Contrarian » U.S. Politics

US Republicans mimic Harper’s disdain for the census

Parker — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:28:17 +0000

The ultra-conservative US Tea Party movement is taking a page from Stephen Harper’s playbook: gutting the census. Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would shutter several Census Bureau projects and programs. Robert Groves is the Bureau’s director:

[Video link]

My mother, a school board member in her tiny Maine town, had a bumper sticker that read, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” You might equally, if less pithily, say, “If you think the census is expensive, try not knowing what’s happening to your country’s population.”

Gathering statistical information about a country’s demographics has been a hallmark of civilized countries for centuries. The requirement for a decennial census is embedded in the US Constitution. Nothing better illustrates the no-nothing arrogance of neoconservatives, US and Canadian, than their contempt for evidence that might betray flaws in their ideology.

H/T: Nathan Yau

Culture gap

Parker — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:36:53 +0000

A Chinese engineer, on his first trip to the United States, a work assignment for his company, snapped this photo, reproduced today on James Fallows’s blog. Fallows asks his readers:

Why did he take the photo?
What happened next?

For the answers, go here.

Separated at birth?

Parker — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:12:12 +0000

I am one of what I think must be a small number of people who met both of these guys, which may be why I was struck by the resemblance when I saw the photo on the left in the Ottawa Citizen.

They weren’t separated at birth, because the man on the left was born 26 years after the man on the right. I wonder if they ever met. Mr. Manning?

10 years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. It worked.

Parker — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:52:01 +0000

At a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of Portugal’s bold experiment in drug policy — the decriminalization of all drugs — Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, said, “There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal.”

The number of addicts who repeatedly use hard and intravenous drugs has fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people.

Goulao, a medical doctor, stressed that treatment decriminalization was not solely responsible for the drop, but that treatment programs and risk reduction policies also played a role.

As E.D. Cain wrote at Forbes.com:

Many of these innovative treatment procedures would not have emerged if addicts had continued to be arrested and locked up rather than treated by medical experts and psychologists. Currently 40,000 people in Portugal are being treated for drug abuse. This is a far cheaper, far more humane way to tackle the problem. Rather than locking up 100,000 criminals, the Portuguese are working to cure 40,000 patients and fine-tuning a whole new canon of drug treatment knowledge at the same time.

None of this is possible when waging a war.

A group of former BC attorneys general yesterday proposed the decriminalization of marijuana, a policy that probably enjoys majority support in Canada despite decades of anti-pot propaganda. But few North Americans have the gumption to propose legalization of the hardest drugs. The Portugese experience shows that decriminalization of highly addictive drugs may show the greatest social benefit, since the addictive quality of those drugs gives crime lords their greatest leverage.

All this should be obvious to a laissez faire economist like Stephen Harper. Instead, his response to the monumental failure of the war on drugs is to escalate it. The Conservative Party of Canada talks a good line about personal liberty, but finds the use of police power to enforce their personal morality irresistible.

H/T: Shine Boy.

Infographic: Who gets US social support money?

Parker — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:48:30 +0000

Federal government benefits in the US —chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, income security, unemployment insurance, and veterans’ benefits—accounted for 17.6 percent of personal income in 2009. The New York Times today published another of its fantastic interactive charts, this one showing where federal assistance has gone over the last 40 years: what counties got what percentage of their personal income from which programs in each of those years.

This screenshot doesn’t do the actual chart justice, so click through to the original.

An accompanying story concludes that, while social support programs once went mostly to the poorest Americans, the middle class has recently become the largest recipient. Americans who complain vociferously about overly generous social programs are themselves recipients.

Wouldn’t it be illuminating to see something similar for Canadian federal and provincial government benefits?

Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill

Parker — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:22:13 +0000

Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called “the indispensable (and highly controversial)” Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as “hazardous,” and warranting “health warnings of emergency conditions.”

What caught my attention was Fallows’s assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is “the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China.” That is astounding: one PM2.5 meter for a nation of 1.3 billion people. By contrast, Sydney, Nova Scotia, population ~27,000,* has seven instruments that monitor PM2.5.

Bear with me for a brief technical digression. PM2.5 is a measure of the concentration of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns (millionths of a metre)—tiny particles that can find their way deep inside people’s lungs. It’s the air quality scientist’s indicator of choice for air pollution most likely to damage health.

To confound matters further, Sydney’s closely monitored air quality appears to be quite good. Here is the most recent publicly available data, from a 24-hour sample collected on October 12.

Each column represents a different monitoring station, each of which has two types of monitors. The highest reading among them was less than 1/1ooth of that registered this week in Beijing. These monitors run for 24 hours once every six days, a schedule that coincides with Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) network. A seventh Sydney-based unit operates continuously and contributes data used to calculate Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI), but the PM2.5 results are not reported separately.

This appears to be a clear case of underkill in Beijing, where much better data is warranted, and I would argue, overkill in Sydney, where air quality has been unremarkable by North American standards for the last two decades. Over-measurement in Sydney reflects the public panic over the Tar Ponds cleanup in the late ’90s and early ‘oughts. A few environmental activists persuaded residents that air-quality impacts from the Tar Ponds were putting their health at risk, a falsehood Environment Canada has been loathe to correct. Ironically, back before Sydney’s coke ovens closed in 1988, the city’s air likely did pose a health hazard, but went largely unmonitored.

