The Redwing Report

Guilty of first-degree murder

2012-01-29T15:22:00.001-05:00

KINGSTON, Ont. — After Canada’s first mass-honour-killings trial, three members of a Montreal family have all been found guilty of first-degree murder in the drowning deaths of four other family members — including three teenage sisters.

National Post, January 29, 2012

The Canadian judicial system finally gets it right.

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http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/29/jury-reaches-verdict-in-shafia-trial/

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The end of made-in-Ottawa health care

2012-01-29T15:03:00.001-05:00

"… the entire structure of the Canada Health Act ... is essentially based on extortion." –National Post

National Post, January 25, 2012

By Shaun Francis

Last week, the provincial premiers disclosed how they would respond to the Harper government's exciting new approach to Medicare. The response indicates that, yet again, provincial politicians just don't understand the scale of the problems we face. Indeed, the group of premiers we currently have running the provinces may be too out of it, and too ideologically pre-programmed, to grasp the opportunity Prime Minister Harper has given them.

First, some background: The federal government helps the provinces pay for health programs, which our constitution stipulates are a provincial responsibility. The arrangement dates back at least to 1957, when prime minister John Diefenbaker's Tory government began subsidizing certain provinces' public hospital insurance programs. The Diefenbaker subsidy freed up enough cash for Tommy Douglas' provincial government in Saskatchewan to go ahead and fund the expansion of that province's hospital insurance program to include primary care, such as doctor's bills. The result? Saskatchewan led the country toward Medicare.

In recent decades, the federal government has provided the health subsidy in exchange for the provinces fulfilling certain conditions. For example, Pierre Trudeau's 1984 Canada Health Act made the subsidy conditional on five principles. If the provinces didn't adhere to those principles, the feds wouldn't fork over the money. As a National Post editorial adroitly put it recently, "the entire structure of the Canada Health Act ... is essentially based on extortion."

Back in December, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty presented a new arrangement between the provinces and Ottawa. All the premiers grasped the implications of the overt, financial component: The Harper government pledged to continue the 6% increases in federal health-care funding until 2017, then committed to increases equal to economic growth plus inflation until 2024, with a minimum annual increase of 3%.

What few of the premiers seem to have grasped is the more exciting, second part of the announcement: Harper and Flaherty told the premiers they were handing over the money without conditions. For the first time in decades, the deal was: No strings attached.

If the extortion is over - if the Harper government truly means what the Prime Minister has said, and there truly aren't any restrictions on the money that the feds pay to the provinces - then Harper's pledge would seem to effectively suspend the legislation that has defined Canadian health care for the last 27 years.

Even if Harper is merely signalling a looser interpretation of the Canada Health Act's five principles - public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability and accessibility - this could usher in a new age of Canadian health care. Harper is challenging premiers to compete with one another in the pursuit of health-care excellence, and providing them with the freedom to innovate as they see fit.

But rather than accepting the challenge, thus far the premiers are doing the opposite. They are convening something called the Health Care Innovation Working Group, which will be chaired by PEI's Robert Ghiz and Saskatchewan's Brad Wall. According to one report, the group

"will attempt to explore more co-ordinated management and to address competition across health systems"

- the goal being to avoid "competition" in regard, for instance, to health-workers' salaries.

That's just the sort of market-averse, socialist thinking that got us the problems we have today. "Competition" is a good thing, and the provinces should embrace it. Competition is how federalism is supposed to work. Federalism is a race among the provinces to achieve excellence. Since 1984, the Canada Health Act has hampered that race. No longer. Harper has fired the starter's pistol, even if none of the premiers appear to have heard it.

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Shaun Francis is Chairman and CEO of Medcan, North America's largest preventive health care clinic and one of Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies.

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/control+lobby+statistical+black+hole/6047003/story.html

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The gun-control lobby's statistical black hole

2012-01-29T14:19:00.001-05:00

"Please note, … that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police."

National Post, January 25, 2012

By Lorne Gunter

Last month, the RCMP and Statistics Canada were forced to admit that they don't keep statistics relating to the number of violent gun crimes in Canada that are committed by licenced gun owners using registered guns.

"Please note," Statistics Canada wrote in response to an access to information request filed by the National Firearms Association, "that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police." Nor does StatsCan's annual homicide survey "collect information on the registration status of the firearm used to commit a homicide."

This raises the question: Why did it take so long for the government to begin ridding Canada of the horribly expensive, unjustifiably intrusive federal gun registry? If no one in Ottawa had any systematic way of tracking whether or not Canadians suspected of committing a violent gun crime were licensed to own a gun and had registered the gun being used, then they had no way of knowing whether registration and licensing were having a positive impact on crime.

There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There's another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)

Typically, gun crime is committed by street criminals using stolen or contraband weapons. The gun registry never had any effect on this class of thug. Some of the 8,000 violent gun crimes no doubt were committed by licensed owners using registered guns - people who might be tracked or even deterred using a registry system. But since no one in Ottawa ever had any idea how many people are in this latter group, they had no way of determining the usefulness of the registry.

A cynic might say that not knowing was the point all along. Backers of the registry knew it would produce very little impact, so they deliberately didn't bother collecting data that would confirm the database's uselessness.

I think the truth is less conspiratorial (and far more arrogant): Backers were so sure the registry would produce tangible benefits, they never thought they might need to show proof. After all, they were experts and they had thought it up, so how could it not work?

I would have thought it was a better strategy to collect as much data as possible from year one. That way backers could track the decline in gun crimes committed by licensed owners using guns they themselves had registered. But neither StatsCan nor the RCMP - nor, for that matter, local police forces - tallies gun crimes relative to who committed them and whether or not the gun used was registered with the federal government. It was purely on blind faith that supporters of the registry - police chiefs, victims' rights groups, women's shelter operators and grandstanding politicians - assumed that making Canadians register their guns would magically cut down on violent crime.

Gary Mauser, an emeritus professor at the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., and one of the country's leading firearms researchers, has done his best to piece together some sort of statistical analysis of firearms crime and licenced gun owners. Using Library of Parliament data and raw StatsCan crime numbers, Prof. Mauser believes about 3% of murders committed in Canada since the registry opened in 1998 have been committed by licenced gun owners using firearms, registered or not - this despite the fact that at least 8% of Canadians own firearms. Prof. Mauser calculates that this works out to a rate of 0.38 murders per 100,000 licensed gun owners versus a murder rate of 1.85 per 100,000 - nearly five times higher - for the population as a whole.

All of this shows what a horrendous waste of time and money the registry has been. The sooner it is dismantled, the better.

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lgunter@shaw.ca

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/control+lobby+statistical+black+hole/6047003/story.html

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The faces of courage

2012-01-28T14:10:00.001-05:00

“By mid 1944, the inmates knew that Germany was losing the war. Believing they would die anyway, Anna and her friends wanted to find a way to fight back, to give their deaths meaning. Ester, Anna, and a few other female prisoners began to smuggle gunpowder from the factory, a tiny amount at a time, hidden in their kerchiefs or sleeves. Being caught meant instant execution.”

National Post, January 27, 2012

By Bernie M. Farber

On Jan. 27, 1945, 67 years ago today, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz. From 1942 to late 1944, the concentration camp became the center of the wholesale murder of European Jewry. There were others - Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, to name just a few. But it was Auschwitz that was to become the archetype of genocide. The gas chambers of Auschwitz took the lives of an estimated 1.1 million people, almost a million of them Jews.

Yet within Auschwitz's horror there were unique acts of bravery from which we must always take heart. The courage of Anna (Wajcblum) Heilman and the women of the Auschwitz munitions factory is one such story.

Anna was born to an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland on Dec. 1, 1928. Her childhood ended in September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto, where overcrowding, starvation and disease killed many awaiting deportation to the death camps. In 1943, the remnants of Jews trapped in the ghetto fought back to no avail; amongst them were 14 year old Anna and her older sister Ester. (Her oldest sister, Sabina, had escaped with her fiancé to the Soviet Union.)

Anna, Ester and their parents originally were sent to the camp of Majdanek, where Anna's parents were gassed upon arrival. Anna and Ester then were transported to Auschwitz to work as slave laborers at a munitions factory.

By mid 1944, the inmates knew that Germany was losing the war. Believing they would die anyway, Anna and her friends wanted to find a way to fight back, to give their deaths meaning. Ester, Anna, and a few other female prisoners began to smuggle gunpowder from the factory, a tiny amount at a time, hidden in their kerchiefs or sleeves. Being caught meant instant execution.

The young women gave the smuggled gunpowder to a young Polish Jew named Rosa Robota, who in turn passed it on to the Sonderkommando, a detail of Jewish male slave crematoria workers. These Sonderkommando included Soviet prisoners of war who knew how to make improvised explosives.

On Oct. 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando revolted, attacking the SS with stones, axes and homemade grenades produced from the smuggled gunpowder.

Several SS were killed. One of the four crematoria was severely damaged by the improvised explosives. It was never used again, saving many lives. The Sonderkommando were all killed.

The SS traced the gunpowder back to the munitions plant. Anna's sister Ester and three other young women, Ala Gertner, Rosa Robota and Regina Safirstajn, were tortured for months by the SS. But they gave up only the names of the Sonderkommando, who were already dead. They did not betray Anna or the others involved.

The four young women were hanged as saboteurs in January 1945, less than two weeks before the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz. In a smuggled note she wrote shortly before her execution, Ester asked her friend Marta Bindiger to look after Anna. Marta kept Anna going on the 700 km westward death march to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. Prisoners who faltered or fell were immediately shot.

Anna and Marta were liberated by the Soviet army in May, 1945. Emigrating to Israel a short time later, Anna married another survivor, Josh Heilman, and eventually moved to Ottawa, where Anna became a social worker with the Children's Aid Society.

In a Belgian displaced-persons camp after liberation, Anna rewrote from memory the confiscated diary she had kept in Auschwitz. She told no one about the diary for over 45 years. Encouraged by Marta, Anna worked hard to get recognition for the sacrifice and heroism of her sister and the three other young women. In 1991, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, dedicated a monument to the "Four Martyred Heroines of Auschwitz." Working with her son-in-law, Anna developed her diary into a book titled Never Far Away. It won the 2002 City of Ottawa Book Award.

Anna Heilman's life was seared by the Holocaust. But, as much as she had lost, as much as she had already given, Anna had much more to give. In her later years, Anna took pride in a new role as witness, teacher and advocate. She returned with groups of young students to Auschwitz several times through a Holocaust-education program called "The March of the Living." In her eighties and in ill-health, she lobbied Canadian parliamentarians to take action on the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

This heroine of Auschwitz died on May 1, 2011, aged 82. On this day above all others, her story is worth remembering - a rare and uplifting tale of survival from the very heart of the Nazis' kingdom of death.

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Bernie M Farber, the former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, is the son of a Holocaust survivor. Anna and Josh Heilman, and their daughters Ariella and Noa, were friends of the Farber family in Ottawa.

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Heroines+Auschwitz/6059384/story.html

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Obama's 18th-century industrialism

2012-01-28T13:38:00.001-05:00

"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it." –Adam Smith

Financial Post, FP Comment, January 26, 2012

By William Watson

Barack Obama seems such a 21st-century guy. Yet his industrial policy is so 18th-century. Why 18th-century? Because it's all about manufacturing, manufacturing, manufacturing. The president is obsessed with Things, as are his rivals Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, who also have special plans for the manufacturing sector, including, in Santorum's case, no taxes.

Adam Smith, one of the greatest 18th-century guys, was also enthusiastically into manufacturing. Key chapters of The Wealth of Nations contrast productive and unproductive economic activity. Productive includes agriculture and manufacturing, unproductive almost everything else: singing opera, practising law, professing economics for a living and especially running a government. These activities were all doubtless appreciated by those who consumed them. But once consumed, Smith argued, they were gone. Their benefits evaporated. In contrast to the benefits from things, which live on.

In one of his most famous phrases Smith argued that "Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct. The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproductive hands." But by "unproductive" he meant only that governments typically did not produce things, not that they were necessarily wasteful, inefficient or frivolous - though he certainly believed they could be and often were all of that, especially when granting favours to businessmen.

Unlike Obama, Smith had a good excuse for Thing fetishism. His focus on manufacturing was actually liberalizing and expansive, a reaction to the then-prevailing views of the French physiocrats, for whom agriculture was the source of all economic value and manufacturing was a frill. In a way, you can understand their thinking. Without agriculture, as the farm lobby's billboards keep telling us, people can't eat. Without an agricultural surplus, without creating more calories than farmers burn creating calories, societies can't do anything else. In a sense, therefore, agriculture comes first (though you might wonder if that's still true when the agriculture in question is producing exotic dessert fruits rather than just lentils).

Smith challenged this orthodoxy by arguing that other things than foodstuffs could be good for the economy, too. If you put your capital into manufacturing, you were left at the end of the economic process with a "vendable commodity," with something tangible and sellable. Selling this vendable commodity allowed you to get your capital back, presumably with a little profit. Reinvesting that profit, as business people were wont to do, helped the society accumulate even more capital and thus led to the endlessly proliferating division of labour that produced productivity growth and allowed the world to reach the "universal opulence" Smith thought he saw around him in 1760s and 1770s England and Scotland.

It's hardly a stretch to think that as society grew richer and richer - there were barely any roads in Smith's day, after all, let alone an electronic turnpike - as more and more services became traded, as people demanded more services the higher their incomes grew, and as many service industries generated the capital that did indeed further the division of labour, Smith would have amended his thinking to allow that services, too, could be productive engines of growth. Yes, it seems somehow unsubstantial and insecure to make your living producing movies, video games or apps, but if that is what the world wants, a very good living can be had from it. True, if disaster occurs and some cataclysm hurtles us all back to the Stone Age, these skills will not be very useful (or "productive.") But if the apocalyptic does happen, what good will a talent for manufacturing do you, either, or anything but familiarity with hard-scrabble farming?

Smith's most elemental and enduring insight was that individual business people were always and everywhere the most discerning judges of how best to use their capital. "Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command."

It therefore follows, in those famous words that should be inscribed over the doorway to every legislature on the planet and probably extra terrestrially, too, that "The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."

Especially during this election year, candidates Obama, Santorum and Romney are verily brimming over with folly and presumption. Mr. Obama is pursuing the loony policy of, for some reason he divines from the stars, doubling U.S. exports. ("Exports good, imports bad" was a credo Smith spent many pages debunking.) He wants: a minimum tax for multinationals to prevent them escaping taxes by outsourcing enterprise; tax breaks for companies that employ people at home; even bigger tax breaks for U.S. manufacturers; and double tax breaks for hightech U.S. manufacturers.

"Our workers are the most productive on Earth," Mr. Obama declares (though actually Norwegian, Luxembourgeois and Irish workers have higher output per hour), "and if the playing field is level, I promise you - America will always win." This prompts the question of who America will trade with if America always wins. If there are to be imports to America, and there have to be, other countries must sometimes win, too.

In most rich countries, manufacturing is falling as a share of both output and employment, and has been for decades, just as agriculture did before it and is now doing in China, thus making possible China's rapid growth in manufacturing, as it enabled North America's a century ago. Mr. Obama's tax subsidies will not change that. In that sense, his policies are actually 11th century. That's when Canute commanded the tide not to come in. Canute, at least, was under no illusion his command would be obeyed.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Obama+18th+century+industrialism/6053363/story.html

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The economist manifesto

2012-01-28T13:33:00.001-05:00

“There is a vision here that has a remarkably current ring. The continuing global relevance of Smith's ideas is quite astonishing, and it is a tribute to the power of his mind that this global vision is so forcefully presented by someone who, a quarter of a millennium ago, lived most of his life in considerable seclusion in a tiny coastal Scottish town.”

