Thinking Sanely About Risk

I did not want to comment on the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas day ( if that indeed is what it was). The response, however, has been even more unhinged than usual. Middle aged men everywhere will be pissing themselves because washrooms are available for the last hour of the flight (and of course while on the ground). And we will all be treated to the prospect of spending a ridiculous amount of time staring at the seat back in front of us, not reading, not working. No doubt meditation will make a huge comeback.

We all face risks every day of our lives. The trip to the airport and the food you eat there and on the plane will continue to expose you to far more risk than some nutbar who is much more likely, apparently, to immolate her or himself than cause any real damage. The best way to sideline these lunatics is to ignore them. These people only gain credibility when we respond with fear and/or vastly over-react.

When we are afraid, they win. Let's stop

Sadness, Not Depression

In a timely article published Christmas Eve on the Project Syndicate site, Allan Horowitz and Jerome Wakefield, both who teach courses on the conceptual frameworks of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine, examine the ways in which the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry have profited from the removal of a diagnostic distinction between sadness or grief and depression. As they note

The distinction between contextually appropriate sadness and depressive disorders remained largely unchanged for two and a half millennia. But the psychiatric profession abandoned this distinction in 1980, when it published the third edition of its official diagnostic manual, the DSM-III.

The definition of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) became purely symptom-based. All conditions that display five or more of nine symptoms – including low mood, lack of pleasure, sleep and appetite difficulties, inability to concentrate, and fatigue – over a two-week period are now considered depressive disorders.

In other words only the most pathologically cheerful are likely to avoid the snares of depression over a lifetime. Perhaps as in Huxley's Brave New World, the one unforgivable crime has become despondency.

Soma anyone?

Romero on Christmas

From catholicanarchy.org

With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time. On this night, as we Christians have done every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone, and that our aspiration for peace, for justice, for the reign of divine law, for something holy, is far from earth’s realities. We can hope for it, not because we humans are able to construct that realm of happiness which God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us. (December 25, 1977)

Obama and Neo-Constantinianism

Jarrod McKenna of Jesus Manifesto had an interesting post earlier in the week contrasting the reality of Obama's presidency and in particular the sentiments expressed in his Nobel acceptance speech.

In this speech, Obama played off a Neihburian realism against the ideals of King and Ghandi, and his Christian faith. His conclusion was that while King, Ghandi and of course Christ called us to something entirely transcendent, the needs of state unfortunately demand something much more prosaic. Yet as McKenna argues

What if Obama had not taken a step back from the Black Churches (in which he had come to faith) because their impassioned prophetic rhetoric became a liability in cultures were we like God to bless our agendas, not challenge them? What if Martin Luther King Jr. had lived to preach his next sermon, which he had titled “Why America May Go to Hell”? Would Obama still have referred to him? It would be hard for any President to be part of King’s congregation that day, let alone respond “amen.” How much harder to not just claim King as a hero but Christ as Lord? Yet in our sinfulness we seem immensely skilled in sanitizing and sidelining examples that show us that Jesus’ Way of costly love and risky nonviolence is not just practical, it’s the narrow road that will lead out into life. There is a danger in quoting King and Gandhi as embodiments of abstract ideals to admire rather than fiercely pragmatic examples to follow. Instead of following them as they follow Christ we might just end up “believing in him” while playing chaplain to Empires the likes of which put him on the cross. Instead of living Martin King’s dream we might find ourselves collaborating with the nightmarish forces that assassinated him a year to the day he publically called for an end to the war in Vietnam.

On Christmas day, it would be well to reflect the extent to which the Church has become a neo-Constantinian church -- a church in the service of empire -- by and for the rich and powerful and largely unaware or scornful of God's preferential option for the poor.

Finding or Following?

This week's reflection from the Ekklesia Project compares abstract spirituality (have you found Jesus?) with living out a concrete faith in the here and now:

One of the great dangers and persistent temptations of the Christian life is abstraction and reduction, universalization and generalization. We like platitudes and principles, spiritual laws and high-sounding words like “love” and “grace” or “justice.”

But not with Luke. Not with the New Testament. At Christmas we run up against the Incarnation. Instead of timeless truth we get God in particular: a teenaged mother and young father with their baby in a cattle trough, trying to stay warm in a cow shed on the backside of a dusty overlooked town on the far side of the Roman Empire. We get the specific, the particular, the concrete. None of this “once upon a time,” timeless and eternal we get in fairy stories. This story can be dated – when Quirinius was governor of Syria. We can take a road map and follow Mary and Joseph’s journey from Galilee to Nazareth to Bethlehem. Not four spiritual laws. We get an angel calling Mary. God speaking to Joseph. God coming in the particularity of a baby. . . .

But when we stick with the story of the Incarnation we can’t make it anything we want. We can’t say “yes” to four spiritual laws and hate our neighbors and kill our enemies. We can’t ask an abstract Jesus into our hearts and ignore his life and the life he calls us to. We can’t be “spiritual” and not become a member of his contemporary body, the church. The miracle of the Incarnation says it is this Jesus born in the specifics of Bethlehem in the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria who called us to a particular way of life embodied in his church located in our time and place today. God is particular. Jesus came to be with us right here.

We live out our faith as a community in the world. And while we cannot earn our salvation we must surely participate in it. One of my favorite verses in Jame's epistle is verse 19 in Chapter 2:

You believe that there is one God? Good! Even the demons believe that -- and shudder.

Jesus did not say "find me". He said "follow me".

Advent and Hope -- II

Today's Verse and Voice reflection included this quote from theologian, pastor and martyr Deitrich Bonhoeffer

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes ... and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.

Our faith is one of hope and not smug self-assurance and of humility and not triumphal arrogance. It is good to be reminded at the close of Advent what this season represents and what our calling is.

Legal Fraud

As the history of last year's financial debacle is written, one wonders how many more stories there will be like this one by Gretchen Morgensen and Louise Story in today's New York Times:

. . . authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them, people briefed on the matter say.

One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded.

Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created.

Goldman and other Wall Street firms maintain there is nothing improper about synthetic C.D.O.’s, saying that they typically employ many trading techniques to hedge investments and protect against losses. They add that many prudent investors often do the same. Goldman used these securities initially to offset any potential losses stemming from its positive bets on mortgage securities.

But Goldman and other firms eventually used the C.D.O.’s to place unusually large negative bets that were not mainly for hedging purposes, and investors and industry experts say that put the firms at odds with their own clients’ interests.

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

Investment banks were not alone in reaping rich rewards by placing trades against synthetic C.D.O.’s. Some hedge funds also benefited, including Paulson & Company, according to former Goldman workers and people at other banks familiar with that firm’s trading.

It is becoming clear that not only can we maintain a viable economy without this kind of institutionalized criminality but that we must. If these operators are "too big (or too important) to fail, then they are a public good and need to be nationalized or at least tightly controlled. And a few corporate leaders doing the perp walk wouldn't hurt either.

