Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2012

Abusing the homeless … by giving them money to perform tasks

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Chris Selley skewers the bien-pensant journalists who got so upset that some homeless people were given an opportunity to earn money:

Now, you might think homeless people, development directors at homeless shelters and anti-homelessness activists would know a thing or two about what homeless people need and want, and you would be correct. You might therefore think this was a good-news story, and you would be wrong. BBH took heavy fire from keyboard warriors who think the program was just ghastly.

Here in Canada, Maclean’s technology correspondent Jesse Brown, perhaps testing out a new hyperbole app, led the pack. He called it a “disgusting marketing ploy,” an “epic milestone in the history of bad taste,” “grotesque” and “degrading — literally.” Yes, literally.

“Yes, [the employee] keeps the money. No, that doesn’t make it okay,” he sniffed, presumably enjoying easy access to many multiples of $50 as he typed.

[. . .]

There ought to be an official term for this phenomenon, wherein well-meaning, bien-pensant carer/sharers freak out on behalf of a group of (homeless, poor, oppressed, disaster-afflicted) people, only to be told by those people to shut their goddamn pie holes. We saw it after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when people criticized Royal Caribbean cruise lines for continuing to sail to its private beaches in the country, where it employs locals and, for a time, donated the proceeds of its visits to relief efforts. Such bad taste!

March 13, 2012

Still no reason to get excited about robopocalypse, says Kelly McParland

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:33

Oh, good. I’m not alone in finding the robocall armageddon to be a bit less than exciting:

I have a confession to make. I have not been following the robocalls “scandal” with all the fervency it calls for.

It’s possible my inability to get excited results from six years … oops, make it seven … of the Liberals leaping to their feet every 18 seconds to accuse the Conservatives of plotting to pervert Canadian values, undermine democracy and display their contempt for the laws of the country. There’s this old morality tale about a kid who cried “wolf” too many times, so when a real wolf showed up, no one believed it any more. Maybe that’s why I have a hard time believing this is the real wolf.

It could also be that I find the premise hard to accept. To wit: a top-level conspiracy of Conservative grandees to steal the election by disrupting the vote, sending voters to incorrect polls or discouraging them from turning up at all. This would indeed be a major scandal if it was true, but think about it: Would a nation-wide exercise in disruptive phone calls have any chance of going undetected? Does anyone really believe (outside the fetid confines of the Toronto Star) that the senior ranks of any sane government would take such an extreme risk going into an election it expected to win anyway?

I could see some local bozos getting it into their heads that robocalling the opposing candidate’s supporters might be a great idea, but your cynicism has to be a lot deeper than mine (which would take some doing) to believe anyone could get to be Prime Minister, or his national campaign chairman, and still be either dumb enough, irresponsible enough or reckless enough to sign on to such a plan

Update, 15 March: In the comments, Saskboy strongly disagrees with my lack of excitement over the robocall scandal, and he’s been covering the story on his blog (that’s one of several posts on the topic).

El Neil on Limbaugh’s “show of weakness”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

L. Neil Smith weighs in on the Rush Limbaugh “apology” to Sandra Fluke and the media feeding frenzy it perpetuated:

Please understand that I am not a conservative of any kind. As a more or less lifelong libertarian, and a proud, battle-scarred (and, I like to think, highly decorated) veteran of America’s 1960s Sexual Revolution (which actually began in the 1920s), I’m very much in favor of individuals finding joy, and generally doing whatever they desire with their own lives. Love (or whatever floats your boat) is such a rare commodity that they ought to revel in it whenever they can. What I am vehemently opposed to, however, is making other people pay for it.

But then, despite the basic truth behind what he’d said about her, Limbaugh decided — far more likely it was decided for him — to apologize.

John Wayne became famous, among other things, for declaring, in several of his movies, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.” Mark Harmon has said it, too, in the role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs of NCIS. And there’s a basic, Darwinistic truth in what they’ve both said, as illustrated by what happened next to the Formerly Fat Flumpus.

When his ideological enemies began screaming about what Limbaugh had said, if he’d told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine and break it off, their screaming would have subsided and finished with a whimper.