NewStatesman, April 23, 2010

By Amartya Sen

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith's first book, was published in early 1759. Smith, then a young professor at the University of Glasgow, had some understandable anxiety about the public reception of the book, which was based on his quite progressive lectures. On 12 April, Smith heard from his friend David Hume in London about how the book was doing.

The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thought to have been. It’s time we realised the relevance of his ideas to today’s financial crisis. –NewStatesman

If Smith was, Hume told him, prepared for "the worst", then he must now be given "the melancholy news" that unfortunately "the public seem disposed to applaud [your book] extremely". "It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises." This light-hearted intimation of the early success of Smith's first book was followed by serious critical acclaim for what is one of the truly outstanding books in the intellectual history of the world.

After its immediate success, Moral Sentiments went into something of an eclipse from the beginning of the 19th century, and Smith was increasingly seen almost exclusively as the author of his second book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which, published in 1776, transformed the subject of economics. The neglect of Moral Sentiments, which lasted through the 19th and 20th centuries, has had two rather unfortunate effects.

First, even though Smith was in many ways the pioneering analyst of the need for impartiality and universality in ethics (Moral Sentiments preceded the better-known and much more influential contributions of Immanuel Kant, who refers to Smith generously), he has been fairly comprehensively ignored in contemporary ethics and philosophy.

Second, since the ideas presented in The Wealth of Nations have been interpreted largely without reference to the framework already developed in Moral Sentiments (on which Smith draws substantially in the later book), the typical understanding of The Wealth of Nations has been constrained, to the detriment of economics as a subject. The neglect applies, among other issues, to the appreciation of the demands of rationality, the need for recognising the plurality of human motivations, the connections between ethics and economics, and the co-dependent rather than free-standing role of institutions in general, and free markets in particular, in the functioning of the economy.

Beyond self-love

Smith discussed that to explain the motivation for economic exchange in the market, we do not have to invoke any objective other than the pursuit of self-interest. In the most widely quoted passage from The Wealth of Nations, he wrote: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love." In the tradition of interpreting Smith as the guru of selfishness or self-love (as he often called it, not with great admiration), the reading of his writings does not seem to go much beyond those few lines, even though that discussion is addressed only to one very specific issue, namely exchange (rather than distribution or production) and, in particular, the motivation underlying exchange. In the rest of Smith's writings, there are extensive discussions of the role of other motivations that influence human action and behaviour.

Beyond self-love, Smith discussed how the functioning of the economic system in general, and of the market in particular, can be helped enormously by other motives. There are two distinct propositions here. The first is one of epistemology, concerning the fact that human beings are not guided only by self-gain or even prudence. The second is one of practical reason, involving the claim that there are good ethical and practical grounds for encouraging motives other than self-interest, whether in the crude form of self-love or in the refined form of prudence. Indeed, Smith argues that while "prudence" was "of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual", "humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others". These are two distinct points, and, unfortunately, a big part of modern economics gets both of them wrong in interpreting Smith.

The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society. Even John McCain, the Republican candidate in the 2008 US presidential election, complained constantly in his campaign speeches of "the greed of Wall Street". Smith had a diagnosis for this: he called such promoters of excessive risk in search of profits "prodigals and projectors" - which, by the way, is quite a good description of many of the entrepreneurs of credit swap insurances and sub-prime mortgages in the recent past.

The term "projector" is used by Smith not in the neutral sense of "one who forms a project", but in the pejorative sense, apparently common from 1616 (or so I gather from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), meaning, among other things, "a promoter of bubble companies; a speculator; a cheat". Indeed, Jonathan Swift's unflattering portrait of "projectors" in Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726 (50 years before The Wealth of Nations), corresponds closely to what Smith seems to have had in mind. Relying entirely on an unregulated market economy can result in a dire predicament in which, as Smith writes, "a great part of the capital of the country" is "kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it".

False diagnoses

The spirited attempt to see Smith as an advocate of pure capitalism, with complete reliance on the market mechanism guided by pure profit motive, is altogether misconceived. Smith never used the term "capitalism" (I have certainly not found an instance). More importantly, he was not aiming to be the great champion of the profit-based market mechanism, nor was he arguing against the importance of economic institutions other than the markets.

Smith was convinced of the necessity of a well-functioning market economy, but not of its sufficiency. He argued powerfully against many false diagnoses of the terrible "commissions" of the market economy, and yet nowhere did he deny that the market economy yields important "omissions". He rejected market-excluding interventions, but not market-including interventions aimed at doing those important things that the market may leave undone.

Smith saw the task of political economy as the pursuit of "two distinct objects": "first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and second, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services". He defended such public services as free education and poverty relief, while demanding greater freedom for the indigent who receives support than the rather punitive Poor Laws of his day permitted. Beyond his attention to the components and responsibilities of a well-functioning market system (such as the role of accountability and trust), he was deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might remain in an otherwise successful market economy. Even in dealing with regulations that restrain the markets, Smith additionally acknowledged the importance of interventions on behalf of the poor and the underdogs of society. At one stage, he gives a formula of disarming simplicity: "When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters." Smith was both a proponent of a plural institutional structure and a champion of social values that transcend the profit motive, in principle as well as in actual reach.

Smith's personal sentiments are also relevant here. He argued that our "first perceptions" of right and wrong "cannot be the object of reason, but of immediate sense and feeling". Even though our first perceptions may change in response to critical examination (as Smith also noted), these perceptions can still give us interesting clues about our inclinations and emotional predispositions.

One of the striking features of Smith's personality is his inclination to be as inclusive as possible, not only locally but also globally. He does acknowledge that we may have special obligations to our neighbours, but the reach of our concern must ultimately transcend that confinement. To this I want to add the understanding that Smith's ethical inclusiveness is matched by a strong inclination to see people everywhere as being essentially similar. There is something quite remarkable in the ease with which Smith rides over barriers of class, gender, race and nationality to see human beings with a presumed equality of potential, and without any innate difference in talents
and abilities.

He emphasised the class-related neglect of human talents through the lack of education and the unimaginative nature of the work that many members of the working classes are forced to do by economic circumstances. Class divisions, Smith argued, reflect this inequality of opportunity, rather than indicating differences of inborn talents and abilities.

Global reach

The presumption of the similarity of intrinsic talents is accepted by Smith not only within nations but also across the boundaries of states and cultures, as is clear from what he says in both Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. The assumption that people of certain races or regions were inferior, which had quite a hold on the minds of many of his contemporaries, is completely absent from Smith's writings. And he does not address these points only abstractly. For example, he discusses why he thinks Chinese and Indian producers do not differ in terms of productive ability from Europeans, even though their institutions may hinder them.

He is inclined to see the relative backwardness of African economic progress in terms of the continent's geographical disadvantages - it has nothing like the "gulfs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia" that provide opportunities for trade with other people. At one stage, Smith bursts into undisguised wrath: "There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving."

The global reach of Smith's moral and political reasoning is quite a distinctive feature of his thought, but it is strongly supplemented by his belief that all human beings are born with similar potential and, most importantly for policymaking, that the inequalities in the world reflect socially generated, rather than natural, disparities.

There is a vision here that has a remarkably current ring. The continuing global relevance of Smith's ideas is quite astonishing, and it is a tribute to the power of his mind that this global vision is so forcefully presented by someone who, a quarter of a millennium ago, lived most of his life in considerable seclusion in a tiny coastal Scottish town. Smith's analyses and explorations are of critical importance for any society in the world in which issues of morals, politics and economics receive attention. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a global manifesto of profound significance to the interdependent world in which we live.

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Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. He is the Thomas W Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University. His latest book is "The Idea of Justice" (Allen Lane, £25).“The Theory of Moral Sentiments" by Adam Smith is published by Penguin (£10.99).

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/04/smith-market-essay-sentiments#reader-comments

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Born with a certain lean

2012-01-28T12:22:00.001-05:00

“Just like the language instinct, the moral instinct, and the art instinct before it, their paper describes political animals as a largely predictable population, constrained and enabled by their genetic nature, a herd following the politics instinct.

According to the idea, we do not so much learn our politics from our parents and peers as inherit the foundation for it, come what may.

The way that our genes influence us changes over time. The genes themselves do not change, but the interaction between gene and behaviour is dynamic as people age, from puberty through menopause and mid-life crises. It is a generally stable system with crisis points.”

National Post, January 28, 2012

By Joseph Brean

The Republican leadership race has been, at root, an effort to find the conservative ideals of being tough, persistent, firm, reliable, loyal, orderly, careful, restrained and decisive, amid all these people who seem so rigid, anxious, conformist, prejudiced, stubborn, moralistic and close-minded.

Likewise, on this side of the border, the NDP leadership campaign seems to pit the party's liberal strengths, such as a tendency to be enthusiastic, expressive, creative, curious, imaginative, tolerant and free, against its liberal weaknesses, such as the tendency to be slovenly, indifferent, unpredictable, eccentric, uncontrolled, individualistic and impulsive.

Those personality traits all come from a single taxonomy, published in Political Psychology in 2008, in which diverse research was compiled into a picture of the known correlations between personality and political leaning. It fit with even the most grotesquely detailed political caricatures, the liberal squish and the conservative scold.

To psychologists, those regularities stood to reason. Because personality develops in infancy and is influenced by genes, the common wisdom is that the political attitudes we hold in maturity have been learned, and shaped by our more basic personality. Not so, according to new research.

"Though the issues may change across time, the underlying trait of liberalism versus conservatism probably has existed since forever," said Brad Verhulst, a Canadian researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Last year, his research on twins, who offer a special perspective on how genes and environment shape the inheritance of traits in mature adults, found links between being neurotic and holding liberal attitudes on immigration and multiculturalism, and between being psychotic and holding conservative attitudes on religion, sex and punishment.

But it is his newly published research in the American Journal of Political Science, jointly with Lindon Eaves and Peter Hatemi, that could inflict the most damage on settled wisdom. It suggests that the true driver in the growth of the political animal is in fact some common genetic precursor to both personality and politics.

Just like the language instinct, the moral instinct, and the art instinct before it, their paper describes political animals as a largely predictable population, constrained and enabled by their genetic nature, a herd following the politics instinct.

According to the idea, we do not so much learn our politics from our parents and peers as inherit the foundation for it, come what may.

The way that our genes influence us changes over time. The genes themselves do not change, but the interaction between gene and behaviour is dynamic as people age, from puberty through menopause and mid-life crises. It is a generally stable system with crisis points.

"It's not that every apple falls directly under the tree. If the tree is on a hill, you could get an apple a long ways away. In some cases, the political stripes of our parents are not going to be reflected in ourselves, and in our children they might change back. However, the normal progression across generations is fairly constant," Mr. Verhulst said in an interview. He means too constant to be accidental.

"More than likely, it's some common latent genetic factor that's driving the development of both, instead of the personality traits driving the development of political attitudes," he said.

The main problem with his theory, as with much research on genes and behaviour, is that no one has yet found any specific genes for politics.

Even in physical traits like height, for example, there is obviously a strong genetic component, in that tall parents tend to have tall children, but no one has yet found an actual gene or genes that make people tall.

Political attitudes and personality traits are even less obviously inherited than tallness, so the quest is even harder, though not necessarily impossible.

"People have said, 'Well, if you can't find the genes, they must not be there.' And that's not really a fair criticism [of his family-based research], but it's one of them," said Mr. Verhulst.

He notes that the data in this research is mostly American, and so the ideological terrain, most prominently in questions of abortion and health care, is different from Canada.

But a dominant theme is just how consistent people are in their variation across the political spectrum, and how there seems to be a stable component to politics beneath all the hubbub, like a stage on which Mitt Romney's staid trustworthiness competes with Newt Gingrich's stern tenacity, and Tom Mulcair's unpredictable enthusiasm is weighed against Brian Topp's imaginative curiosity. That stability, Mr. Verhulst said, comes from some interplay of our genes, our environment, even the past presence of our own ideas, "the attitudes we had yesterday." And when people find a balance between their politics and their personality, it sticks.

"Ideas, just like anything else, have inertia, and if you don't apply some force to it, like in a political campaign for leaders or newspaper articles for policy changes, then people just aren't going to reevaluate it. And eventually, if you just don't think about an issue for long enough, it will just drop off your mind, and then perhaps whatever new information you do encounter will end up changing your attitude," Mr. Verhulst said.

"But we are living in a fast paced and ever-changing world, and those new experiences that we have will affect us, and they will in some cases lead us to change out attitudes, or modify or solidify them. And so the way that we end up interacting with out political environment will alter the beliefs that we profess and the views that we hold."

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jbrean@nationalpost.com

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Born+with+certain+lean/6065843/story.html

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Big Green aims at Big Oil

2012-01-23T21:00:00.001-05:00

“The major environmental organizations campaigning against the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL are as strategic, self-serving and political as their Big Oil counterparts. They exploit the Canadian sector's ineptness at telling its story, as well as Canadians' ignorance, to push their competing anti-oil, pro-green energy industry agenda, stretching facts and magnifying risks. Meanwhile, they raise money.”

Financial Post, January 22, 2012

By Claudia Cattaneo

The heated debate over new export pipelines has morphed in recent days into a debate over foreign meddling into Canadian oil sands development.

The issue was thrust into prime time by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver when they questioned the legitimacy of foreign environmental organizations stirring the pot against the Northern Gateway pipeline, a Canadian project they have turned into an extension of their successful fight in the U.S. against Keystone XL.

Foreign groups shot back the debate over the oil sands is a global one, and that foreign oil companies are also meddling into Canadian affairs because they are driving their expansion.

Here's the wrinkle: according to an independent poll by Toronto-based Forum Research Inc., Canadians are more worried about increasing foreign ownership in the oil and gas industry, which lately has seen a surge in Asian purchases, than about foreign environmental organizations targeting the oil sands.

For Mr. Harper, "It's kind of back fired," Forum president Lorne Bozinoff said in an interview. "It's the foreign oil companies that [Canadians] are concerned about right now."

According to the poll of 1,211 randomly selected adult Canadians conducted on Jan. 13, right after the high-profile start of community hearings by federal regulators on Northern Gateway, more Canadians (43%) said they are opposed to the proposed pipeline than they are in favour (37%).

The poll also found that more than half of participants (53%) agreed that foreign oil companies should be barred from the Northern Gateway hearings, while only 36% believe foreign environmental groups should be barred.

The only bright spot in the poll for pipeline supporters is that opposition has softened since a similar survey was taken by Forum Research on Dec. 13 that showed 51% of Canadians were opposed and 35% were in favour.

According to Mr. Bozinoff, environmental organizations enjoy higher credibility than the oil industry because they are perceived to be fighting for the environment and not gaining monetarily.

This is nonsense and Canadians should know better.

Foreign green organizations do not have and should not have the same standing as foreign corporations in discussions about major infrastructure projects because they have no skin in the game other than views - some valid, some loopy - about what makes a better planet. Their main contribution to Canada? Fear.

Foreign corporations' increasing ownership of Canadian resources is a worry - but let's keep this in perspective. They have sunk many, many billions here with no guarantee of success. Indeed, they have a long history of overpaying for what they get. They employ thousands, support government budgets at all levels through taxes and royalties. They have fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and have to follow Canadian processes and laws. That includes regulations that are better than anything else in the world and disclosure rules that that require them to be truthful.

