Quotulatiousness

April 11, 2011

Election bombshell in leak of Auditor General’s report?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:01

The Winnipeg Free Press has a potentially explosive article about a leak of part of the Auditor General’s report:

The Harper government misinformed Parliament to win approval for a $50-million G8 fund that lavished money on dubious projects in a Conservative riding, the auditor general has concluded.

And she suggests the process by which the funding was approved may have been illegal.

The findings are contained in the draft of a confidential report Sheila Fraser was to have tabled in Parliament on April 5. The report analyzed the $1-billion cost of staging last June’s G8 summit in Ontario cottage country and a subsequent gathering of G20 leaders in downtown Toronto.

It was put on ice when the Harper government was defeated and is not due to be released until sometime after the May 2 election. However, a Jan. 13 draft of the chapter on the G8 legacy infrastructure fund was obtained by a supporter of an opposition party and shown to The Canadian Press.

This could be the big break that the opposition parties have been waiting for: the leak is just about perfectly timed for maximum effect (just before the first debate), and the Auditor General has refused to discuss the news story or to give any interviews during the election campaign.

Budget was over-optimistic, but promises based on that budget are fantasies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Over at the consistently interesting Economy Lab blog at the Globe and Mail, Stephen Gordon casts scorn equally on Liberal, Conservative, and NDP campaign promises:

All parties are using the March 22 budget as a baseline for their scenarios; their platforms enumerate tax and spending plans in terms of deviations from the budget scenario. So the first problem to point out is that the budget’s scenario of freezing nominal expenditures for five years without cutting services or programs is at best implausibly optimistic.

The Liberal platform [. . .] builds on that implausible baseline by overestimating anticipated revenues from an increase in the corporate income tax (CIT) by a factor of 2.5.

The Conservative platform’s variation on its own budget is a promise to identify and implement savings worth $4-billion a year within the next three years without cutting programs or reducing services. No other explanation is offered, but then again, neither do they seem to be able to explain the cuts that were announced in the budget.

But the prize for budgetary opacity must surely go to the New Democrats’ “costing document”. Firstly, their estimate of $9-billion a year from increasing the CIT rate is even more implausible than that of the Liberals: an overestimate by a factor of at least three. The next largest source of revenue — “Tax Haven Crackdown” — is supposed to produce more than $3-billion in 2014-15. I cannot offer you any more in the way of explanation behind that number, because the NDP platform is completely silent on the matter. No measures are announced, no reasoning is offered to explain why those measures might be sensible, and no research is offered to justify the $3-billion estimate. The same goes for the “Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies” entry: $2-billion a year in extra revenues, again with no explanation, discussion or research.

SSL is “just an illusion of security”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is critically important to safe communications on the internet. It may also be “hopelessly broken“:

SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the rightful owners of the domains visitors are accessing, rather than impostors who have hacked the users’ connections. Countless websites also use SSL to encrypt passwords, emails and other data to thwart anyone who may be monitoring the traffic passing between the two parties.

It’s hard to overstate the reliance that websites operated by Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Bank of America and millions of other companies place in SSL. And yet, the repeated failures suggest that the system in its current state is hopelessly broken.

“Right now, it’s just an illusion of security,” said Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher who has repeatedly poked holes in the technical underpinnings of SSL. “Depending on what you think your threat is, you can trust it on varying levels, but fundamentally, it has some pretty serious problems.”

Although SSL’s vulnerabilities are worrying, critics have reserved their most biting assessments for the business practices of Comodo, VeriSign, GoDaddy and the other so-called certificate authorities, known as CAs for short. Once their root certificates are included in Internet Explorer, Firefox and other major browsers, they can’t be removed without creating disruptions on huge swaths of the internet.

Wormme mashes up Theodore Sturgeon and Frederick Winslow Taylor

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:46

wormme read an older Atlantic article linked from Instapundit and had this to say:

Via Insty, this is one of the best things I’ve ever read. It eviscerates the myth of management competence the way that Joe Biden destroys the idea of government competence. But let’s take a step back from the specifics of business management. Look at all the other occupations that share management’s main trait.

Because in reality they’re all the same thing.

