The Canadian 1% Want To Privatize the CBC

And it's just them, from a new Forum Research poll for the Globe & Mail, Canadians in general oppose privatizing the CBC by a 2:1 margin, and it is a majority (51%) who are decided against, versus only 25% who are for it.  That's the good news, and it is pretty good news considering that it's not like we've been waging a major national debate about this (though movement conservativism in Canada has made this a major goal for at least several years, the PM and Government have made no overt suggestion or move to do this).  The bad news is that those for it are the people who count:

Every other income group is strongly opposed, and what's remarkable is that the merely affluent in the 80-100K and 100-250K groups are very strongly opposed.  It really is the 1% versus the rest here (technically 32 people out of 1525 in the sample is 2%).

Now 32 is a small sample size for the subgroup, so I'm sure the margins of error are fairly large on this group, but I doubt they're enough to reverse a 66% for, 32% against trend.

Citigroup called Canada a "plutonomy" in a memo a few years back, a country ruled by the very rich.  If that's correct, it means the privatization of the CBC is likely to happen.  The 1% want it.  The CBC competes with their private media empires, it accurately informs people, and it isn't beholden to them.  All good reasons to eliminate it (a privatized CBC would not recognizably be the CBC anymore).

Given they're already consistently running behind Trudeau's Liberals, we can hope this scares the Conservatives off any such scheme, but we're in the mid-term period of a majority where you've got time to do things that anger the public and hope they forget in time for election day.  Destroying the CBC has been a long running conservative goal, they might try it whatever the polling.  Once it's done it will be very expensive to undo.

A Short List of Gun Product Safety Laws

One substory of the gun insanity in the US I had been unaware of previous to Newtown, was the bevy of liability shield laws (including a federal one) that protect gun manufacturers from the very normal product liability lawsuits that any other product maker would be subject to when their product's flaws cause injury or death to someone.

This is truly amazing when you stop and think about it.  There are all sorts of very powerful businesses who would love to have blanket immunity from the harm their faulty products bring, and if we include tobacco companies, the obvious and known harms of using their products as intended, but none seem to manage to get such specific protection. 

I'm not even talking about the thousands of people killed deliberately with guns, where the shooter is more or less using the gun in its intended fashion.  I mean, it's arguably fair that gun manufacturers should not suffer liability for that (also arguable that they should, but I can at least understand someone making that claim).  If a person gets beaten to death with a shovel, it would be bizarre to sue the shovel maker (even as that is not the intended use of a shovel). 

But instead, think of all the tragic gun accidents where some better design and additional safety features could actually save lives (and save gun nuts lots of bad press from children getting shot and such).  Week after week, Daily Kos' KagroX posts a round up of "gunfail" stories largely involving such tragedies:

1. LEALMAN, FL, 2/12/13: Not sure how I missed this one. A Bay Area church congregation is rallying together in prayer for their pastor's daughter. The young woman was accidentally shot. According to officials with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, church member Moises Zambrana was showing a 9mm handgun to two young men in a closet near the recreational area. Detectives say one of the men, who is Kelley's boyfriend, was interested in getting a gun. While Zambrana was showing him the safety features, authorities say the gun went off. The bullet went through the wall, and hit Kelley in the head. According to authorities, Zambrana did take out the magazine clip, but a bullet was still in the chamber. She died on Feb. 18.

That's completely typical.  I've noticed people in the comments to his People Who Died posts often rage on about how "stupid" these gun owners are.  I don't disagree, but that's really the point of why widespread gun ownership is not a great idea.  Lots of people are stupid.  Some people are smart most of the time, but everyone has stupid moments.  I was in the Canadian Forces for 8 years, in the Infantry and we drilled safety continuously and I still saw a couple dozen negligent discharge events - most with blank ammo and no one ever got hurt thankfully. Soldiers train regularly and have NCOs enforcing numerous means of gun safety discipline, yet still have ND's be common enough that every soldier knows what an "ND" is (we no longer refer to "accidental discharges" though they're remotely possible if a weapon suffers a mechanical failure which causes a round to fire).