But the minute he apologized, the minute he rolled over on his back, sticking his paws in the air and exposing his belly, they fell on him like wolves. With the ladies and gentlemen of the evening who constitute our news media cheering them along, public figures called for removing him from the air the way they had Don Imus — and Imus, true to the sad, broken figure of Winston Smith he had become, joined in.

“Do it to Limbaugh!”

Meanwhile animals and barbarians of all kinds showered Limbaugh with death threats and other worst-wishes, and the Internet writhed like a pit of snakes with vile, anonymous accusations of every kind against him. Clearly free speech in this country is supposed to be reserved to the creatures who call themselves “progressives” because they’ve dirtied the word “liberal” to the point it can’t be used any more.

March 12, 2012

The role of narcissism in calls for military intervention in Syria

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Brendan O’Neill says that one of the driving factors for those demanding military action in Syria is narcissism:

Failed Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff recently made waves with an op-ed in the Financial Times calling for Western intervention in Syria. Revisiting some of the themes of his 1990s writings (Ignatieff made a living championing ‘humanitarian interventionism’ before he led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst electoral defeat ever), Igantieff said the West should impose a ‘comprehensive quarantine of Syria’ in order to ‘force [Assad] from power’.

Yet the most startling thing about his piece was not its extreme short-term historical amnesia, its ignorance of the disasters unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan following Western meddling, but rather its exhibition of self-regard and self-concern, even of that most malignant form of self-love: narcissism. Ignatieff mentioned his own feelings about what is happening in Homs six times and the possible feelings of the people of Homs themselves only three times. His short op-ed mainly focused on the ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ felt by people like Igantieff — that is, Western observers possessed of a good, caring, Sarajevo-informed ‘international conscience’ — while the ‘fear’ and ‘desperation’ of the people of Homs were given far briefer treatment.

This ratio of 2:1 between Ignatieff’s feelings of guilt and Syrians’ feelings of desperation not only suggests that modern Western interventionists are two times more obsessed with themselves than they are with the victims of foreign conflicts they claim to care so much about — it also reveals that what is really motoring the demands for Western intervention in Syria are the emotional needs of Western observers rather than the practical needs of Syrians. This kind of narcissism is now widespread among those who desperately want the ‘international community’ to intervene in Syria. These people are so amazingly vain that they see the bombing of Syria as a kind of balm for their guilt-ridden consciences, a physical act that might help to make their own emotional turmoil that bit more bearable. Their rallying cry should be: ‘Bomb Syria so that I can sleep at night.’

GM: the re-Volting face of corporatism

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Redmond Weissenberger on the decline of GM from world-class manufacturer to crony capitalist shell:

General Motors was once the Jewel in the crown of American Capitalism. By many, it was considered the greatest manufacturing company in America, if not the world. The company was destroyed by the insidious nature of the Neo-National Socialism that has infected the USA for well on 80 years now, when the merger of state and corporate power that swept across Europe was aped first by Hoover and then by FDR in the disastrous New Deal. The unions that were encouraged to eat away at GM from the inside were bailed out and the US Federal government took a 25% ownership in company. In the 2009 deal to “restructure” GM, the bondholders were wiped out, and the Unions were given a free pass to continue their destructive behaviors.

Built by what is now a de facto state-owned corporation, the Volt was the child of the green-washed brains of the Obama administration. The Volt was built for no-one, but a vision of the perfect, “New eco-Socialist Man”. Who is buying the Volt? According to Bill Visnic, senior editor of Edmunds.com, “The Volt appeals to an affluent, progressive demographic” General Motors itself stated that the average income of a Volt buyer is $175,000 a year. This trend does of course line up with the type of individual who has been at the forefront of the environmental movement since day one. A rarefied elite, righteously indignant, statist in nature, ready to have the government force eco-correct behavior on all who inhabit the land. The classic example is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who once opined that “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation”.

The Volt is a very good example of what happens when the means of production falls into the hands of the State. The system of profit and loss that can only operate when prices are set by the private owners of the materials and the means of production. The Chevy Volt can only exist within the sphere of the state wherein there is no rational economic calculation possible.

[. . .]

