Odds and Ends

Just a few links that don't really merit a post of their own...


A somewhat dated paper from the OECD on global housing prices. What's most interesting is that it has a longer set of historical data across a wider range of countries than you usually see.

A few things to note:

As at 2003 mortgage debt as a percentage of disposable income was the same for Canada and the U.S. at 77%. I'm guessing it must be a fair bit higher in Canada by now.

post edited to add: Well maybe not, only because the denominator, disposable income, hasn't been doing so well in the U.S. over the last few years.

Looking at table III.1 you can see that over the period 1970-1995, house price appreciation was greater in Canada than in most of the developed world. Over the period 1970-2005, appreciation in Canada was in the middle of the pack, behind places like Ireland, Spain, the U.K., Holland, Australia and New Zealand which had massive run-ups in housing prices (prices generally tripled or quadrupled in these places even after adjusting for inflation), similar to European countries such as France, Norway and Italy (where prices roughly doubled after inflation) and ahead of the U.S., Sweden, Finland and Denmark (where prices were up 50-75% or so), and a group of countries where house prices peaked in the early 90's and never recovered (in real terms), including Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Korea (little if any increase in real housing prices over the period).

---
As a complement to the previous article, here's a well-written piece from the IMF on the global housing market that is more up-to-date. The article suggests that one of the best metrics of valuation in the housing market is the price-rent ratio and notes that the 2 countries where the price-rent ratio exceeds long run averages the most are Sweden and Canada. The Price-Income ratio is also well above the long run average in Canada, but on this metric we trail the countries which showed the huge price appreciation in the OECD report above (Ireland, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Spain).

I'd speculate that the reason Canada ranks higher on price-rent is that the countries with the huge appreciation suffered from both a housing bubble and a housing shortage that drove up rents as well. Unlike Canada where the boom led to many years where housing starts far exceeded estimates of household formation, there was little increase in housing starts in places like Australia and the U.K.

The report concludes, "That leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: house prices in many countries still have room to fall."

---
An article in the telegraph detailing some research supporting Fred Hirsch's contention that as society grows wealthier we are drawn into intensifying zero-sum competition for positional goods which means the greater wealth isn't increasing our happiness.

---
Malcolm Gladwell writes about how civil behaviour in politics has the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma and employs some arguments that will sound quite familiar to anyone who has read through my posts on ethics.

"Here’s a suggestion, borrowed from game theory. What is incivility but a species of collective action problem? A collective action problem is generated whenever a situation's rational opportunities at the individual level generate, at the systemic level, outcomes that are bad for everybody. Consider the familiar example of status-seeking via acquisition of a luxury sport utility vehicle. As consumers compete for this particular clump of positional goods — the feelings of safety that come from a ride bigger than the other guy's, plus the bmw or Mercedes logo over the grille — they have to shoulder mounting personal costs. The competition then turns into a 'race to the bottom,' in which every move to advance my position (larger car, fancier logo) creates a new incentive for you to invest more in pursuit of the same combination of size and status. Because these goods function by position, there is no theoretical upper limit to the ratcheted spending of our competition. Ultimately, the mounting opportunity costs mean we all end up poorer, even as the ends of 'safety' are obliterated by the fleet of urban tanks surging through the city streets.

How and when the exercise of rational self-interest generates system-wide defeats has been the subject of much investigation and analysis. Some scholars have suggested, for example, that individual rationality, amped by greed and cleverness, led to the collective self-defeat we know as the economic meltdown of 2008 — though this analysis says little about the uneven distribution of the costs of that meltdown, whereby the greediest somehow ended up losing the least. But relatively little attention has been given to discursive versions of collective action problems, perhaps because we naively assume that transparency will govern political exchanges; we think we know what the other person's interests and actions are. This assumption is false. Discourse, no less than consumption, has positional and hence competitive aspects. Indeed, winning the argument — or, rather, being seen to win it — is the essence of many discursive exchanges, especially political ones. If politics is reduced to elections or debates, it goes from being a shared undertaking of articulating ends and means and becomes a game of status and one-upmanship."

---
David Olive writes about the housing bubble in the Star.