Oops -- This Thing Still Isn't Over!

Last week I noted that I was ready to dip back into the market (one day prior to BoC Governor Mark Carney's pessimistic take on the market) but I have since had some cold feet. I stayed with bonds (high grade corporate and government) and don't see changing this in the near term.

And an article in the online Economist dated yesterday vindicates this. I'll let them tell it:

The bad news is that today’s stability, however welcome, is worryingly fragile, both because global demand is still dependent on government support and because public largesse has papered over old problems while creating new sources of volatility. Property prices are still falling in more places than they are rising, and, as this week’s nationalisation of Austria’s Hypo Group shows, banking stresses still persist. Apparent signs of success, such as American megabanks repaying public capital early (see article), make it easy to forget that the recovery still depends on government support. Strip out the temporary effects of firms’ restocking, and much of the rebound in global demand is thanks to the public purse, from the officially induced investment surge in China to stimulus-prompted spending in America. That is revving recovery in big emerging economies, while only staving off a relapse into recession in much of the rich world.

This divergence will persist. Demand in the rich world will remain weak, especially in countries with over-indebted households and broken banking systems. For all the talk of deleveraging, American households’ debt, relative to their income, is only slightly below its peak and some 30% above its level a decade ago. British and Spanish households have adjusted even less, so the odds of prolonged weakness in private spending are even greater. And as their public-debt burden rises, rich-world governments will find it increasingly difficult to borrow still more to compensate. The contrast with better-run emerging economies will sharpen. Investors are already worried about Greece defaulting (see article), but other members of the euro zone are also at risk. Even Britain and America could face sharply higher borrowing costs.

Big emerging economies face the opposite problem: the spectre of asset bubbles and other distortions as governments choose, or are forced, to keep financial conditions too loose for too long. China is a worry, thanks to the scale and composition of its stimulus. Liquidity is alarmingly abundant and the government’s refusal to allow the yuan to appreciate is hampering the economy’s shift towards consumption (see article). But loose monetary policy in the rich world makes it hard for emerging economies to tighten even if they want to, since that would suck in even more speculative foreign capital.

These worries are compounded, I think, by the U.S. Fed's (and to a lesser extent the BoC's) focus on the phantom menace of inflation that appears to be giving recovery short shrift. Hence my comfort with bonds. So the fat lady may be warming up, but she's not on stage yet.

Advent and Hope

This week's posting on the Ekklesia Project blog talks about advent and hope and particularly the role of hope and faith as a counterpoint to revolutionary action. Here is a segment of that post:

In many times and places, it is the women who best celebrate the triumph of God.

Elizabeth’s profound greeting and Mary’s transcendent song echo the triumph songs of ages past. Miriam sang of Yahweh’s victory over the horse and the rider who had pursued the Hebrews into the sea. Hannah sang of Yahweh’s victory over her barrenness borne in the gift of Samuel—a sure sign of Yahweh’s coming victory over Israel’s barrenness in the time of the judges. These women’s words herald God’s powerful deliverance of His people.

But what are Elizabeth and Mary celebrating? Elizabeth has experienced a Hannah-esque conception. “Mary” is the Hellenized rendering (Mariam) of the name of Moses and Aaron’s sister. But where is the victory? Where are the dead charioteers and horses? All that is in view, it seems, are a couple of women sharing good news about their unusual pregnancies, and one of them sings. Their sons, as mighty as they will be, are not even born. Yet, these women are celebrating as if the victory had already been won. What’s the fuss? Nothing has happened yet.

But Mary lives in anything but a fantasy world. Luke has her singing her song “in the days of King Herod” (1:5). More than a vague chronological marker, Luke’s reference to the reign of the original King of the Jews carries nearly as much freight as “after 9/11.” Herod the Great was notoriously great at killing off his wives and sons. The gloriously beautiful temple in Jerusalem Herod built was underwritten by the crushing taxes borne by his subjects. Mary lives in time of acute political tension. “The proud,” “the powerful” on their thrones, and “the rich” have a face that fills the poor and marginalized with dread.

Mary, however, is as capable of overthrowing Herod and the empire he represents as the village women in Zambia are of pulling down a global economy that devastates their farming through drought and market forces. Instead of revolutionary fervor, what Mary models is how to live in the hope of Advent, how to live in between the ages. Instead of taking matters into her own hands, she sings. Instead of seizing power, Mary rejoices.

The already is small; the not yet is vast. Yet Mary can cling to the words of promise God has entrusted to her. The leaping of the yet-unborn John and the blessing pronounced by Elizabeth confirm Mary’s miraculous conception and equally miraculous vocation as the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. A virgin conceives and a poor peasant girl from a backwater village is named great. In these small signs unnoticed among the rich and powerful, Mary sees the outlines of a divine revolution. Her song identifies God, and not any human agent, as the one launching a decisive reversal of all of our power equations:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

At last, God will fulfill His promise to bring forth a King who will shepherd His people with mercy and justice. “And he will stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord” (Micah 5:4). He will judge tyrants like Herod and redeem a broken creation. In fact, Mary declares these decisive events as already having happened. God’s mighty reversal is all in the past tense. It is as good as done!

We who despise small beginnings and insist on seeing everything before we get on board will miss out on joining what God is doing. This is God’s way of working: backwater village, peasant girl, manger, mustard seed, and cross.

Mary models a hope that doesn’t begin with us or our ability to see. It doesn’t even begin with the Church. It begins with a revolutionary God who is true to His word. God will put the world right. Mary models the Church’s hopeful vocation and Her dangerous joy.

This is not a call to pietistic quietude. Nor is it a call to align ourselves with the powers of the world or view them as ordained by God. It is a faith that if we do the work we are called to on a small and very human scale -- if we do our part -- then God's justice will prevail. Advent is a season when we celebrate the entry of hope into history against all evidence.

Where's Canada

On Wednesday, the progressive Prospect Magazine published a list of what they thought were the top twenty-five public intellectuals who engaged the economic crisis. One can question their choices, though I think they are pretty solid. What is notable is that there is not one Canadian. Presumably our universities and think-tanks produce top calibre academics. And surely at least one or two would have the ability to take their act public.

Why Do I Listen to the CBC?

As promised yesterday, journalist and Giller prize winner Linden MacIntyre took on the Afghan detainee issue this morning. What a joke. The half hour segment was divided into two parts. The first was simply phone ins, mostly rants, from polarized perspectives. Yes, cheap, lazy journalism, but the norm for the people's network.

The second half featured right-wing fossil Lowell Green (isn't he dead yet-- I remember listening to him in the 60s?) and left-wing harpie Linda McQuaig. Predictably it turned into a scream fest. Lowell wrapped himself in the flag (as a diaper?) while McQuaig loudly drew on her limited supply of lefty tropes. The issue itself was scarcely touched, but for the ancient and irrational there was much catharsis I guess.

