O Canada Pt. 2

It's good to be wrong sometimes.*  That is all.


* Shame about the NDP's collapse tho'.

O Canada

Are Canadian pollsters any better than Brits I wonder ?  And just WTF happened to the NDP ?

Canada's future PM ?  They can't believe it.

Not the North Pole ! What will that Dastardly Vlad Do Next ?

Ah, the Daily Express, my number-one source in determining the major threats to our civilisation, to our way of life, to our survival.  That paragon of journalistic integrity and accuracy.  Do tell.  Do tell.

Vladimir Putin: Russia owns the NORTH POLE - and the UN needs to give it back to us!

VLADIMIR PUTIN has made his most audacious land grab bid yet after claiming that Russia owns the NORTH POLE.

Not content with just spreading his power base into Ukraine, the eccentric president has now submitted a bold claim to a large portion of the Arctic.

Russia has long had eyes on the Arctic ice, which it is thought could contain vast reserves of oil, precious gems and minerals. 

Putin recently announced plans to bolster the country's naval presence in the region, sparking fears that the country could attempt a military-led land grab.

Those would be the plans would they to restore a fraction of the former Soviet presence in the region, at a time when all interested parties are staking their claim to the far North, and at least one Western oil-company is actively planning to drill in the Arctic ?  I can't imagine why they would be doing that.

Now Russia has submitted a claim to the UN for a large swathe of Arctic ice covering an astonishing 500,000 square miles, parts of which have already been claimed by Denmark. 

Gasp !

Russian officials claim tectonic plate maps show that the disputed territory is part of Russia's "continental character".

...

In a statement outlining the claim, the Russian government stated: "The outer borders of the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean is based on the scientific understanding that the central Arctic underwater ridges…have a continental character."

Moscow will now ask the UN Commission on the Limits and the Continental Shelf (CLCS) to rule on the boundaries of the contintental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. 

They asked a UN body specifically tasked with advising on continental boundaries to...advise on continental boundaries ?!!  The cads !  The bounders !

Denmark’s submission to the commission, made on behalf of Greenland, was the first attempt to claim outright ownership of the North Pole. 

Wait, what ?  Back up just a second there...Denmark did what ?

That has provoked the response from Putin, who would be unwilling to see potentially lucrative lands falling into western hands. 

When Denmark submitted its bid in December 2014, a leading expert on Arctic sovereignty predicted that Russia would retaliate. 

Er, *cough* Crimea *cough* Eastern Ukraine *cough*.

Canadian professor Michael Byers said: “It is ironic that the only country that right now could be said to be acting provocatively in the Arctic is Denmark. That is out of character with the country’s tradition of constructive diplomacy." 

Erm, what was our headline for this article again ?  I don't recall any mention of Queen Margrethe or Mister Rasmussen.  Weren't we talking about a certain Russian fellow ?

Under UN rules states are entitled to claim the continental shelf extending to 200 nautical miles from their coast. 

The Danish government expects its claim to be processed by 2027 after spending more than £31million in research. 

Canada has also said it will try to extend its territorial claims in the Arctic to include the North Pole, although it hasn't yet fully mapped its claim....

The monsters !  Oh wait, Canada isn't an officially designated villain in this story, is it ?  Canada's actions are inherently benign then.

...Last month Russia announced that its navy will deploy a fleet of new icebreakers to the Arctic tasked with sidestepping traditional Nato security patrols. 

We're politicising ice-breakers now ?  When did then happen ?


I dunno, this shit is hilarious, but what percentage of the idiots reading the Express will just see the headline and believe it implicitly without even bothering to read the story ?

What percentage, as evidenced by certain comments on the story, will click on the link, not bother to actually read the story, and then, despite not having read the Express' own words on the matter, post a comment publicly, based solely on the hyperbolic headline ?


Meanwhile, the Express also has a highly perceptive story to offer in which they note that all-out nuclear war between Russia and the West would create a 'dystopian future where London ceases to exist'.  No !  You don't say !  Illustrated throughout with images based upon some stupid movie (30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, baby !), that basically involve taking pictures of actual London, and simply blackening them a little, and adding some smoke & fire.  Despite their own 'futurologist's rather generous comment in the article that 'If anything, [the images] were a little optimistic. Things like The Shard on fire, if you had a Third World War it would be a pile of rubble - it wouldn't be on fire.'  Er, no shit.


What would we do without such fine journalism ?

No Taxpayer-funded Campaigning Under M. Harper, Non

In accordance with our commitment to a fixed election-date, the next general election will be held as prescribed by law.  As it is my intention to begin campaign-related activities, and it's also the case for the other party-leaders, it's important that these campaigns be funded by the parties themselves, rather than taxpayers.