Perhaps oblivious to the fact that almost every metric shows Canadian housing prices and debt levels to be near or higher relative to fundamentals such as incomes and rents than U.S. prices were at the peak of the U.S. bubble, Olive opens by saying that, "Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has headed off any last chance of a housing bubble developing in Canada."

Olive legitimately appears to believe that people who warn about a housing bubble are concerned that housing prices are about to *start* increasing at a rapid rate, seemingly unaware that those warning about a bubble are concerned that prices already *have* risen at a rapid rate and the concern is that they might fall.

So Olive sets forth a number of facts meant to reassure the reader: Ottawa is toughening mortgage rules, taxes on housing are going up, interest rates have nowhere to go but up, etc. and then concludes that we don't have to worry about a bubble because "the fundamentals of our economy don't support another leap in prices."

Aside from his complete obliviousness to the arguments *on both sides* of the housing bubble debate, Olive also puts forth an incredibly weak argument that, "One of the classic characteristics of a bubble is that in the midst of one, no one thinks it's a bubble. If they did, they'd quickly clear their winnings off the table. That fears of an emerging Canadian housing bubble have preoccupied economists, lenders, policymakers and buyers since last fall is a sure indication that the market is not caught up in an irrational buying frenzy."

Obviously the people who matter - those who are buying the houses and driving up prices - don't think it's a bubble. Per Olive's argument, the fact that prices continue to go up should mean that it *is* a bubble. Aside from that, he seems completely unaware how similar the situation is here to what happened in the U.S. In the U.S. a few pundits (e.g. Robert Shiller, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker) raised concerns about a housing bubble, but the vast majority bought into a 'this time is different' argument. Here in Canada, the situation is the same, the government, the Bank of Canada, economists etc. are all on board with the argument that there is no Canadian housing bubble, with a few exceptions (again Robert Shiller, David Rosenberg, Garth Turner).

---
A blog on the Science of Cooperation, and from that blog, a recent paper on 'Costly Punishment.' Costly punishment is one of the roads people go down when they twist themselves into pretzels trying to argue that an economy could work just fine if every person was purely self-interested. Of course if people are purely self-interested, they will rip each other off, but if there are sufficient punishments for bad behaviour, it will be in everyone's self-interest to act nice. But what about the self-interest of the people doing the punishment. Taking the time and effort to mete out justice has a cost of its own (hence costly punishment) so the problem of motivating self-interested people remains. The paper in questions suggests that if people are given a choice of entering or leaving a particular collective undertaking (rather than participation being compulsory), the population is more likely to end up being comprised of people who will punish those who fail to cooperate in a group effort.

I'll probably spend some more time on this sort of research a little ways down the line in the series on ethics.

----
A couple of interesting posts from Rajiv Sethi on the economic theories of Hyman Minsky. Not much comment from me other than to note that I generally agree with Minsky's argument that an economic boom contains the seeds of its own destruction in that, the longer the boom lasts, the more people behave in ways that make sense during a boom but are unsustainable through a full cycle (e.g. subprime mortgage lending).

---
Penultimately, from Economist's View, an article detailing research on the human brain's response to inequality (we appear to be 'hardwired' to dislike inequality - shocking, I know...)

One does feel like banging one's head against the wall reading this part of the article,

"[the result of the experiment] O'Doherty notes, is somewhat contrary to the prevailing views about human nature. "As a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who works on reward and motivation, I very much view the brain as a device designed to maximize one's own self interest," says O'Doherty. "The fact that these basic brain structures appear to be so readily modulated in response to rewards obtained by others highlights the idea that even the basic reward structures in the human brain are not purely self-oriented."

Camerer, too, found the results thought provoking. "We economists have a widespread view that most people are basically self-interested, and won't try to help other people," he says. "But if that were true, you wouldn't see these sort of reactions to other people getting money."

Still, he says, it's likely that the reactions of the "rich" participants were at least partly motivated by self-interest—or a reduction of their own discomfort. "We think that, for the people who start out rich, seeing another person get money reduces their guilt over having more than the others."

Here's what David Hume wrote on the topic, in 17 frickin 77 - i.e. 233 years ago.

"the voice of nature and experience seems plainly to oppose the selfish theory.