All this is to say while convincing the population they don't need guns and are better off without them is the best approach, it would still be worthwhile to consider what the gun makers should be forced to do in order to make their products moderately safer, such that many moments of stupidity or irresponsibility by gun owners are less likely to end in tragedy:

• All guns should have a safety mechanism.  It's ridiculous that any gun can lack such. I don't even buy that Police or Military need such a thing. I don't care what design compromises it introduces, a thing that emits death at literally the pull of a trigger needs a safety.
• All guns need an indicator that shows whether there is a round in the chamber.  Mechanically this isn't hard to engineer.  One of the depressingly common Kagro stories goes "I thought it was empty when I pulled the trigger."  A visible indication from outside showing there's a round in there would save lives.
• Triggers need to be harder to pull as shipped from the manufacturer.  Yes, I'm sure some gun types will alter it and make a hair trigger.  But many won't bother, default settings should always be safer. If you go out of your way to make it less safe, fine.  Many children would be saved if triggers were harder to pull.  We made cigarette lighters and pill bottles harder for kids to use, why not guns?
•  Require proof of, or purchase of, a trigger lock when buying any gun, including private sales.  Yes, idiots would game this by having 1 trigger lock for 50 guns.  Nothing's perfect but many people who wouldn't buy one otherwise would get one and would use it, since they have it.
• The safety should be put on by the act of loading the magazine or chambering a round.  I'm less certain this can be done mechanically but if it can be, it should be.  Safety should be the default, rather than having to remember to put the safety "on" when readying the weapon, you should have to remember to take it off to fire it.  I'd also be more than fine if it is spring loaded and the shooter has to hold the safety off in order to keep firing, that it re-engages once their hand is removed.
• Require trigger guards.  Stupid but some weapons don't have them. Brushing up agaisnt something or dropping the weapon shouldn't pull the trigger.
• Two-handed holding to fire.  You could design weapons that required two hands on the weapon to fire.  Rifles could require the weapon be in your shoulder to fire.  There are a variety of ways to really help ensure the weapon only fires when you're positively aiming and mean to pull the trigger.  That won't stop all forms of tragic stupidity, but it will help.
• Sell a device that is designed to catch at least low power rounds.  Idea here is that this is where you aim when clearing the action of your weapon in the home/garage/etc.  I know at CF bases in warzones, the practice was to require a little sand-bunker area by the gate, so returning patrols could safety their weapons (removing magazines and chambered rounds) and "fire" the empty action into the sandbags - even if a mistake was made and a round fired, no one would be hurt.  Kagro always has a bunch of "pointed it at the floor/wall and it fired, bullet went through and killed someone on the other side" stories.  Like trigger locks require gun owners to have at least one of these things.  One that will stop a .44 or a 7.62mm round is of course likely impractical but something that would stop a .22 is not. Lots of people are killed by .22 rounds.
• Warning labels on boxes of Ammo ("This calibre can kill children. Don't leave guns loaded!" etc).  Safety manuals with the guns like the ones you get with a kid carseat (lots of diagrams with bad uses of the carseat and warnings "death will result if you do this!").  

All of the design requirements add to the complexity, cost and so forth of guns.  Boo hoo.  Safety addes to the complexity and cost of every system.  The purest designs have to be compromised to handle the rigours of real world application.  All of these are just at the mechanical level.  They've already started adding electronics to guns which means sky's the limit as far as safety features go.  Passwords, biometric coding to owners, detection of human targets, all sorts of features are possible once the thing's computerized.

A basic tenet of user interface design in computer science is to make errors more difficult and the consequences less severe.  Design so that the things people commonly do work out as intended or at least do no harm.  That's why most software will prompt you "are you sure?" when you've chosen to do something irreversible like delete a bunch of files or format a drive.  Why certain powerful options are buried in an "advanced" menu so you have to go looking for that possibly dangerous feature and really mean to turn it on.  Guns delete lives, it's not too much to ask that they get the nearest analog of an "are you sure?" prompt built in at design level.

