My latest weekly column at GuildMag is now online. Over the past week we’ve seen lots of information from the stress test on Monday plus more articles and videos from April’s Beta Weekend Event. Now we just need to hear when the next Beta Weekend Event will be held.
May 18, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Reputations take years to create, but can be destroyed overnight as Toronto Police have discovered
Chris Selley on how the Toronto G20 protest and the still amazingly bad police response has contributed to the decline in public support for all police organizations:
On July 6, 2010, 10 days after the disastrous G20 summit, Toronto’s City Council voted to “commend the outstanding work of [police] chief Bill Blair, the Toronto Police Service and the police officers working during the G20 Summit in Toronto,” and thank them for a “job well done.” The vote was 36-0. The yeas included then-Mayor David Miller and many other left-wing luminaries. At this point in the G20 post-mortem, this seems a bit hard to believe.
We know much more now about how poorly the security operation was planned and executed: This week’s report from Gerry McNeilly, director of Ontario’s Office of the Independent Police Review, lays it out in painstaking detail. But what we knew 10 days later was bad enough: Thugs had wreaked havoc at will; 400 borderline-hypothermic people were held for hours in the pouring rain for no good reason; police cars were burned; journalists were roughed up and arrested; untold numbers of people were randomly and improperly searched and arrested.
Yet no one on a decidedly left-leaning Council saw fit to vote against the absurd “job well done” commendation (though then-councillor Rob Ford, now Mayor, did complain that the police had been too nice). One has to wonder how much longer politicians’ traditional lockstep support for police is going to last last.
[. . .]
People still call the police in hope of honest and brave assistance, and they almost always get it. But in late March, Angus-Reid asked Canadians how much “confidence [they] have in the internal operations and leadership” of their police forces. A minority of 38% had “complete” or “a lot of” confidence in the RCMP. The number for municipal police forces, taken together, was 39%. That’s about half of what it was in the mid-1990s. The respective numbers in B.C. are below 30%.
If that’s not a credibility crisis, I don’t know what is. Politicians are generally not in the habit of blindly supporting entities with those kinds of approval ratings, and police ought to be worried about that for all kinds of reasons. One of the obvious keys to fixing the problem is, simply, accountability. And it is nowhere to be found — not from the officers who witnessed fellow officers’ misdeeds, not from the commanders, not from Chief Blair, and not from the federal politicians who foisted this debacle on an unprepared and unsuitable city.
At the bottom of this post you can find a litany of complaints about the police handling of the Toronto G20 protests.
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The nature of NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been having a bit of an identity crisis for more than twenty years, as the original reason for its formation — the military threat posed by the Soviet Union and its subject nations in the Warsaw Pact — had almost literally fallen down in ruins. All those main battle tanks, armoured personnel carriers, fighter-bombers, helicopters, missile launchers, and other impedimenta of war were all pointing at a vast power vacuum. Doug Bandow has a post at the Cato@Liberty blog in advance of the upcoming NATO conference in Chicago, but he has a problem in his headline that needs to be fixed:
NATO Has Become a Form of U.S. Foreign Aid
Let me fix that for you, Doug:
NATO Has Become Always Been a Form of U.S. Foreign Aid
The NATO summit starts Sunday in Chicago and will be the largest gathering ever held by the alliance. This is fitting given NATO’s desire to act around the globe. While U.S. officials say no decisions on further expanding membership will be made at the meeting, they explain that the door remains open. Adding additional security commitments in this way would be a mistake.
The United States has always been and will continue to be the guarantor of NATO’s military promises. In reality, NATO could not pay its bills without the United States, much less conduct serious military operations. American alliance policy has become a form of foreign aid. Nowhere is that more true than in Europe.
[. . .]
The United States cannot afford to take on more allies and effectively underwrite their security. It is not worth protecting Georgia at the risk of confronting Russia, for instance. Moreover, now is the time to end this foreign aid to wealthy European countries. The Europeans have a GDP ten times as large as that of Russia. Europe’s population is three times as big. The Europeans should defend themselves. If they want to expand their alliance all around Russia, let them.