Together with their Canadian counterparts, it's these companies that are developing, investing in and implementing environmental improvements in the oil sands - not green organizations.

"The environmentalists are not the only ones that are worried about the planet and have an interest in it," said Jack Mintz, Palmer Chair at the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy and a director of Imperial Oil Ltd.

The major environmental organizations campaigning against the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL are as strategic, self-serving and political as their Big Oil counterparts. They exploit the Canadian sector's ineptness at telling its story, as well as Canadians' ignorance, to push their competing anti-oil, pro-green energy industry agenda, stretching facts and magnifying risks. Meanwhile, they raise money.

Unlike Big Oil, they are not transparent about their motives.

The movement's concerted push against the oil sands started at least four years ago, when a handful of major groups like the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, Oregon-based Corporate Ethics International and the Alberta-based Pembina Institute formed a cross-border coalition to jointly raise funds from big U.S. foundations to take on Canadian politicians, regulators, investors, communities and the media.

In a July 2008 PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Financial Post, the groups outlined their plans to raise the negatives of the oil-sands industry, boost the costs of producing them, stop infrastructure development and enrol key decision-makers.

In an interview at the time, Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, a senior attorney with the NRCD and one of the architects of the coalition, said the environmental movement was uniting because it saw oil sands extraction as a major cause of global warming. "And what we really believe is that we have better energy choices right now. What you are seeing with a campaign that starts to bring in so many different groups is that this is really the critical issue of the next 10, 20 years."

Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz has since been relentless. This week, immediately after U.S. President Barack Obama shot down the Keystone XL pipeline, she told the CBC from the U.S. that she was just getting started on Northern Gateway.

Coinciding with Keystone XL's permit denial, the NRDC was urging followers on its website to send a thank you note to the president for standing up to Big Oil while, of course, soliciting donations.

Great play for U.S. greens and Mr. Obama's re-election machine. Poor outcome for Canada and those Canadians who don't see how they are being played.

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ccattaneo@nationalpost.com

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Foreign+influx+sands+issue/6035917/story.html

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Capitalism writ large - in Chinese

2012-01-23T20:42:00.001-05:00

“A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.”

“Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.”

New York Times, January 21, 2012

By Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

In China, Lina Lin is a project manager at PCH International, which contracts with Apple. “There are lots of jobs,” she said. “Especially in Shenzhen.” To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Mid-wage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.

While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.

Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.

What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.

In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.

“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “But will someone in his 40s have the skills for them? Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”

The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.

Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

There wasn’t even a tiny scratch on the screen.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=charles%20duhigg%20and%20keith%20bradsher&st=cse

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Capitalism under a microscope at Davos

2012-01-21T20:04:00.001-05:00

“All of this will be 2012's Davos milieu. Its panellists and speakers will be preoccupied with tweaking capitalism, resurrecting socialism or inventing some "responsible capitalism" hybrid.

Frankly, any system run by humans is doomed. As Winston Churchill put it: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."

Financial Post, January 21, 2012

By Diane Francis

Besieged capitalism will be the subtext next week at the World Economic Forum held in Davos. The five-day conference is the world's most elite gathering of political and business leaders, academics and, occasionally, scoundrels. For 42 years, conference organizers have trotted out a theme, but this year, as in most years, a pervasive mood has hijacked all plans and causes some cancellations.

Last year, Arab Spring was just getting into full swing so the despots and dictators from the Middle East who usually attend either stayed at home or stayed quiet.

This year, Davos copes with capitalism's critics and concerns. To underscore this, CEOs recently polled on the biggest global risks did not cite terrorism or soaring commodity prices but responded that income inequality posed the most severe threat to economic stability.

"Occupy" movements are everywhere, and a U.S. poll showed only 50% react positively to the word "capitalism" while 40% of Americans react negatively.

The rich-poor divide is why a Barack Obama White House has boycotted this conference for its entire term, unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, who sent their vice-presidents or came themselves. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will attend but mostly to meet his financial and institutional counterparts such as IMF boss Christine Lagarde or the head of the European Central Bank.

Also missing will be the usual parade of high-profile leaders, eager to promote their economies and nation-states as great capitalist destinations.

The "headliner" will be German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and plans are that her speech will lead directly into a debate on stage on whether capitalism is failing society. Germany, like Canada, has sailed through the mess of the past few years mostly unscathed, as have Australia, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey and the Asian economic miracles.

Other no-shows will be politicians who have been voted off their respective islands or who are about to be. Russia's Vladimir Putin was touted to be the big headliner this year. But Russian voters, protesters and rivals have put a damper on that. If he comes, he will likely park his swagger at Zurich Airport.

The tone, therefore, will be stern, not triumphant. Few speeches about doing business in Bora Bora, or wherever, and more leaders coming up with ways the 1% can fix or replace free enterprise to spread the wealth to more of the 99%.

Of course, this is simply another fad. Until Wall Street and London brought the world to its knees, so-called "Anglo Saxon" capitalism was the favoured economic religion. Then 2008 happened.

The next year, the Europeans pilloried Wall Street and the City of London. They proffered that their gentler, kinder, traditional, glacial form of Euro capitalism provided a better alternative.

Then 2010 happened. They were exposed when the world found out they couldn't run a pop stand either and were hoodwinked by some of their own members.

Now in 2012, China, and others with "planned or controlled economies," will be strutting their stuff and tut-tutting the rich for being spendthrifts, too laissez faire economically and lazy.

Of course, they will slowly get their come-uppance because their system doesn't work better in all respects. Remember 1989 and all those social, financial and environmental benefits that the communist command economies delivered.

This time it's different, says China. Its new economic religion has been gussied up as a mixture of both: Capitalism with "Chinese characteristics." Of course, the jury's out on that one too, and labour unrest combined with corruption are sure to bring that system down around the heads of leaders again. In some ways, China is still a communist military dictatorship, but with rich politicians and their rich friends.

What's fixed this anti-capitalist mood is the reality that free-enterprise cheerleaders - U.S. Republicans - have joined its critics. They have been pummelling their presidential candidate, front-runner Mitt Romney, for the "crimes" of being tax-efficient, risk-taking and wealthy.

He's done nothing wrong legally, but morality is shifting and a growing consensus is that a guy worth US$200-million paying 15% income tax is unacceptable, even in the United States.

Hand-wringing is underway in The Wall Street Journal, on Fox TV, in the venerable Financial Times of London and other media outlets read and watched by the privileged 1%. These capitalistic apologists are becoming introspective and running criticism about capitalism's failure to address income disparity and corporate skulduggery or CEO greed.

All of this will be 2012's Davos milieu. Its panellists and speakers will be preoccupied with tweaking capitalism, resurrecting socialism or inventing some "responsible capitalism" hybrid.

Frankly, any system run by humans is doomed. As Winston Churchill put it: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."

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dfrancis@nationalpost.com

http://www.financialpost.com/opinion/columnists/Capitalism+under+icroscope+Davos/6031007/story.html

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Addicted to prohibition

2012-01-21T19:51:00.001-05:00

“Granted, stark hypocrisy is probably not a terribly big surprise to those who pay attention to drug policy today. If anything, it's a pointed reminder that, when it comes to drug control, little changes.”

National Post, January 21, 201

By David Berry

In The Man with the Twisted Lip, Arthur Conan Doyle's 16th-favourite Sherlock Holmes story, Dr. Watson is impelled to find a man in an opium den located in "a vile alley" on a London wharf. The establishment itself is not much better: "Through the gloom, one could dimly catch a glimpse of ... bowed shoulders, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-luster eye turned upon the newcomer." They mutter to themselves or to each other in trailed-off conversations, and Watson doesn't aim to stay long.

Conan Doyle - whose most famous hero was a proponent of both cocaine and morphine, remember - was propagating what was for his time the conventional wisdom on opium dens: horrible, dim places, populated chiefly by ethnics and a few wayward countrymen. As frequently happens with conventional wisdom, this was wrong on several counts.

For starters, opium dens were never terribly widespread in England, due mainly to the low population of Chinese people, who tended to spread the practice: Outside of Asia, opium dens chiefly flourished, as it were, in France and along North America's west coast. Second, they weren't necessarily squalid: Some Asian dens were actually quite opulent, as photographs from the day show. According to contemporary accounts, the state of North American dens tended to vary with the class of patrons, a good number of whom were from the less maligned - i.e. white - ethnic groups.

Nevertheless, it was this popular conception that helped stir up public fervor against not just the dens but the drug they distributed. San Francisco took the first steps, banning the public smoking of opium in the 1870s, helped along by a healthy wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, stirred partly by the increased numbers who had come to help construct railroads and other infrastructure. The fervent need to do something spread until, on January 23, 1912, 13 nations got together in The Hague, Netherlands, and signed the International Opium Convention, the world's first global drug-control treaty.

The success of our century-long experiment is, well, debatable. Opium dens, of course, have long been consigned to daguerreotypes and Victorian fiction, which is actually no small victory: With pockets of exception, and then essentially only for narcotics far softer than heroin, there is almost nowhere in the world where you can openly take the substances we have collectively decided to prohibit without the fear of police intervention. That's indicative of the fact that, though it may not seem like it, drugs are actually harder to get than when we began. To take opium as an example, in 1906 there was supposedly 41,000 tons of it produced in the world (reliable statistics from the time are hard to come by, so this number is disputed); nevertheless, today, despite a recent uptick, medicinal and illegal uses of opium combined only manage an eighth of that, even with a vastly expanded population. This is some kind of progress.

Still, though the signers of the original treaty allowed for the "gradual suppression" of drugs, it's doubtful they meant this gradual. The illegal drug trade is estimated to generate some $400-billion worldwide, putting it only behind oil and weapons in terms of worldwide economic scope. Then, of course, there are prohibition's spin-off effects. Drugs always have had a human toll (China, which was crazy for the stuff, still spoke regretfully of the "opium ghosts" that were sometimes left in its wake). But the sort of institutionalized violence we see today in, say, Mexico's border region, at least wasn't a function of unregulated drug use.

Actually, to detour for a second, it should probably be qualified that non-government-sanctioned institutionalized violence wasn't a necessary consequence of unregulated drugs. Though the Chinese and opium use were intimately connected by 1912, the union was helped along greatly by the British military.

Opium first popped up in China in the 18th-century, but the Chinese emperor eventually made it illegal, which helped minimize its use until the British sought to resolve a huge trade deficit - they were almost literally importing all the tea in China - by flooding China with opium from its Indian colony. Though smugglers were quite happy, the Chinese twice tried very hard to stop the practice. With an economy to protect, the British responded by waging the Opium Wars, the results of which included the British control of Hong Kong and a widespread culture of opium use in China. There is no small irony in the fact that the 1912 convention, signed by the British, devotes an entire chapter to essentially shaming China, including detailing how the contracted powers will prevent the plague of opium use in the country.

Granted, stark hypocrisy is probably not a terribly big surprise to those who pay attention to drug policy today. If anything, it's a pointed reminder that, when it comes to drug control, little changes. However you judge the success of our first century of global efforts to eradicate drug use, what is most striking is how similar our approach has remained: Save for some archaic language and a welcome brevity, the 1912 convention could pass for a 2012 resolution, with its assumption that good intentions and making things illegal will be enough to solve the problem.

With luck, by the time 2112 comes along, we will have at least adapted our approach. There is no reason, to borrow from Conan Doyle again, that drug policy should be the one fixed point in a changing age.

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dberry@nationalpost.com

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Addicted+prohibition/6031002/story.html

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Teardrop protein eats bacteria

2012-01-21T17:31:00.001-05:00

"If we can detect single molecules associated with cancer, then that means we'd be able to detect it very, very early. That would be very exciting, because we know that if we treat cancer early, it will be much more successful, patients will be cured much faster, and costs will be much less."

Science Daily, January 19, 2012

(From Bob)

A disease-fighting protein in our teardrops has been tethered to a tiny transistor, enabling UC Irvine scientists to discover exactly how it destroys dangerous bacteria. The research could prove critical to long-term work aimed at diagnosing cancers and other illnesses in their very early stages.

Ever since Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming found that human tears contain antiseptic proteins called lysozymes about a century ago, scientists have tried to solve the mystery of how they could relentlessly wipe out far larger bacteria. It turns out that lysozymes have jaws that latch on and chomp through rows of cell walls like someone hungrily devouring an ear of corn, according to findings that will be published Jan. 20 in the journal Science.

"Those jaws chew apart the walls of the bacteria that are trying to get into your eyes and infect them," said molecular biologist and chemistry professor Gregory Weiss, who co-led the project with associate professor of physics & astronomy Philip Collins.

The researchers decoded the protein's behavior by building one of the world's smallest transistors -- 25 times smaller than similar circuitry in laptop computers or smartphones. Individual lysozymes were glued to the live wire, and their eating activities were monitored.

"Our circuits are molecule-sized microphones," Collins said. "It's just like a stethoscope listening to your heart, except we're listening to a single molecule of protein."

It took years for the UCI scientists to assemble the transistor and attach single-molecule teardrop proteins. The scientists hope the same novel technology can be used to detect cancerous molecules. It could take a decade to figure out but would be well worth it, said Weiss, who lost his father to lung cancer.

"If we can detect single molecules associated with cancer, then that means we'd be able to detect it very, very early," Weiss said. "That would be very exciting, because we know that if we treat cancer early, it will be much more successful, patients will be cured much faster, and costs will be much less."

The project was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and the National Science Foundation. Co-authors of the Science paper are Yongki Choi, Issa Moody, Patrick Sims, Steven Hunt, Brad Corso and Israel Perez.

- - - -

See Also:

Health & Medicine

Matter & Energy

Strange Science

Reference

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120119143332.htm

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Cognitive ageing is partly in the genes

2012-01-21T17:18:00.001-05:00

Cosmos Online, January 19, 2012

by Daniel Cossins

PHILADELPHIA: Differences in our genes contribute to how well we maintain our cognitive abilities over the course of our lives, according to a new study.

Comparing DNA from almost 2,000 people who were tested for intelligence as children and again in old age, researchers estimate that genetic factors account for around a quarter of the changes in cognitive performance that people experience over a lifetime. The research indicates that we should now search for the specific gene variations that govern this change if we want to understand why some people age better than others.

"For the first time we've been able to quantify how much genetic variants influence how people age cognitively," said Peter Visscher, a quantitative geneticist at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the study published in Nature today. "So now we can try to find specific genetic factors that influence this trait. That may tell us why some people decline cognitively and may give leads into a better understanding of the onset of dementia."

The search for influence

General cognitive ability (also known as general intelligence) - a measure of our ability to solve problems and perform everyday tasks - changes with age. Some people retain their cognitive abilities better than others. Since the amount and the rate of change in intelligence has such a large effect on mental health and well being in later life, researchers have long been interested in the causes, both genetic and environmental.

Up to now, no population-based genetic study of age-related intelligence had looked at people as children and followed them into old age. So there was no way to know how much genetic variation contributes to the fate of our cognitive abilities.

In the new study, however, Visscher and colleagues, including researchers from the Queensland Brain Institute, report the results of their analysis of data on a full lifetime of cognitive change in a group of Scottish people. They found that genetic factors account for about 24% of changes in intelligence between childhood and old age. In short, then, the study shows that there is a strong genetic basis for how we retain our cognitive abilities as we age - though it also indicates that the biggest influence is probably environmental.