I suppose this is what journalism looks like from a barstool: lazy, cheap and completely uninformative. Yet this is an issue as serious as any the military has ever faced and one that should, given how it has been played, bring down a government.

The problem here is that Parliamentary government has succumbed to a monopolistic journalism and dictatorial political executive -- a symbiosis of the unaccountable. Parliament and ultimately the courts, the venues where this issue should and must be played out, have been sidelined.

This is sad.

Time to Acton

A senior Canadian official has now made credible allegations (not proven, if they were proven they would not be allegations) that implicate senior Canadian officials, military and civilian and possibly ministers of the current government in activities that might reasonably be construed as war crimes.

That government's response has been multifaceted: to deny requests for documentation, to smear witnesses, to shut down the work of the committee investing these allegations and finally to threaten to prorogue Parliament for several months in the hope that a snap election will remove them from this jam.

What they are hiding from, however, is horrifically serious. And in hiding from it, this government has lost any moral credibility to continue to govern. What is particularly tragic is that it is a minority government that serves only at the pleasure of the opposition parties. And compounding this is the fact that the leader of the opposition is an academic with an international reputation in human rights issues.

In other words, no one has covered themselves in glory here. Indeed the one who knows better but permits evil is often the guiltier. This is not only a stain on the Harper government, however indelible that may be, but on the Canadian political system as a whole.

More Common Sense

Via Freakonomics, a dose of common sense from the IMF regarding the circus in Copenhagen:

The science of the issue can get pretty incomprehensible pretty quickly. And the politics are clearly very ugly. Let’s not forget, however, that much of the economics is simple.

It’s an externality, stupid — so price it.

I am currently reading William Nordhaus's Question of Balance. He and his colleagues have developed a comprehensive and useful model for comparing the costs of various climate change scenarios and policies to ameliorate them. While I will have more to say on Nordhaus's work later, in brief, it largely reflects the above; internalize externalities so that social costs are taken into account.

Channeling Richard Nixon

The Harper government is beginning to resemble nothing so much as the post-watergate Nixon administration. Today, government members of the panel looking into detainee abuses simply failed to show up, effectively suspending this work. And as noted earlier, rumors are swirling about a proroguing of Parliament.

Not surprisingly, the opposition parties are howling. But their degrees of freedom are not zero here. It is unlikely that the Harper Conservatives want to fall on this issue. If the opposition parties could signal credibly their willingness to bring this about in the absence of a full hearing into this issue, the response would likely be positive.

The problem is that the opposition parties are being as, or even more, cowardly than the Conservatives. The Liberal leader in particular, with his international reputation on human rights issues could put his credibility to great use in insisting that we immediately address what is indeed an allegation of war crimes.

Lomborg on Climategate

One of the truly disheartening suggestions coming out of Copenhagen this week is that the debate arising from the University of East Anglia emails is one between a scientific community that has established the fact of human based global warming and a growing cadre of neanderthal knuckle-draggers who the idea of global warming is a fraud or even a conspiracy.

While there are always voices on the lunatic fringe, the real contention is between those whose sense of infallibility and righteousness feel justified in silencing dissent and those who first are concerned when scientific rigour is sacrificed and second are concerned that the policy prescriptions of the zealots are self-defeating. What there is no disagreement on is the fact of global warming, its importance and the compelling need to address it. Bjorn Lomborg sums this up thus:

What the stolen emails revealed was a group of the world’s most influential climatologists arguing, brainstorming, and plotting together to enforce what amounts to a party line on climate change. Data that didn’t support their assumptions about global warming were fudged. Experts who disagreed with their conclusions were denigrated as “idiots” and “garbage.” Peer-reviewed journals that dared to publish contrarian articles were threatened with boycotts. Dissent was stifled, facts were suppressed, scrutiny was blocked, and the free flow of information was choked off.

Predictably, the text of the more than 3,000 purloined emails have been seized on by skeptics of man-made climate change as “proof” that global warming is nothing more than a hoax cooked up by a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals. And this is the real tragedy of “Climategate.” Global warming is not a hoax, but at a time when opinion polls reveal rising public skepticism about climate change, this unsavory glimpse of scientists trying to cook the data could be just the excuse too many people are waiting for to tune it all out.

What seems to have motivated the scientists involved in Climategate was the arrogant belief that that the way to save the world was to conceal or misrepresent ambiguous and contradictory findings about global warming that might “confuse” the public. But substituting spin for scientific rigor is a terrible strategy.

So, too, is continuing to embrace a response to global warming that has failed for nearly two decades. Instead of papering over the flaws in the Kyoto approach and pretending that grand promises translate into real action, we need to acknowledge that saving the world requires a smarter strategy than the one being pursued so dogmatically in Copenhagen.

In other words, the real enemy of environmental protections is those who believing themselves above reproach are willing to bend the rules.

Krugman on Paul Samuelson

As anyone with an interest in economics will know, Paul Samuelson passed away over the weekend. Paul Krugman's tribute reminds us of how much we take as commonsensical is attributable to Samuelson's work:

With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realized that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

2. Welfare economics: What does it mean to say that one economic outcome is better than another? This was a blurry concept before Samuelson came in, with much confusion about how to think about income distribution. Samuelson taught us how to use the concept of redistribution by an ethical observer to make sense of the concept of social welfare – and thereby also taught us the limits of that concept in the real world, where there is no such observer and redistribution usually doesn’t happen.

3. Gains from trade: What does it mean to say that international trade is beneficial? What are the limits of that proposition? The starting point is Samuelson’s analysis of the gains from trade, which drew on both revealed preference and his welfare analysis. And everything since, from the distortions analysis of Bhagwati and Johnson, to the generalized comparative advantage concepts of Deardorff, has been based on that insight.

4. Public goods: Why must some goods and services be provided by the government? What makes some, but only some, goods suitable for private markets? It all goes back to Samuelson’s 1954 “Pure theory of public expenditure”.

5. Factor-proportions trade theory: Every time we talk about resources and comparative advantage, every time we worry about the effect of trade on income distribution, we’re harking back to Samuelson’s work in the 1940s and 1950s: he took the vague, confusing ideas of Ohlin and Heckscher, and turned them into a sharp-edged model that defined most trade theory for a generation, and remains a key part of the modern synthesis.

6. Exchange rates and the balance of payments: A bit of personal storytelling: Most people who work in international trade tend to lose the thread when the discussion turns to exchange rates and the balance of payments; as I’ve sometimes put it, the real trade people regard international macro as voodoo, while the international macro people regard real trade as boring and irrelevant (and when I’m in a sour mood, I suggest that both are right). But I was saved from all that when I read Dornbusch, Fischer and Samuelson 1977 on Ricardian trade, which among other things showed how trade and macro, exchange rates and the balance of payments, the possibility of gains from trade but also the possibility of unemployment, all fit together.

In other words this is economics as useful social science rather than applied ideology.

