Here we go again

U.S. pounces on export surge

. . . U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab this week accused Canada of shipping too much lumber to the United States, and hence violating a bilateral agreement aimed at ending the long-running dispute.
Ms. Schwab launched arbitration hearings, which Canadian officials insist they are confident of winning.

Yeah, well, since when has being wrong ever mattered to the elephant next door?

Learning from the Bush administration

Wondering why you missed the news?

Three weeks ago, late on a Friday night, the military released a report into the friendly-fire incident in which one Canadian soldier was killed and 30 others wounded after an American A-10A attack plane accidentally strafed members of the Royal Canadian Regiment at Ma'sum Ghar.

Shatner-watch

Last week, Canada's own William Shatner was in Chicago, of all places.
Nope, not at Yearly Kos. He was at Transvision 2007, which Roy informs us, will help us live forever provided we like doing it in silicone.
Personally, I have wanted to try some of the new silicone cookwear, which is "colorful, nonstick, stain-resistant, hard-wearing, cools quickly, and tolerates extremes of temperature" -- though perhaps it is a somewhat different kind of silicone that the Transvision people are proposing freezer-wrap my personality.
Anyway, back to William Shatner, who is, after all, Canada's own. A reporter for New City Chicago describes Shatner's appearance:

...as the minute hand moves a good half hour beyond Captain Kirk’s scheduled time of arrival, it’s clear that an excited anticipation has swept over the growing crowd. And while the audience only swells to fill half the small Field Museum auditorium, it’s still noticeably larger than for any of the day’s previous presentations. Finally, a speaker approaches the stage to introduce the man of the hour, and after a short, bizarre video featuring a "Star Trek"/James Bond mash-up to transhumanist lyrics like "We can live forever and make everything better!" Shatner takes the stage.
It doesn’t take long for his cool demeanor and slight self-deprecation to get the audience laughing, and it provides a welcome shot of levity into an otherwise far-too-serious afternoon. Whereas speakers like Philippe Van Nedervelde warned of futuristic Unabombers who would blow the planet to pieces with nanotech nukes—and then went on to propose the use of microscopic cameras to perpetually monitor the population and preemptively exterminate "dangerous" individuals—Shatner keeps it lighthearted (and a lot less horrifying). "Why should any of you care about a science-fiction series?" he asks the crowd before coming up with his own response: "This whole vision of the World Transhumanist Association…very Trek-like."

When you think about it, how many other keynote speakers could have come up with that connection?
And if reading this post made you regret missing the whole speech, maybe you need to take The Standardized Should I Stalk William Shatner Test.

Getting Iraq right was simple

I have to say, I am getting very impatient with the wailing and gnashing of teeth over how very, very hard it was, in the fall and winter of 2002-03, to make the right decision on Iraq and to realize that the US invasion of Iraq was a bad decision.
It was, I think, an easy decision -- for three reasons:
First, though Iraq's leader was a murderous meglomaniac, his regional ambitions were completely contained by economic sanctions and the no-fly zones. Hussein even agreed to let the UN weapons inspectors back. They couldn't find anything much.
Second, Iraq had not attacked the United States or Britain or Israel. No nation has any right to launch a preemptive war, not without compelling evidence of immediate threat. And that's what the United Nations was set up to evaluate -- thus we reach the third point. In spite of the worldwide sympathy and support given to the United States after 9/11 and in spite of all the diplomatic pressure exerted around the world by the US and Britain, not even a significant minority of the UN Security Council were willing to support war on Iraq. If you can't get the UN to support you, that's a pretty big clue that something is wrong.
Therefore, ipso facto and quid pro quo, the war was a bad idea.
Michael Ignatieff wrote an article in the New York Times exploring why he was wrong about Iraq, and both Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias have critiqued it.
Ignatieff first looks at why he made the mistake of wanting to invade Iraq. Turns out, it was all Harvard's fault:

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

But Yglesias notes that many actual academics opposed the war. It was the neocon "scholars" of the AEI and the Weekly Standard who pushed it:

The war's foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically -- were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really "independent" of political machinations.