We frequently bestow praise on virtuous actions, performed in very distant ages and remote countries; where the utmost subtilty of imagination would not discover any appearance of self-interest, or find any connexion of our present happiness and security with events so widely separated from us.

A generous, a brave, a noble deed, performed by an adversary, commands our approbation; while in its consequences it may be acknowledged prejudicial to our particular interest.

Where private advantage concurs with general affection for virtue, we readily perceive and avow the mixture of these distinct sentiments, which have a very different feeling and influence on the mind."

…

"It is but a weak subterfuge, when pressed by these facts and arguments, to say, that we transport ourselves, by the force of imagination, into distant ages and countries, and consider the advantage, which we should have reaped from these characters, had we been contemporaries, and had any commerce with the persons. It is not conceivable, how a REAL sentiment or passion can ever arise from a known IMAGINARY interest; especially when our REAL interest is still kept in view, and is often acknowledged to be entirely distinct from the imaginary, and even sometimes opposite to it."

This really should be, in my opinion, just as obvious now as it was over 200 years ago, and it's sad to see the presumably intelligent and well educated researchers in the article still holding to the absurd belief that people are only motivated by self-interest.

---
And finally, on the same topic (more nails in the empty coffins of zombie ideas) here's a paper which shows that people can distinguish historical price patterns in financial markets from randomly generated patterns. The abstract notes that this refutes, "the widespread belief that financial markets 'look random.'" but don't expect any of the people (economists) who subscribe to this theory to change their mind any time soon, any more than the findings on brain response to inequality will affect those who cling, against all evidence, to the notion that people are only motivated by self-interest.

Progress

I see that Bank of Montreal just completed spending a pile of money to renovate their Vancouver Main branch, moving the teller lines from the basement to the main floor. Meanwhile, two blocks away, HSBC is spending a pile of money to move the tellers from the main floor to the basement...

Writer's Blogk

Random mental wanderings for when politics gets too boring to write about - Note: I titled this post to reflect the fact that I had nothing to say and yet this post is kind of long - take that as you will, but it could certainly be construed as a warning

When I got home from soccer tonight my girlfriend had on Rob and Amber's wedding. It's probably a sign that I have politics too much on the brain, but as I watched all the ceremony and the dress and the bachelor party and how happy everybody in both families was (or at least seemed to be), I couldn't help reflecting on how nuts it seems to me that people would go to such great lengths to prevent gay couples from being able to hold this kind of ceremony.

And yet, this time (early 21st century) and this place (Western world), is probably one of the only (or few anyway) instances of a culture where my opinion wouldn't be in a very small minority (at least that's my understanding of history - I'm open to correction if others know a different story). I don't really know what it means, but I feel like we can have tolerance without license, and be accepting without society degenerating into some kind of anarchic no-holds-barred free for all.

------

I was on the bus heading home from work and we passed by a church with an (I thought) odd sign out front reading, "True courage is the ability to step into the unknown" (or to leave your comfort zone, or something like that, I don't recall exactly). My first thought was that *true* courage, for me anyway, has been going back and facing the things I know all too well - there's worse things in life then the unknown.

Of course as church signs go, that was pretty coherent. I remember when I lived in Waterloo, there was a church on King St. (near Waterloo Town Square), which used to have the oddest, most incomprehensible sayings out front. I used to wonder if maybe the priest responsible had lost his faith years ago, and the sign was his silent cry for help. Or maybe the local students were into high-brow acts of deviance and just liked to rearrange the letters on the sign as a test of their anagramming skills. It was a long time ago so I don't remember any specific instances, alas, but if I had to make up something reminiscent it would be along the lines of, "God's raincoat can be worn even on sunny days" or something like that.

I bet a nice long driving tour around North America (preferably with side trips to Fenway, Camden Yards, Yankee Stadium, Comerica, etc.) would yield enough church sign gems to make a good toilet side paperback novel. (sort of like Bushisms only Churchisms), but I'm probably being too hard on churches. After all, anything they write is more entertaining than the 99 million variations on 'buy this' which litter the urban (and suburban and rural to a large extent, but especially urban) landscape. I remember the park/zoo by where I grew up generally limited itself to notices of upcoming events, an occasionally invasive exhortation to smile or be cheerful and, in the spring, warnings to drive slow to avoid running over the baby ducks. I've learned over the years that you could do a lot worse as a sign writer.

