A great take on the CanCon lobby’s latest shakedown of the CRTC for online dollars, in response to a piece by a Globe and Mail B-team scribbler:

ACTRA thinks it is tragic that subpar actors work at McDonalds. I think it is tragic that subpar McDonalds workers get public funding to try to act.

Ooh, snap!

The CBC is the latest rent-seeking group to exhort the CRTC to confiscate money from Internet users to pay for Canadian-produced ‘content’.  This should pass belief but this is Canada, where BMW-drivers in expensive suits assemble in the capital to plead poverty. On the one hand, Canadian artists insist that they are skilled and wonderful and pretty much a gift to us all, yet they regularly turn up mooching in Ottawa, insisting they cannot compete on the world’s most open and accessible marketplace.  The barriers to entry on the Web are rather low, and if anything, Canadian artistes have great advantages over much of the potential competition. How can the CRTC even be listening to this nonsense?  How can the cultural mendicants jingle the change in their begging bowls with a straight face? And, perhaps more to the point, how will the CRTC torture and mutilate the wording of their mandate in order to legally thrust their bureaucratic snouts into this new trough of New Media, just as the old TV broadcast one is running out of maple-flavoured swill?

The elusive Mr. Prawo Jazdy, “a person with over 50 identities”, and a cult hero among the second-largest immigration population in Ireland was finally apprehended by the Irish police.  During this time, Mr. Jazdy was identified as the “country’s most reckless driver” after numerous close escapes from the police.  BBC provides additional details.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police’s rank and file had been looking for – a Mr Prawo Jazdy – wasn’t exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.

In fact he wasn’t even human.

“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda’s traffic division.

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 Even the Chinese government recognizes the growing street credibility of bloggers versus traditional authorities:

In wake of the widespread disbelief expressed across the Chinese internet with regard to the official explanation that a 24-year-old man died from serious brain injuries while playing hide-and-seek in a detention center, the Yunnan government has taken the unusual step of appointing one of Kunming’s most popular bloggers head of the investigation into the incident.

[...]

The unorthodox move to make popular bloggers heads of an investigation committee is a tacit admission by the Yunnan government of the power of the internet – especially blogs – in shaping Chinese public opinion. It also belies the widespread suspicion of the official version of Li’s death.

H/T Slashdot

On Nov 22, 2008 the NYT published an op-ed piece by the Cheshire-cat-grinning Gail Collins, who looks to be high on dopey-hopey change that was common at that time.

Thanksgiving is next week, and President Bush could make it a really special holiday by resigning.

Seriously. We have an economy that’s crashing and a vacuum at the top….

Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible. Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush. In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.

Let me understand this right, Pelosi was going to manage the presidency, along with her legislative responsiblilities between her botox appointments, as if the presidency is a part-time job?  All this from a mere mortal instead of The One, the Lightworker and the Rare Kind of Attuned Being?  How has The One done since he took office?  The transition began before the election on Nov 4, 2008 and the state of the presidency was as follows on Feb 17, 2008 according to WaPo.

Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama’s senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. To date, the president has not nominated any assistant secretaries or undersecretaries at the Treasury, and the handful of mid-level staffers who have started work were still finding their offices and getting their building passes and BlackBerrys.

And this is more than three-months later.  Can we now call Gail just crazy instead of desperate?  So was the downside to this cockamamie idea just that “… a few right-wing talk-show hosts might succumb to apoplexy”?  No wonder the NYT stock price is less than the Sunday edition of the newspaper.

Journalist seem to be of the opinion that handing them a megaphone, in the form of a job with MSM, imbues them with wisdom for the ages.  One day they are reporting on the high-tech industry in US and holding forth on net neutrality, and the next day they are in Asia holding forth on nuances of Pashtun tribal customs.  All with authority of course.

James Hansen is the leading global warming scaremonger after Al Gore. He recently wrote in the Ottawa Citizen that we should not develop Canada’s tar sands, lest we “initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century”. According to him, atmospheric carbon dioxide must not go above 350 parts per million (ppm), whereas it has already risen to 385 ppm. By eliminating the burning of coal, and other hallucinations, we may just be able to get it back below 350 ppm.

When I read these dire warnings of the global warming alarmists , I am comforted by the fallowing facts, which have been a proven as anything in the geological record can be.

First, the world in the last million years has been fluctuating in and out of ice ages. A series of eight glacial/interglacial cycles, driven by changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, has been our “recent” fate. The glacial periods last much longer than the interglacial. We are now living at the tail end of the latest and warmest interglacial period, which began with the most recent melting of the glaciers about ten thousand years ago.

Martha’s Vineyard, Long Island and Nantucket Island are the moraines, the rubble pushed forward by the continent-covering glaciers of the last ice age, which ended some twenty thousand years after humans left Africa.

All of human civilization has emerged in the latest global warming period.

Second, the earth’s warmth is largely determined by the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, life could not continue: the oceans would freeze. The proportion of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily shrinking over the past 50 million years. 500 million years ago the concentration of CO2 is estimated to have been 18 times higher than it is today. By comparison, the dinosaurs died out about 62 million years ago.

Why has the proportion of atmospheric CO2 diminished? Rock and oceans store dissolved carbon dioxide. Rain falling on bare rock causes dissolved CO2 to react and leach out of the atmosphere. The rise of the Himalaya Mountains, driven by the Indian tectonic plate colliding with the Asian plate, and the actions of monsoons raining on the resulting mountain range, have led to a gradual reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. (A source of this information, among several others, is a standard introduction to geology available at the Smithsonian Museum).

Third, whatever the cause, atmospheric CO2 has been lowered over the past 50 million years until we have reached a point where, most of the time, the ice sheets cover North America down to the mid-Atlantic states. We are in an exceptionally warm period “at the moment” and our time in the heat is likely to come to an end within two to three thousand years, if previous inter-glacial periods are any guide.

These facts can be readily found out by readings in geology and climate history available from reputable publishers.

Whether the earth is getting colder or warmer is strictly a question of one’s time perspective. For this reason, most geologists, whose time perspective is in the millions of years, have a distinctly skeptical view of the global warming scare. Once you acknowledge the large facts revealed in the geological record, the minor blips up and down of temperature can be seen in the proper perspective. Man-caused global warming, to the extent it takes place, occurs against this backdrop.

Mark Steyn shows us all how to hit it out of the park.

A member of the Labour establishment finally wonders what happens if “simple folk” stop responding to the mainstream message:

Mr Golding said local young people has voted BNP because they found it “almost impossible” to get a council house. He blamed a policy that allocated council houses to “foreigners and asylum seekers”.

Mr Hain said: “All political parties, but especially the Labour party, have got to prioritise the fight against the BNP.

He said there was a “real danger” of complacency in the Labour party.

“It is areas when Labour has traditionally been strong – like Swanley – where the BNP has been making a great deal of headway and exploiting fears and spreading their racist and fascist beliefs.”

Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that Labour and the other parliamentary parties long ago abandoned the constituency they now demonize.

Between exhausted New New Labour and the über-twee Cameron Tories, something will have to give.

Grit pundit and faded varsity debater Rob Silver flaunts his Eureka moment on party fundraising:

The single easiest fundraising the Liberal Party can do under the current rules is to get more votes.

That obviously can’t be the exclusive fundraising strategy, but the 308-riding strategy is, in part, about maximizing votes in currently “unwinnable” ridings.

If Ignatieff can get even 100,000 additional votes in Alberta and Saskatchewan next campaign, it likely won’t translate into a single additional seat. But it would represent almost $1-million over four years in additional public subsidy for the Liberal Party.

There are in fact at least two easier options:

1. Go ask Liberal supporters now to willingly donate money, rather than pace back and forth waiting for a bigger welfare entitlement
2. Google what the Liberal Party actually plans to do instead of making  up research on the fly as if this were prep for a debating tournament round

Instead, Silver is more focused on rounding out his list of deadly sins. Gotta have goals, I guess.

One of the keys to the success of Google’ search engine was that it relied on data in the “market place”, i.e. the web, for its analysis.  It consisted of a link analysis algorithm that assigned a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance.  This technique was patented and trademarked as PageRank.  The utilization of PageRank led to much more accurate web search results.

What does market-driven data say about our current financial crisis?  If this data point is to be believed, then grab your gun and run for your lives!

The source article notes the following.

Sales of alcohol for off-premises consumption were down by 9.3 percent from the previous quarter, according to the Commerce Department. This is absolutely unprecedented: the largest previous drop had been just 3.7 percent, between the third and fourth quarters of 1991.

Beer accounts for almost all of the decrease, with revenues off by almost 14 percent. Wine and spirits were much more stable, with sales volumes declining by 1.6 percent and 0.9 percent respectively.

When beer sales fall it is a crisis indeed.  Based on conventional thinking, reinforced with personal experience in college dorms, one would think that in times of recession, beer would be a Giffen Good, but alas that is not the case.