Delong takes issue with Ignatieff's definition of "academic" thinking:

I think what Michael Ignatieff is talking about is not an academic mode of thought but a student mode of thought--a not-too-bright-student mode of thought. A not-too-bright student achieves success by (a) figuring out which book on the syllabus is favored by the instructor, (b) taking that book to be the gospel, and (c) regurgitating large chunks of that book on the exams and in the papers.

Getting back to Ignatieff's article, he also asks why Bush made the mistake of wanting to invade Iraq. Turns out it was all the fault of his own ego:

I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.
Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.
People with good judgment listen to warning bells within.

But the "warning bell" rang for me, and for the world, when the United Nations wouldn't support it. The United States and Britain should have listened. Chretien got it right:

The White House said Friday it wants Saddam Hussein ousted even if Baghdad disarms, a stand that immediately provoked a sharp response from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who said the United States can't just wander the world changing regimes it doesn't like.
Mr. Chrétien, on an official visit to Mexico, reacted with dismay when told of the White House's unflinching insistence on regime change. The demand was stressed by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who said the administration's goal is "disarmament and regime change."
"Myself, I think that the consequences can be very grave when we go for a change in regime," the Prime Minister said in French. "... When are we going to go elsewhere? Who's going to be next? ... This is a very dangerous concept."

Yes, and it still is.

Signs

Here's some more signs of "progress" from Iraq -- At U.S. base, Iraqis must use separate latrine.
Seems to me the United States and Canada have both tried something like this before.
And people died to get it stopped:



And we're not finished yet. This was in Toronto, in 2004:

Great line of the day

At The Poorman, Sifu Tweety interrupts his beach holiday to write about the new nuclear conventional wisdom in I’m not lazy, I’m shocked into silence

Twenty years ago, everybody in this country (give or take a baker’s million blazing nutjobs) understood that the use of nuclear weapons was a cataclysmic, final act of madness, a step towards global suicide to be avoided at (almost) any cost. Now, absent an enemy with any real ability to do us harm, the idea that nuclear weapons should be available to use on caves full of crazy idiots armed with weapons that were the height of military sophistication approximately seventy years ago, this idea is the conventional wisdom? Of the Democratic Party? The party that ostensibly wants to end the war in Iraq? Where have you gone, Robert McNamara / A nation turns its loony eyes to you, doot doot doo.
What the fuck, seriously. What. The. Fucking. Fuck. I want off this ball, blundering downhill. I want to go home, to the nation I imagined I lived in. I want to stop caring about politics, about blogs, about far-off presidential primaries: I want everything right-side out and forwards again, you blinkered, blithering, warmongering establishment bastards. It’s enough to drive a lad to the barricades, it is. Just let me finish this Badminton game.

Emphasis mine.

Compare and contrast

In Florida, gay legislators get arrested for soliciting blow jobs in public washrooms and then play the race card in a desperate and despicable attempt to save their career.
In Canada, gay legislators get married.

Great post of the day

Don't miss this amazing post by Ian Welsh My Friend Peter:

Peter was the kindest man I ever met. I moved into his old house one winter in the early nineties. Rent was $235/month, there was a shared kitchen and showers and 7 tenants. On the ground floor lived the landlord - Peter, and his Japanese wife.
I lived there three years. They were thin, cold years for me . . . Peter let me work a lot of my rent off with jobs around the house. I painted this or that, under careful supervision I did plumbing work; I shoveled snow; and I laid bricks. Peter taught me how to learn . . .
Peter was old. He had been born in Germany. And he had fought for Hitler.

Read the whole story.

Too soon old and too late smart

We were watching the sports wrap-up tonight when a sportscaster did a little feature blurb comparing Barry Bond's 755 home runs with Hank Aaron's 1974 season, and making a Canadian connection by comparing Aaron's achievement with the Paul Henderson 1972 goal.
His stats were right, but he chattered on about how race in America was not as much of an issue until the 1970s and how Henderson's goal didn't mean anything outside of the Canadian hockey world --- and as we listened, we realized: he was getting it all wrong!
We lived through those years, and so we know.
You young whippersnapper, it just didn't happen that way!
And I guess I'm turning into an old crank pretty fast. I might as well face it -- I'm going to be hearing more and more errors like these from now on, as more and more of the people who are broadcasters and journalists and talk-show hosts and actors and writers are just too young to actually remember the 60s and 70s.
It's a human trait, I guess. In western society at least, any time period before we were born is "old-fashioned" and "quaint"; basically, we all feel that nothing happened in the past that could possibly have meant as much to anyone as the things that are happening now.
Wolcott has some comments today along the same lines. He's blogging about a new TV show called Mad Men, which purports to be set in the New York advertising agencies of the 1960s. He quoted a comment about it:

People, people. You can't really think that human beings in 1960 were really like this! These are mirages, twists of smoke. The ad men of that time were lethal motherfuckers, profane and funny, exhausted, bleary-eyed, and really smart with ivy league degrees on their resumes. And the women were not zombies who stood around overdressed in kitchens smoking with their dish washing gloves on. In fact, no one in this show seems to know how to smoke. I wanted to physically shake the divorcee's arm to unfreeze it, and tell her use the prop and not let the prop use her. Yes, everybody smoked then but it didn't look like this. . .
The list of wrong things in this show is nearly endless, but it's not just the verisimilitude that sucks, it's the way they missed the mood of the period. This was a time of urgency, when modernism was feverish and drove everything in the city and the post war suburbs seemed to be as much a part of that rush to the future as Madison Avenue. This show is a shadow play on a wall, completely without dimension.

You know those lists of attributes of today's college students that professors are supposed to understand -- they don't remember the Soviet Union, they've always had cell phones and computers and half-pipes, they don't remember Kim Campbell.
Well, maybe today's 30-somethings need a list of little-known facts about the 60s and 70s -- like, for example, that Paul Henderson's goal was a defining moment for everyone in Canada, not just for hockey fans.



There -- that'll learn 'em!

Some photos I liked

Anak, a 31-year-old Orang Utan, holds her five-day-old baby Apie in her arms in Ouwehands Zoo in Rhenen, central Netherlands.


Andy at rest: Andy, one of three lion cubs sits in his basket at the Serengeti-Park in the north-western German town of Hodenghagen.


Gaza beach : A Palestinian rides a camel as people enjoy a day at the beach in Gaza City.


A man plays with his daughter next to the Kukulkan pyramid at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.

Good news for barley farmers

The Wheat Board was supposed to lose its monopoly over barley marketing as of August 1. Now, a federal court has stopped this change:

A court decision has derailed, at least temporarily, the federal government's plan to strip the Canadian Wheat Board of its monopoly on western barley sales.
Federal Court Judge Dolores Hansen ruled Tuesday the Tory cabinet overstepped its authority earlier this year when it passed a new regulation to allow farmers to sell their barley independently.
"I conclude the new regulation is ultra vires (beyond cabinet's power) and of no force and effect," Hansen wrote.
The judge sided with supporters of the wheat board, who argued any changes to the board's monopoly must be made via a law passed in Parliament - something that could be blocked by the opposition.

Not only could be, but would be.
The disingenuous aspect of the issue is this: the federal Conservatives keep saying that 62 per cent of farmers voted for 'marketing choice". But did they? Not really. While just over one-third of 30,000 barley producers voted that the Canadian Wheat Board should retain the "single desk" (ie, monopoly of barley marketing), only 14 per cent of producers said the Board "should have no role in marketing barley." In other words, a large majority of barley producers want the Canadian Wheat Board to continue handling barley. But in reality, without their monopoly the Board actually couldn't do it.
Here's why. The CWB is not a grain company like, say, United Grain Growers or the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. The CWB doesn't own or manage elevators, nor does it manufacture or process a product. It doesn't actually "make a profit".
So here is how things would work if the CWB continued to purchase barley from farmers. It would probably repeat what happened from 1935 to 1939 when there was "dual marketing" for wheat -- for the Board, it wasn't pretty:

The result of a voluntary CWB or dual market was that when the initial payment turned out to be above the world price the CWB got all the wheat and paid farmers the difference between the "world price" and the initial payment. When the initial payment was lower than the "world price" the CWB got no wheat and the trade received all the wheat and hence all the profit.

So without a monopoly, why should the CWB continue to purchase anyone's barley at all? They would just lose money.
As a non-lawyer, the Canadian Wheat Board Act seems pretty clear to me -- Part Five says that the jurisdiction of the Board can be extended to Oats and Barley by Cabinet regulation, but that excluding wheat or barley from CWB jurisdiction is to be done by Parliament. And the federal court judge basically said this too, if I understand her statement correctly.

Good kitty

Alison connects the dots on Stevie's newest hobby snapping photos of himself withlittle kitties. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Let's just hope the cute little guy (the orange one) doesn't turn into any of these:

It's Wizard of Oz time

Hmmm... didn't the Wizard of Oz turn out to be just a little man hiding behind a green curtain?
The Washington Post is describing the situation between Iran and the United States as a new Cold War, complete with a "Green Curtain":

The Bush administration is now adapting the tactics of the last Cold War to the new one. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union lowered its Iron Curtain to shore up communism in Eastern Europe and prevent penetration from the West. The former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates, are trying their own version, with a Green Curtain designed to cut off the bloc of Iranian-linked radicals and protect U.S. allies in the Middle East . . .

But it sounds like they won't be finding a Yellow Brick Road any time soon:

The basic U.S. premise -- isolating regional foes behind the Green Curtain -- is in trouble even among Washington's closest allies. "The United States is trying to define the main line of confrontation as the extremist camp versus the camp of moderation, a division which does not exist," Pillar said. "It may be reflective of our rhetoric and the way Americans see the world, but it is not reflective of the realities in the Middle East."

The progressive blogosphere is suitably derisive. At Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy says:

We had the clever idea of ending several decades of successful containment of Iran by cleverly transforming Iraq from Iran's biggest regional counterweight into a chaotic failed state "led", if that is the right word, by people with close ties to Iran. In the process, we even more cleverly pinned our troops down right where Iran could get at them, and gave them every incentive to do what they could to keep us tied down there by hinting that as soon as we were finished with Iraq, it would be time to take down Teheran. We can't get out unless the Maliki government succeeds, and so even though it is led by Shi'as and friendly to Iran, we are funding and supporting it, and trying to do so without empowering Iran, which is, um, impossible. At the same time, we are trying to contain Iranian influence in the region and mollify our increasingly nervous Sunni allies by by selling lots and lots of weapons -- $20 billion worth -- to the delightful government of Saudi Arabia. But guess what? Saudi Arabia is arming -- of course -- the insurgents who are fighting against the Maliki government -- the very same government that we are trying to prop up!
This is what comes of having idiots in charge of our foreign policy.

I think this "Green Curtain" stuff is just another attempt to inflate the Bush administration's petulance and warmongering into some kind of Clash Of The Titans, so that Bush can continue to pretend to be Churchill rallying the Free World to defeat the Heathens, while Cheney plays William Stephenson.
All the Serious Beltway Pundits and Reporters will take all this Green Curtain stuff very Seriously, of course.

Great line of the day

Mikhail Gorbachev:

Gorbachev, who presided over the break-up of the Soviet Union, said Washington had sought to build an empire after the Cold War ended but had failed to understand the changing world.
“The Americans then gave birth to the idea of a new empire, world leadership by a single power, and what followed?” Gorbachev asked reporters at a news conference in Moscow.
“What has followed are unilateral actions, what has followed are wars, what has followed is ignoring the U.N. Security Council, ignoring international law and ignoring the will of the people, even the American people,” he said.

Great line of the day

Scott Tribe updates us on the Conservative accountability reforms:

. . . this was another dog and pony show designed to try and curry favour with voters from Deceivin’ Stephen’s bunch by giving the impression of doing something to clean up politics in order to get that vaunted majority. In truth, the Conservatives have discovered they like appointing their friends and partisans as much as anyone else, and have made sure so far they aren’t hampered from doing it.

Emphasis mine.
Now personally, I never did think this election promise about making political appointments on merit rather than on party affiliation would ever actually be enacted.
An existing government that wins reelection might be able to get away with making some "bipartisan" appointments, but when a new party takes power, there is a pent-up demand from hundreds of their nearest and dearest friends and partisans for all those plumb government appointments, and no political leader can afford to just ignore their own supporters. Putting it politely, one could say that of course a government is going to appoint people who already have demonstrated they support the new government's goals.
Putting it crassly, a politician has to dance with the one who brung him.
But Scott is exactly right that voters wanted a different approach. They actually thought they might get it with Harper.
Fool me once...