Speaking of invasive exhortations, I pity the people who drive the 401 regularly and have to put up with the sign-nanny constantly nagging them about wearing a seat-belt, not using the cell-phone, allowing space while following, signaling, checking blind spots, not drinking and driving, thinking positive thoughts, and generally reminding them that everything they need to know they learned in kindergarten.

If I was put in charge of the signs, the messages would be more like, "Drive Clean, No Celine" (accompanied by a stick figure with a line through it), or "It's 8 A.M., how fast do you think it's moving beyond the next transfer?", and the word "Express" would generally be surrounded with ironic single quotes. I wonder what the impact on traffic fatalities would be?

----

My vast legions of hyper-observant cyber-stalkers will have noticed that I switched internet providers from Telus to Shaw recently. Looking at it rationally, there were 5 reasons for the switch. 1) Telus stinks 2) Telus' customer service is terrible 3) It took 11 days from when the phone was disconnected at our old place for them to get it (and the internet) working at our new one. 4) While on hold (which always started with the song 'Smooth' by Santana - and I'm sure it's not just people who've (somewhat) recently taken Cha-Cha lessons who think this song is already seriously overplayed) for 50 minutes on one occasion, I was repeatedly advised to get faster service by going to their website. Despite the fact I was on hold after telling the Telus robot that I was calling about Internet connection troubleshooting - possibly a good hint that their website wasn't really an option at that moment. 5) The bill I got from Telus the other day was pretty incomprehensible (and part of my work is writing computer generated reports, so generally I'm fairly good at reading them) 6) We were given wrong information on a number of occasions. Such as being told (on a Saturday) that a person could come tomorrow (and then when nobody came being told that of course nobody would come on a Sunday). 6) When I asked for the issue to be escalated to a manager I was informed that they would then (by telus guidelines) have to respond within 24 hours. And they did, calling us 23 hours and 55 minutes later. 7) As far as I can tell (remember what I said about the bill) they don't seem to be planning to charge us for the phone line for the 11 days it was out - but they *are* going to charge us for the internet during that time. Did I say 5 reasons? You're lucky I'm stopping at 7!

I should mention that so far Shaw has been excellent in all respects (not to mention cheaper). If you get your internet from Telus I highly recommend switching (unless you like aggravation).

Anyway, I'm thinking about switching my local line to Sprint but am a little worried about the idea of them being bought by Rogers, the only rival Telus has for bad service in my experience (except for Jetsgo, but they didn't have a monopoly so they went bankrupt). I guess we'll see - it probably won't be long before Telus provokes me into switching.

-----

OK, you've made it this far, let's talk politics. The Liberals are clinging to power with three fingernails instead of two after winning today's Labrador byelection.

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj
jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

Sorry fell asleep with my finger on the j key there, good thing it starts to beep once the buffer fills up. Where was I, oh yeah, I was talking about my first *real* (cubicle) job, doing some routine computer stuff. I've never been much of a morning person so the whole concept of getting up 5 days a week at 7 am was even more foreign to me then than it is now. People passing in the hall could only see me from behind so I tried to position my hands on the keyboard so as to look like I was typing (or at least in the middle of a thought) and zone out. Of course I always fell asleep and was woken by the beeping of the keyboard.¹


So, politics. OK, I went to the Globe and Mail's website for inspiration and there was nothing. Even worse, John Doyle is caught up in the media failure two-step, devoting an entire column to the idea that there is too much talk about Donald Trump in the media. First line,

"One of the most depressing developments of the last 12 months has been the ubiquitous presence of Donald Trump.

You just can't get away from this Trump guy"

I get that there is some Trump movie or other and John is reviewing it, but a lot of TV airs in a week - if there's too much talk about Trump, maybe he could have found something else to talk about. I think a column about the Alias finale might have been interesting. OK, it would have been dull if it was just the usual, "the lighting was good, the acting was uneven, the writing was good but the dialogue was stunted, the stunts were spectacular, it wasn't quite a thrill ride more of a 'ghoster coaster' blah blah blah, typical media review, but what if it delved into the question of why they decided to make the credits all Sydney (Jennifer Garner) in the same year she faded into the cast and only played a minor role in many episodes.

