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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

At first I was ambivalent about the HST. I didn’t know exactly what it was other than a combination of the GST and PST. I bought my house before the summer to avoid it. I thought the HST petition would be “fun”, that it would be nice to get a break from the Liberal party’s hegemony. There is something about taxes that inspires populist revolt. We feel the Boston tea party and the fall of the Bastille in our hearts whenever a politician dares to intimate that the government be somehow paid for the services it provides.It’s beginning to look like the HST petition was more of a referendum against our one-party legislature and Bill Vander Zalm’s return to politics than it was about helping the economy and making sure we had jobs.

This is not to say that the government is blameless. They completely botched the media coverage. They thought they could tack on an extra 7% to many goods and services without anyone noticing, when they should have been up front about the benefits from the start. Now, I’m not a tax lawyer, but from the research I’ve been able to gather, we need the HST for at least three reasons:

1) To reduce the cost of doing business in BC.

Under the PST system, BC businesses had to pay taxes on every input to their business. This includes heat, electricity, machinery, and computers. The HST eliminates these taxes and only needs to be paid on the end consumer product. This means more money for businesses so they can grow and invest in such grand things as HUMAN capital, which means better jobs for you and I. Even if you don’t have a job at this point, you could start your own business and have less costs to worry about.

2) To simplify the tax code for businesses.

Bringing in the HST and eliminating the PST takes out an entire level of bureaucracy for businesses. This frees up time and money they can use on other aspects of their services.

3) To keep tax revenue flowing from a rapidly aging population.

Like it or not, baby boomers are retiring, leaving a massive income tax revenue gap. An increased sales tax is a good way to make up the shortfall without increasing the burden on young people.

We should have known that, but they never bothered to tell us. Why should they, given how we reacted when we found out we’d be paying an extra quarter on our egg mcmuffins? The problem is that all political parties see themselves as immutable, flawless institutions, not a bunch of human beings in suits trying to make decisions.

If the HST does what it’s supposed to do and we all have more income because of it, who cares if we pay a little more sales tax? I think to complain about it gives the government a little too much credit. It’s up to us to make real changes in government. The HST is but one idea to make the province a better place and keep our government from spending money it doesn’t have. If we don’t have a better idea to take its place, all this petition is doing is tying up our supreme court and generating a little schadenfreude for bitter Liberal opponents who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, much less form a government.

Whether we liked it or not, the Tamil refugee ship docked in Victoria, and  the 490 passengers made it safely into the hands of the BC correctional system. Handling that many people at once isn’t such a problem for our border and immigration services. They see about 30,000 refugee claimants a year. It still made a lot of people think good and hard about how (and if) our immigration system works.

It’s clear that there are people-smugglers are involved in this, but I don’t believe that the Tamil refugees had many options other than that tramp freighter. While I haven’t met anyone trying to immigrate to Canada, my friend Tarra had to go through the US system to be with her husband in Seattle. It was expensive and a bureaucratic pain in the ass, but I imagine it was preferable to spending three months in a crowded ship with a suspect toilet. Sri Lanka doesn’t exactly have the best human rights record, and these are members of an ethnic group that just lost a major civil war. When the Tamils in Toronto speak to the media, they often hide their faces so that their relatives back home won’t get harassed by the authorities. It doesn’t sound like they could just go to the Canadian consulate in downtown Colombo and start the immigration process.

I think the government is doing exactly what it needs to do: investigate the refugees on a case by case basis, and prosecute any snakeheads or terrorists that they find. Liberal MP Keith Martin suggested that we set up refugee camps abroad so that we can undercut the people smugglers and put them out of business. Personally, I don’t think you should need more than a clean criminal record and an A on your TOEFL to get into this country.  We have so much room. Canada’s so depopulated it’s like we’re doing a dress rehearsal for the rapture or something. Immigrants also create jobs by using government and commercial services. Our sales taxes ensure that they provide revenue for the rest of us. Taking refugees also undermines repressive regimes that we don’t like, but don’t have the money to topple militarily. It’s easy to get angry when we see the government devoting time and money to people who aren’t citizens, but if we’re committed to human rights and democracy, I can think of no better way to put our money where our mouth is.

Researchers at the University of Florida are working on an  video game that attempts to educate pre-teen Latina girls on how to resist peer pressure to have sex. Players will don motion capture suits to interact with the characters on the screen to practice proper social responses. Now, forget for a moment that it’s abstinence education. Forget that it’s the result of a $434,000 government grant. What we have here is a group of adults who have completely misunderstood children and video games.

The most obvious flaw in this project is the graphics. How is this game supposed to engage anyone if we’re scraping the bottom of the uncanny valley with these character designs? It seems like the researchers believe that realism is the most important aspect of engaging people through video games. Most best selling video games often feature cartoon avatars, or at the very least highly stylized human avatars. There is an entire genre of school simulation games like the Persona series that are based on simpler technology and would be way more entertaining and effective than this awkward monstrosity.

The game also seems to treat decision making as if it were some kind of pavlovian response. There are way more factors going into a child’s decision to use drugs or have sex than remembering to “just say no”. No matter how realistic the graphics might be, it’s much harder to model factors like the involvement of a parent, the availability of birth control, or the feelings you’ll have to manage when it’s a childhood friend applying the peer pressure. If you can express those concepts, your game might become entertaining, but then it’ll run the risk of being accused of glorification. Some parents think that just learning about a bad behaviour in an engaging way constitutes glorification. It’s a risk that educators run into more often than they should.

Dealing with peer pressure is an important part of being a child. The more education you have about peer pressure, the better equipped you’ll be to make good choices. However, if we design that education based only on adult assumptions about children and concepts adults are comfortable with,  all you’ll be left with is a half million dollars worth of creepy CGI corpse-children.

A screencap of an actual ad on facebook. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this BS in Religion, but apparently it’s pretty important.

If the fallout surrounding the American Health Care bill was any indication, you’d think that the States were about to have another Civil War. Comment boards on CNN are aflame with rant’s about Obama’s “Nazi socialist baby-killer”. Angry Mobs are literally spitting in the faces of congressmen. Protesters are marching on Washington with assault rifles. Is the great American experiment over? Will I have to start running an underground railroad to Canada for my Seattle friends out of my apartment?

I doubt it. America couldn’t possibly have just doubled its amount of populist right-wing hatred in one week. Washington is in no danger of falling under a coup d’etat. If anything, the media coverage of the Tea Party protesters is only cementing the Democrat hold on the government.

Still, the discourse over this health bill seems to be dominated by a bunch of paranoid red-necks who believe that Universal Health care is the work of the devil. Why?

There is one thing that the Tea Party goers have figured out that more centrist Republicans haven’t. Everyone else is too worried if they have their facts right or if they are going offend anybody. People without such filters are going to be commenting on more blogs, posting videos, and speaking to more people about their cause. They’re not going to convert anybody, but they are going to rally anyone who is sitting on the fence. When all it takes is an email or a blog post to express your views these days, we should be less concerned with making sure our opinion is correct and more concerned with expressing it in the first place.

First, a little bit of background. The Canadian Board of Health recently appointed Bernard Prigent, Medical Director of Pfizer Canada. This presents a potential conflict of interest because the last time a Pfizer executive was appointed to a Government advisory committee, their recommendations included reducing support for generic drugs and doing away with drug research committees like UBC’s Therapeutic Initiative.

A friend of mine sent the Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq a letter explaining that appointing Mr. Prigent would skew the boards decisions in favor of Pfizer’s stock price rather than the Canadian People. The Health Minister’s reply was a single page of a two page letter, stopping in mid-sentence. (Click to Enlarge)

I wonder if the good people of the Health ministry are aware of their position here. To them, this might be a small office mix-up, but in the age of viral social media, word gets around. This one letter alone is not enough to start a revolution, but it raises questions about how the Canadian government communicates with people. Even if you disregard the missing page, it carries that passive aggressive tone of “we appreciate your concern, but you’re just an anonymous screwball, so there.”

So if were not going to rise up against the corporate plutocracy, what are we to do? For now, we’ll just make a note of it, keep an eye on the situation, and spread the word. This is just one example of the government acting callous, but if we come up with more of these, then we’ll start to see something happen.

I caught up with the passionate Eye on CBC Newsworld the other night. The feature for the evening was “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin”, the story of the effect of the Beatles on Cold war-era Russia. The songs were first smuggled in by recording broadcasts from Radio Luxembourg using cannibalized X-ray prints as records. The bootlegs turned out to be one of the factors in inspiring the movements that eventually toppled the iron curtain.

This got me to thinking. There is now an entire generation of a civilization that owes their political freedom to piracy. The music and movies that they copied gave them the chance to dream of the better life that they now have. The oppressed peoples of the world may continue wrest control of their own destinies this way in Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe, and even North Korea. Russia and other former communist countries still have music industries despite this prevailing attitude against copyright. It looks like the battle to label piracy as theft may already be lost.

I probably wasn’t the only one disgusted with the Canadian Minister of Industry Jim Prentice when he referred the to the problem of climate change as “hype”. A mountain of scientific evidence apparently doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when you’ve a bunch of Alberta energy companies breathing down your neck. I also love how he tries to pay lip service to investment in clean technologies. Does he expect the market to take on the uncharted territory renewable energy when they have a sure thing in the tar sands? It wasn’t the market that protected Canadian investments during this recession, and it’s not going to clean up the environment either.

Now I’m not saying I believe all of the “hype” of climate change either. The extinction of the human race? Highly unlikely. But famines, floods, droughts and the Earth looking like hell in general? Certainty. Already happening, in fact. If we don’t do something about it, very bad things are going to happen. And don’t even bring up that climategate or whatever the so-called “skeptics” are calling it. If you’ve worked on any form of geographic data, you understand that those scientists are not trying to falsify anything. Since those e-mails are also 10 years old, they likely have little to no bearing on the research that continues to this day.

But if we are steadfastly refusing to take the debate of climate change outside the realm of ad hominem attacks, consider this. Upon news of the leaked e-mails, the rest of the scientific community regarded it as a non-event, while Saudi Arabian Climate negotiator Mohammed Al-Sabban stated, “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.”

So on one side we have the representative of feudal military dictatorship that considers freedom of the press, women, and religion as an affront to God. On the other side, we have scientists whose job it is to provide us with the technology and foresight to keep our country from looking like said feudal military dictatorship. That’s easy math, if you ask me.

I have a conundrum for you. Let’s say a certain Churubusco High School in Indiana is being sued by the ACLU. The school had banned two female students from all athletic and extra-curricular activities for one year for appearing in some photos where they were in lingerie, licking phallus-shaped lollipops. Dan Savage, a sex advice columnist whom I have read for many years, spent the intro of his November 10th podcast episode carpet f-bombing the whole situation. How dare they stifle these girls’ freedom of expression! Their bodies are theirs to post on MySpace where “only their friends can see them”. Here comes the conundrum. Why do I think that suing this school over this is a galactically stupid idea?

Now again, I wouldn’t be ranting about this unless I read Savage’s column, or listened to his podcast. They are entertaining and open up an important dialogue about our modern moral values. However, if he’s willing to beat up a principal over this, he has no idea how these situations work. The reason this suspension seems like an authoritarian beat-down is that the schools can’t talk to the media like the ACLU can. They can’t provide details of sweet jack all if it isn’t approved by their lawyers. Details like where they got the photos, what else the girls may be in trouble for, or complaints from other parents regarding these girls’ behavior.

Still, even though the photos were taken off of  school grounds, since they made it into school grounds, that turns it into something the school needs to deal with. It’s not going to matter that the photos were posted in a private area of Myspace (no pun intended) if the girls have several hundred friends. Even if the school did nothing about it, the photos would probably  be used against the girls in some other way, which would have the girls’ parents screeching into the principal’s office waving around a bullying lawsuit with the fury of 1000 Elizabeth Hasselbecks.

What will the lawsuit accomplish anyway, even if the girls win? Posting racy pictures online is still a bad idea. They will make you look flakey and desperate for attention no matter how enlightened our society gets. Meanwhile, the school will have to make some cuts to pay for their legal fees. What do you think will be the first to go? Athletics? Nah, the soccer moms would tear them a new arse. How about services that fewer students use, like drug counseling, or special needs? Oooh, I know! They could cut sex education! And if you think that the Principal should have thought more about his students’ welfare before going on his crusade against women’s bodies, ponder this. If he’s like any other school principal in the country, between dealing with this lawsuit, his staff, and hundreds of other students and parents, he has no time to think of anything but his students’ welfare.

You know, I deplore censorship of any kind. I also think sexual expression is a beautiful thing. Even so, this should not be the hill we die on for those ideals. The administration of Churubusco High School made a tough call, but this punishment pales in comparison to the kind of difficulties these girls will face in the future if they think this behavior is okay. Photos like that could damage their careers and relationships. Now that the girls know better, they can avoid all that. Freedom is the supreme value of our time, but if we send our kids to these schools to learn how to make decisions and think for themselves, we have to appreciate the lessons in all their forms. Even the ones that get you kicked off the volley ball team.