Studying a lifetime of change

The researchers looked at data from three groups: people from the Aberdeen Birth Cohort (all born in 1936) and people from two separate Lothian birth cohorts (born in 1921 and 1936). In total 1,940 individuals who had been tested for general intelligence levels at the age of 11 were tracked down and re-tested in old age (age 65, 70 or 79). That provided the team with a unique dataset on the change or stability of cognitive abilities over a period of 54 years or more.

In an attempt to tease out variations in the genes of these people that correlate with variations in the fate of their cognitive abilities, the researchers analysed their DNA. They looked at 'genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)' data, which means they examined over half a million tiny variations in the DNA sequence. Comparing the two sets of data, they were able to calculate whether these genetic markers were associated with variations in cognitive ability.

"We could only do this because my colleagues did a fantastic detective job in finding a group of people for whom we had measures of intelligence over an entire lifetime," said Visscher. "We realised that we if we could take snapshots of the genomes we could compare the similarities and link that with the similarities in their intelligence. So we were able to tease out how much the change over time was due to genetic factors."

Time to track down the genes

The researchers are careful to point out that their estimate - that genetic factors account for roughly a quarter of changes in intelligence between childhood and old age - does not have conventional statistical significance because the dataset is too small. Nevertheless, the results are useful because such estimates have not previously been available. What's more, the results show that it is worthwhile to search for the specific gene variations that have an influence on how intelligence changes over time.

"I wouldn't take the exact figure as all that important," said David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the study. "It's a minimum estimate, so it may be an incomplete representation of the effect of the genetic variants that are there. What's more important is that this study has shown that there is a strong genetic contribution to the stability of cognitive performance over a lifetime. It tells us that there is a genetic trait there to be studied, so now we know it's worth trying to find the specific variants."

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http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5191/cognitive-ageing-genes-partly

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How U.S. charities fund Greens

2012-01-21T17:02:00.001-05:00

“Why should so many different groups have competing strategies to accomplish the goal of renewable energy? Wouldn't it be more sensible to decide on the optimum strategy, and then all pull together for the shared goal?"

Financial Post, January 21, 2012

By Lawrence Solomon

Americans should be able to influence Canada's environmental debates. They should not be able to do so under the radar.

But they do, and not just in the case of the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the West Coast - today's hot environmental topic. Unbeknownst to most Canadians, over the past two decades Canada's fabulously influential environmental movement increasingly has had U.S. paymasters. As elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tunes.

It wasn't always so, and foreign money wasn't always a problem. Canada's environmental groups in the 1970s and 1980s were a diverse lot advocating all-over-the map solutions to the many environmental problems they tackled. The Canadian groups would write up funding proposals for their ideas, shop them around to potential funders on both sides of the border, sometimes finding takers among them, sometimes not. It was largely a hit and-miss operation, and especially hard to obtain funding from the U.S. foundations, which tended to favour U.S. environmental groups. In this marketplace of ideas few funding proposals found much favour, and most environmental groups on both sides of the border struggled to survive.

Then the funders - typically the well-heeled U.S. foundations, most of them offshoots of corporate fortunes - got down to business.

"We have the money, we have the sophistication, we have the organization," they said to themselves. "In contrast, these well meaning environmentalists, though they may have the public's ear, are unsophisticated, disorganized and inefficient."

The funders compared notes with each other over cocktails and at confabs, commissioned high-priced consultants to conduct expert studies into how best to manage grants to the environmental sector, had the consultants present their findings to the funders' executives at colloquia called for that purpose, and decided to take charge.

The funders started by trying to professionalize the environmental groups - capacity-building, they call it - by offering them management courses and access to managerial expertise. Then the funders decided to eliminate what they saw as wasteful competition among the environmental groups.

"Why should so many different groups have competing strategies to accomplish the goal of renewable energy?" they wondered. "Wouldn't it be more sensible to decide on the optimum strategy, and then all pull together for the shared goal?"

Co-operation, not competition, became the watchword. At future joint meeting of funders and agreeable environmental groups, common strategies would be set, and differing roles carved out for the agreeable groups. Environmental groups that weren't agreeable found themselves without funding.

Then the funders decided that they, themselves, were being inefficient, by scattering their funding among the endless environmental causes that came in to them, whether wildlife protection, water quality, air quality, overpopulation, overfishing, or protecting the rainforest, or myriad local niche issues. Wouldn't it be more sensible for the funders as a group to focus their efforts on the most pressing problems facing society, have an enormous push to solve them, and then move on to the next most pressing problems?

It would be, many of them decided.

With that decision, the environmental funders took the steering wheel away from the environmentalists. No longer would environmentalists set the agenda, with the funders acting as enablers. Now the funders became the agenda setters and the environmental groups became, in effect, their contractees. For U.S. issues, the funders work through U.S. environmental groups, to capitalize on their credibility with the public. For issues that involve foreign countries, the funders will also enlist local environmental groups in the foreign countries, to put a home-grown face on their campaigns.

This organizational model has been fabulously successful. The first concerted effort to change Canada's domestic policies in the 1990s and 2000s involved Canada's forestry industry. The Boreal forest and much of Canada's land mass is now subject to a legion of Made-in-the-U.S. certifications and other restrictions. But no issue holds a candle to the #1 priority for the U.S. funders: global warming.

"Our investigation produced a chilling conclusion: If we don't act boldly in the next decade to prevent carbon lock-in, we could lose the fight against global warming," explains Design to Win, a major report commissioned by six funders, including the $7-billion William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (the Hewlett of the Hewlett-Packard Corp.), the $6-billion David and Lucile Packard Foundation (the Packard of the Hewlett-Packard corporation), the $1.6-billion Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (heiress to the American Tobacco Co. fortune), and the $900-million Joyce Foundation (lumber).

This 2007 report, which involved "more than 150 of the world's leading experts on energy and climate change," helped them develop "an exhaustive list of possible interventions and used existing mitigation models to quantify each strategy's expected cost and emissions reduction."

It decided what policy changes were needed to get the most bang for their buck, and that funding from U.S. philanthropic organizations would need to quadruple, to $800-million annually, to accomplish their goals. It also decided to create funding bodies in foreign countries to "oversee highly leveraged, strategic interventions," all this in aid of influencing voters and changing policy at all levels of government.

The upshot of these and other interventions by Big Philanthropy is the greatest environmental advocacy effort in history, of which the controversies involving Northern Gateway pipeline, the Keystone XL pipe line, and the Tar Sands form a small part. The concern for Canadians, apart from the environment, is the integrity of our democratic decision making. When Americans tell us what is good for us, we rightly take the source of the advice into consideration. We should do no less when the advice comes from Canadians in the pay of Americans.

- - - -

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and the author of The Deniers.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/charities+fund+Greens/6031047/story.html

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‘Leverage is financial steroids’

2012-01-21T16:38:00.001-05:00

“I have a pretty simple view of this, and maybe it is an outsider’s view. … But the whole problem with the investment world is that it got way too preoccupied, way too convinced that, as a sector, it was the smartest guy in the room. Well, it didn’t turn out to be.”

Financial Post, January 21, 2012

By Nicholas Van Praet

It’s become a fact of life in Quebec that if you’re the coach of the Montreal Canadiens or the chief executive of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, there’s always somebody, somewhere out there screaming for you to resign.

In Michael Sabia’s case, it happened even before he set foot in his 11th-floor corner office suite.

As the first anglophone and non-Quebecer to lead the Caisse, Canada’s largest pension fund manager, Mr. Sabia was the subject of attacks from the moment he was named to the job in March 2009. His employment track record? “Controversial at best,” wrote one columnist. His connection to Jean Charest by way of Brian Mulroney and the Privy Council? Proof of political favouritism, wrote another.

The critics were merciless. He’s an outsider from Ontario, they charged. He could never succeed in steering the Caisse in its historical role fostering a Quebec French-speaking financial class. He’s a crony, they said. Not the right person needed to plant the Caisse back on course and claw back the embarassing $39.8-billion annual loss under his predecessor in 2008 — the biggest in Canadian pension-fund history.

Funny how time can change perceptions. Funny, too, how the bottom line tends to speak for itself.

When Mr. Sabia took over from former CEO Henri-Paul Rousseau, the Caisse had $120.1-billion in net assets as of the end of 2008. Since then, the fund has grown that asset base by $37.8-billion through the end of June 2011, to $157.9-billion. Its two-year annualized return is 14%.

If the pension fund’s private investments sufficiently offset likely stock market losses, it could tally a third straight year of positive returns when it reports 2011 results as scheduled at the end of February. That would put it within striking distance of recouping the money lost under Mr. Rousseau.

Those who know Mr. Sabia will tell you he will not be taking sole credit for the recovery, when it happens. That’s just not his style. He’s not a flashy guy. He doesn’t like fancy restaurants. He doesn’t fuss with expensive suits or watches. Prone to self-deprication, the bilingual 58-year-old is not a fan of hyperbole or dramatic language.

In an interview last week at Caisse headquarters on the edge of Montreal’s old quarter, he wore a casual red wool sweater. No tie. In many ways, he’s Quebec’s Sergio Marchionne, an expert in industrials who talks straight, dresses down when he can, and thinks three steps ahead.

Besides, as Mr. Sabia well knows, the real test is yet to come: How to protect depositors’ money more permanently against the kind of volatility currently lashing the world economy. And how to more definitively restore public confidence in the Caisse, shredded after a spectacular failure of risk-management that showed it simply didn’t understand many of the investments it was making.

“When I got here … the place really felt under siege and there were lots of morale issues,” Mr. Sabia says. “The thing that has mattered a lot is getting people to feel like the organization is moving forward, that is has a direction, that they’re part of something that’s progressing. And I think that’s happening.”

Make no mistake, this is not the same Caisse that saw one quarter of its assets wiped out in 2008. Its 13-member executive committee has been almost completely shaken up. New executive talent has been tapped including Roland Lescure, an investment specialist from France who led one of that country’s largest asset management firms. As well, risk-control practices have been dramatically tightened.

That work done, Mr. Sabia is focussing on the next phase in the Caisse’s development, one that’s arguably a lot tougher.

The former Bell Canada chief executive is now trying to build an organization in which all of its investment professionals have a profound understanding of what the Caisse has bought and why, a knowledge of investments that goes beyond profit and loss statements and digs into the quality of operations. He’s already got real-estate professionals who run shopping malls and office towers. Now he’s begun hiring specialists who know airports and pipelines and mines.

It’s all part of a rethink of the pension fund’s diversification strategy — one that will see it shift away from buying indexed stocks towards fewer but more targeted investments that are much better mastered, and from both public to private markets.

“You’re going to see people moving away from the extent of the reliance that we’ve all had on public markets,” Mr. Sabia says. “There are probably better returns” privately, he added, and they’ll be more stable over time.

Pulling back from public markets will create some accountability challenges for the Caisse because its performance is measured against that of various public benchmarks such as the S&P/TSX composite index and the S&P 500. It will have to figure out different ways to communicate successes and failures and what exactly it is doing. That may be difficult given the trust between the fund and its 25 Quebec depositors remains on the mend.

“The confidence of retirees in the Caisse is still shaky,” says Madelaine Michaud, president of the Association québécoise des retraité(e)s des secteurs public et parapublic, a group representing 27,000 retired workers, most of them civil servants. She says the Caisse has been unresponsive to its demand that it allow a retiree representative on its board.

Underpinning Mr. Sabia’s transformation of the Caisse is the belief that it should use leverage in a much more limited way.

In this, he is certainly not alone. Many companies, notably Magna International Inc. under Frank Stronach, have displayed a nearly religious aversion to carrying debt. The Caisse itself has reduced its liabilities by half during the past five years, to 17% of total assets in 2010 from 30% in 2004.

If the financial crisis of 2007-2008 taught the world one thing, it’s that borrowing big is bad. As the U.S. government commission analyzing the debacle concluded:

“The crisis was avoidable and was caused, in part, by widespread failures in financial regulation, dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance - including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk - and an explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street.”

Where Mr. Sabia differs from others on debt is in his willingness to pass up investments using leverage because of the chance it will come back later and bite. To him, buying an investment that generates small and consistent profits with no debt is better than using debt to buy something that may result in big profit-loss swings.

“Look, leverage is just a financial steroid. That’s all it is,” he says. “[And] in a volatile world, you don’t want to be on steroids.”

Michel Nadeau, a former Caisse vice-president, agrees. “The Caisse abused its use of leverage in the past,” he says. “Way too much.”

There are conflicts in that dogmatic position.

If leverage is so bad, why is the Maple Group, that consortium of 13 institutions including the Caisse, using it in spades to buy the TMX Group? And won’t the steroid actually turn into a straightjacket — immobilizing the Caisse at the very time it is convinced there are massive buying opportunities out there because of depressed asset valuations and desperate governments?

To be sure, the Caisse has plenty of cash to play with. But its appetite for asset purchases sounds bigger than what those cash stores may hold.

Mr. Sabia says there will be a wave of substantial infrastructure privatizations in Europe in the months ahead as governments deal with their fiscal issues. The Caisse is a buyer in that scenario, likely in club deals with other investors. Like the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and others, it has become a potential saviour for states that can sell instead of slashing social programs and risk undermining economic growth in their bid for budgetary sanity.

“If I were in a European government, I would be way more interested in trying to sell a port, sell a toll road, sell a bridge, sell a whatever than I would be … to constantly cut social expenditures,” he says. “There are limits to the political tolerance for those things.”

Likewise, the Caisse is very bullish on the United States. It is watching for motivated sellers of U.S. assets, particularly Europeans who may want to offload real estate. The Caisse has been bitten in this market recently — a Jan.11 Wall Street Journal report said it sold $111-million worth of debt it held on Manhattan’s Park Central Hotel at a loss. But there are plenty more deals to be had.

“The degree of motivation has been increasing recently,” Mr. Lescure says of the sellers. “We’re not a vulture. But what we’re looking at is good opportunities …. The prices are slowly but surely coming down.”

There are other plans on the table. The Caisse is underinvested in emerging markets and wants to increase that exposure. And it has people working on putting together infrastructure investment proposals to support the resource boom projected as part of Quebec’s $80-billion plan to develop its northern territories.

Companies pulling iron ore out of the ground to fuel production in China’s steel-making factories will need shelter for their employees, roads or railroads to get the resources out, and ports to ship it overseas. Funding for a couple of projects has been announced but the infrastructure needs vastly outweigh current supply.

Stoking economic development in Quebec is one of the Caisse’s mandates, something many observers consider a hindrance to the larger imperative of making profits for its depositors. And yet, there are many influential people who believe the Caisse still isn’t doing enough to fuel growth in the province.

It all amounts to a delicate political balancing act for Mr. Sabia, one made all the more complicated when the Caisse runs afoul of provincial language laws. Still, for all the pension manager’s missteps, it is difficult to imagine another Caisse CEO bearing down as hard to prove the naysayers wrong.

The Caisse is a machine whose overhaul is still in progress. It’s all about deepening the understanding of its investments. And Mr. Sabia has plenty more deepening to do.

“I have a pretty simple view of this, and maybe it is an outsider’s view,” Mr. Sabia concludes. “But the whole problem with the investment world is that it got way too preoccupied, way too convinced that as a sector it was the smartest guy in the room. Well, it didn’t turn out to be.”