Or maybe compare the Alias Rambaldi² storyline to the unfolding of the Iraq war to see which one makes U.S. intelligence services seem more incompetent. But no, it's 'I want to talk about why people shouldn't talk about Trump time', sigh.

OK, maybe the Star is better. Indeed it is, with some commentary from resident genius Jane Jacobs on Toronto's horrible planning process. True, I know nothing of how Toronto's planning process works but I feel free to condemn it because I lived there and - while there are certainly many examples of things done right - there are so many examples of things done wrong that it makes you shake your head and wonder what might have been (and we're not just talking waterfront here, the downtown is littered with disasters). And it's not just a case of 'well, that's how things go', because I've lived in Montreal and I live in Vancouver and both do a vastly better job of ensuring that the built environment (a little phrase I like to use instead of 'buildings' so that I sound all architectury) actually makes sense and adds to the pedestrian experience rather than just obstructing views and throwing up barriers, blank facades and wind tunnels. Of course, neither Montreal or Vancouver are burdened with a developer friendly provincial planning board and I know that Vancouver for one, has planners prettty heavily integrated into the development process (and holding some real clout). It really does make a big difference.


What, you're still reading this? You need a hobby. This is your hobby? You're doomed.




That's it, no more (OK there's footnotes, but you'll have them read in no time).




-----------------------

¹ I should mention that those days are long ago and I am now a highly motivated, consistently productive worker.

² Kudos to the google's oh so polite, did you mean? function which correctly figured out that I meant Rambaldi despite my egregious misspelling of it. I wonder how many years until you can customize that aspect and get it to say stuff like, "Learn to type you idiot - I'm assuming you really meant 'whatever and have modified your search accordingly. Of course if you really meant that first thing, then I'm sorry, but you know I've seen people make that mistake a hundred times. There was this guy, in Ohio the other day, he was searching for.... etc. etc.

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Blog - Undisciplined Thoughts on Just About Everything

Sometimes I feel as though my head is a giant tub filled with various thoughts about politics, the economy, society etc. and by starting this blog I have created an opening in the tub which allows some of those thoughts out. The problem is that the opening is tiny since, due to the effort required by choosing topics, finding links, organizing thoughts, constructing paragraphs, editing and so on, the amount of stuff which can actually be posted on is pretty small. And of course it doesn't help when your internet provider (Telus) leaves you disconnected for a week.

Besides this, spending a few days away from the internet made me want to have more variety in my posts. So I decided to do a little experiment and just type for a while on whatever topics have been on my mind lately with no discipline or real organization whatsoever.

Important! This last sentence was a warning that, even if you've made it this far into this self-indulgent post, you probably shouldn't really continue on. Proceed at your own risk of wasted time, keeping in mind that you're only young once.

So anyway, I've been thinking about the upcoming battle to (maybe) bring down the federal government. Is it just me or is it ridiculous that the health of some MP's could be a factor, since they may be too ill to get to the House of Commons? What century is this? I'm not keen on seeing the government fall since I'd like to at least see the legislation on Same Sex Marriage pass first, but I don't want to see it continue on because someone was too sick to vote.

Meanwhile, if this is true it's really sad - not to mention likely counter-productive. Bad enough when parties bribe their own members to keep them in line (did I mention we should shut down the Senate) - now they're bribing the opposition as well? Of course if it's not true, it's even more sad. I guess we'll see.

It seems like a bunch of people are re-considering voting Liberal under the sponsorship scandal circumstances but can't bring themselves to vote for the gays-are-separate-but-equal, made-in-Canada-solutions-to-Global-environmental-problems, cut-taxes-increase-spending-but-don't-worry-about-the-budget, ask-how-high-when-Americans-say-jump-and-tie-ourselves-ever-more-closely-to-their-dangerously-unstable-economy Conservatives or the surplusses-are-bad, fifty-point-government-plans-will-solve-every-problem, electoral-reform-is-was-will-be-our-#1-priority NDP party.

I'll probably explore my thoughts on the NDP in greater depth and more fairness in a later post (it's half written in draft already). For the Conservatives it seems like there is a disconnect between what voters want (a clone of the Liberals) and what the Conservatives want (a clone of the U.S.?). The time honoured approach would seem to be for the Conservatives to just pretend to be a clone of the Liberals for the purposes of getting elected and then do whatever they feel like once they are in charge. For now, while I welcome their move to the centre, I'll probably treat any Conservative promises on Child Care or Kyoto with a grain of salt or two.

Anyway, I invite people looking for alternatives to join me in voting Green in the next election. In moving to the Centre the Green party has positioned itself as being similar to the Liberal party but more innovative on the revenue/environmental side and more libertarian/easy-going/less-uptight/not-so-puritanical/call-it-what- you-will on social issues (such as marijuana legalization).

Moving on to provincial politics, B.C. votes in two weeks. The most important thing is for people to get out and vote 'Yes' to the referendum on switching the electoral system to the Single Transferable Vote. As a voter, I can't see why someone would favour a system which gives them very little choice over one which gives them a lot of choice. As a democrat I can't see why people would favour a system where there is a huge disconnect between the votes cast and the representatives elected over one where the distribution of seats in the legislature bears some resemblance to the votes cast.

Aside from the referendum, the 3 main parties contesting the election are the Liberals, NDP and the Greens. I've read all the platforms but need a couple of days to digest it all before posting in detail. A quick thought for now is that I wish (like always) that I could go for the 'make your own pasta' option where I get the Greenolini noodles with a creamy NDPfredo sauce and chunks of roasted Liberal on top.

On issues like RAV and the Olympics I favour the Liberal approach of supporting big projects that will make B.C. a better province long into the future. But then stuff like the ill-fated Coquihalla privatization plan shows how the Liberals get carried away with their ideology in the face of common sense.

Plus their attitude to the environment, the provincial park system, First Nations and Unions is way too extreme for me.

On Health Care everybody wants to spend more so there's not much to choose there. I do like the Green plan of shaping the tax system to lower taxes on stuff good for your health (i.e. sports equipment) and raise taxes on stuff bad for your health (like junk food). This will be a far more efficient approach to preventitive medicine than ad campaigns urging B.C. residents to eat their vegetables or whatever it is the NDP and Liberals seem to be planning on this front. The Green platform has a number of ideas I think are terrible (such as reducing university tuition to 0 eventually) but is also filled with a number of really good ideas (campaign finance reform being a standout).

Overall it's going to be a tough decision for me and may require some thought on various vote deciding methodologies (strategic voting, vote my conscience, marginal voting, flip a coin etc.). That's probably a topic for a post in itself as well.

Let's see, what else. This is kind of sad. The corporate battle to fence off information and charge people access to the info-petting zoo is continuing on all fronts. I'm guessing that public libraries will be the final victims of this trend. Rented a movie the other day (A Series of Unfortunate Events - great artwork on the credits but otherwise disappointing - Jim Carrey was especially irritating) and there was a big message at the beginning about how you wouldn't steal a TV so why would you download a pirated copy of a movie. Of course if my neighbour had a 60 inch TV and I could make a free copy for myself leaving his TV perfectly intact, I *would* do that. Any my neighbour wouldn't stop me. Talk about a lame analogy. Still, the whole copying=theft meme is the big media corporations' biggest weapon in trying to make people feel guilty about something they really shouldn't.

The NY Times had a long article last week about how TV makes you smarter (it's in the pay archive now). Basically the article took about 3,000 words to say that because years of intensive practice has made people better at watching TV (so now we like shows which are more complicated, have more storylines and explain things less than in the past) it must be making us smarter. No mention was made of how smart we could be if all those hours spent watching TV were spent reading. Or how much less fat people would be if they spent some of that time exercising. Or the implications of TV watching for consumerism, erasing the line between childhood and adulthood, levels of social capital, etc. etc. etc. If only Neil Postman was still alive he could have given that waste of space the smackdown it deserved.