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QotD: The real function of newspapers
I sometimes wonder that I write for the Guardian when what I say seems to anger so many readers. Most people buy a newspaper not to be prised from their settled opinion but to find it confirmed and comforted. They would not be dragged from it by wild horses, let alone the old nag of reason. A newspaper is their tribal notice board, their badge, their identity.
Nor is that all. Tribes of left and right tend to buy the shop. They take their politics table d’hôte, not à la carte. Those on the left are for more public spending, higher taxes, no war and a tolerance of scroungers, those on the right the exact reverse. Once they have opted for Labour or Conservative (or the obscure freemasonry of liberal democracy), they surrender their political virginity to the party line, lie back and enjoy it — usually for life.
Simon Jenkins, “So, you think reason guides your politics? Think again”, The Guardian, 2012-05-17
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SpaceX Dragon smuggling secret cargo to ISS
At The Register, Brid-Aine Parnell gets all conspiracy theorized:
Just to add some icing to the SpaceX Dragon launch cake, the cargoship may be carrying a secret payload that nobody knows about.
The first ever commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, due to go up tomorrow, will already be carrying nonessential food, student science projects, clothes and other supplies for the ISS crew, but Elon Musk’s firm has also hinted there could be something else aboard.
On the last test flight of the Dragon, the craft carried a Top Secret cargo SpaceX refused to reveal to anyone until after mission, which turned out to be a lovely big wheel of cheese in an homage to the classic Monty Python sketch in the cheese shop.
On a slightly more serious level, Jonathan Amos has this report at the BBC News site:
Although billed as a demonstration, the mission has major significance because it marks a big change in the way the US wants to conduct its space operations.
Both SpaceX and another private firm, Orbital Sciences Corp, have been given billion-dollar contracts to keep the space station stocked with food and equipment. Orbital hopes to make its first visit to the manned outpost with its Antares/Cygnus system in the coming year.
Lift-off for the Falcon is timed for 04:55 EDT (08:55 GMT; 09:55 BST). It is going up from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The ascent phase should last a little under 10 minutes, with the Dragon capsule being ejected just over 300km (185 miles) above the Earth.
The conical spaceship will then deploy its solar panels and check out its guidance and navigation systems before firing its thrusters to chase down the station.
A practice rendezvous is planned for Monday when Dragon will move to within 2.5km (1.5 miles) of the station.
If Nasa and SpaceX are satisfied that the vehicle is performing well, it will be commanded to fly up and over the outpost in preparation for close-in manoeuvres on Tuesday.
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Conservative arguments for legalization of marijuana
Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog:
Milton Friedman — Nobel Laureate in Economics and adviser to Ronald Reagan — supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Stephen Easton’s classic paper advocating marijuana legalization was published by the Fraser Institute. Why do so many right-leaning economists favour marijuana legalization?
Conservative economists typically believe that a person is a best judge of what is in his or her own interests. From this premise it follows that the government should not try to constrain or influence people’s behaviour. Yes, marijuana use has well-documented negative side effects, from memory loss to male breast growth. Yet if fully informed individuals decide that these personal costs are worth accepting for the benefits that marijuana use brings, the government should respect that choice. As Willie Nelson says “I smoke pot and it is none of the government’s business.”
[. . .]
Another reason for conservatives to favour legalization and taxation of marijuana is that they do not like paying taxes. Criminalization costs. According to a 2005 US study, legalization would save state and local governments $5.3 billion annually in reduced enforcement costs, while the federal government would gain another $2.4 billion federally. Locking up people for possession of a small amount of marijuana is a waste of resources, and good fiscal conservatives deplore waste.Taxing marijuana would be a money-maker: $6.2 billion annually, if marijuana were taxed at rates similar to those on alcohol and tobacco, according to this same 2005 report.Those revenues could be used to reduce deficits, or fund reductions in the taxes paid by conservative economists.
Conservatives have lots of good reasons to favour legalization. The people who should be fighting legalization are the small scale growers: little family-run organic pot farms wouldn’t stand a chance against industrial scale agri-business.