Oh and don't you dare tell me that gun culture takes seriously safety.  If it did, everything above would already be baked into the design of "mainstream" guns and any guns lacking these features would be some kind of antique or exotic find, like the guy you know who has a car old enough to be grandfathered in before seatbelts were mandatory.  Unsafe guns (as they would be regarded) wouldn't be allowed at ranges and would be illegal to use hunting.  Collectors might have them but they wouldn't be in regular circulation.  Instead, gun culture would fight tooth and nail against most or all of this and instead rely on the proven failure "individual responsibility" as if people themselves will somehow magically evolve to be smarter and more reliable than we really are.  People are flawed, we know that, you address that by improving the system, not demanding better people.

Not Impressed with NDP Climate Motion Ploy

Today the NDP's environment critic used an opposition day to have the House of Commons vote on this motion:

“That this House: (a) agree with many Canadians and the International Energy Agency that there is grave concern with the impacts of a 2 degree rise in global average temperatures; (b) condemn the lack of effective action by successive federal governments since 1998 to address emissions and meet our Kyoto commitments; and (c) call on the government to immediately table its federal climate change adaptation plan.”

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives, Liberals and sole Green Party MP Elizabeth May all voted against this motion.  Obviously the NDP didn't think for a second the Liberals were going to vote for a motion that condemns their own governments between 1998 and 2006 and Elizabeth May has objected on the obvious grounds that the motion only calls on the government to table an "adaptation plan" rather than an action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The NDP are quick out of the gate with items like this, grouping the Liberals and Conservatives together as is their wont.  I'm not impressed with the whole thing, it's beneath the NDP for one thing and speaking as a voter who could be persuaded to vote NDP instead of Liberal, this does nothing to inform me about actual, meaningful policy differences between the two parties on an issue I care deeply about, climate change.

I am all for the NDP finding ways to inform Canadians about important distinctions between themselves and the other left-of-centre parties so that when 2015 comes around they can fight for the largest share of that ~65% of the public that won't vote Conservative, but this doesn't seem helpful to that end.  It doesn't tell me any actual salient difference between the Greens, NDP and Liberals on the climate issue.    That both other parties have such obvious outs to vote against this motion makes it ineffective as a tool to prove that the NDP line on either the Greens or Liberals is accurate (the usual line being that both are effectively conservative parties and not true progressive institutions).

Lest I be accused of concern trolling, I'll say I really would like to know if Justin Trudeau would take meaningful action on the climate if elected in 2015.  I fear he won't, and would like it if the NDP finds ways to force him to take significant policy stands that allay or confirm that fear.  Asking him to have his party condemn the Chretien and Martin governments (much as they deserve condemnation on this file) isn't going to do that.  Ethics of the thing aside, if Trudeau had somehow had his party support this motion, the news coverage would be all about the meta-story of the Liberals voting to condemn their own past governments, not about the climate issue.

Maybe I'm not the target audience and this will be very effective at, well, tricking, less politically aware voters who have the environment as a top-of-mind issue and don't read past the headlines.  But it doesn't work on me, and strikes me as the stereotypical form of holier-than-thou progressivism that the NDP is often criticized for.   It's not the biggest deal in the world, just some petty political positioning and attack-ad fodder, but even describing it that way is to repeat that the NDP should be better than this.

America's Political Nightmare in One Paragraph

My god this may be the finest paragraph Paul Rosenberg has ever written:

In truth, the Republican party only has three problems: its policies are unpopular, its policies do not work, and they hate everybody who does not agree with them. In contrast, the Democratic party has only one problem: it wants to be more like the Republicans. 

Don't look to me for the bog standard two party "duopoly" rant because I think adding more parties to a corrupted system is like asking the staff for a new set of dice at a crooked casino - the new dice will be loaded too.  Whatever forces are corrupting the two parties would almost certainly corrupt any new party that emerged absent some kind of deeper understanding of those forces of corruption and real means to defeat them.