Here's a question, does it seem logical that the person appointed by the U.S. to be ambassador to Canada should be someone who actually has some interest in the country? Is it better to have someone who knows nothing and thus comes in with no preconceptions? I think if I was appointing ambassadors I'd try to pick people with some knowledge of where they're going, especially for my country's closest neighbours. Maybe ambassadors are just irrelevant patronage appointments like Senators and I should just ignore them. Of course if I'm going to take this approach, I'd like our mainstream media to go along as well and not treat every pronouncement by the U.S. ambassador as front page news.

And finally, on a lighter note, some advice for all you blogging kids out there: don't walk between parked blogs, don't blog with your mouth full, wait at least an hour after eating before blogging, and never, never cover more than one topic in a single post.

Potpourri

While researching my post on polls I came across this discouraging poll which estimated that 44% of Canadians believe the Federal government is running a deficit - up from 37% two years ago! Yikes.

Of course, when was the last time you saw the results of any poll / survey / test / whatever and your reaction was, 'wow, people really seem to be informed about what's going on'? There seems to generallly be a wide gap between what people know and what we (I?) think they should know.

---------------------------------

It's been a while since I linked to 'No More Shall I Roam', but the last two posts there are both worth a look. This one on why we need science to be able to truly understand the world around us is a gem.

Also, not only does Jonathan read Ezra Levant's column so you don't have to, he even writes about it afterwards. It seems like a lot of effort to devote to someone so lacking in interesting ideas, but it makes for a fun read. The latest episode is worth reading not so much for the Ezra related content but rather for how Jonathan picks apart the claim that Alberta's provincial spending is up 90% since 1996. Why use 1996 as a benchmark you ask? So does Jonathan.

The graphs and discussion which follow in his post are a great demonstration of why your pundit sneak-o-scope should immediately go off any time you see a claim that Item X has changed by Y% since year Z - especially where Z seems like an arbitrary choice.

For example, 'airlines are a great investment because air travel is up 50% since fall 2001.', or 'The number of tourists visiting Montreal has been flat with ony a 5 increase since 1976', or 'The tech era is over with tech stocks down 30% in value since mid-2000.' I could go on.

-----------------

Bringing together the themes of ignorance and people getting more attention than is warranted, I have to say I was left typeless by Time magazine's embarrassing decision to feature right wing hatemonger Ann Coulter on their cover. Luckily Eric Alterman wasn't and neither was Digby:.

"Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it's a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see."

This and That

Over at Polspy, Sean asked the question, "Is it possible to be a Conservative and an environmentalist at the same time, or are the two mutually exclusive?" and got some interesting (and some silly) replies.

My favourite came from Ray who said,

"Of course it is possible to be conservative and an environmentalist, as easily is it is to be conservative and gay, though Scott Brison might disagree with me. ...

[big chunk omitted - go read his comment in full] ...

Grizzlies are in an endangered state, eagles are being butchered for cash, but the single most contentious issues in Ottawa are whether or not gays will be allowed to marry or whether Canada will support a program it is already in to help the Americans shoot rockets that don't fly to defend us against missiles that don't exist.

It's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong."

My personal opinion, as I commented, is that if we're talking big C Conservative (i.e. the political party not the philosopy) then it is possible, but they sure aren't making it easy.

-----

Meanwhile, at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has a thoughtful post up on the general trend towards democracy over the last 50 years and how the invasion of Iraq may have impacted it.

-----

And finally, something I was not only slow in posting about, I was even slow in linking to Pogge when he posted about, was a pair of columns in the Toronto Star by Thomas Walkom about the erosion of civil liberties and the privacy of our information in this post 9/11 security legislation environment. Both are worth a read, unless you prefer to remain in a good mood, in which case give them a pass.

This and That

First, via Real Climate a more thorough and less alarmist piece on global dimming than the BBC had. Doesn't really change my basic point though.

Second, regular readers will know I like to refer to Wikipedia sites. From a comment by WhoMan on this post at Robert's Blahg, I found this concise and seemingly pretty accurate (although a little dated on some of the numbers) assessment of the difference between various economic measures in Canada and the U.S. A good reference to arm yourself with prior to reading anything about the Canadian economy vs. the U.S. one or vice-versa.