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http://business.financialpost.com/2012/01/21/leverage-is-financial-steroids/

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Follow the money, then expose the misinformation

2012-01-21T16:14:00.001-05:00

National Post, January 20, 2012

By Peter Foster

Congressional Republican attempts to force U.S. President Barack Obama's hand on the Keystone XL pipeline produced the required result on Wednesday, at least from the GOP perspective. The President gave the project the thumbs-down, and Republicans instantly castigated Mr. Obama as a job destroyer. For his part, the President naturally made no mention of toadying to radical greens, and even claimed that he had nothing against the pipeline, which would create tens of thousands of jobs and is designed to take up to 900,000 barrels a day of diluted bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to the Gulf Coast. His rejection, rather, was due to Congress's "rushed and arbitrary deadline," which prevented the State Department from gathering material necessary to "protect the American people."

Such electoral manoeuvering has hardly done Keystone sponsor TransCanada - or the oil sands more generally - any favours. Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed "profound disappointment" at Wednesday's decision, and reportedly told Mr. Obama of Canada's determination to diversify export markets. This will be easier said than done. While emphasis is on aboriginal opposition to the Enbridge-sponsored Northern Gateway line to take oil sands oil to Asian markets via the West Coast, that opposition is significantly being funded and led by the same radical environmental groups that stalled Keystone XL, and will certainly attempt to stall, or kill, a modified application.

Responding to the Keystone XL decision Wednesday, and to the prospect of reapplication, Susan Casey-Lefkowitz of the heavy-hitting U.S.based National Resources Defense Council declared "TransCanada will face the same valid public concerns and fierce opposition as the first time. No matter how many times it is proposed, Keystone XL is not in the national interest." The previous evening, a stern-faced Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz had appeared on the CBC's The National to assert that the NRDC and its colleagues in B.C. were just getting started in fighting Northern Gateway.

Recent comments by Mr. Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver about the influence of foreign money and foreign radicals (such as the NRDC) in filibustering and hijacking the regulatory process for Northern Gateway have inevitably attracted outrage from those who believe themselves to be "well intentioned" rather than mere pawns of green socialism. The hard left has always used the well intentioned as human shields.

The response to the Conservative attack has congealed around a couple of arguments, which were dutifully trotted out by the unofficial CBC opposition during Peter Mansbridge's television interview with Mr. Harper Monday night, and Anna Maria Tremonti's radio grilling of Mr. Oliver Wednesday morning: "You don't think foreign money should be involved in opposing Northern Gateway? What about all the foreign money that's involved in promoting the oil sands? And didn't Canadians try to influence the U.S. political process in gaining approval for Keystone XL?"

This attempt to stir the ghosts of nationalism on both sides of the border misses the main difference between the opposing sides of this issue: Promoters of oil and gas development are in the business of creating jobs; radical environmentalists are in the business of destroying them. Moreover, the source of radical funding is less important than the fact that environmental groups have engaged in massive - and successful - campaigns of disinformation and often outright thuggery in pursuit of their anti-development goals.

Don't just follow the money - expose the hysterical misrepresentations and the tactics.

Nobody is arguing against a balanced and responsible approach to development. The problem is that the radicals in question have no interest in such an approach.

Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz and the NRDC have been prominent in influencing Canadian policy for many years. She has found herself with some strange bedfellows in her fight against Canadian development. She led NRDC support for U.S. corporate protectionists during the softwood lumber wrangle, apparently on the basis that anything that shut down Canadian forestry was good.

Although the NRDC was not a signatory to the 2010 Boreal Forest Agreement - under which a group of environmental NGOs led by the U.S.based Pew Foundation brought the Canadian industry to heel , Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz was prominent in the campaign of Boreal disinformation and Do-Not-Buy protests,.

She claimed the NRDC did not want to see "a global treasure like the boreal lost so that companies can make toilet paper from old-growth trees." However, the notion that the Canadian Boreal was being damaged, let alone decimated, was nonsense. Canadian logging standards are among the highest in the world. The Boreal is subject to exactly zero net deforestation. No species were under threat of extinction.

This column noted after the Boreal agreement that "Now that forestry has been subdued, with the apparent approval of Canadian politicians [Then Conservative Environment Minister Jim Prentice "welcomed" the deal], oil sands producers would do well to be a little more nervous."

Sure enough, after the Boreal job, the ENGOs were free to focus on closing down the oil sands. Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz featured prominently as a voice of U.S. concern in the CBC documentary Tipping Point, which regurgitated claims about poisoning Athabasca natives, although these claims had just been refuted by a report from the Royal Society of Canada.

Shortly afterward, a coalition led by the NRDC launched a report on Keystone, spearheaded by Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz, filled with hysterical prose and entirely fictitious figures on oil spills, which were subsequently refuted by Alberta's Energy Resources Conservation Board.

When misinformation fails (and in fact it has largely succeeded) there is always simple condemnation of oil companies and profits. After Mr. Oliver's recent open letter about foreign radical funding, Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz responded on her blog that "Multinational oil companies are making tar sands decisions about what brings them the most profit and the Canadian federal government seems to want the oil industry to continue making those decisions."

This claim is nonsense. Canada has a rigorous - indeed over-rigorous - environmental review process. What would be much more nonsensical would be that energy strategy, job creation and aboriginal policy should be dictated by activists such as Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz, wherever they come from, and however they are funded.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Follow+money+then+expose+misinformation/6024158/story.html

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In praise of older women

2012-01-18T19:56:00.001-05:00

Social engineering erodes our youthful, zestful years. –JGP

National Post, January 18, 2012

By George Jonas

I'm about 12, sitting in my room, leafing through an illustrated edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. The Italian classic tells risqué stories about the extramarital adventures of Florentine ladies during the plague years.

My father comes in with my prissy aunt. She's aghast when she sees what I'm reading. "Isn't the boy too young for that?" she demands, taking the volume from my hand.

My father retrieves the book and puts it back on my desk.

"You don't have to worry whether boys are too young to read about sex, my dear," he says to Aunt Prissy. "When they are, they don't. It bores them. When they're interested, they're not too young."

Four years later I'm in showbiz, a gofer, carrying a soubrette's wardrobe bags after rehearsal. On the way to her place we chat. I make no secret of finding her sexy - at 16, I wouldn't know how make it a secret. When we reach her door, I ask if I can come in.

She looks at me quizzically.

"Do you know how old I am?"

"Sixty? Seventy? I don't care."

"Don't be cheeky ... If you tried to make love to me, I'd die laughing," she says, not unkindly. "In 10 years time I'd probably give my eye-teeth for you to ask, but you won't. Too bad."

Did my long-ago soubrette do the right thing? In one sense, she certainly did. If she had invited me in, I probably wouldn't remember her.

Turning on the news, I see the Yanks are proposing to haul a woman into court for having decided the way I hoped my soubrette would decide. A Connecticut babysitter is alleged to have yielded to the temptation of sex with the 14-year-old boy in her charge.

Last year, apparently, a babysitter did the same thing in Idaho. Fancy that, the home state of the finest potatoes. Well, never in a thousand years...

Oh, father, put a lid on it. It's no joking matter. This is a different world.

The police say the babysitter sexually assaulted the boy after providing him with alcohol. This sounds sinister, but since minors cannot consent, and any sexual contact without consent is an "assault," translating the charge into English, chances are all that happened was a boy, 14, and a girl, 20, had sex after a drink or two.

When I propositioned my sexy soubrette, I was already a man of experience. So were many of my friends. The women who guided us through our rites of spring - family friends, kissing cousins, serving girls, prostitutes - were usually older. Was it traumatic for us? Hardly. It was part of growing up. Was it legal? In Europe, few things were. Who cared?

These days we do. "It is the way these laws are written to keep positions of authority from taking advantage of younger people," explains a spokesperson for the Clinton Police Department, sounding much like my prissy aunt. And a grey-fringed fellow identified as a family therapist on the television news says that "it's very difficult for a 14-year old boy to make decisions about sex and the decision shouldn't be imposed on him by someone who is significantly older."

Hmm - unless it's the state of Connecticut and its family therapist, I suppose. They seem to have no qualms about imposing their decisions on 14-year-old boys. They only object when 20-year-old babysitters do it.

Hush, Dad! I know it may not have been so difficult for you and me to make decisions about sex at 14, but times have changed and - oh, you wanted to say something else. You wanted to say that the Connecticut authorities are only Aunt Prissy writ large.

Well, I think they're a little more than that, Dad. The self-righteous prosecution of babysitters occurs at the confluence of three fashionable follies, two "liberal" and one "conservative."

The first liberal folly is mindless egalitarianism, insisting on treating men and women as if they were identical, which they aren't. Equal yes, identical no. It's a big difference.

The next liberal trend is the feminization of males as a matter of social policy. Among other things, it consists of pretending that male vulnerabilities in sexual matters are the same as female ones and require the same protection, which is nonsense.

As for the conservative folly, it's just a general neo-Victorian backlash, rebounding after the baboon-like permissiveness of the 1960s and 1970s. That's indeed Aunt Prissy's ghost hovering in the rafters, trying to resurrect whatever moral strictures it can, in a kind of pathetic attempt to close the barn door after the horse is gone.

I don't know what the evidence shows in Idaho or Connecticut, but the statutory nature of the offence may not permit courts to examine it. Did the boys solicit the encounters? Did they result in harm or benefit? Such questions may not be asked. My own memories of being a teenage boy, bolstered by such classical works of literary fiction as Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, suggest that sexual encounters between adult women and teenage boys are usually victimless - save such victims as our moralistic busybodies create.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/praise+older+women/6012057/story.html

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The flap over bird flu research

2012-01-17T21:44:00.001-05:00

"Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that."

National Post, January 16, 2012

By Joseph Brean

At a conference in Malta last fall, a virologist announced that by infecting a ferret with a mutated strain of bird flu, then infecting another ferret with nose swabs from the first, and repeating this 10 times, he created a strain of virus that could pass from ferret to ferret without the swab, simply through the air.

In effect, Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Holland had weaponized bird flu.

Provocative as it was, his experiment went largely unnoticed until last month, when the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Bio-security asked the world's leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, to withhold publication of key details of the methodology and results of Prof. Fouchier's experiment, and of related work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The request to censor science on national security grounds was unprecedented, and caused a global furore. The journals, which have not yet published the papers, signaled their agreement in principle, on the condition that the omitted details be made available to other responsible scientists.

But critics feared the precedent that was being set.

If these papers "are the first to be published with key details missing, they probably won't be the last," writes John Steinbruner, director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, in a catalogue of expert opinions published Sunday by Nature.

Prof. Fouchier himself, jointly with a colleague, argues the U.S. should not have a global veto on sensitive science, and writes that "we do question whether it is appropriate to have one country dominate a discussion that has an impact on scientists and public health officials worldwide.... An issue this big should not be decided by one country, but by all of us."

Yesterday, the World Health Organization announced that it will convene an international meeting on the question, seeking to bring "balance to the discussion to make sure that the technical and scientific and the political and the public health concerns are all brought together," Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment, told The Canadian Press.

"And I just very, very much want to make sure that we don't go off on one tangent or another, pulled by one loud voice saying, 'This is the issue,' when in fact there are several different issues."

Although it has a death rate of over 50%, bird flu was slow to catch on in the public imagination as the next big scare. H5N1, as it is known, emerged in 1996 at a goose farm in Guangdong province in China, and was reported the next year in Hong Kong, along with the first human cases. Reports of infected birds then came in from Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Indonesia by 2004, Turkey and Iraq by 2006, then Egypt. Human cases followed, nearly always from contact with birds, but occasionally through human-to-human contact. All told, there have now been 577 human cases world-wise, and 340 deaths.

As a respiratory disease you get from chickens, however, it seemed to lack the storybook feel of the gut-liquefying ebola virus, the proven bio-weaponry track record of anthrax and the historical resonance of Spanish Flu, which killed millions, although at a much lesser rate.

That is changing. An animal-based flu is the star of the latest Hollywood viropic, Contagion, in which a scientist tells a government crisis meeting: "Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that."

When a viral scourge as great as smallpox was eradicated in about 1980, it bolstered the seductive belief that when viruses go extinct they stay that way. But in 2002, the polio virus was synthesized from scratch, and a WHO expert panel recently predicted that smallpox could likewise be recreated in a lab for about $200,000.

Peter Palese, a microbiologist whose report on his recreation of the Spanish Flu virus was published in full in 2005, after a similar debate, wrote in Nature: "The more danger a pathogen poses, the more important it is to study it (under appropriate containment conditions), and to share the results with the scientific community. Slowing down the scientific enterprise will not 'protect' the public - it only makes us more vulnerable."

Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious disease at the University of Hong Kong, recalled the use of biological warfare by Japanese scientists with Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the Black Death, and endorsed the censorship because, "It would at least buy some time to find and stockpile the appropriate [medicine]."

Calling airborne H5N1 "an ultimate biological weapon unknown even in science fiction," D.A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity said "We should not publish a blueprint for constructing such an organism."

Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University said the bio-security regulatory level for bird flu should be increased, and prior approval required for all new research aimed at increasing a pathogen's "virulence, transmissibility or ability to evade countermeasures."

"Although adding and deleting genes can create super-strains that put the entire world at risk, such research also helps to develop public health tools such as vaccines and diagnostic tests," wrote David L. Heymann, head of the Centre on Global Health Security at Chatham House in London.

"Preventing this research would also prevent us from using all possible scientific options to prepare for naturally occurring - or deliberately caused - outbreaks."

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jbrean@nationalpost.com

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/flap+over+bird+research/6000971/story.html

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Financial watchdogs at “work”

2012-01-17T20:57:00.001-05:00

“And this is precisely where we find us. A monstrous crisis, threatening the whole Western World, that is caused by growing excessive bank exposures to what was officially ex-ante perceived as not risky, and growing bank underexposures to what is officially perceived as risky.”

(Re: Letter to FP Comment, National Post, Global financial watchdog toothless, John Greenwood, Jan. 13)

By Per Kurowski

Canada's former prime minister Paul Martin opines that the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and presumably the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision (BCBS) too, need a lot more resources.

So does Alan Alexandroff, a professor at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, who is quoted saying, "They need a lot more worker bees, there are very few actual permanent people - this has to be a real problem."

On the surface they are both right, but that assumes the FSB and BCBS know what they are doing. Which they don't.

The fundamental element of all bank regulations emanating from the Basel Committee is the capital requirements for banks based on perceived risk of default: The higher the perceived risk, the higher the capital and the lower the perceived risk, the lower the capital. Though it sounds so logical it is in fact what has created the current crisis - first by equating ex-ante perceived risk to ex-post real risk, and second and foremost, by given incentives to the banks to exaggerate the following of those perceptions.

By allowing the banks to hold extremely little capital when lending or investing in something officially perceived as not risky, like triple-A-rated securities and infallible sovereign, the regulators permit the banks to earn much more on their equity and therefore induce the banks to dangerously overcrowd the safe havens. And on the contrary, by requiring the banks to hold much more capital when lending to the officially perceived as risky, like the unrated small businesses and entrepreneurs, the regulators impede the banks from earning much on their equity and therefore hinder the exploration of the more risky but also prospectively more profitable bays.

One thing is for the banks rationally following the credit ratings and another, quite different, is for these to follow the signs the ratings emit, after having taken the hallucinogens ordered by the Basel Committee regulators.

And this is precisely where we find us. A monstrous crisis, threatening the whole Western World, that is caused by growing excessive bank exposures to what was officially ex-ante perceived as not risky, and growing bank underexposures to what is officially perceived as risky.

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Per Kurowski, a former executive director at the World Bank (2002-2004), Rockville, Md.

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/assume+bank+watchdogs+actually+know+what+they+doing/6006077/story.html

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Thatcher outshines the movie

2012-01-17T20:46:00.001-05:00

“Ms. Streep at times elicits real compassion in her role, but one can't help concluding that this movie was at best misconceived and, at worst, a hatchet job on one of the most significant political figures in the past 50 years.”