Rosenberg's apt synopsis of the Republican party's problems is actually the less important part of his thesis, which is: What the hell is wrong with the Democratic party?  To wit:

But the Democrats have it even worse. They have won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992 except for 2004, and yet they have been playing defence - rather badly - throughout most of this period. They do not have the means to even consider what it might look like to go on offence, except as a kabuki theatre to rev up their base come election time. 

Examples of this really are legion, from the failure to enact Hillarycare in 1993, triangulating through the rest of the Clinton presidency, failing to end the Iraq War in 2007 with control of Congress, failing to kill the filibuster in 2009, 2011 and now in 2013, the too-small stimulus, voluntarily killing ACORN under a nonsense trumped up non-scandal, falling over themselves to condemn Move On for actually opposing right wing warmongers like Bush, Cheney and Petraeus, failing to get prosecute corrupt bankers and financiers, and we can add stripping the Public Option from Obamacare.  Yes, there were a variety of villains to blame for each of these failures from Liberman to Nelson to the Blue Dogs to Obama himself but the core of it a party unwilling to really grasp the rusty levers of power and effect significant change when it counts.  Keeping the stupid filibuster in place was probably the most obvious sign that at some level, they're happy to have the excuse not act.  Not necessarily because they're "corrupt" in the sense of consciously being bought out to not do what voters sent them to do (though some no doubt are) but in not really wanting to, or being afraid to.

The Republicans are the party that won't take "no" for an answer from the voters, returning with the same bad enrich-the-rich policies over and over, year after year, but the Democrats are the party that won't take "yes" for an answer and give the voters what they want: sound liberal economic policy.  Jobs,  economic security, schools that work, a clean environment.  The Democrats had two chances in 1992 and 2008 where they controlled the trifecta of both houses of Congress and the Presidency and in both cases failed to deliver bold liberal policy that would measurably improve people's lives quickly and noticeably.  That's the big secret of what FDR did to achieve the amazing political success of the 1932-1994 Democratic coalition.  He/They (Democrats) enacted policies that made their lives better.  Not some arcane neoliberal tax credit to employers that only economists can detect any impact from, the government started mailing seniors actual cheques.  They hired people who needed work.  They built stuff that needed building and would be useful anyway - bridges, libraries, schools.  It wasn't complicated, and it worked. People felt things improving, and in 1934 and 1936 gave FDR historic supermajorities to do more of the same.

These insights don't take political genius to understand, in fact it takes a special kind of political genius for the Democrats to avoid these lessons and try to handwave away these obvious truths.  Right wing ideologues and hacks have obvious motives to ply sophistry and revisionism to deride FDR as they simply don't want to win by implementing liberal policy.  They, ultimately, must trick voters into voting against their own interests.  That's much tougher and it's why they lose the popular vote so often, even with their generally better electoral messaging machinery and rampant voter suppression.

Yes, I know the causes are in some sense obvious, lobbyists and corporate money and so forth.  But all that stuff existed in 1932, but Rosenberg suggests a deeper problem, that the leadership of the Democratic party simply don't really want to implement bold liberal policy because they don't believe in it:

Regardless of your own ideology - conscious or unconscious - you just have to wonder why Obama clings so doggedly to both substantive policies and political strategies that repeatedly fail so profoundly. No doubt there are multiple factors involved, but the most compelling answer, I have come to believe, comes down to a lack of vision: Obama quite simply cannot see any alternative. His politics are drastically confined by the crabbed nature of his neoliberal imagination, formed in the shadows of Reagan and Thatcher.  

I tend to agree.  Despite its rampant failure in the past few years, neoliberalism still has the world's elites in thrall.  They evidently cannot turn from it.  Even the ones who know it is failing can't imagine what could take its place.  I hope democratic politics can find some way to dethrone the lot of them and let some new blood take the reins for a spell, because the alternative ways this ends are not good.

Do read Rosenberg's whole piece.

The Media Should Not Cover YouTube Attack Ads

If a political party isn't willing to pay to put an ad into places people are likely to find it on their own (like TV, radio, newspaper or even paid online adverstising), the media should not provide free publicity to almost-no-cost "attack ad" content:

There was no day off to celebrate for Justin Trudeau, who won the Liberal Party leadership decisively Sunday night with more than 80 per cent of the vote.

