andrewmcintyre.ca

…I truly don’t know of another area of public policy where relevant facts and salient debates are more divorced from the public discussion — where ignorance and fear have more currency — than is the case with tech policy. The unreality of the debate tends to work out fine for the defense contractors, industry consultants, and major corporations involved in tech policy. But that state of affairs leaves the public in the dark.

Nancy Scola, writing for The American Prospect blog on the INTERNET KILL SWITCH (!!!!1) and “The Trouble With Tech Reporting“

From yesterday’s Rolling Stone:

From the start, General McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,”  joked General Stanley McChrystal as reported in the New York Times in April.

General McChrystal recently got lost in the complexity of this spaghetti and meatballs plan for “winning” the war in Afghanistan, of which he was one of the chief architects. Michael Hastings, a shrewd reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, appears to have blended into the war-imbedded background as the proverbial fly on the wall while McChrystal and his senior aides’ frustrations boiled over.  To empathize, McChrystal’s agitation seems justified given the laughably quagmire-prone strategy that  he is attempting to execute (see above) and the recent report to the UN Security Council noting an “alarming” 94 percent increase in roadside bombings.

Correctly observing that “McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war”  in his impressive exposé piece published today, among the numerous incendiary comments made by the top General and his posse, Hastings reported these additional gems:

In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side.

…

The most striking example of McChrystal’s usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of [Afghan pseudo-president] Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan.

…

McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

…

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire.

This is major scandal: a top military leader and his aides playing fast and loose with the facts,  undermining the authority of elected officials to create policy and pushing the United States and her NATO allies, including Canada, further into an incredibly expensive war. A war fraught with loosely defined, fuzzy objectives and tactics, as well as lacking: much public support to speak of, many key personnel and a clear exit strategy.

Undoubtedly, the continuing Western military operation in Afghanistan is being exploited for PR and recruitment purposes by al-Qaeda just across the porous border in Pakistan. And America’s policy towards Pakistan looks as though it is exacerbating the problem.  Three days into his presidency, Obama authorized the continuation of a Bush-era neoconservative policy (that persists to this day), which allows the CIA to conduct attacks from unmanned drones. Ignoring the fact that the US congress has never formally declared war on Pakistan, the results of the potentially illegal drone missions haven’t always been pretty. (As an aside, in a sort of  surreal post-modern haze, soldiers stationed in south-western United States are flying drone missions as a 9:00AM-5:00PM day job and are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder just like soldiers on the battlefield.)

But to give a final hat tip to Hastings’ incredible reporting work, I’ll conclude with his analogy comparing the futile development effort (which is part of the bottomless-pit-of-blood-and-treasure-Afghan-war-plan) to America’s schizophrenic quasi-war policy towards Pakistan:

Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock.

General McChrystal is expected to tender his resignation this morning.

My friend @DuncanKinney reminded me that the fee-for-carriage decision (a.k.a. the end of the annoying “Save Local TV” vs. “Stop the TV Tax” campaigns) is coming out today. It reminded me of the most brutal dismantling of the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that I ever had the pleasure of reading.

Broadcast industry veteran Howard Bernstein brings out the hammer and the blowtorch in Liars Poker at the CRTC:

The CRTC has seldom, if ever, had close ties to the real world. The consumer is always at the bottom of the CRTC’s list of cares. The CRTC’s job, as they see it, is to protect Canadian TV. Not TV production as in new dramas and comedies, but TV distributors and stations. The reason: without a bunch of TV stations operating in Canada there is no need for the CRTC to oversee television. So they protect the millionaire owners. More important to the CRTC is cable. Every decision they make is to fortify cable. As long as most Canadians get their TV through cable the CRTC is powerful. You see, you cannot block over the air signals at the border, you cannot stop satellite feeds from entering Canadian air space, but you can control Canadian companies who distribute these signals over cable to millions of Canadian homes. Thus, over the years the CRTC has become the political arm of Rogers Cable. I have appeared before the CRTC five or six times and on each occasion at least half the commissioners were former Rogers employees. In many cases they went back to work at Rogers after their term was up at the CRTC. The connection is too obvious and has been going on for too long to call this a coincidence. CRTC decisions inevitably favour the cable companies first, the broadcasters second, the satellite companies third and I have to say it, the consumer never.

Some sensible people have created a Dissolve the CRTC slacktivist Facebook page. I do suggest that you join.

Are Albertans getting a fair royalty rate for the resources we own?

It’s a reasonable question and one that has dogged Ed Stelmach since 2007 when he “initiated a public review of the province’s royalty and tax regime to ensure Albertans are receiving a fair share from energy development through royalties, taxes and fees.”

An important reason why Ed seems to be hated by much of Calgary’s oil and gas sector is the conventional wisdom (a.k.a. convenient myth, for some opportunists) that this royalty review drove away investment from the province and is primarily responsible for our continued economic woes.  The real blow to Alberta’s “one sector economy” occurred not long after the review when the global market for oil became extremely volatile and the price fell from $142 to $34 abarrel as the global finance industry melted down in the fall of 2008. The price eventually stabilized around $65-75 after the stock market began to recover last March.

It was unlucky political timing for a new Premier having difficulty articulating a vision for Alberta’s future, but even worse for the thousands of Albertans that lost their jobs as a result.

Brent barrel petroleum spot prices, May 1987 – March 2009

Last year’s tough economic times affected Alberta’s entire economy and this year’s $4.7 billion deficit is strong evidence that these circumstances endure. But even with the price volatility ushered in by the greatest financial collapse in 70 years, the question of whether Albertans are getting their fair share for the resources we own remains a reasonable, albeit limiting, one. I would prefer to see us asking how our government can act as more responsible and effective steward of our natural resources, our climate and Alberta’s environment. We also need to look at how to reduce the province’s ridiculous over-reliance on variable resource revenues and make large strategic investments to our post-secondary education system to help diversify our economy, (the exact opposite approach of the 2.7 per cent cut we saw in budget 2010).

Bearing all this in mind, yesterday the Edmonton Journal reported that:

Alberta least competitive in oil and gas: U of C report

EDMONTON — Alberta is dead last in terms of competitiveness for oil and gas development and should drop its current royalty regime, says a University of Calgary professor.

Jack Mintz, director of the School for Public Policy, ranked five provinces plus Texas for the ability of their tax and royalty structures to attract investment, and found Alberta’s current royalty regime “creates a burden on investment that is twice as high on oil and gas” compared with other sectors in the economy.

Interesting findings. Here’s the PDF.

Although the comment is now removed from edmontonjournal.com website, the following was pasted from a Forbes.com database of board of directors’ compensation disclosed by publicly traded companies:

Director Imperial Oil

57 Years Old

Jack M. Mintz, Palmer Chair in Public Policy for the University of Calgary. President and chief executive officer, The C.D. Howe Institute (public policy institute) and professor, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Director Compensation (Imperial Oil) for 2008

Fees earned or paid in cash	$69,000.00
Stock awards	$138,200.00
Option awards (in $)	$0.00
Non-equity incentive plan compensation	$0.00
Change in pension value and nondisqualified compensation earnings	$0.00
All other compensation	$0.00
Total Compensation	$207,200.00

Serving on Imperial Oil’s board of directors, Mr. Mintz has a direct financial stake in the success of a subsidiary of the largest oil company in the world that just happens to have billions invested in projects in Alberta.

The introduction to Jack Mintz’s research states that:

it is crucial to know just how much government tax and royalty policies affect the investment decisions the oil and gas industry makes relative to those of other sectors of the economy.”

If the conflict of interest couldn’t be more glaringly obvious, look no further than imperialoil.ca where you find them crowing: Imperial Oil Foundation gives $1 million to the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

Ridicule is the only appropriate response to this mockery of “public policy research. ”

For the record, I agree it is important to ask how much do “government tax and royalty policies affect the investment decisions the oil and gas industry?”

Without independently funded studies, free of direct financial conflicts of interest on the part of the researcher and the university department undertaking the study, I have little faith in our ability to get a straight answer to this important question… which is another compelling reason for the government to properly fund our post-secondary researchers.

The Journal took some flack on this in the comments for churning out a preliminary story on this naked and seemingly effective, attempt to grab headlines. There are 70 (AHHH!!!) related articles and it looks like most are  churnalism.

Ok. Deep breath.

Can we please all work together and put in a little more effort to ensure that we aren’t being spoon fed bullshit?

K thx.

Do LOLCats help fight censorship? The surprising answer is that yes they do.

This year’s Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism was a feast for media nerds like me. Former CBC reporter and producer Sue Gardner, now executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, made more insightful comments about the future of media, journalism and the way the web is changing our relationship with information than I can recount here. But one comment on the resiliency of the web in adressing would be censors of widely adopted social media platforms really stuck out for me.

Reflecting on the usefulness of Twitter to the Iranian election protests last June, Sue Gardner said (with my added emphasis and links):

Things like Twitter are really hard to censor because they are tools that lots of people use for lots of different reasons. There’s a guy named Ethan Zuckerman, who is a fellow at the Berkman Institute at MIT and he calls this the “cute cat theory.”

So the theory is that if millions of ordinary people use a tool like Flickr, or YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever – and they use it to share cute pictures of cats, or their grandchildren, or party invitations, or snapshots, or whatever – and meanwhile a few activists also use that same tool for other purposes, to share “information that wants to be free,” that people want to suppress: that makes censorship really difficult.

What happens is that if you try and shut down the tool that people are using to share cute pictures of cats they will freak out, right?  Because they want to share the pictures of the cats.

So what that means is that the pictures of the cat lovers provide cover for tools that are also used for, frankly, more important purposes such as for sharing information that would otherwise be suppressed. So the utility, the sort of general broad utility, of something like twitter makes it much much harder to censor.

Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend that you listen to the entire hour long 2009 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism, and while you’re at it, subscribe to the CBC Ideas podcast where I found this gem among many others. Lastly, a hat tip to the I can has cheezburger network, including the infamous FAIL Blog, for their enormous lack of FAIL.

The difference between science and ideology is that science tries to explain all known observations, whereas ideology selects only those observations that support a preconceived notion. As world leaders negotiate this week in Copenhagen, let’s hope science, not ideology, guides their discussions.

Thomas Homer-Dixon and Andrew Weaver in today’s Globe and Mail debunking four common nonsensical statements about climate change.