It is estimated by Tom Gantert that the Volt has received up to $3 Billion in Local, State and Federal Subsidies. And if you believe that GM has indeed sold 6,000 Volts, then the total subsidy per car can be estimated anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000. All of this for a mid-sized 4 door sedan that retails for $39,828 (eligible for a $7,500 federal rebate of course).

March 6, 2012

Nick Gillespie: Short memories and shorter tempers

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

A very funny trip down a memory lane not quite in the same dimension as we currently occupy:

With Super Tuesday upon us like a plague of 24-hour locusts that threaten not just the GOP but the very fabric of the nation itself (a wool and Lycra blend explicitly forbidden in Leviticus, btw) which is being stripped more bare than the bride by her bachelors even or the dessert bar near closing time at a Golden Corral buffet, it’s as good a time as any to wonder:

Was it just four years ago that The New York Times was running stories about the deleterious effects of a long, drawn-out, bruising fight for the Democratic presidential nod?

[. . .]

Good god, how does the nation ever survive the primary process? Isn’t it a scientific fact that nobody has ever won the presidency after having gone through a difficult nominating race? Obama was forced to visit all 57 states (by his count) multiple times until he kept fainting on stage from exhaustion like that guy from the Black Crowes who used to be famous.

After all, hasn’t a poll just scientifically proved that the GOP is hurting its “brand” (you know: Depends-wearing, anti-government crackers who only leave their houses on the Medicare-purchased personalized motor scooters to cruise to the mailbox to pick up their Social Security checks and oil-company dividend checks) by not immediately appointing the candidate most likely to get smoked by Obama in November?

The only subgroup of Americans who have weaker memories than high school seniors (99 percent of whom contend that the War of 1812 was fought between the Crips and the Bloods over the last Cabbage Patch doll between 1983-1986) are political journalists, many of whom, you may recall, took Donald Trump and Herman Cain seriously.

Michael Kinsley: Of course it’s insincere

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and I’m not likely to start listening in the near future, so my concern about “Slutpocalypse” is neither deep nor lasting. Limbaugh used the term “slut” to describe a Georgetown law student who was pleading for free or subsidized birth control. He then was forced to apologize, and the apology was deemed insincere by media commentators far and wide. Michael Kinsley points out that they went about it in the wrong way to garner a sincere apology:

The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers.

Well, of course he wasn’t sincere. And of course he was only apologizing to pacify advertisers — who were getting pressured to pressure Limbaugh by these very critics. Oh, there might have been a political calculation, too, that he’d gone too far for the good of his ratings or his celebrityhood. But any apology induced in these circumstances is almost by definition insincere. You can’t demand a public recantation and then expect sincerity along with the humble pie. If they wanted a sincere apology, Limbaugh’s critics would have had to defend his right to make these offensive remarks, and then attempt to change his mind using nothing but sweet reason. Go ahead and try.

[. . .]

Of course, the insincerity is on both sides. The pursuers all pretend to be horrified and “saddened” by this unexpected turn of events. In fact, they are delighted. Why not? Their opponent has committed the cardinal political sin: a gaffe.

A gaffe, as someone once said, is when a politician tells the truth. This is a bit imprecise. The term “politician” covers any political actor, certainly including Rush. And the troublesome statement needn’t be the truth, as it certainly wasn’t in this case: more like “the truth about what he or she is really thinking.” The typical gaffe is what they used to call a “Freudian slip.” But, with all due respect to Freud, why should something a politician says by accident — and soon wishes he or she never said, whether true or not — automatically be taken as a better sign of his or her real thinking than something he or she says on purpose?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

This is why I haven’t been covering the robocallpocalypse

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Margaret Wente in the Globe & Mail brings a sense of proportion to the robo-call “crisis” in Canadian politics:

What’s happened to my country? I went away for a couple of weeks and all hell broke loose. I came back to find that someone named Poutine stole the last election. At first I thought this was a typo, that they meant Putin. But no. It turns out that Russia is a shining beacon of democracy compared to Canada. Apparently, our country has been hijacked by “the most comprehensive electoral fraud in our nation’s history” (Pat Martin, NDP critic). Voter suppression — lying, cheating and general chicanery — has driven us into “uncharted waters” (Bob Rae, Liberal Leader).