My fucking jaw dropped when I heard this on the CBC.  The balls on this man...

And how about deceptive robocalling-campaigns ?  Is it okay for them to be funded by the taxpayer, Mister 'Message from the Government of Canada' ?


Meanwhile, that economic downturn I'm currently overseeing ?: More reason you be very very afraid of the opposition and keep me in power even longer.  And also, ISIS: VERY, VERY AFRAID !  Liberals & NDP weak !  Justin inexperienced !  Me protect you from Scary Vladimir Putin ! BE AFRAID !

Oh, and in case I don't sound enough like an American Republican: 'Best country in the world !'  But only so long as you keep us in power.  BE AFRAID !!!

That 'Soft Power' Bullshit

Can't even remember now where I was hearing it discussed, whether it was R4/X or some podcast...

Then, I come across this chart, and, hang on a minute, Austria ?  The country that should be, were it not for the historical existence of a certain empire, and the later genocide at the hands of one of its own sons, part of Deutschland ?  A country routinely confused by the world at large with a continent in the South Pacific ?  What cultural or other 'soft power' does the Österreich possess ?  I'll give you Wolfgang & Falco, granted, but then ?

And Singapore ?  Singapore has a culture ?  Of its own ?

And the UK at number one ?  What, because of the popularity of British themes in Japanese manga ? The UK is viewed by the majority of the world as some sort of heritage-themed resort for tourists.

And Canada, shit !  What, other than a handful of slang-words, traditional spellings, the Queen on plastic currency, and poutine, really defines Canadians as separate from Americans, eh ?

I just don't understand anything any more.*


* I just liked the way that sentence sounded in my head.

Tony Abbott is an Asshat Part MMMCCXLVII

Government pulls the plug on household solar

The Abbott government has opened up another front in its war on renewable energy by pulling the plug on investments in the most common form of alternative energy, rooftop and small-scale solar.

As a storm raged over the government's directive to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to no longer back wind energy projects, it emerged that it has also put a stop to solar investments other than the largest industrial-scale projects.

The solar industry has been left fuming by a letter to the CEFC by Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in which they direct investments in household and small-scale solar to be "excluded" from the $10 billion fund in future.

The draft investment mandate calls for "mature and established clean energy technologies … to be excluded from the corporation's activities, including extant wind technology and household and small-scale solar".

Currently, about a third of all CEFC investments involve small-scale solar. The corporation, which has produced more than a $1 profit for the government for every $1 invested, was assessing $500 million in finance for solar projects valued at more than $1 billion.

There are 1.3 million rooftop solar systems in Australia and most households receive publicly-backed rebates to install, but the CEFC has made a priority projects that help people who do not own their own homes, those who live in apartments and community groups to invest in solar panels.

...

Australian Solar Council chief executive John Grimes accused Tony Abbott of playing "cynical politics" after the Prime Minister insisted on Sunday that his government "supports renewables" but wants to "reduce the upward pressure on power prices".

Mr Grimes said the CEFC had made it possible for low-income people and retirees to invest in solar and take advantage of the power bill savings that flow.

"Tony Abbott is keeping people trapped paying higher electricity prices," Mr Grimes told Fairfax Media.

The government tried and failed to abolish the profit-making CEFC after failing to get Senate support and its latest strike against wind and solar is expected to further scare renewable energy investors away from Australia, Labor and the Greens claim.

..

Shadow environment spokesman Mark Butler said: "These proposed changes go well beyond Tony Abbott's opposition to the aesthetic values of wind farms - it's a wholesale attack on renewable energy.

"Tony Abbott is broadening his assault on renewable energy technologies putting thousands of Australian jobs and billions of dollars in investment at even further risk."

Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon thing.  Here we are in 2015, decades after we were first warned about global warming, and at a time when even the PRC in China are embracing renewables, we have governments in the US*, Canada, the UK, and Australia all actively working against renewable projects, such as windfarms & solar, and championing greater investment in fossil-fuels.

And in this case, it would seem it isn't even about money.  $1 profit for every $1 invested sounds like a pretty good investment to me.  This is just being an asshole for the sake of it.  It's the politician's equivalent of those assholes in the US, who 'roll coal', ie modify their vehicles to release black smoke on demand, then wait till a Prius shows up in their rearview and blast them.  I really do despair for humanity.


* I'm referring here of course not to Barack Obama, but to the Republican assholes in Congress and elsewhere.

Would that Humans Humane Were

With a new government — the first really new government in 44 years — Alberta politics is alive with possibilities for new directions and fresh approaches. Two ideas in particular have the province’s political class abuzz.

The first is the possible introduction of a guaranteed minimum income, known to be an area of interest to the province’s new finance minister, the former city alderman and poverty activist Joseph Ceci. The second is an increase in the province’s minimum wage to $15, as promised in the NDP’s election manifesto.

The two might be thought to work in parallel, both with “minimum” in their name, both aiming — or professing to do so — to improve the lot of the worst off in society. In fact, they are opposites.

The guaranteed minimum income has been the desideratum of generations of economists and welfare theorists, from the left and the right. The idea is to combine a number of existing income support and benefit programs into one, for which every citizen would quality as of right: no forms to fill out, no eligibility criteria, just a basic entitlement.

The benefit would start at a relatively low level, for those with no income at all, but would be withdrawn relatively gradually as earned income increased, thus ensuring recipients were not unduly penalized for taking a job and advancing themselves. The easiest objection to the guaranteed minimum income — that it would leave people with no incentive to work — is thus the most easily rebuffed.

The real disincentive to work arises not from giving money to people who don’t work, but taking it away from them when they do.

But notice how it works. The benefit is a social obligation; thus, it is socially financed, i.e., through the tax and transfer system. Everybody pays for it (though the more you make the more you pay) and everybody is eligible for it (though the more you make the less you receive). It is available whether you are in work or out, and has no impact either on the willingness of workers to supply their labour or the willingness of employers to demand it.

Now contrast all this to the minimum wage. This makes no pretence to be available to all. To benefit from it, you must have a job. Moreover, rather than being financed collectively, through a levy that all must pay, the cost is borne entirely by employers — at least in theory.

But of course, employers have a simple means of avoiding this obligation that the rest of us have seen fit to thrust upon them: by hiring fewer workers. And the higher the minimum wage, the greater an employer’s incentive to take this exit. It need not mean actually laying people off; it may simply be that they take on fewer new hires than they otherwise would. But all the legislation in the world can’t force a company to pay a worker who isn’t in their employ.

Of course, the minimum wage benefits some workers: those who are employed make more than they otherwise would. Surprisingly few workers are actually at the minimum wage — just five per cent of the labour force — and few of these work full-time or serve as a family’s principal source of income. But there’s also some evidence that minimum wages tend to push up wages at higher levels, to the extent wage bargainers work off the difference between the two.

But this is hardly social justice. A just society concerns itself first with the lot of those worst off, and the very worst off are surely those, not on low income, but no income at all; not those in work, but those out of work, priced out of the market by the tariff the state has thoughtfully placed on their labour.

A government that wanted to help those whose lack of skills or experience left them unable to earn what the rest of us would regard as a decent level of income would therefore prefer the minimum income to the minimum wage — that is, a government that valued results, rather than just good intentions, would do so.

... 

I've heard worse arguments certainly.

Canada Ending Tax on Tampons ?

Federal 'tampon tax' to be removed July 1  

The federal government plans to remove the tax on tampons and other feminine hygiene products, effective July 1.

A notice of a motion to amend the Excise Tax Act says the move will apply to sanitary napkins, tampons, menstrual cups and other similar products.

The NDP and others have been calling on the government to get rid of the so-called “tampon tax,” saying it unfairly targeted women.

Under the Excise Tax Act, the GST is typically applied to “luxury” items not considered essential to daily life. But in trying to get the tax eliminated, NDP MPs argued that tampons and pads are essential for most women of reproductive age.

Since January, more than 74,000 people have signed an online petition calling for an end to the levy on menstrual products.

Earlier this month, the NDP introduced a motion in the House calling on the government to exempt the products from the GST – a motion that the Conservative government said it would support.

Good.  Australia next ?  For some reason, fundamental human bodily functions always seem to get short shrift when it comes to talking about human rights, especially when it's to do with women's bodies.  Politicians never tire of talking about ways to make rich white men even richer, but addressing the messy details of actual human bodies ?  Ew !  Don't want to even think about it.  Make it go away...

The Grauniad Spitting into the Prairie Winds of Probability

Sure, it could.  So, what, the NDP & Liberals should engage in some grand alliance ?  Yeah, ha ha.  Sure.  That'll happen.

Short of electoral reform (and the record of that in the west is pretty bad, the US having failed to make any movement whatsoever towards abolition of the electoral college, that system having finally in 2000 made a man president ahead of his opponent who literally won more votes, and the electorate of the United Kingdom having actually voted down the option of AV (Alternative Vote/Preferential Voting), because...because, well, there's no way I can say that without being deeply insulting to the intelligence of said electorate), strategic voting is still the best option the voters have.  In theory, politicians and parties could put their own egos and ambitions aside, but when has that ever happened in the West outside WWII ?

For most of my lifetime certainly, voting for the least shitty likely outcome has always been the most sensible option for most of the western world, which does again beg the question for proponents of proportional voting who voted against AV in the UK, what the fuck were you thinking ?  Think the Tories are ever likely to put proportional voting on the ballot given the last results ?  Think there's much chance even AV will be on the cards again for the next several decades ?  Think a likely future rUK will give you any choices other than Tory or UKIP, or the future identical simulacrums thereof ?

But returning to Canadian voters again...Fuck it, you're going to re-elect Harper's government again and you know it.  Short of a massive crisis of confidence in the Tories' economic policies and/or some titanic scandal, you'll vote, like the idiot Brits, in favour of caution over chance, even if you're sane enough to recognise that burning off the oil-sands may well be a death-knell for the planet.

Because you're cautious, you're conservative, you're easily scared, you're risk-averse, you're disproportionately focused on the near-term future, you're rather wedded to irrational thinking, and, in other words,...you're human.

(Yet) A(nother) Message from the Government of Canada

OTTAWA – Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre is making no apologies for using taxpayer dollars to produce videos of himself promoting the universal child care benefit.

Opposition MPs call them “vanity videos” that mark a new low for a government that has a penchant for producing partisan advertising on the public dime.

But Poilievre says he’s simply informing Canadians about the newly enriched and expanded child benefit.

And he says he’ll continue to work “aggressively” to promote the benefit despite the uproar, even coyly addressing his critics by tweeting out “the video everyone’s been talking about” Friday.

And indeed, why would he ?  Using the resources of the state for continuous political propaganda is perfectly normal behaviour in a one-party dictatorshipparliamentary democracy, as is using bribery to try to maintain one's position of power.

The Arrow

Speaking of the CBC, and the fiction that Canada can these days defend itself without being entirely dependent upon the protection of its pimpthe United States, got me thinking of this maybe not totally authentically historical but still awesome piece about the Avro Arrow...and what could have been.  And yay, it's on YouTube.

Also, It's a Lie...

Strong. Proud. Free. And a state secret.

The genesis of the Harper government's "Strong Proud Free" slogan that is currently bombarding Canadian television viewers is considered a cabinet confidence and will be sealed from public scrutiny for 20 years.

...

A spokesman for the Privy Council Office, the bureaucracy that supports the Prime Minister's Office, would only say that the slogan is "drawn from the thematics" of the government's 2013 throne speech.

Opposition critics point out the language is also drawn from the 2011 Conservative party platform and mirrors the themes promoted as Conservative values on the party website and in fundraising pitches.

...

The Conservatives have come under repeated criticism for spending tens of millions of dollars annually on government advertising that is often indistinguishable from the partisan branding of the party. The marketing exercise extends to departmental web design (now a uniform Tory blue, with cross-pollinating links to popular Conservative initiatives such as family tax cuts) and even departmental press releases, often heralding local "Harper government" expenditures.

"There have been some ambiguous government ads where a plausible defence could be made that they are not partisan or that they provide some modicum of information, but the 'Strong Proud Free' tagline makes no such pretence," said Jonathan Rose, a specialist in political communication at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

"It's almost verbatim from the Conservative party website."

Economic Action Plan (those were just straight up blatant partisan ideological propaganda), War of 1812, 150th Birthday of Canada...  My prediction is, if Stephen Harper & Co. are still in power after 2017, no matter what, they'll still find...something...requiring a constant taxpayer-funded barrage of 'A Message from the Toriesthe Government of Canada' ads.  Why not just drop the pretense already ?  Assholes.

Orphan Black's Back

Very very glad of the same, but don't have anything particular to say on the subject, so hey, go read one of the Guardian's seemingly infinite number of writers on the subject.  And since we have to have a cool picture (below), please check out Collider's Interview with Tatiana whence the picture is borrowed.

I'll refrain for this post at least in saying what I think of so-called 'BBC America' and their backers.  It's a cool show.  Watch it.

David Bowie: Panic in Detroit

Historically, geographically, the wholesale abandonment of Detroit by non- 'African-American' populations makes no sense.  And what other similar territory in the US would not, decades later, have been gentrified by now ?  What is it about this particular piece of real estate, with wealthy white suburbs ringing it all about, with nearby Arab-heavy suburban communities, and with so many auto factories relocated just north of the border into Canada ?  Where else in the US is the line between populations so explicitly marked along stark white and black lines ?  For what reason, and to what end ?  By rights, Detroit could have been/should be one of the jewels of America's crown.  Instead, it's a perpetual embarrassment, and a racial case-history upon which no race seems hugely inclined to dwell.  I could go into the current right-wing 'emergency measures' being put forward for the 'reform' of Detroit, but I don't think my heart could stand it.  Detroit deserved/deserves better.

Of course Detroit is merely practice.  YourTown, USA is next on the Billionaire agenda.  Your time will come, and sooner than you think...