House Prices and Reality

News today that house prices in Canada are up 19% year over year and sales up 73% for the same period. Prices are now at an all time high vis-a-vis income and not surprisingly debt levels are also at record highs. All of this is sustained by record low interest rates that are sustaining the rest of the economy. This is particularly true for variable rate mortgages which are currently fetching just 2%.

Of course, this cannot last. Whether it will lead to a substantial correction in prices is anyone's guess. But we do know that when interest rates recover, which they will, many household will be unable to meet obligations. And at this point the party will surely end.

Common Sense on Financial Institutions

Elizabeth Warren, chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel on bank bailouts in an interview with Newsweek offers this commonsensical advice on financial institutions and markets:

There are a lot of ways to regulate "too big to fail" financial institutions: break them up, regulate them more closely, tax them more aggressively, insure them, and so on. And I'm totally in favor of increased regulatory scrutiny of these banks. But those are all regulatory tools. Regulations, over time, fail. I want to see Congress focus more on a credible system for liquidating the banks that are considered too big to fail. The little guys aren't immortal; they pay for their mistakes. The big guys can't be immortal either. A free market cannot operate in a too-big-to-fail world.

Wind them down rather than prop them up? What is implied here is provisions for short-term nationalization, along Swedish lines. Given last year's off the books EFF policy, we should be paying attention to this too.

Run Away! Run Away!

The brave Harper tories are doing the obvious in the face of a potentially devastating issue: running away. Word is that Parliament is to be prorogued before Christmas, only to return in March, table an election budget full of delayed Christmas goodies and then drop the writ.

As they undoubtedly know more than the rest of us, the Afghanistan detainee issue is not going to go away. So far, they have not taken much of a hit from it, as was predicted. Giving the issue time to cool off and then calling a snap election in which we are bought with our own money is a proven strategy. And hopefully deal with the fallout from this issue from the comfort of a majority.

This is Disturbing

From boingboing, Cory Doctorow writes:

My friend, the wonderful sf writer Peter Watts was beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards on Tuesday. I heard about it early Wednesday morning in London and called Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She worked her contacts to get in touch with civil rights lawyers in Michigan, and we mobilized with Caitlin Sweet (Peter's partner) and David Nickle (Peter's friend) and Peter was arraigned and bailed out later that day.

But now Peter faces a felony rap for "assaulting a federal officer" (Peter and the witness in the car say he didn't do a thing, and I believe them). Defending this charge will cost a fortune, and an inadequate defense could cost Peter his home, his livelihood and his liberty.

Peter's friends are raising money for his legal defense. I just sent him CAD$1,000, because this is absolutely my biggest nightmare: imprisoned in a foreign country for a trumped-up offense against untouchable border cops. I would want my friends to help me out if it ever happened to me.

Update: Here's more from Peter, in his own words: "Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario's first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

"In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face."

If this is the kinder, gentler Obama U.S., I think I will stay home.

Where is our foreign affairs minister, and the critic, the largely invisible Bob Rae, on this.

An Idolatrous Church

From Catholic Anarchy, this from Dorothee Soelle

In a theological perspective it is evident that the content of this fascist religion [right wing Christianity] contradicts the message of the Jewish-Christian tradition. The God of the prophets did not preach the nation-state, but community between strangers and natives. The apostle Paul did not base the justification of sinners on the Protestant work ethic, but on grace, which appears for young and old, for diligent and for lazy people! And Jesus did not make the family the central value of human life, but the solidarity of those deprived of their rights. The most important norms of the Moral Majority are not contained in Christian faith, as we can see from the many critical remarks against the family that appear in the gospels. It is characteristic of Christofascism that it cuts off all the roots that Christianity has in the Old Testament, in the Jewish Bible. No word about justice, no mention of the poor, whom God comes to aid, very little about guilt and suffering. No hope for the messianic reign. Hope is completely individualized and reduced to personal success. Jesus, cut loose from the Old Testament, becomes a sentimental figure. The empty repetition of his name works like a drug: it changes nothing and nobody. Therefore, since not everybody can be successful, beautiful, male, and rich, there have to be hate objects who can take the disappointment on themselves. Jesus, who suffered hunger and poverty, who practiced solidarity with the oppressed, has nothing to do with this religion.

At a mass meeting a thousand voices shouted: ‘I love Jesus’ and ‘I love America’—it was impossible to distinguish the two. This kind of religion knows the cross only as a magical symbol of what he has done for us, not as the sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal, like thousands today who stand up for his truth in El Salvador. This is a God without justice, a Jesus without a cross, an Easter without a cross—what remains is a metaphysical Easter Bunny in front of the beautiful blue light of the television screen, a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in service of the mighty.

This is not only not the Church that I know. It is not the Church.

Support Your Local Dope Dealer

In case you thought that all of those government dollars were the cause of the quick turnaround in the financial sector last year and this, now comes news that it wasn't just government, it was dope.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result...

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

"That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was," he said.

Who said capitalism can't be fun?

Armed Socialism for the Rich

Though it is generating much controversy, BoingBoing's back and forth on the arming of corporate welfare chiselers is too much to resist:

"I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit," said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it's true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn't call me back...

Plenty of Wall Streeters worry about the big discrepancies in wealth, and think the rise of a financial industry-led plutocracy is unjust. That doesn't mean any of them plan to move into a double-wide mobile home as a show of solidarity with the little people, though.

No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.

I don't know. Do you think we should arm everyone on welfare?

Advent Conspiracy

For a wonder-full (thank you Dexter Quinlan) take on Christmas and the Advent season you would be hard pressed to do better than this. It is beyond ironic that the season that celebrates the entry of God into history has become one of a triumphant idolatrousness.

Prophecy and a Third Way

Over the past couple of month's I have received and read through two papers on economic justice published by Kairos. While it is difficult to disagree with the generally progressive slant of these papers, I found it frustrating that there seemed to be little in them that was unique to the Church or to a Kingdom economics.

Last night, I began reading Walter Brueggerman's The Prophetic Imagination and it was immediately apparent that this work offers a very useful framework for understanding and explaining why liberal Christian critiques of the dominant powers in our society often seems so sterile. As Brueggarman presents it, there can be little doubt that much of the talk of God that emanates from the rich and powerful is talk of a thoroughly co-opted God -- one who poses no risk to those served. Liberal critiques of this, however, more often than not seem to omit God altogether. It seems rather than claim a more subversive and more biblical God, they retreat from the notion altogether.

For Brueggerman, the prophetic imagination is one in which the God of Moses who led His people out of Egypt is wholly present and in which the subversive nature of this God is completely claimed. It is here, that people such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Dorothy Day and Deitrich Bonheoffer seem to fit. In place of an idolatrous conservatism and an atheistic liberalism there is an alternative.

Douglas Bell Nails It

There is a minor food fight going on over at the Globe&Mail about the primacy of Parliament vis-a-vis documentary evidence on Afghan detainees. It is really a spat between a water-carrier for the Conservatives, Norman Spector and one for the NDP, Brian Topp.

Douglas Bell, however, captures the larger issue

Watching my colleagues Norman Spector and Brian Topp so ably and intelligently flip each other off on the question of parliamentary privilege is a dizzying experience. It’s a debate which I enter with considerable trepidation. That said, here goes nothing.

Does the government of Canada really want to run the risk, however slight, of making their armed forces subject to supranational judicial organizations like the ICC? We signed onto the International Criminal Court precisely because we imagined that that our sovereign systems of review and assessment were beyond reproach. We helped create a body whose standards we ought by definition to exceed.

Hence, any failure to pursue the truth in matters whose inherent interest extend beyond our borders is a failure both to protect our sovereignty and to uphold the standards that justify our claim to sovereignty in the first place. Surely that cannot be the government’s intention.

Rick Hillier in the dock at The Hague? I doubt it. But perhaps a fallen government becomes more possible.

Thoughts on Obama in Oslo

There is little doubt that Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo represents a vast advance on the rhetoric we have heard from Washington for the past decade. As Andrew Sullivan notes in a very eloquent posting,

It's a remarkable address - Niebuhr made manifest. What strikes me about it most of all - and I do not mean this in any way as a sectarian or non-ecumenical statement - is that it was an address by a deeply serious Christian. It was not Christianist. It did not seek to take sacred text or papal diktat to insist on a public policy or to declare that the president of the United States is somehow the instrument of God or good or that America is somehow more divinely favored than any other nation. It was written and spoken in such a way to reach anyone of any faith or none. It translated a deeply Augustinian grasp of history into a secular and universal language. It was an expression of tragic hope.

Yet it is worth considering that it is precisely this Niebuhrian realism that obscures a more radical and hopeful approach. Surely during Advent, it is worth considering that to view this problem in light of the Gospel is to transcend the politics of the world with something entirely new and unique. In a brief response to Obama's remarks, Johann Cristoph Arnold insists that

It is nice that Mr. Obama invoked the memories of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was right in saying that without their vision and moral clarity, he would never have been standing at the lectern in Oslo. But he neglected to mention that both sacrificed their lives for taking this stand. This is true leadership.

Yes, like our President said, evil does exist in the world. But he was wrong in saying that a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. It is this thinking that gives nations the right to wage “just wars.” Any kind of war is wrong. There is a much better way. This is why our President and all Americans need to understand the power of nonviolence.

History has proven this. Due to the patience and perseverance of Gandhi and his many followers, the mighty British Army was halted in its tracks and had to withdraw from India. This came about at a great personal cost to Gandhi. He was beaten, thrown into jail, and went on many hunger strikes which almost killed him.

By advocating love, forgiveness and nonviolence, Dr. King also withstood the hatred and viciousness of those who believed in white supremacy. He, too, was beaten and imprisoned. He was even stabbed and did not retaliate. Through this he inspired hope and gave millions of people a vision that transformed our entire society.

As a young man, I had the privilege of marching with Dr. King in Selma, where I experienced firsthand the nonviolent legacy that King gave to our nation. In the end, both he and Gandhi were assassinated for their beliefs. The evening before King was killed, he said: “I have been to the mountaintop; I have seen the glory of the Lord and I am not afraid.”

This is not some sort of easy armchair pacifism. It is a willingness to take a different path whatever the cost and with no assurance that it will work out, simply because it is the right thing to do. It is to be in but not of the world. And it is indeed proof that we cannot serve two masters.

Not So Fast Says Mr. Grinch

Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, sent me a Christmas present this week (I was about to switch a large portion of my investments back into equities), but threw cold water (here and here) on the Canadian economy.

There were three facets to Carney's remarks. First, he worried that equities, which have experienced a remarkable comeback over the last several months, are due for a correction as earnings reports begin to show that recent performance, while improved, still has a long way to go. Second, and perhaps more important, he threw a large bucket of cold water on the housing market, reminding both borrowers and lenders that historically low interest rates cannot continue indefinitely and more important that one result of those rates is a substantial overvaluation of housing that is likely to correct sooner rather than later. And finally, he began to hint of monetary and fiscal tightening to come.

Perhaps more troubling, Carney had faint praise for the recovery thus far. The unmistakable message from this is that we are far from out of the woods yet.

So I think that I will hold off on equities for now.

Clement Gets it Right (i.e. Correct)

In a week where the hapless Harper government appears increasingly on the ropes, Industry Minister Tony Clement has delivered a piece of good news just in time for the Christmas break, by introducing meaningful competition into the Canadian wireless market. As the Globe's Jane Taber describes it

Ottawa has rejected a regulatory decision and allowed Globalive Wireless Management Corp. to enter Canada's wireless market, adding a fourth major service in an industry now dominated by three players.

Industry Minister Tony Clement said Friday the federal cabinet decided to “vary” an October ruling by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that Globalive could not enter Canada because it violated ownership rules, finding the majority of its equity almost all of its debt is owned by an Egyptian company, Orascom Telecom Holding.

Ottawa is keen to spark more competition in the telecommunications business and reviewed the CRTC ruling with input from the industry, although Mr. Clement said his decision was based firmly on legal ownership requirements.

“The decision to vary the CRTC Globalive decision, let me emphasize, was based on the legal facts and not on the government's position that there needs to be more competition in the marketplace,” Mr. Clement said. “That said, I firmly believe, that Globalive entry into the market to provide near national service will enhance competition for the benefit of Canadian consumers. A competitive marketplace assists consumers by giving more choice, at better prices and higher quality.”

Mr. Clement said 80 per cent of Globalive's voting shares are controlled by Canadians, and just four its board members are those nominated by foreign interests.

So this government can abide by its principles and deliver intelligent policy.

John Ibbitson and Ministerial Responsibility

So John Ibbitson thinks Peter MacKay will survive. We will agree to disagree.

Far more disturbing, he also believes that

"Ministerial responsibility" is an anachronistic phrase that used to hold cabinet ministers responsible for whatever goes on in their department. It lost any meaning back in 1991, when then-foreign minister Joe Clark refused to resign over the al Mashat affair, blaming his staff for the arrival of Iraq's former U.S. ambassador as an immigrant, with inside help.

The doctrine of ministerial responsibility does not suggest that ministers should step aside or otherwise fall on their sword every time an official screws up. What it does mean is that Ministers are accountable to the House for the operations of their department. And where a minister is found to be directly implicated in misdeeds or coverups of misdeeds there is an expectation that the minister will step aside until she or he is cleared, if this is to be.

Far from being an anachronism, this doctrine is the very core of our parliamentary democracy. Though it is unfortunately often honored more in the breach, it is nontheless about the only bulwark we have against an executive (i.e. prime minister) with dictitorial powers. To suggest, as Ibbitson does, that a minister is only as responsible as a prime minister deems them to be may describe an unfortunate outcome in a particular case but not the way democratic accountability is meant to work.

Shame on him. He knows better.

Norman Spector on Richard Colvin

Former deputy minister and Mulroney chief of staff Norman Spector weighed in today on the Colvin allegations and the attempts by some of his senior colleagues to defend him. He suggests that Colvin had an obligation to go public with his allegations when he found that they were not being heard by his superiors. He rightly asserts that Colvin would have been protected in law, but I am concerned that this deflects from the real question here: were crimes committed in ignoring Colvin's warnings.

Spector's connections to the Conservative party (albeit the Mulroney wing of it) leave his argument at least somewhat suspect. And I am convinced that it is far more important to pursue justice in this matter. If Mr. Colvin chose career over conscience, that is regrettable. But if his superiors ignored their legal obligations, as appears increasingly clear, that is illegal.

Let's keep our eye on the ball here.

Screwing the Poor -- Part 2

Via Jesus Radicals, this story from the Memphis Catholic Worker:

Yesterday (Dec. 3) Memphis police began handing out little business sized cards to homeless persons telling them to go to a particular “service provider” for help to get off the streets. Few went rightly fearing it was a set up. At the same time, the police told homeless people that starting next Wednesday, Dec. 9th, they would arrest anyone found sleeping outside or in abandoned buildings, confiscate their belongings and take them to jail. All of this in a city with NO free shelter, NO city run shelter at all, widespread destruction of public housing, and a severe lack of other services for homeless persons to help them get off the streets…

I cannot improve on JR's comment on this

It is bad enough that the celebration of the birth of Jesus has turned into such a capitalist money fest. It is bad enough that Advent (waiting for the Incarnated One) has turned into the period of pushing, rushing and waiting in long shopping lines. It is bad enough that we are pressured to define our love for one another by how big and expensive a gift we can squeeze into boxes. It is bad enough that Christmas has turned into a time of incredible greed and incredible waste. But to criminalize those who have been chewed up and left to fend for themselves during the season in which we give thanks and praise for Jesus’ entrance into this world as a homeless infant–well, it just adds insult to injury.

The Great Awakening

So CDS Walter Natynczyk came clean today about the problematic transfer of detainees. Predictably, the opposition called for the Minister's head. A dollar short and a day late. Whatever else it is, this is another sad chapter in the erosion of ministerial responsibility, a pillar of our parliamentary democracy. The inability of Minister MacKay to take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates and more onerously his attempts to defame one of his officials who was of course unable to defend himself in a public forum, bespeak a cowardice that only further corrodes the public's confidence in government.

When he goes now, and he will, the damage will have been done. The good name of our military and those who so bravely serve it will have been impugned. The spectacle of our prime minister hiding behind the troops is particularly shameful in this regard. Our international reputation has been sullied. Who will now trust us to be an honest broker when we have acted so egregiously and then lied to cover it up. How many of our soldiers will suffer and die because we are now perceived as agents of despicable actors.

Our opposition parties have hardly covered themselves in glory. Calling for a public inquiry now is necessary but scarcely sufficient. Kicking MacKay in the ass on the way out the door is probably just gratuitous at this point. Collectively, the NDP, Liberals and BQ have the power to defeat a government that is possibly implicated in violations of international and Canadian law: in war crimes. It is time for them to go, and if the opposition parties want to be truly courageous, they can bring this about.

Beyond Incompetence

Via Conservative Senator Elaine McCoy's blog, news that the inquiry into the tasering death of Robert Dziekanski. She offers the following quote from the report, which I cannot improve, on suggesting that

any of the versions of events as presented by the involved members because I find considerable and significant discrepancies in the detail and accuracy of the recollections of the members when compared against the otherwise uncontroverted video evidence. In their statements, the members indicated in responses to numerous questions that they could not recall the detail of the events as they unfolded. The fact that the members met together and with the SRR prior to providing statements causes me to question further their versions of events

In other words, when you lie about one thing, your willingness to lie about others must be assumed.

Screwing the Poor

There is much to-do this morning about a leaked document at the Copenhagen summit that appears to impose a unilateral, un-negotiated and permanent secondary status on developing countries. The Guardian is offering the following analysis:

A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;

• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";

• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;

• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

In other words, given the unlikely prospect of targets ever being met by anyone, it seems at least plausible that the goal of the summit is to cement the primacy of the rich nations -- in other words to screw the poor.

The News that Matters

On the opening day of the Copenhagen conference, with, we are told, the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, comes this shocking news: Tiger Woods does not use condoms when stepping out on his marriage!

Earth to Huffington Post . . .

Get. A. Life.

Blame Canada!

So we are the new evil empire. At the snap of our tar sand stained fingers we can turn your hyper-virtuous Prius into a planet destroying Hummer. A developed world that is obviously unwilling to look at its own consumption casts around for targets of convenience. It turns out that there is a rather large one in northeastern Alberta.

As the world gathers in Copenhagen this week, the incredible hypocrisy of this process is becoming increasingly clear. In fact, the environmental movement is coming to resemble nothing so much as the medieval Catholic church. Rational debate is replaced by an unchallengeable orthodoxy banishing any and all heresies. We are treated to an orgy of climate porn to whip up frenzied hatred of the heretics and increasingly irrational targets that no one can possibly take seriously are proposed. The end product is a document that governments and ngo's can use as a cudgel to beat each other with but that bears no resemblance to reality.

The greatest evil in all of this is that it will inevitably serve to protect the privileges of the rich world against the demands of the poor. We have ours; too bad for you. Climate change is undoubtedly real. It must be addressed, but this must be done in a way that enhances justice rather than cement injustice. And this means a fundamental shift in the global distribution of wealth and a real and protracted effort to alleviate the misery of that half of humanity for whom this must appear such a travesty.

Monetary Policy and Economic Stimulus

News this morning is that the Bank of Canada is signaling its intention to keep the overnight rate at .25% or effectively zero. Thus Canada will hold at the limit of traditional monetary policy. Given our current situation, this is probably the wisest course.

A widely circulated paper by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart of the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, "The Aftermath of Financial Crises", lists the types of problems that are likely to persist when events such as last year occur, and except for the level of debt, Canada is by every measure past this crisis.

Moreover, one of the lessons learned from the crisis, according to Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute in the U.S. is that efficacy need not end at the zero bound. Indeed we know now that efforts at quantitative easing and other forms of non-traditional monetary policy played a significant role in attenuating the crisis.

The Gagnon paper is particularly interesting as it lays out a framework for effective counter-cyclical policy that avoids public debt. While there are inflationary risks here too, as the author recognizes, they are minimized by a type of policy that can be adjusted, up or down, much more quickly than fiscal measures that require legislative approval and once enacted quickly gather powerful constituencies.

This strength of monetary policy, however, might be seen as a source of weakness. It is the purview of central banks that operate at least at arms length if not independent from legislatures and executives. So while it can quickly be adjusted by administrative fiat it is often wholly unaccountable to those it serves.

So pick your poison.

Peter MacKay Must Go Now

This morning's Globe&Mail has a story that appears to directly implicate current Defense Minister and then Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay in misleading the House about what his government knew about detainee abuse.

Apparently one of the detainees who no one in government or the military knew about was rescued by us.

In the case of the transferred and subsequently rescued detainee, Canadian soldiers intervened to take an Afghan from a room where he was surrounded by five or six Afghan police who were beating the handcuffed man with shoes or boots.

Blood was running down the detainee's face so “I immediately assumed positive control of the individual and removed him,” the soldier's field diary says.

The soldier's notes are among thousands of pages of documents filed as part of the federal court action in which Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union unsuccessfully sought an injunction banning further prisoner transfers.

The incident – and another in which Canadians refused to transfer prisoners threatened with death – suggest Canadian soldiers were well aware of their obligations under the Geneva Convention.

The rescue incident dates from June of 2006, during the period when ministers and senior officers now insist they were completely unaware of repeated warnings of the risks of abuse and torture being filed by diplomat Richard Colvin.

The Canadian soldier's account, handwritten in a field notebook in the hours after the June 19, 2006 incident, is corroborated by a medic's examination of the detainee's injuries and photographs, which the government refuses to release. The account, first outlined in a May, 2007 affidavit by Colonel Steve Noonan, Canada's first task force commander, was subsequently confirmed by then Brigadier-General Joseph Deschamps, who was chief-of-staff for operations in Canada's expeditionary forces command when he was cross-examined about it in January, 2008.

After Col. Noonan's first disclosure of the incident, the military denied the detainee ever really qualified as a Canadian captive. Then Lieutenant-General Walt Natynczyk – who has since been promoted to chief of defence staff – issued a statement in May 2007 denying that the beaten detainee had originally been captured and transferred by Canadian troops.

“Media reporting of a specific example of an individual detained by Afghan Authorities are inaccurate,” Gen. Natynczyk said in a statement.

“The incident took place in the Zangabad area in the course of an operation in June 2006. The CF members came upon the individual and questioned him but at no time did they capture him.”

However, the soldier's contemporaneous field notes – written on the day of the incident but not released until months after the DND's media statement – offer a version that matches the sworn affidavit and provides compelling detail of a sequence of capture, transfer, rescue and medical treatment. “Local ANP [Afghan National Police] elements were in possession of a PUC [person in custody] detained by CDA troops and subsequently transferred to ANP custody,” the detailed written notes say.

They also refer by name and unit to the Canadian platoon that originally captured the individual and took pictures of him (showing no injuries) before they handed him over. Those photos, both showing the detainee unharmed before being handed over and after being beaten, have been withheld by the government.

The master-corporal's notes also quote two other Canadian soldiers who provided statements saying they had witnessed the Afghan police beating the detainee with shoes on the face and back.

Col. Noonan's affidavit also refers to instances of Canadian soldiers refusing to transfer prisoners threatened with death by Afghan security forces.

“The Afghan National Army wished to take custody of a detainee captured by the Canadian Forces and were overheard, by an interpreter, to be contemplating the execution of the detainee,” Col. Noonan said in his affidavit, adding that the chain of command was advised and the detainee wasn't transferred.

The incidents demonstrate that Canadian soldiers deployed in a dangerous war zone were willing to take additional risks to uphold their Geneva obligations and recover detainees being abused.

Numerous others instances of post-transfer suspected torture and abuse exist – including at least eight where Canadian officials demanded investigations of detainee abuse or torture by Afghan security officials – but in all those cases documentary records have been withheld or censored by the government.

It would appear that the Minister, not to mention senior officials and a certain retired CDS are implicated in misleading us about something that would appear to be a crime, both in international law, as the Globe mentions and in Canadian law, which it fails to.

This is no longer a case of a minister who can hang on claiming ignorance. We have a doctrine of ministerial responsibility in this country. Peter MacKay must resign.

Green Neo-Malthusians?

In 1803, Thomas Malthus, an Anglican priest, published An essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions.


Malthus' concern was the the Utopian dream of progress envisioned by enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, Condorcet and Godwin, was imperiled by population growth , which in turn would be the product of egalitarian policies such as the Poor Laws. In short, feed the poor or provide for anything but the meanest subsistence and you only encourage them to breed and thus contribute to catastrophic overpopulation.

Two centuries later, we are still here and still hearing the same warnings. Now, as then, we are told that the earth has or will soon reach the point where it is unable to support a growing population. While the science is more sophisticated by many orders of magnitude the ethical argument seems not to advanced at all. While the affluent classes in the comfortable west will certainly have to make adjustments, we are told, it is the world's poor, of whom there are all too many already, who will have to take the biggest hit.

The tragedy of course is that this argument was first grounded in faith and in fact quite often continues to be. Very few (Bjorn Lomborg is one exception) have suggested that the overwhelming issue facing humanity is the appalling, evil poverty that afflicts its majority. And no one dare state the obvious: That alleviating this must mean an unparalleled decline in the material standards of the life of the planet's rich. In our lives.

This was the lacuna in Malthus' work -- it is the rich who consume and not the poor. And it is the elephant in the room with current environmental concerns.

It's Over?

Despite forebodings yesterday from Paul Krugman, today's employment numbers in the U.S. and Canada would seem to indicate that the economic downturn has bottomed out and that both economies are on the mend.

Yes, inventories are being drawn down and yes stimulus dollars have driven much of this. But in Canada in particular, stimulus dollars will continue to drive growth and our energy sector will underpin growth as world demand increases.

As Krugman notes today, however, the danger is now that stimulus efforts will be curtailed or even rolled back as a free-market government here and a timid one in the U.S. switch their focus to an as yet non-existent threat to inflation.

Munk Debates

I have just finished watching a podcast of this Monday's Munk Debates on climate change. As many of you will know the debaters were George Monbiot, Elizabeth May, Bjorn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson. The question was whether climate change is the defining issue for humanity.

I would recommend that you watch it, and I hope to have comments over the next few days. To my mind, the most valuable contribution of the debate was to underscore the need for a balanced response to those who would seal off debate, dictate policy and shout down all dissenters. In particular, Bjorn Lomborg offered a thoughtful approach that bears much closer scrutiny. I am picking his book up this afternoon and hope to have more on it later.

Academic Thuggery -- Part 2

Further to my earlier post, here are some links to items of interest for those who wish to follow up on this.

Earlier this year, the NYT magazine ran an article by Nicholas Dawidoff titled The Civil Heretic describing the heir to Einstein's chair at Princeton's concerns with the climate change consensus.

This past Sunday, Times science columnist John Tierney ran a piece looking at the damage done when scientists fiddle with the data, noting that

I’m not trying to suggest that climate change isn’t a real threat, or that scientists are deliberately hyping it. But when they look at evidence of the threat, they may be subject to the confirmation bias — seeing trends that accord with their preconceptions and desires. Given the huge stakes in this debate — the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions — it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?

Finally, Popular Mechanics (of all places) has an excellent review of the fiasco that is a useful starting point for anyone interested in this issue.

Academic Thuggery

I am following the debate around the East Anglia University climate data with interest not so much because of the topic, though it is certainly a critical issue, but because of how academics often operate. In short, their methodology resembles nothing so much as that of the medieval church. Those who disagree with them are not in error. They are evil. And they are not to be debated with. They are to be silenced and if possible destroyed, though we no longer burn them at the stake; we deny them tenure (that great engine of non-conformity) or refuse to publish their work in reputable journals.

As the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, tirelessly argued, science is never settled. We must always be prepared to modify or even discard our most cherished theories if they are found wanting. If climate change resulting from human activity is a problem, and I believe that it is, then good science will not only support this but will point the way to solutions. Those who would preclude all debate, however, leave even well informed non-scientists wondering what is being deliberately obscured or overlooked.

Popper's great protagonist, Thomas Kuhn, argued that science and scientists protect and defend existing theories often by bending data to fit or by excluding those who would question. What Kuhn never seemed to realize and what Popper so strenuously argued is that this is not science but politics, and where this occurs we have a duty to be skeptical.

Only in Germany You Say?

Via Matt Yglesias, news that two German cabinet ministers and a senior military officer have resigned over a recent airstrike in which a number of civilians were killed

Franz Josef Jung, Defense Minister of Germany at the time of the Kunduz airstrikes gone bad, got demoted to the Labor Ministry in the post-election cabinet reshuffle and will now be resigning from the cabinet altogether. General Wolfgang Schneiderhan and State Secretary Peter Wichert have already resigned over this matter.

In light of the fact that all this is happening in part because of an increased American emphasis on the need to reduce civilian casualties, it does strike me as worth wondering whether you can imagine anything comparable happening in the United States? In any bureaucratic organization, it’s one think to adopt rules or policies saying that such-and-such is a priority. It’s another thing entirely to demonstrate that doing such-and-such is, in fact, crucial to one’s career.

Or in Canada.

Minister McKay's 'the dog ate my homework' excuses are an embarrassment. He was Foreign Affairs Minister then and Defence Minister now. It is time for him to go.

What Would Philip Berrigan Do?

I have just finished reading Phil Berrigan's wonderful autobiographical work, Fighting the Lamb's War. His was an uncompromising Catholicism. He loved the Church but was never afraid to take it on. Reading the Irish Times' report on the decades long cover-up of abuse in Ireland I longed for a voice like his to lend some moral clarity to this.

Andrew Sullivan, whose love of the Church is palpable, has this to say

If the Catholic church were a secular institution in Ireland and had been found guilty of child abuse to the massive extent the Church has, it would be forced to close. Its top officials would not be issuing statements of apology and regret, but serving sentences in jail. The name of John Paul II would not be a revered mantra; it would be synonymous with the head of an international organization that had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge its own long-running, institutional brutalization of generations of defenseless children.

Unto the least of these.

Krugman on Dubai

Paul Krugman puts it like this:

As far as I can tell, there are three ways to look at it — three stories, if you like, about what Dubai means.

First, there’s the view that this is the beginning of many sovereign defaults, and that we’re now seeing the end of the ability of governments to use deficit spending to fight the slump. That’s the view being suggested, if I understand correctly, by the Roubini people and in a softer version by Gillian Tett.

Alternatively, you can see this as basically just another commercial real estate bust. Either you view Dubai World as nothing special, despite sovereign ownership, as Willem Buiter does; or you think of the emirate as a whole as, in effect, a highly leveraged CRE investor facing the same problems as many others in the same situation.

Finally, you can see Dubai as sui generis. And really, there has been nothing else quite like it.

At the moment, I’m leaning to a combination of two and three. For what it’s worth (not much), US bond prices are up right now, suggesting that the Dubai thing hasn’t raised expectations of default.

Anyway, we continue to live in interesting times.

Yes, but a bet against Roubini is often a risky bet.

Dubai and Derivatives

This should warm your heart on a cold fall day. It turns out that Dubai, whose economy is in free fall as I write, taking world markets down with it, is a global leader in innovative derivative products. Wow! Just like Iceland! As the Global Arab Network describes it

NASDAQ Dubai’s equity derivatives market has won the Futures & Options World (FOW) 2009 Award for “Best Innovation by an Exchange in Product Design, Middle East.”

Commenting on the November 2008 opening of the market and its early growth, UK-based FOW said: “Pushing ahead with the launch amid the worst (global) recession for decades, and when some in the industry voiced doubts, is to be applauded.

“The resulting platform offers greater risk management scope for investors in the region, at a time of extreme market volatility.”

Equity derivatives trading volumes on NASDAQ Dubai have increased sharply in 2009, reaching a monthly record of 21,330 in October.

Jeff Singer, Chief Executive of NASDAQ Dubai, said: “FOW is a leading opinion former in the derivatives industry and we are delighted to be recognized by its Award. Our derivatives offer hedging opportunities for regional and international investors with exposure across UAE and wider Middle East markets.”

We have learned nothing.

A Note on References

I have not known what to do until now about books I refer to. So I have decided to do this.

Because I live in Toronto, I will first try to provide a link to the Toronto Public Library. My second choice will be the University of Toronto library. UT allows for the purchase of reader cards giving access to one of the better university library systems on the planet.

When all else fails I will provide a link to the purchase of a used copy via Amazon Canada.

I have no interest in shilling for book retailers, particularly when I only buy books (always used) when all else fails.

If You Require Service in English, Press 1

If you have ever spent a stroke inducing hour talking to a clueless "customer service rep" in Mumbai, Benoit Duteurtre's novella Customer Service will ring hilariously true.

Our oppressors are no longer jack-booted thugs but hapless call centre operators clinging to the bottom rung of the middle class in third world countries.

Lost in Space

Where is this guy going with this?

Though an extraordinarily perceptive commentator and brilliant academic, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff appears completely tone deaf.

In a week in which Conservative poll numbers have rightly gone off a cliff as allegations of willful blindness on the abetting of torture take hold, Ignatieff has been pretty much silent. And now news from the Globe's Jane Taber that he is "unplugging" himself and embarking on a tour to listen to Canadians. Key quote . . .

“This is all about listening to Canadians,” he told his caucus. And he advised them to be patient and work hard - noting that every question in Question Period and that every bit of work done in a committee is part of the re-building process for the Liberals. He said he was “certain” that rewards would come.

This minority government deserves to fall. The Minister of Defence is on life support. If a plug needs to be pulled, it should be his. This is not a time for contemplation; it is a time for taking the reins. Or as Lawrence Martin suggested in his column this morning

Nobleman Ignatieff has brought in new advisers, including some veteran Chrétien warriors. The Afghan detainees file is their first big test. We'll soon get an idea whether they will follow Mr. McKenna's advice and change course or whether it will be more of the same: Liberal popguns, Conservative cruise missiles.