Before Trudeau's first full day as leader had even begun, attack ads against him appeared on YouTube in English and French.

I'm reminded of that West Wing episode where the Bartlett campaign returns a "leaked" attack ad on Bartlett to the Republican campaign, who deviously turn it over to the media, claim they didn't create it and because the "story" of it being anonymously provided to the Bartlett people is "news" - the ad gets major free airtime on all the networks at no cost to the Republican campaign.  Now the Conservatives/Republicans don't even have to trick their political opponents into doing something to provoke media coverage, just post it on Youtube and it gets mucho coverage.

This is even worse though, the media is just volunteering to be gamed.  If the Conservatives aren't going to put money behind their ads to get them in people's faces, no one should be writing about them.  At least if an ad goes viral on Youtube by itself, then, sure, it's already news, discuss it.  This is ridiculous.  If more people are going to see something because of media coverage of it, then would see or hear of it otherwise, it probably shouldn't be covered.

And since I'm clearly in the realm of "shouting at the wind" here because the media's incentives are all wrong, the Liberals and NDP should take their cue from this and return the favour.  If the media wants to fill news hole with vacuous "someone made a practically zero cost attack ad" stories, better feed the beast because if you don't, the cynics on the right gladly will.

(I also can't help but think the gross budget cuts inflicted on the CBC are partly behind their sinking to the level of the for-profit media - not having enough reporters and editors to produce meaningful content that's worth talking about makes an outlet starved for content, these things cost money, and spending time talking about some video the Conservatives posted is free, your existing host can blather about it, you don't even have to send reporters anywhere, but it adds zero value to what Canadians know about politics).

Irony Collapses After Desperate Sprint to Not Get Lapped

Thin skinned anti-science idiot Chrisopher Monckton has a big sad that a bunch of actually smart people called out his errant nonsense as nonsense so he's naturally doing what real intellectuals do when their ideas are challenged:  Defend them, I mean complain to authorities and try to have the critics fired:

In a letter to Victoria University vice-chancellor Pat Walsh, the British aristocrat claimed the professors had been dishonest and brought the university into disrepute.

He claimed professors James Renwick and David Frame, both accomplished climate scientists, had insulted him in the media by calling his views harmful with no scientific basis.

 The mot-de-juste comes not from the scientists (who are happily not concerned about ramifications from this) but Monckton himself:

"In saying I have 'no training' he [Professor Renwick] has lied. I have a Cambridge degree in classical architecture."

I'm sure there were important lessons about atmospheric chemistry and radiative forcing in learning about the Collesium.

This is your hero, cliamate deniars.  Aren't you tired of being on the same side as such an egregious moron?  There's a cure for that, accept reality and stop pulling for the wrong team.  Your grand kids may thank you (if we actually avoid the calamity that will come if we don't act, if not, I hope you have some compelling lies planned to explain why their world is a shithole.  Saying you hated Al Gore, David Suzuki and enviro hippies isn't probably going to explain it to their satisfaction).

 

New Zealand Sets the Gold Standard For Monckton Journalism

This is how every article about one of Christopher Monckton's revivalist evangelical bamboozlement roadshow sessions should go:

Lord Monckton, who once argued for the quarantine of AIDS patients in internment camp-like facilities, is a vocal leader of the climate change-denying movement. 

In Copenhagen in 2009, the member of the right-wing anti-European UK Independence Party (UKIP) caused fury when he called young climate activists, 'Hitler Youth'. 

In 2011, he was forced to apologise after comparing Australia's chief climate adviser Ross Garnaut to a Nazi. 

Lord Monckton, 61, has no scientific training, having studied classics and journalism. He has toured the world trying to convince people that climate change is being exaggerated.

Awesome.  You don't have to embellish anything, just describe the man's actual record and it's transparently obvious not only should you not take his climate views seriously, you wouldn't even buy a used car from the guy.