the game at 5-5, but the record of 6 consecutive titles was not to be for the Canadian side. The Americans played a fast paced game and blocked as many shots in the game as I’ve ever seen. Kudos to them. I hope the young ones enjoy it as the upcoming Olympic tournament is going to be sheer madness. We (Canada as a country) cannot wait.

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The other day I was calling myself naive for thinking that perhaps the unsuccessful attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight on Christmas day would not be overblown. Boy was I wrong. It did seem to me that the Canadian response was somewhat more measured as new security was only put into place for flights to the US. It may however be time to break out the ‘naive’ label again. Listening to the CBC News:World Report Podcast on my way into work this morning, I was disappointed to hear that Transportation Minister John Baird is set to make an announcement later on this afternoon about new security measures that will be put into place at Canadian airports. When I switched over to my radio, the top of the hour newscast featured a similar report.

One of the DJ’s made two observations that are relevant here; with all the billions of dollars spent on airport security since 9/11, this attempted attack was (at least partially) foiled by passengers. She also noted that we don’t employ such extreme security measures in other modes of mass transportation, citing the relative lack of security when taking a ferry between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. To my ear it sounded as if the announcer was speaking from a place of fear and wishing for more security. This however seems backwards to me and her observations illustrated that quite well. We don’t have extreme security measures except for air travel as human irrationalities trump clearer thinking when flight is involved. The first point leads me to the conclusion that no matter how much is spent on security it is impossible to prevent all highly motivated individuals from attempting to use airplanes as a way to sew terror. None of this is to say that we shouldn’t be vigilant in regards to air travel and not have any security, merely that a cost/benefit analysis of our security spending is needed and in my non-expert opinion we are already well past the point of diminishing returns on dollars spent.

Stay tuned to the CBC or your Canadian news outlet of choice for more information on what is actually going to change.

Update : By my reading of this news report it appears that the new security measures entail installing the ‘full body scanners’ that we have been hearing about lately at Canada’s major airports to randomly screen passengers, but only those travelling to the US. I don’t have a problem with my privacy being violated by them seeing me ‘naked’; the privacy commissioner’s office is placated on that front, so I am too. I do think that they are a waste of resources, but the US masters have mandated them from on high, so I don’t really what options we have. As we get more extreme with screening, the frequency with which we see false positives like this will go up. I don’t even want to think how much money in lost productivity this screw up over honey cost.

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Felix Salmon, economics blogger for Reuters had this post up a few days ago:

Mike Mandel has four nominees for his “Economic Statistic of the Decade” award, including home prices (obvs), Chinese growth, and global trade. But the most startling one, for me, is US household borrowing:

I like the time frame that Mike has chosen here, since it shows not only the huge increase in borrowing during the credit boom and the stomach-churning plunge thereafter, but also, for much of the 1990s, what “normal” should look like.

Mike notes that the data for this chart includes domestic hedge funds, so it shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value. But it’s the best visual representation I’ve seen of the credit boom and bust.

There’s also a nice riposte in comments to someone whining about the current decade not being over yet:

There is one full year remaining in the decade that consists of the first ten years of the 21st century. There are no more years remaining in the decade that consists of the ten years beginning with 2-0-0. Each of them is “the current decade” (as is the decade that consists of the years 2007 through 2016). It turns out that the overwhelming majority of the population finds it most appealing to review the history of a decade defined as the set of years with the same three initial digits, and they are in no way wrong to do so.

Exactly. Enjoy this new decade. And borrow sensibly! I’ll see if I can’t find the same data for Canadian households. I imagine it is only somewhat more prudent…

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Here’s some geekiness and comedy wrapped into a nice visual data package for you as you get set for back to work this Monday (if you are like most of us simple peons..) From the wonderful webcomic xkcd. If you aren’t reading it..well, you should see if you like it.

Click to Enlarge

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Senate Chamber, Centre Block, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Canada (photo by Montrealais, used under Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike license)

In my haste to post on the prorogation of parliament, I completely forgot to mention one of the more tangible reasons for Mr. Harper to do so; Senate appointments. As I understand it, (mostly by way of Kady O’Malley) with parliament not in session, the Prime Minister will be able to appoint at least 5 new senators and possibly as many as 13 depending on his willingness to get out the old parliamentary playbook again. Five new Conservative senators would give them a plurality in the upper house (did you know that there are still 2 PC Senators?) along with more bargaining power on the allotment of Senate committee seats. If Harper invokes Section 26 of the Constitution Act (only previously successfully done by Brian Mulroney to allow passage of the bill that created the GST) then he could appoint 8 additional Senators to the 5 seats that are currently unoccupied, thus giving the Conservative Party an outright majority with 59 seats out of a total of 113 (there are 105 ‘regular’ seats with Section 26 allowing the temporary addition of 8 Senators, with attrition then being in effect until the Senate returns to the ‘normal’ level of 105 seats through retirements.)

This benefit is by far the most likely prize for the PM; shutting down the House to continued criticism on the handling of the transfer of  Afghan detainees and delivering a budget clean of opposition injections when Parliament reopens are ancillary bonuses to being able to get legislation that has cleared the House through the Senate unmarred by those lefty Liberals and NDP’ers (don’t forget the rump PC’ers!)

This puts me in an interesting position; while I don’t agree with the means that Harper is using, I can sympathize with the ends he is trying to reach. As one who spends far too much time enveloped in US politics, I have developed a healthy fear of an overly powerful Senate. Now obviously the two bodies are very different but as time goes by it increasingly seems that the Canadian Senate is also becoming a place for legislation passed by our elected representatives to go to die. My wikipedia tells me that “[...]as a matter of practice and custom, the Commons is by far the dominant chamber. Although the approval of both houses is necessary for legislation, the Senate rarely rejects bills passed by the directly elected Commons.” I need to do some more looking to qualify my feeling that the qualifier ‘rarely’ is becoming less appropriate as time goes by, but I certainly do feel that is the case. If any readers have info that supports or refutes that feeling it would be much appreciated. In my own humble (am I allowed to add considered?) opinion, Senate reform is something both the US and Canada need (the US much more so than Canada, but why shouldn’t we get ahead of a growing problem ourselves?)

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