Here’s some fields in which competence is assumed, all evidence to the contrary: government, law, management, education, economics, scholarship, and all journalistic media.

Notice what they all have in common? As a primary feature?

Jaw flappin’, tongue waggin’, hot air spewin’ talkety talk talk words blah blah blah.

“Them that can, do. Them that can’t, teach.” And manage and report and govern. But you don’t hear that adage anymore, do you? The Talkers have brainwashed people into thinking they’re Doers as well.

I expect this is the thing that actually brings down Western Civilization. The Doers letting the Talkers take over the Doings.

The chin-waggin’ industries want “ex cathedra” status for their every mumble. How do they repay? By finding nothing but fault in the Doers: industries, energy production, “big box” stores, etc., all the way down to the evil of the Happy Meal.

This still wouldn’t have spelled civilization’s doom, had the Talkies remained apart. Journalism in particular is supposed to report on lies and wrongdoing. And they do so with gusto, when investigating Doers. Do you ever see them going after fellow Talkers like that? They’re in cahoots. Total…cahoots.

Political grandstanding at the expense of Muslim women

Filed under: Europe, France, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Josie Appleton points out the logical inconsistencies of the various European “Ban the Burkha” movements:

In spite of the grave crisis of the Euro, the French cabinet will today (19 May[, 2010]) find the time to discuss a draft law banning the wearing of full-face veils in public places. Spain has just slashed public wages and is on the verge of economic collapse, yet the minister of work yesterday made the effort to visit Lleida and voice his support for the mayor’s plan to prohibit full Islamic facewear in the streets. Last month, Belgium’s coalition government had dissolved and there was talk of splitting up the country, yet the parliament managed to unite 136 out of 138 deputies to vote through a law banning the burqa and niqab.

How is it that European leaders, in such difficult times, have invested such energy in the matter of women’s facewear? Why was a Spanish schoolgirl who insisted on wearing a headscarf so fascinating as to draw the media’s attention away from government cuts? Why such detailed discussions on the intricacies of Islamic veils? Newspapers feature pullouts on the different forms of Islamic veil, and commentators explain why the niqab is so much worse than the shayla or the chandor, and indeed how the hijab is fine and even liberating for Muslim women.

The burqa-ban laws were introduced with such displays of speechmaking that anybody would think the fate of these countries hung on this single point of principle. One Belgian deputy admitted that ‘the image of our country abroad is more and more incomprehensible’, but said this near-unanimous vote banning the burqa and niqab rescued ‘an element of pride to be Belgian’. A French commission on the veil said the veil was ‘contrary to the values of the Republic’ and the parliament should make it clear that ‘all of France is saying “no” to the full veil’. The Spanish work minister said this clothing ‘clashes fundamentally with our society and equality between men and women. The values of our society cannot go into retreat.’

Lovely sounding stuff in front of the microphones, to be sure. Good photo ops for ambitious politicians, to a clamour of general approval and risking the loss of very little: there were so relatively few women wearing these articles of clothing — and few of them or their husbands/fathers/brothers likely have the vote anyway.

Now, pay heed to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Many of these women now have a choice: disobey the family head by going out in public without wearing the niqab/hijab/burkha (and risk beatings or even honour-killing), or follow the dictates of the family head and risk being arrested by the gendarmes.

How, exactly, is this going to benefit those poor women?

Update: The ban in France was passed in October and goes into effect today:

The centre-right government, which passed the law in October, has rolled out a public relations campaign to explain the ban and the rules of its application that includes posters, pamphlets and a government-hosted website.

Guidelines spelled out in the pamphlet forbid police from asking women to remove their burqa in the street. They will instead be escorted to a police station and asked to remove the veil there for identification.

[. . .]

In Avignon, Vaucluse, Reuters TV filmed a woman boarding a train wearing a niqab, unchallenged by police.

“It’s not an act of provocation,” said Kenza Drider. “I’m only carrying out my citizens’ rights, I’m not committing a crime … If they [police] ask me for identity papers I’ll show them, no problem.”

France has five million Muslims, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed actually to wear a face veil.

Many Muslim leaders have said they support neither the veil nor the law banning it.

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