I certainly don’t wish to make light of voter fraud. But this fraud seems to have been engineered by the Keystone Kops. Not a single voter claims to have been prevented from voting. No ballot boxes appear to have been stuffed. Nobody was fraudulently elected. There weren’t even any hanging chads. Elections Canada says 31,000 Canadians have complained, but the vast majority of these complaints (“somebody called me at 10 p.m.”) seem trivial.

The dirty trickster at the heart of this evil scheme turns out to be someone with the nom de plume of Pierre Poutine (real identity unknown). Mr. Poutine and his henchmen were not personally directed by Stephen Harper but are widely thought to have been channelling him. In Guelph, Ont., they engineered a bunch of robo-calls that directed people to show up at non-existent voting stations. This tactic was evidently intended to discourage people who didn’t support the Conservatives from voting. It was so effective that the Liberal candidate won by a margin of 11 per cent.

Australia’s “Ministry of Truth” founding document

Filed under: Australia, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

A rather alarming report to the Australian government by Ray Finkelstein recommends setting up a News Media Council to exercise control over political speech in the media, both professional (TV, radio, and newspapers) and amateur (bloggers, Facebookers, Twitterers, and other private individuals posting their opinions to the internet). It appears to be directed at climate change sceptics, but the provisions of the proposed body of rules will allow a great deal of control over all political speech:

The historic change to media law would break with tradition by using government funds to replace an industry council that acts on complaints, in a move fiercely opposed by companies as a threat to the freedom of the press.

The proposals, issued yesterday by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, also seek to widen the scope of federal oversight to cover print, online, radio and TV within a single regulator for the first time.

Bloggers and other online authors would also be captured by a regime applying to any news site that gets more than 15,000 hits a year, a benchmark labelled “seriously dopey” by one site operator.

The head of the review, former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, rejected industry warnings against setting up a new regulator under federal law with funding from government.

[. . .]

“News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply,” the report states. It says this would be enforced through the courts.

The council would absorb the supervision of radio and TV current affairs by Canberra’s existing regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which ran the “cash for comment” investigation into talkback radio over many years.

The council would scrutinise online news sites that get more than 15,000 hits a year, clearing the way for government-funded action against amateur website operators who comment on news and current affairs. Greg Jericho, a prominent Canberra blogger on national politics, said: “The level of 15,000 hits a year, or about 40 hits a day, is seriously dopey.”

Some media executives privately dubbed the News Media Council as a potential “star chamber” because it would not have to give reasons for its decisions, which would not be subject to appeal

There’s a petition site at http://www.freespeechaustralia.com/ for those Australians who’d like to register their opposition to the new council.

Some excerpts from a Menzies House email from Timothy Andrews:

It is clear from the report, in particular paragraphs 4.31-4.42, that silencing climate realists is a major reason for these regulations: it is unashamedly explicit in this (and even uses the dirty trick of using polls from — wait for it — 1966 as evidence the media is pro-climate skeptic, and that — wait for it — only the ABC is unbiased!)

The size and scope of the proposed Super-Regulator is breathtaking. They will have the power to impose a “code of ethics”, force you to print views you don’t agree with as part of a ‘right of reply’, take you to court, and even make you take pieces down! Even personal blogs that get only 40 hits a day will be covered! To make matters worse, the SuperRegulator “would not have to give reasons for its decisions” and the decisions “would not be subject to appeal.” Even climate change websites in other countries like Watt’s Up With That will be covered by this!

[. . .]

11.69 Another aspect of jurisdiction concerns how the News Media Council will exercise its power over all internet publishers. Foreign publishers who have no connection with Australia will be beyond its reach. However, if an internet news publisher has more than a tenuous connection with Australia then carefully drawn legislation would enable the News Media Council to exercise jurisdiction over it.

Well, unless Australia is going to claim jurisdiction over the entire internet, I would imagine it will only prevent Australians from visiting foreign sites. I guess it’s a good thing that they’ve been getting friendlier with China: they can order up their national firewall from the same division of the People’s Liberation Army internet force.

James Delingpole points out that the usual suspects are involved in the process:

You can read the full 400 pages here, if you’re feeling masochistic. But Australian Climate Madness has a pretty good summary of the key issues of concern, starting with Pinkie Finkie’s proposal to create a new super-regulator called the News Media Council [missed a trick there, didn’t he? surely Ministry of Truth would have been more appropriate] which will impose its idea of fairness and balance not only on newspapers but even on blogs with as few hits as 15,000 a year.

But whose idea of fairness and balance?

It’s an astonishing fact that of the 10600 submissions received by the inquiry no fewer than 9600 were boilerplate submissions from left-wing pressure groups, led by Avaaz “a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, poverty and corruption.”

March 4, 2012

Confused about the Cato takeover threat from the Koch brothers? You’re not alone

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:40

Brad DeLong rounds up some of what’s being said about the attempt by Charles Koch to take control of the Cato Institute:

Ed Crane on the Koch Brothers:

    Charles G. Koch has filed a lawsuit as part of an effort to gain control of the Cato Institute, which he co-founded with me in 1977. While Mr. Koch and entities controlled by him have supported the Cato Institute financially since that time, Mr. Koch and his affiliates have exercised no significant influence over the direction or management of the Cato Institute, or the work done here. Mr. Koch’s actions in Kansas court yesterday represent an effort by him to transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda. We view Mr. Koch’s actions as an attempt at a hostile takeover, and intend to fight it vehemently in order to continue as an independent research organization, advocating for Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.

Jonathan Adler on the Koch Brothers:

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Koch v. Cato: Cato’s Crane and Cato Chairman Bob Levy charge the [Kochs’ law]suit is about transforming Cato into a less independent and more political (if not also more partisan) institution…. Many libertarian-leaning organizations receive money from the Kochs and their foundations and are attacked on this basis. Such attacks can be deflected, as financial support is not the same thing as control. But if the Koch brothers themselves represent the controlling majority of an organization’s board, that organization is, by definition, a Koch-run enterprise…. They will forevermore characterize the Cato Institute as “Koch-controlled” — and, as a legal matter, they will be correct…. [A]ny benefit from whatever changes they could make will be outweighed to the permanent damage to Cato’s reputation caused by turning it into a de facto Koch subsidiary. In short, they will have destroyed the Cato Institute to save it.

Update: Jason Kuznicki on the internal side of the debate at Cato:

When I learned that the Kochs were suing Cato, I’m sorry to say that one of the first things I felt was vindication. I’d been saying for years that Cato was essentially an independent shop. The suit makes no sense unless I was right all along.

I’ve worked at Cato for five and a half years. In that time I have never seen a single decision made in consideration of the Koch brothers’ wishes. Cato has always appeared to be run by two people: its president, Ed Crane, and its executive vice president, David Boaz. It was like that when I was hired, and it’s like that now.

Even they don’t call all the shots, either; plenty of things get published that they actually disagree with, including some of my stuff. The people who spin elaborate fantasies about the Kochs acting as our puppet masters were, and are, dead wrong. They’ve been wrong since at least the early 90s, if not earlier. I’ve been saying so for years. Now the whole Cato Institute is in open revolt against the Kochs, a revolt that grew up with astonishing speed.

Passenger rail as the ultimate political luxury good?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

A post at Coyote Blog from last month looks at the eye-popping financial arrangements keeping the New Mexico “Railrunner” passenger service in operation:

Of course, as is typical, the Republic article had absolutely no information on costs or revenues, as for some reason the media has adopted an attitude that such things don’t matter for rail projects — all that matters is finding a few people to interview who “like it.” So I attempted to run some numbers based on some guesses from other similar rail lines, and made an educated guess that it had revenues of about $1.8 million and operating costs of at least $20 million, excluding capital charges. I got a lot of grief for making up numbers — surely it could not be that bad. Hang on for a few paragraphs, because we are going to see that its actually worse.

The equipment used in the New Mexico Railrunner operation looks remarkably similar to what GO Transit runs in the GTA:

Click to see original image at Coyote Blog

Anyway, I got interested in checking back on the line to see how it was doing. I actually respected them somewhat for not running mid-day trains that would lose money, but my guess is that only running a few trains a day made the initial capital costs of the line unsustainable. After all, high fixed cost projects like rail require that one run the hell out of them to cover the original capital costs.

As it turns out, I no longer have to guess at revenues and expenses, they now seem to have crept into the public domain. Here is a recent article from the Albuquerque Journal. Initially, my eye was attracted to an excerpt that said the line was $4 million in the black.

[. . .]

Now it looks like taxes are covering over half the rail’s costs. But this implies that perhaps $10 million might be coming from users, right? Nope, keep reading all the way down to paragraph 11

    The Rail Runner collects about $3.2 million a year in fares and has an annual operating budget of about $23.6 million. That does not include about $41.7 million a year in debt service on the bonds — a figure that include eventual balloon payments.

So it turns out that I was actually pretty close, particularly since my guess was four years ago and they have had some ridership increases and fare increases since.

At the end of the day, riders are paying $3.2 million of the total $65.3 million annual cost. Again, I repeat my reaction from four years ago to hearing that riders really loved the train. Of course they do — taxpayers (read: non-riders) are subsidizing 95.1% of the service they get. I wonder if they paid the full cost of the train ride — ie if their ticket prices were increased 20x — how they would feel about the service?

If all of that wasn’t enough, the financing arrangement has a nasty sting in the tail: in the mid 2020’s, the state will owe two separate payments of over $200 million. Enjoy the subsidized rides now, folks … the payment comes due just in time for your kids to face as they graduate.

March 3, 2012

Rex Murphy: Conservatives going through rough period in parliament

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Writing in the National Post, Rex Murphy considers much of the federal government’s current set of problems are either self-inflicted or made worse by their “browbeating style and defensive righteousness”:

I agree with the point Andrew Coyne made in these pages earlier, that the Conservatives (I’m paraphrasing) have situated themselves to fit these types of accusations. Their browbeating style and defensive righteousness to almost every challenge, or serious question, is a hallmark. That attitude offers them little shield when, as on occasion they must be, they are ill-done by. They play tough and hard and close to the boards, and when a story that fits that broad category, like robocalls, is pushed upon them, it seems to fit. In other words, their brittle style has a cost.

The headlines detailing opposition outrage over robocalls is just the latest instalment of the Conservatives losing all control of what might be called their agenda. They blundered Old Age Security. On Internet surveillance, they surely blundered the “with us or the child pornographers” messaging. And now they’ve been hauled off whatever road they might want to be on by a “scandal” from an election nine months ago. Since the House opened, it’s been one mess after another.

Naturally, the opposition parties are at some advantage in all of this, but not quite as much as they might figure. No one is going to look back on the last week, or the last month, and remember big speeches on the big questions — either energy policy, the country’s fiscal health, or foreign affairs. Instead, it’s been the usual rattle of stones in a tin can that passes for Question Period.

March 2, 2012

Gary Johnson profiled in the Huffington Post

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

Joel Sucher meets Gary Johnson:

At 59, Gary Johnson still projects the energetic aura of an athlete. But these days, the two-time Republican governor of New Mexico and imminent Libertarian Party Presidential candidate has the rumpled look of someone who spends too much time in Starbucks hunched over a laptop. At a sandwich shop near Rockefeller Center where we met for an interview last week, he talks with a quiet kind of energy: non-intimidating; a bit self-effacing, but sincere.

His voice is not mellifluous like Obama’s; his style is nothing like Mitt’s trying-too-hard; and his rhetoric is far from Santorum’s coarse and unbalanced rambling. Johnson’s speech lacks the “uhs,” “y’knows” or similar pauses that usually indicate a bad case of public overthink.

No, Johnson speaks with the conviction of a true believer, one convinced that abandoning the Republican Party for a run as a Libertarian will sow seeds that will take root — if not this year, then perhaps in 2016.

The preening and posturing of Romney and Santorum, looking to score at the socially conservative beauty contest, are anathema to Johnson. He wants to stick close to Libertarian core values, and if that means butting heads with former Libertarian Party presidential candidate (1988) Ron Paul, so be it.

February 28, 2012

The palpable disappointment of discovering there isn’t a vast “denier” conspiracy

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

Ben Pile discusses the huge letdown for environmental activists that the Heartland Institute revelations merely revealed that there isn’t a huge, shadowy conspiracy to discredit them:

When internal documents from a libertarian think tank — the Heartland Institute, known for its sceptical views on climate change — were published on the internet recently, climate-change activists around the world were elated. The leak seemed to reveal the existence of a conspiracy to distort science and impede political progress on solving climate change, just as activists had claimed. But the celebrations turned sour when one of the documents turned out to be fake, and the remainder turned out to reveal nothing remarkable. Rather than telling us anything about organised ‘climate-change denial’, this silly affair reveals much more about environmentalists.

One of the endlessly recurring themes of the environmental narrative is — in the words of the man at the centre of the ‘Fakegate’ mess, water and climate researcher Peter Gleick — that an ‘anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated’ effort exists ‘to cast doubt on climate science’, and ‘muddy public understanding about climate science and policy’. According to this mythology, right-leaning think tanks are funded by big energy companies that are keen to protect their profits from environmental regulation.

There are two problems for environmentalists convinced by this mythology.

The first is that it has never been plausible. Large corporations do not suffer from regulation. They are simply able to pass costs on to the consumer. Moreover, regulation creates firm ground on which to base longer-term strategic decisions about capital investments. And finally, regulation creates opportunities for companies that are able to mobilise resources to enter new markets. Wind farms, for example, are not cottage industries. Regulation suits larger companies.

The second problem for environmentalists has been to demonstrate that the myth is anything more than a myth. An ongoing Greenpeace project launched in 2004, for instance, aimed to provide a ‘database of information on the corporate-funded anti-environmental movement’. However, the sums of money involved were paltry. According to Greenpeace, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the most vilified organisations, had received just $2million from Exxon between 1998 and 2005. Yet between 1994 and 2005, total donations to Greenpeace amounted to over $2 billion. According to the greens’ conspiratorial narrative, a handful of conservative think tanks with relatively small resources were seemingly able to undo the campaigning of a host of huge international environmental NGOs, national governments, international agencies, and yes, corporate interests, whose combined resources were many, many thousands of times greater.

Occupy London has become an open-air asylum

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph on the state of the Occupy London protests:

Even though I am an absolutist with it comes to the right to protest, I couldn’t help feeling relieved when a court decided this week that the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral should sling its hook. For what started life as a middle-class shantytown packed with self-righteous haters of the rich — an annoying spectacle, yes, but hardly the end of world — has in recent weeks descended into something far more degenerate. Occupy London is now effectively a holding camp for the mentally ill, a space where the psychologically afflicted and deeply troubled can gather to eat, drink and be un-merry. And to have such a makeshift lunatic asylum on the steps of St Paul’s is not good for London nor for the inhabitants of the camp, who clearly need somewhere better to go.

On the five occasions I have visited Occupy London, I have noticed a steady decline in the calibre of the campers. To begin with, the inhabitants were mostly young, with red cheeks and purple hair, talking utter rubbish, of course, but not unpleasant to look at. Before long, that contingent seemed to disappear, to be replaced by straggly-haired conspiracy theorists banging on about 7/7 and the chemicals in our food. Now the camp has the distinct whiff of rotting food and decaying socks, and its dwellers are all sad-eyed and pathetic, many of them old, confused, and clearly too fond of booze. “GET TAE F**K!” one of them was shouting, at absolutely no one, the last time I was there.

[. . .]

All those commentators who wrote glowing reports about the camp a few months back, who took their organically fed children on day trips to visit it, who slammed anyone who criticised it and said we didn’t understand its “historic momentum” or “strategic function”, are now nowhere to be seen. That’s not surprising. What they giddily described as a turning point in radical politics has turned out to be more like a modern-day Bedlam, where respectable people on their way to work peer with increasingly wide-eyed bemusement at the strange, mumbling folk inside this unhygienic and collapsing institution.

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