It is frequently said that this financial crisis will lead to this administration making its own mistakes, instead of repeating the ones that were made during Great Depression in US and those made by the Japanese during the “lost decade“.  The Obama administration is working on two pieces of legislation that exemplify this and could be critical going forward.

The first legislation is the plan by EPA to regulate carbon dioxide.   NYT acknowledges the enormity of the task.

The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power…

If the environmental agency determines that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act, it would set off one of the most extensive regulatory rule makings in history. Ms. Jackson knows that she would be stepping into a minefield of Congressional and industry opposition and said that she was trying to devise a program that allayed these worries.

The second legislation will require an amendment to the tax code “to impose a tax on certain securities transactions to the extent required to recoup the net cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program”.  Part of the problem in the current financial crisis is lack of liquidity in the markets.  This tax will increase the cost of providing that liquidity thus reducing it when it is necessary.

Perhaps a better source of tax income would be to tax college endowments which has been suggested before, see here and here.  As an example, Harvard university, in spite of the recent losses, has an endowment of approximately $30 billion and a tax on that would go a long way toward paying for the cost of TARP.  Of course the biggest impediment in accomplishing this is the fact that the universities were the largest donors to the Obama presidential campaign.

When examining the statistics for the top twenty donors, one notes that five universities are represented along with five financial firms, four law firms and three high-tech firms.   As a percentage of money donated the statistics are as follows: universities 28.7%, financial firms 25.8%, high-tech firms 16.6% and law firms 16.4%.  The One won’t bite the hand that feeds him.

Rick Santelli on CNBC.  This could catch some steam.  It’s moving around the Web pretty quickly.

In May 2008 your correspondent suggested following the path that Nordic countries followed in addressing their banking problem in the early 90s.  Today the FT published an article which states the following:

Nationalisation, long regarded in Washington as a folly of Europeans, is gaining rapid ground among US opinion-formers. Stranger still, many of those talking about federal ownership of banks are Republicans.

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, said that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agreed with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”….

Barack Obama, the president, who has tried to avoid panicking lawmakers and markets by entertaining the idea, has recently moved more towards what he calls the “Swedish model” – an approach backed strongly by Mr Graham.

In the early 1990s, Sweden nationalised its banking sector then auctioned banks, having cleaned up their balance sheets. “In limited circumstances the Swedish model makes sense for the US,” said Mr Graham.

Mr Obama made it clear last week that he favoured this model over the piecemeal approach taken in Japan, which many would argue is the direction US public policy appears to be heading.

“They [the Japanese] sort of papered things over,” Mr Obama said. “They never really bit the bullet . . . and so you never got credit flowing the way it should have, and the bad assets in their system just corroded the economy for a long period of time.”

The question is, will Obama let his gargantuan ego get in the way and discard this option because it was originally proposed under the Bush administration and is now endorsed by the Republicans?  A case of “not invented here“.

One of Canada’s more muddle-headed packs of rent-seekers is at again by banging the drum for regulating the internet to subsidise “Canadian content”:

“Our fundamental position is that this is a public space and that the Broadcasting Act does cover elements of what happens on the Internet and that the prime responsibility of the CRTC almost before anything is to ensure that in Canadian homes and workplaces that a certain amount of the content available to them is Canadian.”

Let’s parse this gem of insight:

“[The internet} is a public space and ... the Broadcasting Act does cover elements of what happens on [it].”

Broadcasting involves electromagnetic spectrum, which is by its nature a limited resource and thus necessitates regulation of it as a common good. Want access to internet pipeline? It’s a buyers’ market, Comrade Morrison, with plenty of dark fibre waiting to be lit up when customers pony up.

If anything, the internet has removed many of the supposed obstacles to the generation of Canadian content such as costs for production infrastructure and limited distribution channels. All that is is left is consumer demand, the product love that dare not speak its name in the Canadian “ahts” world.

Thanks to state policy, vast spools of celluloid were subjected to the horrors of depicting unmarketable narcissism. Now it should entirely up to the luvvies to push those electrons before willing audiences.

“[T]he prime responsibility of the CRTC almost before anything is to ensure that in Canadian homes and workplaces that a certain amount of the content available to them is Canadian.”

Says who? Will we have to have mandatory CanCon toolbars installed in our browsers?

But what more can we expect of a Canadian culture vulture with a grasp of the issue equal to that of a disgraced octogenerian ward-heeler?!