FP Comment, National Post, January 17, 2012

By Peter Foster

One wonders whether Meryl Streep's forgetting her spectacles on the way up to collect her Golden Globe on Sunday was deliberate: an attempt to counter the criticism that her presentation of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a pathetic, semi-demented crone in the Iron Lady was cruel and unusual portrayal. "Hey look, I'm a losing it too."

The conceit of Baroness Thatcher's remarkable life being told in a series of flashbacks during conversations with her dead husband, Denis (played by Jim Broadbent), looks an awful lot like revenge on a figure the lefty liberal arts community has not merely never understood, but actively hated. Ms. Streep's thanking the English for allowing her to come and "trample all over their history" was also telling.

It is suggested that Ms. Streep is now a shoo-in for the Best Actress Oscar. Best prosthetics, maybe. Her last Oscar was for playing Julia Childs. Ms. Streep couldn't help biting the hand that fed her there by suggesting Ms. Childs' cuisine caused heart disease and calling the celebrity chef "a pawn of big business." This from the woman who joked on Sunday that Harvey Weinstein was "God." She has admitted that she didn't agree with Mrs. Thatcher's politics, but then how could she even begin to understand them? Ms. Streep, we might remember, caused panic over a harmless chemical, Alar, and damaged the entire North American apple business. Mrs. Thatcher had a degree in chemistry from Oxford.

The Iron Lady clumsily covers all the bases, from Mrs. Thatcher's penetration of the appeasing Tories under Edward Heath, through her election as Prime Minister, the fear and outrage over her first budget, the miners' strike, the Brighton bombing, the Falklands War, the economic recovery and her final defeat over the poll tax. Screenwriter Abi Morgan and director Phyllida Lloyd claim they saw Mrs. Thatcher's life as a Shakespeare play, but the fact that they had in mind King Lear rather that Henry V suggests - with apologies to Julius Caesar - that they really did come to bury Mrs. Thatcher rather than praise her. The first British woman Prime Minister had very little in common with King Lear, except perhaps that her Tory colleagues ultimately took the role of Goneril and Regan. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless Cabinet.

The unkindest cut of all comes at the end of the movie when, having finally managed to pack up the old clothes of Denis - who has played a kind of phantasmagoric Fool throughout - the departing husband turns and says that she'll be all right on her own, "You always have been."

"I will not go mad," she says, echoing Lear. But she is not going mad, merely tragically senile, and this should certainly not be how she is remembered.

Ms. Streep at times elicits real compassion in her role, but one can't help concluding that this movie was at best misconceived and at worst a hatchet job on one of the most significant political figures in the past 50 years.

Anybody who wants to begin to understand Baroness Thatcher and the depth of both her convictions and her wisdom should read her two autobiographical volumes, The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power. Both are related with painstaking forthrightness and often dry humour. She came to power in 1979 determined to reverse the 30-year socialist "consensus" that, with scarcely a peep from her own party, had left Britain "sick man of Europe." She saw herself faced with three challenges: "long-term economic decline, the debilitating effects of socialism, and the growing Soviet threat." None of these challenges is clearly explained in the movie.

It was her staunch commitment to free-market principles, her unwillingness to bow to the public opinion polls, and her luck - if you can call it lucky to survive being blown up by the Irish Republican Army and have the Argentineans invade the Falklands - that enabled her to take on the unions, cut taxes, reduce regulation, privatize swathes of sinkhole nationalized industry and return Britain to a position of respect on the world stage.

The role of her father and Grantham mayor Alfred Roberts receives its full due in the movie, but only perhaps to make it look as if she has somehow been programmed young rather than having thought through the soundness of a set of principles. She believed that "It was the job of government to establish a framework of stability - whether constitutional stability, the rule of law, or the economic stability provided by sound money - within which individual families and businesses were free to pursue their own dreams and ambitions."

The measures she was forced to take by economic reality - not ideology - inevitably meant many plant closures and lost jobs, but her policies worked. In the 1980s, British productivity grew faster than in any other industrial economy. Some 3.3 million new jobs were created between March 1983 and March 1990.

Mrs. Thatcher opposed "naive internationalism" of the kind represented by the UN, as well as the regulatory absurdities and political ambitions she saw lurking within the European Community. If her wisdom is anywhere currently apparent, it is in her skepticism about the "European Ideal," which is now crumbling.

In the movie, however, her principles are portrayed as the tedious platitudes recalled by a demented old woman. This is not merely mediocre art and bad history, it is shameful.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Dementia+becomes/6006083/story.html

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Political Islam without oil

2012-01-17T20:13:00.001-05:00

New York Times, January 10, 2012

By Thomas L. Freidman

With the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the even more puritanical Salafist Al Nour Party having stunned both themselves and Egyptians by garnering more than 60 percent of the seats in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, we’re about to see a unique lab test for the Middle East: What happens when political Islam has to wrestle with modernity and globalization without oil?

Islamist movements have long dominated Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both the ayatollahs in Iran and the Wahhabi Salafists in Saudi Arabia, though, were able to have their ideology and the fruits of modernity, too, because they had vast oil wealth to buy off any contradictions. Saudi Arabia could underutilize its women and impose strict religious mores on its society, banks and schools. Iran’s clerics could snub the world, pursue nuclearization and impose heavy political and religious restrictions. And both could still offer their people improved living standards, because they had oil.

Egypt’s Islamist parties will not have that luxury. They will have to open up to the world, and they seem to be realizing that. Egypt is a net importer of oil. It also imports 40 percent of its food. And tourism constitutes one-tenth of its gross domestic product. With unemployment rampant and the Egyptian pound eroding, Egypt will probably need assistance from the International Monetary Fund, a major injection of foreign investment and a big upgrade in modern education to provide jobs for all those youths who organized last year’s rebellion. Egypt needs to be integrated with the world.

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose party is called Freedom and Justice, draws a lot of support from the middle classes and small businesses. The Salafist Al Nour Party is dominated by religious sheiks and the rural and urban poor.

Essam el-Erian, the vice chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, told me: “We hope that we can pull the Salafists — not that they pull us — and that both of us will be pulled by the people’s needs.” He made very clear that while both Freedom and Justice and Al Nour are Islamist parties, they are very different, and they may not join hands in power: “As a political group, they are newcomers, and I hope all can wait to discover the difference between Al Nour and Freedom and Justice.”

On the peace treaty with Israel, Erian said: “This is the commitment of the state — not any group or party — and we have said we are respecting the commitments of the Egyptian state from the past.” Ultimately, he added, relations with Israel will be determined by how it treats the Palestinians.

But generally speaking, he said, Egypt’s economic plight “is pushing us to be concerned about our own affairs.”

Muhammad Khairat el-Shater, the vice chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood and its economic guru, made clear to me over strawberry juice at his home that his organization intends to lean into the world. “It is no longer a matter of choice whether one can be with or against globalization,” he said. “It is a reality. From our perspective, we favor the widest possible engagement with globalization through win-win situations.”

Nader Bakkar, a spokesman for Al Nour, insisted that his party would move cautiously. “We are the guardians of Shariah,” he told me, referring to Islamic law, “and we want people to be with us on the same principles, but we have an open door to all the intellectuals in all fields.” He said his party’s economic model was Brazil. “We don’t like the theocratic model,” he added. “I can promise you that we will not be another dictatorship, and the Egyptian people will not give us a chance to be another dictatorship.”

In November, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an independent Salafist cleric and presidential candidate, was asked by an interviewer how, as president, he would react to a woman wearing a bikini on the beach? “She would be arrested,” he said.

The Al Nour Party quickly said he was not speaking for it. Agence France-Presse quoted another spokesman for Al Nour, Muhammad Nour, as also dismissing fears raised in the news media that the Salafists might ban alcohol, a staple of Egypt’s tourist hotels. “Maybe 20,000 out of 80 million Egyptians drink alcohol,” he said. “Forty million don’t have sanitary water. Do you think that, in Parliament, I’ll busy myself with people who don’t have water, or people who get drunk?”

What to make of all this? Egyptian Islamists have some big decisions. It has been easy to maintain a high degree of ideological purity all these years they’ve been out of power. But their sudden rise to the top of Egyptian politics coincides with the free fall of Egypt’s economy. And as soon as Parliament is seated on Jan. 23, Egypt’s Islamists will have the biggest responsibility for fixing that economy — without oil. (A similar drama is playing out in Tunisia.)

They don’t want to blow this chance to lead, yet they want to be true to their Islamic roots, yet they know their supporters elected them to deliver clean government, education and jobs, not mosques. It will be fascinating to watch them deal with these tugs and pulls. Where they come out will have a huge impact on the future of political Islam in this region.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/friedman-political-islam-without-oil.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=thomas%20l.%20friedman&st=cse

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The cost of enforced bilingualism

2012-01-17T20:02:00.001-05:00

“Fraser Institute: Federal and Provincial Bilingualism Requirements Cost Canadian Taxpayers $2.4 Billion Annually; Provinces Spend $900 Million to Provide Dual-Language Services”

MONTREAL, QUEBEC-(Marketwire - Jan. 16, 2012) - Canada's 10 provinces spend nearly $900 million annually providing bilingual government services. Including the $1.5 billion the federal government spends on bilingualism, Canadian taxpayers are footing an annual bill of $2.4 billion for bilingual services, a cost of $85 per Canadian.

This breakdown on the costs of bilingualism are contained in a new report, Official Language Policies of the Canadian Provinces: Costs and Benefits, released today by the Fraser Institute, Canada's leading policy research think-tank.

"The issue we examine in this study is not whether bilingualism is good or bad policy, but the costs above and beyond that of providing education and other services in the majority language," said François Vaillancourt, University of Montréal economics professor and co-author of the study.

"When provincial spending on bilingualism is combined with federal spending, we see a total cost of $2.4 billion to Canadian taxpayers."

The study concludes that provinces with large francophone populations and a substantial number of government services provided in French could offer those services at a lower cost by contracting them out to the private sector on a user-pay basis.

The study examines the costs and benefits of official language policies of the 10 provinces, including how much each province spends on providing services in French to a francophone minority. In Quebec's case, the report looked at the cost of providing services in English to the anglophone minority. The study is a follow-up to the 2009 report Official Language Policies at the Federal Level in Canada: Costs and Benefits in 2006.

Language rights for most provinces stem from the 1982 adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 23. However, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Quebec are either subject to supplementary constitutional requirements and/or have provincial legislation that provides additional language rights protection above Section 23 of the charter while Ontario has relevant provincial legislation.

Of the 10 provinces, Ontario and New Brunswick have large linguistic minorities (Francophones) while Quebec has a large anglophone minority. Francophone populations in the remaining seven provinces are all quite small.

Ontario spends $623 million annually - the most among all provinces - in providing services in French to its francophone minority. New Brunswick has the second largest budget for minority language services, $85 million, followed by Quebec at $50 million.

With large linguistic minorities and a substantial number of government services provided to these minorities in their native language, these three provinces could reduce the costs for taxpayers by making greater use of the private sector for translations.

Of the remaining provinces, Alberta spends $33 million on bilingual services ($534.70 per francophone), B.C. spends $23 million ($426.90 per francophone), Nova Scotia spends $18 million ($540.10 per francophone), Manitoba spends $16 million ($410.20 per francophone), Saskatchewan spends $9.65 million ($640.50 per francophone), Prince Edward Island spends $5.1 million ($946.20 per francophone), and Newfoundland and Labrador spends $3.4 million ($1780.30 per francophone).

In most provinces, a substantial portion of the money spent on bilingual services comes in the form of providing French-language education.

The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal and ties to a global network of 85 think-tanks. Its mission is to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government intervention on the welfare of individuals. To protect the Institute's independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research.

Visit www.fraserinstitute.org.

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http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/fraser-institute-federal-provincial-bilingualism-requirements-cost-canadian-taxpayers-1606825.htm

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Tools of a kind

2012-01-15T15:17:00.001-05:00

“Stone implements linked Africans and Arabians a surprisingly long time ago.”

Science News, January 14, 2012

By Bruce Bower

Culturally speaking, ancient East Africans were a stone’s throw away from southern Arabia.

Stone tools collected at several sites along a plateau in Oman, which date to roughly 106,000 years ago, match elongated cutting implements previously found at East African sites from around the same time, say archaeologist Jeffrey Rose of the University of Birmingham, England, and his colleagues. New finds also include cores — or rocks from which tools were pounded off with a hammer stone — that correspond to East African specimens, the researchers report online November 30 in PLoS ONE.

East African sites that have yielded these distinctive stone artefacts extend southward along the Nile River to the Horn of Africa.

“In the mountain of papers speculating about human dispersal out of Africa, a link between southern Arabia and the Nile Valley has never been considered,” Rose says.

Either Africans crossed the Red Sea and trekked into southern Arabia well before an African exodus around 60,000 years ago, or ancient people from Arabia influenced African tool-making, the scientists suggest.

“The finds in Oman are rather spectacular,” comments archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the University of Oxford, England. “They have a date that is earlier than similar African artefacts, which could imply a migration back to Africa, or at least a flow between African and Arabian populations.”
Although human fossils haven’t turned up at the Arabian location or at related African tool sites, Homo sapiens bones date to as early as 195,000 years ago in East Africa.

It’s unclear whether ancient Oman toolmakers continued eastward to South Asia or stayed put. Their distinctive tool-making style doesn’t appear at Indian sites dating to around 74,000 years ago, Petraglia says.

Rose sees similarities between the Oman tools and 50,000-year-old stone implements previously excavated in and around modern-day Israel. He speculates that plentiful rainfall between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago made inner parts of Arabia habitable and enabled people in southern Arabia to spread northward and influence tool-making techniques.

The new discoveries in Oman add to evidence that people reached Arabia’s east coast as early as 125,000 years ago (SN: 2/26/11, p. 5) and a northern inland area by 75,000 years ago.

At least two culturally distinct human groups inhabited Stone Age Arabia, Rose suspects: one in the south and another in the north and east. Intriguingly, DNA studies indicate that people interbred with Neandertals soon after leaving Africa (SN: 6/5/10, p. 5). An ice age between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago may have driven people and Neandertals into parts of Arabia that still had water sources, where interbreeding probably occurred, Rose hypothesizes.

The stone tools found at Oman, and those found at Arabia’s two other early H. sapiens sites, display few similarities, in Petraglia’s view. “This must mean that the story of migration and survival, and out-of-Africa dispersals, is much more complex than we have imagined,” he says.

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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336833/title/Tools_of_a_kind

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Quebec Anglos live significantly longer than Francophone majority: study

2012-01-14T15:54:00.001-05:00

National Post, January 11, 2012

By Tom Blackwell

For years, scientists have tended to avoid the “touchy” issues of differences in the well-being of Quebec’s Anglophone minority versus its Francophone majority. But a group of University of Montreal researchers has tackled the linguistic health divide — and discovered that English-speaking Quebecers live significantly longer than their French compatriots.

Higher rates of smoking and related lung-cancer deaths, as well as different drinking patterns among Francophones, seem to explain much of the difference, researchers concluded in the study, just published in the European Journal of Epidemiology.

Lead author Dr. Nathalie Auger said scientists have rarely investigated any aspect of health inequality between Quebec’s linguistic solitudes, possibly because “it’s been a touchy subject.” She argued, however, that the comparison is important.