The relative hazards of air quality in China vs. Nova Scotia show up clearly in this NASA map compiled from satellite readings of average PM2.5 levels around the world between 2001 and 2006:

I would ascribe both conditions — Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill — to the politicization of environmental monitoring. Back when Sydney’s polluting steel mill and coke ovens were the largest employer in a region short of jobs, few people wanted to hear about associated environmental concerns, and government was content to turn a blind eye. Similarly, the Chinese government is reluctant to highlight the environmental costs of its spectacular economic growth (although, as Fallows often points out, its environmental record is not so indifferent as some in the west assume).

In subsequent posts on Beijing air monitoring, Fallows has subtly adjusted his claim about @Beijingair’s putative uniqueness in China. He now describes it as “the only public readings of PM 2.5.” The controversial feed is based on an air monitoring unit on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing. Official chinese annoyance over it was the subject of a Wikileaks cable, and may have contributed to the Chinese government decision to block access to Twitter in 2009. There are welcome early signs, here and here, that China may soon begin more appropriate monitoring. I would be surprised if they are not secretly monitoring PM2.5.

My point here is that citizens should take care to view environmental hazards in context, and always remain mindful that any chemical hazard is proportional to dose.

—

*Sydney no longer exists as a municipal unit, having been amalgamated into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in 1995. Wikipedia puts the “Sydney area” population in the 2006 census at 33,012, but this is suspiciously high. I was unable to ferret out local population numbers from StatsCan’s online census information, but will be delighted if readers can steer me to them.

What real security feels like

Parker — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:00:35 +0000

During a brief stopover in Ottawa yesterday, a gracious member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery took me for a sail on the Ottawa River, where I snapped this photo:

In case you don’t recognize the building, it’s the posterior of 24 Sussex Drive, home of Canada’s Prime Minister. Even without Bruce Cockburn on board, I was struck by the wondrous want of any obvious standing on guard for Stephen Harper.

Our small party boarded my friend’s sailboat at the Hull marina, just across the street from the Museum of Civilization. No one checked our ID, demanded we sign a register, or x-rayed the modest-sized parcels we carried aboard (contents: six bottles Boréale Blonde, six bottles Pilsner Urquell, and 12 Montreal bagels, fresh from the oven at St-Viateur Bakery four hours earlier).

For two hours we gunk-holed along the shoreline beneath the Parliament of Canada, the Bank of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Embassy of France, and the residence of Canada’s Prime Minister. Light wind filled our sails; fall sunlight dappled the river; all seemed peaceful, orderly, and secure in Canada’s capital.

It struck me that this is the antithesis of security theatre: it is what real security feels like. I couldn’t help but contrast it with the recent experiences of Shoshana Hebshi and Vance Gilbert.

Take note, dear American cousins.

River Explainer

Parker — Sun, 22 May 2011 22:42:33 +0000

As the 2011 flood season ramped up across the US and Canada, TheAtlantic.com’s tech blogger, Alexis Madrigal. found himself wondering how the Mississippi River system works. So he produced an explainer that lays out the complex combination of natural and human forces that create, and attempt to control, the inevitable natural process of river flooding.

What is the Mississippi River? It’s not actually a silly question. The Mississippi no longer fits the definition a river as “a natural watercourse flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river.” Rather, the waterway has been shaped in many ways, big and small, to suit human needs. While it maybe not be tamed, it’s far from wild — and understanding the floods that are expected to crest in Louisiana soon means understanding dams, levees, and control structures as much as rain, climate, and geography. From almost the moment in the early 18th century when the French started to build New Orleans, settlers built levees, and in so doing, entered into a complex geoclimactic relationship with about 41 percent of the United States.

Find the rest of Madrigal’s explainer here. Those wanting a longer, more literary account can turn to John McPhee’s classic New Yorker piece Atchafalaya, about controlling the Mississippi.

Friggin’ funny Obama roast

Parker — Sun, 01 May 2011 12:29:25 +0000

President Barack Obama at the White House correspondent’s annual dinner and roast:

It’s fair to say that when it comes to my presidency, the honeymoon is over…. I’ve even let down my key core constituency: movie stars. Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well, Matt, I just saw the ‘Adjustment Bureau.’ Right back atcha buddy.

Donald Trump is here. I know he’s taken some flack recently, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put the birth certificate issue to rest than the Donald. That’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like ‘Did we really land on the moon?’ ‘What really happened in Roswell?’ And, ‘Where are Biggie and Tupac?’ All kidding aside, we all know about your credentials and wealth of experience. For example, the other night on “Celebrity Apprentice” … you fired Gary Busey. These are the kinds of situations that would keep me up at night.

Michele Bachmann is here, and she’s thinking of running for President. Which is weird, because I heard she was born in Canada. Yes Michele, this is how it starts.

Can you imagine any of the leaders in Monday’s Canadian election being half this funny?

Halifax Wikileaks – the canonical list

Parker — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:51:34 +0000

Today’s massive Wikileak dump of US diplomatic cables from Canada includes 131 from the US Consulate in Halifax. For anyone interesting in foraging, here are the subject headings with links to the cables. Please let me know what you find.

2010:

2009:

2008:

2007:

2006:

2005:

2004:

2003: