A Second Hand Conjecture

Whilst most elected Republicans are still preoccupied in pledging to work with (or for) the Obama administration, Sarah Palin isn’t having any of it.

This is significant criticism, because it is vitally important that a Republican leader emerges who can command a media platform, and will articulate regular opposition to the Obama administration on national policy. Naturally, whoever does emerge to shoulder this burden will be perfectly placed to continue that opposition in the next presidential election.

There’s certainly no point in looking to the decimated and newly submissive ranks of congress for this leadership. As in 1976, political reality mandates that it must come from outside Washington. Interestingly, Palin possesses an advantage over Reagan when he sought to become this kind of external leader of the opposition: she holds political office and can reinforce her criticism with independent action, as the new pipeline with Canada demonstrates.

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Stéphane Dion, leader of the defeated Canadian Liberal Party, has rather ignominiously resigned his position today. Thereby he becomes the first Liberal Party leader since the 19th century to have never become Prime Minister of Canada. Given his dismal political skills, it might seem somewhat mystifying how he ever even became a national party leader. According to Dion himself, that’s not a minority opinion:

“In my consultations it became very clear, that in the door-to-door canvassing, my colleagues, my friends were told, ‘We don’t like your leader.’”
(National Post)

Unflattering as it is, the print does the statement a certain justice. Dion’s grasp of the English language often seemed rather more tenuous than it reveals.

For the international observer with no stake in the outcome of the election, it was often amusing to watch Dion’s struggles with common conversations. Something that doubtlessly would have been a little more troubling for Canadian voters with a very real stake in the results. For example, here’s an entertaining flashback from just prior to the election:

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(photo: Brian Long)

Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Canadian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is concerned that Sarah Palin’s decision to have Trig, may lead to a reduction of abortions in Canada through positive example.

This is perhaps demonstrative of how different perspectives on abortion can be in the United States on both sides. It is frankly uncommon to see a senior figure among even the staunchest American defenders of abortion rights, argue that a decrease in their exercise would be undesirable. Indeed, such an opinion is more commonly confined to the most extremist fringes of radical feminism, or within the vile eugenics and zero population growth movements.

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This post of stills reminded me once again of how gorgeous the landscape cinematography was in Brokeback Mountain. Also reminded me of what a friend of mine described as its secret: “You’re in the Canadian Rockies. Turn the camera on.” On a certain level, true.

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Yesterday our flappy-headed friends to the North fired the opening salvo in the next ridiculous consumer scare that, thanks to New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, is sure to be convulsing US consumer markets soon. The enemy this time? BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol-a, a chemical used in the production of polycarbonate, the plastic best known for it’s use in re-usable water bottles and plastic baby bottles. And of course this massive intervention is accompanied by the usual, schizophrenic “danger! danger! But there’s nothing to fear” language that’s typically heard when the government gallops in to save us from nothing:

“We’re not waiting to take action to protect our people and our environment from the long-term effects of bisphenol-a,” the environment minister, John Baird, told a news conference, where he displayed an array of baby bottles made from plastics that do not use the material. The health minister, Tony Clement, told reporters that after reviewing 150 research papers and conducting its own studies, his department concluded that children up to the age of 18 months were at the most risk from the chemical. Mr. Clement said that animal studies suggested “behavioral and neural symptoms later in life.” Potentially unsafe exposure levels are far lower for children than for adults, Mr. Clement said, and he and Mr. Baird both said that adults who use plastic containers made with the chemical were not at risk. “For the average Canadian consuming things in those products, there is no risk today,” Mr. Clement said.

Of course the ironic part of all this is that polycarbonate became the shatter-less choice for spring water and for lining steel food cans precisely due to the fact that it doesn’t impart the “plastic” taste to its contents—even over long periods of time—that other popular polymers eventually do. As far as the science goes, it’s extrapolated from the results of animal experimentation, but searching the internet I could find no mention of a single suspected case of BPA poisoning anywhere. This of course will not prevent thousands of lawsuits citing phony symptoms, but hey, it’s for the children, right? We can’t have our baby daughters becoming lesbians can we?

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“Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”

via Althouse.

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Richard Warman is suing him and many other Canadian bloggers. Read all about it.

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photo: Socar Myles

According to a new study from a McMaster University research group, female rats prefer the scent of sexually active males in choosing their own sexual partners.

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photo: Simón Pais-Thomas

Toronto police recently seized shipments of 10,320,000 counterfeit cigarettes from China (PRC authorities themselves intercepted nine billion in 2007). Chinese made counterfeits bearing fake American branding such as Marlboro, are produced “in underground operations, caves and old warehouses,” and shipped through Vancouver for sale on a vast black market that has developed to evade the high sales taxes legitimate Canadian retailers must charge.

This illustrates another deleterious economic effect of the 23% national sales tax championed by Mike Huckabee (many more were discussed this morning here). As consumers are forced into the black market to escape artificially inflated government pricing, the quality of goods declines with volume, as otherwise quality-focused consumers are introduced to the cheap sub-market products of illegal trade for the first time.

Since the black market is by definition unregulated, there is no effective deterrent for engaging in product counterfeiting to substantially enhance margins, as black marketeers compete with each other, rather than with retailers who are priced and regulated out of the real market. Thus, with high national sales taxes not only does the tax base contract as the black market expands, the real quality of life enjoyed by the populace begins to erode as the marketplace is flooded with cut-rate and even dangerous goods:

Usually priced at $10-to-$15 per 200 instead of a retail price averaging $70, Martin said some contain tobacco scooped off floors. Cut-rate workers also chop up stalks and sometimes leave in lumps due to blunt cutters.

“It’s just human nature for people to save a dollar,” the 10-year investigator said.
(London Free Press)

The belief that most Fair Taxers have that people will not resort to the underground economy to reap fantastic savings, betrays the scheme’s essentially utopian nature. When prices are artificially inflated above natural market prices by the state, someone will always be available to exploit the opportunity. While it is human nature to save a dollar, it’s also human nature to make one when you can. And with a 23% burden resting on businesses to finance the welfare state, there are many to be made.

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photo: Simón Pais-Thomas

Mick at Uncorrelated has another lovely post on the essentially vile character and politics of Mike Huckabee. Toward the end of his remarks he briefly hits Huckabee’s proposed Fair Tax:

…and politically DOA policy planks like the fair tax.
(Uncorrelated)

Politically DOA we must hope, because Huckabee’s tax plan would do more than “eliminate the IRS.” It would probably eliminate the US economy along with it.

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Gas flaring in the Niger Delta (photo: Ellie)

John Ghazvinian is a journalist and historian of considerable insight into African affairs. He also happens to have written one of the best recent books on the emergent international struggle for African petroleum: Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (the paperback edition is due out in April). Whilst being an enormously valuable investigation of a very serious issue, it is also a page-turning and literate adventure into exotic and dangerous places. Indeed, one that’s practically impossible to put down once you’ve picked it up.

As John writes therein, since 1990 the oil industry has invested $20 billion in oil exploration and production in Africa, with $50 billion more planned before 2010. Over the next five years Chevron alone is devoting $20 billion in investment for Africa. Taken collectively, this exercise represents the largest commercial investment in African history. But such a spectacular windfall for some of the world’s most impoverished countries can be a poisoned chalice, where the brutal economic forces of the so-called “resource curse” hollow out states, eviscerate agricultural economies and break traditional cultures.

Populous and promising Nigeria for example, is one of the oldest and most well established oil producing countries in Africa. But with the expansion of Nigeria’s oil extraction industry, she has seen only the systematic erosion of her economic and civil society. As well as witnessing the transformation of her oil bearing region in the Niger Delta (one of the richest in the world), into a vast social wasteland of extreme poverty, rapacious crime and guerrilla warfare. As John notes, “Nigeria” is now a shorthand expression in Africa for what everyone with oil desperately wants to avoid.

John took some time out of his morning yesterday to sit down with me for a telephone interview. We were able to discuss a variety of subjects related to issues raised in his book. Including among other things, US oil supply diversification, the political consequences of offshore exploration in the Gulf of Guinea, the resource curse and rentier states, instability and post-nationalist militancy in the Niger Delta, oil field subculture, the labor problem, Chinese energy strategy in Africa and the difficulty of talking about Africa “without lapsing into sanctimoniousness” (as John puts it in the preface of his book). As I did, I believe you’ll find this to be a rather rewarding and unconventional discussion.

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(Cross Posted at What if?)

We all know that you cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Similarly, an anti-racism conference that features Libya as its chair, with Cuba as its vice-chair, has virtually no chance of achieving any rational dialogue about combatting racism.

In the past, too much of the world has failed to recognize this simple truth. The U.S. and Israel (too often objects of derision from the worst offenders) had to go it alone. The Captain reports, however, that Canada is finally seeing the light.

Originally, Canada wanted to participate in an effort to keep the conference focused on real racism and intolerance. However, when the UN appointed Libya to chair the event, Cuba as the vice-chair, and put its problematic Human Rights Council in charge of oversight, Canada saw the writing on the wall. The HRC has followed the tradition of its predecessor Human Rights Committee in focusing all of its attention on Israel rather than nations that coincidentally sit on the HRC and systematically abuse human rights.

Of course, a few other warning signs have already appeared. The planning sessions got scheduled on Jewish high holy days, effectively ensuring that the Israelis would have no say in the event. However, Iran — whose leader called to have Israel wiped off the map and held a conference to imagine a world without Israel or the US — has been named to the organizing committee.

Canada has made the correct decision. This UN hate-fest only derogates anyone connected with it, as Durban I did. Obviously, the UN has not done anything to eliminate the influence of anti-Semites within its organization, even while staging events like Durban II to scold the world for racism. Perhaps the critics who lashed out at the Bush administration for its refusal to endorse such a despicable event will consider Canada’s rejection as evidence that the White House got this right in 2001.

A small ray of sunshine for the UN – but, we will take what we can get, no? Perhaps one day this organization will realize that you must use silk moths to create silk.

Posted by Peg Kaplan on Thursday, January 24, 2008 at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

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McQ finds the Canadians have been struggling with their own immigration mess. Uh, well some of us wish they had been.

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