“Language is just a bunch of words; (but) there’s something that comes with the culture around that language that we’re trying to capture,” said Dr. Auger, a physician and epidemiologist at the university’s National Institute of Public Health. “There’s something in the community’s environment, in the individual’s environment, that shortens their life.”

Lab mice: The tiny footprints behind 100 years of medical discovery

2012-01-14T15:39:00.001-05:00

“Researchers have been … probing, tweaking, and testing mice for 100 years. The mice engineered by researchers now have much in common with those researchers - sharing blood, livers, and brain tissue.”

National Post, January 14, 2012

By Tristin Hopper

Last week, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh announced they had unlocked a rodent fountain of youth.

The university is host to a colony of progeria mice, mice infected with a rare disease that leads them to die of old age after only three weeks. But when researchers took progeria mice standing on death’s door and injected them with stem cells from their younger, healthier cousins, the dying mice immediately rebounded and lived another two to four weeks.

“We could basically triple their size and their lifespan in some cases,” said lead researcher Dr. Laura Niedernhofer.

Researchers have been thusly probing, tweaking and testing mice for 100 years. The mice engineered by researchers now have much in common with those researchers, sharing blood, livers, even brain tissue. Those Pittsburgh progeria mice are still too much unlike us to expect that a cure for human old age is just around the corner, or even inevitable. But the rodents have been remade, through decades of genetics and breeding, to be more human than ever. And as the difference between man and mouse narrows, we not only know more about the tiny, good-natured rodents than almost any other creature on the planet — we need them more than ever.

A mouse was the first to be vaccinated against cancer. Mice already have a cure for baldness and a pill to stave off Alzheimer’s. Mice remain the only animals to have experienced hover board-style levitation and have their brain simulated in a computer — and they were the first non-human mammals to have their genome mapped. From the moment in 1902 when researcher William Castle first carried a cage of pet mice into his Harvard genetics laboratory, the rodents have been behind almost every major drug, treatment and medical procedure of the 20th century. “Of all the major drugs in the market now, almost all of them have mouse models that made an impact on developing that drug,” said Dr. Janet Rossant, chief of research and senior scientist at Toronto’s Sick Kids Research Institute.

Quebec anglos live significantly longer than francophone majority: study

Like humans, mice have skeletons, immune systems, nervous systems and circulatory systems. And just like humans, mice can get cancer, suffer from heart problems and develop diabetes. With a little bit of tweaking, they can even be afflicted with cystic fibrosis and Alzheimer’s. They are cheap, easy to maintain, and since mice start breeding only 12 weeks after birth, researchers can study multiple generations within the course of a single semester.

The real value of mice, though, is their sheer variety. “Almost any disease you have read about, there is probably a mouse model that is used to simulate or describe it,” said Dr. Michele Martin, veterinary director at the University of Victoria.

Founded in 1929 by lab mouse pioneer C.C. Little, Jackson Laboratory is the world’s leading supplier of genetically defined lab mice. Nestled in the small New England town of Bar Harbor, Me., the massive facility hosts more than 5,000 distinct strains of mice. The company’s most recent catalogue features mice predisposed to overeat themselves into morbid obesity. Mice that can be sent into seizures by loud noises. A two-tone mouse that exhibits signs of autism. Or, for about $30 apiece, researchers can pick up the classic “dilute brown,” the oldest in the catalogue, dating back to 1909.

At first, geneticists “invented” new mice by mimicking the way dog breeders had turned wolves into Chihuahuas; through selective inbreeding. Horizons widened in the 1980s with the advent of genetic engineering: scientists were finally able to tweak genes and build custom-made mice.

Then, in 2002 came the holy grail, with the rodents becoming the first non-human animals to have their genome mapped. With 99% of their genes shared with humans, the floodgates were opened to a whole new world of genetic testing and understanding. As Boston geneticist Eric Lander said in 2002, humans were now able to see themselves in an “evolutionary mirror.”

The 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes (“I think therefore I am”) believed that animals were incapable of feeling pain — and thus had no qualms with strapping dogs to boards and dissecting them without anaesthetic, a practice known as vivisection, just to see how they worked. Descartes’ penchant for vivisection caught on, and soon the live dismemberment of stray dogs became a regular hobby of Enlightenment-era thinkers.

These days, at every modern Canadian university and research institution, the use of animals is approved and governed by an animal welfare committee comprising veterinarians, university officials, students and members of the community.

Generally, the committees follow three main tenets: Minimizing the number of animals needed for an experiment, replacing animal testing with alternatives when feasible and keeping lab animals as free from pain and distress as possible. “On behalf of the Canadian public, they’re really weighing the cost to the animals versus the benefits of that research,” said Dr. Gilly Griffin, guidelines director for the Canadian Council on Animal Care, the organization governing the use of animals in science.

Unlike their 1960s and 1970s predecessors, mice are no longer kept in wire-bottom cages, and are mostly housed collectively in large cages with bedding and places to nest. It makes for happier lab mice — but also better science. “You need to have a normal animal in order to get the best research data,” Dr. Griffin said.

Still, the annual sacrifice made by mice to science remains substantial. Between 2000 and 2009, 10 million mice were euthanized in Canadian laboratory experiments — equal to 3,000 mice per day.

In Japan, Korea and China, many universities hold an annual memorial service to pay homage to animals killed in research experiments. “It is with a certain level of discomfort that a human being inflicts suffering on another living thing, let alone ending its life,” reads a 2001 paper by University of Washington medical students John Lynch and Bill Slaughter. These ceremonies allow the research community to ponder its “indebtedness” to lab animals, they wrote.

Almost every pill bottle in every pharmacy has the imprint of thousands of mice.

Penicillin was first discovered in 1929, but it was not until a 1940 Oxford University study on mice that researchers finally understood its significance. Both the meningitis and polio vaccines are owed largely to lab mice.

The system is not perfect, however. Cancer has been cured dozens of time in mice, but the findings are often hard to translate smoothly into humans. Thalidomide, the disastrous drug that caused severe birth defects in an estimated 10,000 children, had no ill effects on mice. ALS, the degenerative disease that afflicts theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, already has a rodent-based therapy — but the 70-year-old scientist will likely never live to see it tested on humans.

“I’m a mouse geneticist and I’m the first to say that we’re not going to be able to do everything in mice,” Dr. Rossant said. But mice are a “very, very powerful system” to understand the “pathways” of disease.

In 2006 researchers at the University of Texas went public with a scientific breakthrough: They had constructed a mouse with a “humanized” immune system. It had not been easy. First, researchers had engineered a colony of mice born without immune systems. Then, they had injected the mice with human stem cells and fragments of human liver and thymus glands. For the first time in history, announced lead researcher Dr. J. Victor Garcia-Martinez, lab mice could be infected with AIDS.

Hepatitis C researchers employ mice outfitted with tiny human livers. Dr. John E. Dick at the Toronto General Research Network is widely celebrated for creating a mouse able to produce human blood — and develop human leukemia. In 2005, researchers in California created a mouse whose skull contained small amounts of functioning human brain cells.

With laboratories newly packed with humanized mice, scientists are forecasting “phenomenal” progress in everything from cancer to HIV/AIDS to diabetes.

In 100 years of mouse research, the goal all along has been to transform a fuzzy, wild rodent into something resembling a tiny human being. They now have human organs, human blood, human immune systems and they embody all our worst traits: alcoholism, violence, drug addiction and gluttony.

Last month, the U.S.-based National Institute of Health cut funding to all new research on chimpanzees — a move many saw as a critical first step to complete abolition of chimpanzee research, a practice that has been mirrored in every other country around the world save Gabon. The reason? Chimps were just too human to justify experimentation.

Meanwhile, coming in to pinch hit, is the mouse. Their value to humans is their growing similarity to humans, at least in the versions we have constructed. Which are not that much like mice at all.

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http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/14/lab-mice-the-tiny-footprints-behind-100-years-of-medical-discovery/

{Tristin Hopper is an award-winning reporter working for the National and Toronto desk of the National Post

Originally from Victoria, BC, the first years of Tristin's journalism career were spent in Whitehorse, where he was a reporter for the Yukon News and later an associate editor for Up Here and Up Here Business magazine.

In between, he has made his living as a freelancer, with his writing appearing everywhere from Reader's Digest to the in-flight magazine of a B.C. helicopter airline.

Tristin has caught cargo planes into distant Yukon mining camps, canoed to offshore B.C. lighthouses and discussed politics with Ron Jeremy.}

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Fish out of water

2012-01-14T14:38:00.001-05:00

Robert Fulford discusses a new book about the couple currently occupying the White House.

National Post, January 14, 2012

By Robert Fulford

The reaction to Jodi Kantor's new book, The Obamas, illustrates the hyper-sensitive atmosphere of the White House during this painful period. A reporter in Washington for The New York Times, Kantor clearly admires the Obamas. Her book overflows with sympathy for them. Yet they treat her as an enemy.

The President's press secretary dismissed the extensive reporting in The Obamas as "little more than the author's own thoughts." Michelle Obama, on CBS This Morning, declared that the report of her conflicts with White House staff is unfounded and that Kantor portrays her as "some angry black woman."

She admitted she hadn't read the book. She sounded unpleasantly like a movie star who expects to control everything said about her image and manages to get upset whenever that assumption proves incorrect, as it often does.

Kantor's book turns out to be much more than the gossip collection some consider it (The Daily Beast called it a "White House Tell-All"). Those who deign to read it will find that Kantor substantially enlarges our understanding of the President.

Studying the Obama marriage, she draws a credible picture of how Michelle and Barack work together and influence each other. That leads her to an enlightening account of his attitudes, his unlikely presidency and the troubles at its core.

Michelle often says “Barack is not a politician; he's better than that”.

Of course, he's a politician, as how could he not be; but among politicians, he's an extremely odd case.

For instance, he doesn't much like Congress. He possibly likes the idea but certainly not the reality. Kantor describes a moment during his brief career in the Senate when he sat listening to a senator droning through a tiresome speech. He passed a note to a colleague: "Shoot. Me. Now." The speaker was Senator Joe Biden, then already a famous gasbag and later the Obama choice as vice-president, perhaps picked as the best of a bad lot.

The Obamas rarely hide their low opinion of Congress, and make little effort to flatter its members by socializing with them. Kantor describes a Super Bowl party when Obama agreed to invite some members of the House. They naturally expected the usual political stroking. Instead, Obama ignored them and watched the TV set. He thought the purpose of the evening was the game.

Yet he later expected Congress to support his legislative program because it was, he believed, the right thing to do. He comes across as blithely innocent, in the sense of guileless, naive, unworldly. He didn't quite grasp that he needed political friends. In the same way, he believed he could declare commentary on his wife out of bounds - and that journalists would obey his wishes, rather than ignore them, as they had with the Reagans, Clintons, etc.

Each of the last seven presidents elected before Obama brought with them serious experience in managing the political system. All of them had been governors or vice-presidents, so they knew about the intense horse-trading that precedes every political accomplishment in the United States.

Earlier presidents also had experience of executive mansions, either as frequent visitors or residents in the official homes of governors. The Obamas, with no such experience, found life in the White House a series of unpleasant surprises. Even Michelle, who had seriously considered staying behind in Chicago with the girls, had no idea how enclosed she would be, how much a prisoner of schedules and rules. Kantor makes it clear that the Obamas experienced their introduction to their new home as a nightmare.

His predecessors had also been forced to learn about their own inadequacies, in a way that Obama had not. He was warned, when choosing his staff, that he was encouraging turmoil among the economic advisors by appointing experts unlikely to get along. He replied that he could lead them past their grievances through gentle mediation, one of many times when he overrated his own abilities.

In office, Michelle thought cabinet officers and others should do more of the jobs, such as speeches, that were falling to the over-worked president. Kantor explains the problem: Obama took those assignments because he believed he could do them better than anyone else. Soon he was speaking so often that it was hard to remember, a day later, what he had said.

Knowing what Kantor tells us, we can no longer wonder why Washington has so disappointed Obama and Obama has so disappointed his supporters. Given his way of thinking, it would have been astonishing if things had turned out any other way.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Fish+water/5995785/story.html

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Falling into the pit they have made

2012-01-14T14:15:00.001-05:00

National Post, January 14, 2012

By David Frum

Nearly three thousand years ago, the author of the Biblical Psalms delivered a useful warning to people considering employment in the Iranian nuclear bomb program:

Whoever digs a hole and scoops it out, falls into the pit they have made.

The trouble they cause recoils on them; their violence comes down on their own heads.

Or, as Eli Lake reports in the Daily Beast on Friday:

"All told, five Iranian scientists or engineers affiliated with the nuclear program have been killed since 2007, the latest being Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who Iran's semi-official Fars news agency says was responsible for procurement at the Natanz enrichment facility. A sixth, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived an assassination attempt in 2010 and is now the head of Iran's atomic energy agency. William Tobey, a former deputy administrator of the [U.S.] National Nuclear Security Administration and a National Security Council specialist on nuclear issues, said five of the six attacks on the scientists since 2007 used magnetic limpet bombs that would be attached to a vehicle carrying the target."

The Iranian nuclear bomb program has faced other challenges, too. Its computers have been sabotaged by viruses that have accelerated its centrifuges, spoiling the nuclear fuel and wrecking the machinery. Last year, three Iranian weapons facilities were hit by huge explosions. One explosion, on Nov. 12 at a missile-testing base west of Teheran, was felt 45 kilometres away, killing at least a dozen people including (by some reports) members of a visiting North Korean delegation. Another huge blast was reported at the end of the month in Isfahan, site of an important nuclear fuel production facility. On Dec. 11, an explosion ripped through a steel works that produces the special metals required to build nuclear centrifuges - of which Iran needs a great many to replace those ruined by computer viruses.

Reeling from these damaging and humiliating events, Iran has responded with louder and cruder threats, including a threat to close the Straits of Hormuz. But the threats only recoil upon Iran, by discouraging purchases of Iran's only important product: oil.

Japan, Iran's third-most important customer after China and India, has cuts its purchases from Iran by 40% over the past five years. On Thursday, the Japanese government promised visiting U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that it would cut purchases by 10% more. The Europeans - who buy 450,000 barrels a day from Iran, about 20% of Iranian production - also are redirecting their trade. South Korea likewise has promised to reduce its Iranian imports.

These promises gain credibility as Libyan oil returns to market and Iraqi oil production soars to three million barrels a day, the highest production rate since before the first Gulf War. Even without Iran's oil, there will be enough to go around.

Even more threatening to Iran are the newest sanctions enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by Barack Obama at the beginning of the year. Aimed at "collapsing the central bank of Iran," these sanctions will effectively isolate Iran from the global payments system. Iran's oil customers will have little choice except to pay by barter.

The Iranian currency is collapsing under these negative shocks, down another 20% since the beginning of the year. A huge gap has opened between the official exchange rate and the market rate, now about 17,000 rials to the dollar. Consumer prices are estimated to be rising at a rate of 40% per year. The regime has curtailed subsidies for food and fuel, pushing up the price of electricity, gasoline and rice.

The Iranian government has revealed its anxieties by tightening its repression. Reuters reported on Jan. 10 that Iranians, long accustomed to controls over electronic communications, have been unable to send text messages containing words such as "dollar" and "foreign currency."

For years, people have wondered whether Israel or the United States would bomb Iran. That turns out to be the wrong question. Iran is being squeezed without war - and this fearful story of nuclear aggression and would-be genocide may yet have a happy ending.

©David Frum

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Falling+into+they+have+made/5995773/story.html

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Why Romanow is wrong on Health Care

2012-01-14T14:03:00.001-05:00

Letter to the Editor, National Post, January 14, 2021

From Dr. Brian Day, Vancouver

Re: Roy Romanow's One-Note Tune, editorial, Jan. 10.

Your editorial fails to appreciate Roy Romanow's personal reasons for promoting federal control over provincial health care. While you correctly state that federal interference in the provincial domain of health-care delivery is unconstitutional, there is a valid explanation for Mr. Romanow's position.

When he was NDP premier of Saskatchewan, he presided over the worst-performing provincial health system in Canadian history. Many hospitals were closed, waiting lists grew massively and patients suffered. It is reasonable therefore for him to believe that the federal government could do better.

In a CBC interview, I asked Mr. Romanow a direct question: "In a free and democratic society, in which citizens can legally spend their money on tobacco, alcohol, gambling and even pornography, what is wrong with the freedom to spend one’s own after tax dollars on the health care of our self or our loved ones?" He fudged, obfuscated and mumbled, then changed the subject and refused to answer.

It is often stated that Canada shares with North Korea and Cuba the existence and enforcement of laws that restrict our right to choice in health care. This statement is false - we are the only country on Earth that has such laws. Our health system is therefore, as supporters of the status quo point out, a truly distinct and defining feature of our Canadian identity. We are indebted to Mr. Romanow, and indeed to politicians and governments across the country, for this unique status.

Dr. Brian Day, Vancouver.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Romanow+note+tune/5970735/story.html---<RWR>---

Ron Paul’s achievement

2012-01-13T22:17:00.001-05:00

“There are two stories coming out of New Hampshire. The big story is Mitt Romney. The bigger one is Ron Paul.”

Washington Post, January 12, 2012

By Charles Krauthammer

Romney won a major victory with nearly 40 percent of the vote, 16 points ahead of No. 2. The split among his challengers made the outcome even more decisive. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were diminished by distant, lower-tier finishes. Rick Perry got less than 1 percent. And Jon Huntsman, who staked everything on New Hampshire, came in a weak third with less than half of Romney’s vote. He practically moved to the state — and then received exactly one-sixth of the vote in a six-man contest. Where does he go from here?

But the bigger winner was Ron Paul. He got 21 percent in Iowa, 23 in New Hampshire, the only candidate other than Romney to do well with two very different electorates, one more evangelical and socially conservative, the other more moderate and fiscally conservative.

Paul commands a strong, energetic, highly committed following. And he is unlike any of the other candidates. They’re out to win. He admits he doesn’t see himself in the Oval Office. They’re one-time self-contained enterprises aiming for the White House. Paul is out there to build a movement that will long outlive this campaign.

Paul is less a candidate than a “cause,” to cite his election-night New Hampshire speech. Which is why that speech was the only one by a losing candidate that was sincerely, almost giddily joyous. The other candidates had to pretend they were happy with their results.

Paul was genuinely delighted with his, because, after a quarter-century in the wilderness, he’s within reach of putting his cherished cause on the map. Libertarianism will have gone from the fringes — those hopeless, pathetic third-party runs — to a position of prominence in a major party.

Look at him now. He’s getting prime-time air, interviews everywhere and, most important, respect for defeating every Republican candidate but one. His goal is to make himself leader of the opposition — within the Republican Party.

He is Jesse Jackson of the 1980s, who represented a solid, African American, liberal-activist constituency to which, he insisted, attention had to be paid by the Democratic Party. Or Pat Buchanan (briefly) in 1992, who demanded — and gained — on behalf of social conservatives a significant role at a convention that was supposed to be a simple coronation of the moderate George H.W. Bush.

No one remembers Bush’s 1992 acceptance speech. Everyone remembers Buchanan’s fiery and disastrous culture-war address.

At the Democratic conventions, Jackson’s platform demands and speeches drew massive attention, often overshadowing his party’s blander nominees.

Paul won’t quit before the Republican convention in Tampa. He probably will not do well in South Carolina or Florida, but with volunteers even in the more neglected caucus states, he will be relentlessly collecting delegates until Tampa. His goal is to have the second-most delegates, a position of leverage from which to influence the platform and demand a prime-time speaking slot — before deigning to support the nominee at the end. The early days of the convention, otherwise devoid of drama, could very well be all about Paul.

The Democratic convention will be a tightly scripted TV extravaganza extolling the Prince and his wise and kindly rule. The Republican convention could conceivably feature a major address by Paul calling for the abolition of the Fed, FEMA and the CIA; American withdrawal from everywhere; acquiescence to the Iranian bomb — and perhaps even Paul’s opposition to a border fence lest it be used to keep Americans in. Not exactly the steady, measured, reassuring message a Republican convention might wish to convey. For libertarianism, however, it would be a historic moment: mainstream recognition at last.

Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.

Paul is 76. He knows he’ll never enter the promised land. But he’s clearing the path for son Rand, his better placed (Senate vs. House), more moderate, more articulate successor.

And it matters not whether you find amusement in libertarians practicing dynastic succession. What Paul has already wrought is a signal achievement, the biggest story yet of this presidential campaign.

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letters@charleskrauthammer.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ron-pauls-achievement/2012/01/12/gIQABS7duP_story.html

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Tehran’s South American cheerleaders

2012-01-13T22:03:00.001-05:00

National Post, Editorial, January 13, 2012

Amid growing global concern about Iran's nuclear program and sabre-rattling, the ayatollahs are running out of friends: Even China is getting finicky about buying Iranian oil.

Yet there are still a few foreign capitals where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is treated as an honoured visitor. This week, Mr. Ahmadinejad has been on tour in South America, where his destinations have included Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ecuador.

The first three are obvious choices for the Iranian president. Cuba is an isolated dictatorship - just like Iran. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is an outspoken critic of Israel. And Venezuela is led by a crackpot Marxist and 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Hugo Chavez, who thinks the United States might have used some new form of "technology" to give him cancer.

But Ecuador? It's not a country that most of us would lump in with the rogue nations of the world. In fact, it's not a country that most Canadians think about at all. Perhaps that should change, what with the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister (literally) rolling out a red carpet on Thursday for the President of the most dangerous and virulently anti-Western nation on the planet.

And this isn't the first time. Ecuadorian leader Rafael Correa and members of his administration have made numerous trips to Tehran in recent years, and recently have spoken out in defence of Tehran's right to develop a nuclear program.

Ecuador also seems to be moving toward a recognizably Iranian approach to dissent - a subject of special concern to journalists such as ourselves. In 2008, following court proceedings against a failed financial institution, Ecuador's government took over a trio of television stations; in all cases, the news directors were replaced with government-appointed representatives. In 2010, a newspaper columnist was sent to jail after he wrote a column about a prominent government financial official. And in the spring of 2011, Mr. Correa advanced plans to set up a new media-regulation law that would permit the government to go after "ink assassins" - his preferred term for unfriendly journalists.

But perhaps the most frightening threat to free speech in Ecuador involves the case of Emilio Palacio, editorial page editor for one of the country's most respected newspapers, El Universo. On Feb. 6, 2011, he wrote a scathing op-ed titled "No to lies," attacking the behaviour exhibited by President Correa (whom Mr. Palacio described in his piece as "the dictator") during and after a bizarre confrontation between police and soldiers in September, 2010. The President responded by filing a criminal libel complaint against Mr. Palacio, the newspaper's directors and its parent company.

Last July, a judge decided the case in the President's favour, ordering the defendants to pay US$40-million to Mr. Correa, and sentencing Mr. Palacio (who later fled to the United States) and his bosses to three years in jail. Since then, the defendants' appeals have been moving through Ecuador's higher courts. Today marks yet another court appearance for El Universo lawyers, this time before the National Court of Justice.

One aspect of the case that should be of special interest to Ecuador's appellate judges is the mere 33 hours that it apparently took for the lower court to produce the original 156-page July 20, 2011, ruling in favour of the President. Indeed, a subsequent forensic investigation of the judge's computer found support for the theory that the judgment had been pre-written on another computer by a third party - many believe that the author was the President's own attorney - and transferred onto the judge's machine with a memory stick.

There is a larger narrative here, and one that goes beyond Ecuador's borders. The fight against tyranny in Latin America used to be a balanced affair: Outrages were committed against the continent's citizens by dictators on both sides of the political spectrum. But increasingly, the forces of dictatorship are being monopolized by the same socialists who constitute Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Spanish-language cheering section.

On paper, Islamists and Marxists seek very different kinds of utopias. In practice, they both drive their societies toward many of the same policies - including anti-Americanism, Israel-bashing and censorship. Like Iran, Ecuador will likely be a more free country when its current regime is tossed out of power. Until then, the least we can do is recognize the plight of its victims, including Emilio Palacio.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Tehran+South+American+cheerleaders/5989274/story.html

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A Swiss Miss

2012-01-13T21:33:00.001-05:00

FP Comment, National Post, January 13, 2012

By Peter Foster

This has been a bad week for the Swiss national brand. First, there was the radical disconnect between the global regulatory aspirations of Philipp Hildebrand - defenestrated governor of the Swiss National Bank and vice-chairman of the macro-prudentially panoptic Financial Stability Board - and his inability to oversee his judgment-challenged wife.

Compared, however, with another Swiss-based institution, the World Economic Forum, the FSB looks to have dreams of control no more megalomaniacal than those of a peewee-hockey linesman. The WEF, whose annual Davos networkfest is due to start in two weeks, is a fount of monstrous pretension hiding behind Orwellian globaldegook, a nest of Malthusian global governors who appear incapable of being embarrassed by their failures.

Nevertheless, if there is one art at which the forum excels, it is apocalyptic fretting. Its latest report, Global Risks 2012, is beyond parody as a compendium of worry. The study was developed to "map, measure, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks." Full marks for alliteration, but its analysis and recommendations are despicable, deplorable and doorknob dumb.

The WEF has always been a promoter of the European social democratic model that now lies in tatters; a champion of catastrophic man-made climate change, which has now disappeared from the policy agenda; a perpetual bleater about resource depletion even as the oil industry is developing shale gas and oil that promise a centuries-long hydrocarbon bonanza. Although the NGO storm troopers that the WEF has perpetually cheered on secured a major victory last year over the Keystone XL pipeline, and are set to try to talk the Northern Gateway proposal to death, these examples of WEF-style "success" prove that the institution is much better at destroying jobs than creating them.

The WEF is ruled by a kind of North Korean mindset where everything should be centrally co-ordinated on behalf of The People by puppet masters such as WEF head Klaus Schwab. In the past decade or so, Kim Jung Schwab has lost a bundle of WEF cash on high-tech stocks, been implicated in conflicts of interest, lost a boatload of disgruntled staff, and witnessed his hand-picked successor caught up in a bribery scandal. As with all fixated master regulators, however, none of this seems to lead him to doubt his expansive visions for global control, even though its plausibility ranks with that 11 holes-in-one the Dear Leader pulled off during his single round of golf.

Global Risks 2012 projects a "dystopian future for much of humanity." Worse, aspirations for beneficent global governance are under threat. "Our safeguards may no longer be fit to manage vital resources and ensure orderly markets and public safety," it warns.

Risk analysis is a fundamental of human behaviour. However, specific risks are best dealt with in specific contexts. The WEF is unembarrassed to attempt to bring labour market imbalances, geophysical destruction, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, mismanaged urbanization, religious fanaticism, chronic disease, intellectual property, orbital debris, and dozens of other issues into one gigantic, unwieldy utilitarian calculus.

According to the one-way mindset of the WEF, this proliferation of problems justifies and necessitates ever more ambitious globally co-ordinated schemes, embracing more and more political input (as long as it is 100% WEF-compliant), to address them all at once. Just imagine the Northern Gateway inquiry, only with the hearings being about every issue on earth, and everybody gets a turn at the mic.

And how will they manage everything? Rather like getting four elephants into a mini car, only instead of idiot logic, use positive adjectives. Squeeze two in the front and two in the back in a "more agile and cohesive way."

As for the woeful specifics, in 2011 the top brow-wrinkler was "meteorological catastrophe." This year it is "severe income disparity," which makes it look as if WEF surveys are being designed by the young folks who were squatting in Zucotti Park. In what way is severe income disparity a risk, and to whom?

The report's charts and graphs represent a forensic treasure house of bad ideas. "Unforeseen negative consequences of regulations" is seen as a relatively unimportant area of risk when in fact it looms like a Frankenstein monster over the global economy. Failure of global governance is not regarded as a major risk factor (because thankfully we don't have too much of it), but since it is crucial to the WEF's pretensions it is installed in the midst of a mystic looking chart - part Jungian mandala, part cat's cradle string game for a thousand hands - which elaborates fantastic webs of connection and potential control.

In his mushy intro, filled with the usual pseudo-academic flapdoodle, Mr. Schwab suggests that "Underlying all these risks are velocity, multiplicity, and interconnectivity - creating a global system where mastering complexities will be the foremost challenge." This complexity, he claims, "threatens to overwhelm countries, companies, cultures and communities."

But only if you are fatally conceited enough to imagine that you can, and must, manage everything. Meanwhile, we might note that entirely absent from the list of civil and political rights being demanded by Arab Springers is the notion that their activities be overseen by consultants holed up in the Swiss mountains.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Another+Swiss+miss/5989358/story.html

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Tower Bridge under construction–1890s

2012-01-13T21:15:00.001-05:00

(From Eleanor)

Stripped down as you've never seen her: Pictures of Tower Bridge during construction found dumped in a skip.

This is one of the London's most beloved landmarks as you've never seen her before.

Stripped down to her underwear, the never-before seen pictures of Tower Bridge - one of the world's most recognisable structures - have been unveiled after the stash of hundred-year-old prints were found in a skip.

Coinciding with the 125th anniversary of the bridge's foundation, the 50 sepia photos reveal in incredible detail the ingenuity behind one of the capital's most popular tourist destinations, which was the first bridge of its kind in the world.

Never seen before: The pictures of London's Tower Bridge were found in a skip and then wrapped up in brown paper and put in a carrier bag under a bed

The unique pictures, dating back to 1892, document the construction the iconic bridge, which at the time was a landmark feat of engineering nicknamed ‘The Wonder Bridge’.

The discarded pictures, which were retrieved by a caretaker who was looking after a building being turned into flats in 2006, have spent the last five years in a carrier bag underneath his bed.

The 59-year-old, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that after the occupants of the Westminster office building moved out, the album and a number of documents were thrown into a skip outside.

He said: ‘I took the ledgers to the Tower Bridge Museum because I thought they might have some historical value.

Remarkable find: The prints reveal in incredible detail the ingenuity behind one of the capital's most popular tourist attractions and how it was put together.

A view of the bridge: The sturdy steel frame of Tower Bridge can be seen, before it was covered with its distinctive stone-cladding on the orders of architect John Wolfe-Barry.

‘They included records of the materials and used in the bridge's construction and what they cost.

‘I told the man at the museum that I had also found some photos but he told me they already had plenty of those.

‘I didn't know what to do with them so I wrapped them in some brown paper and put them in a bag under the bed.’ It wasn't until earlier this month, when the owner of the photos mentioned them to his neighbour, City of Westminster tour guide Peter Berthoud that the significance of the find fully emerged.

Mr. Berthoud, an expert in the history of London who gives guided tours around famous landmarks including Tower Bridge, said he was gobsmacked by the haul.

Stripped down: The photographs show how the bridge was put together over eight years, revealing why it was nicknamed at the time the 'Wonder Bridge'.

Landmark: Tower Bridge remains one of the capital's most iconic structures and a tourist attraction today, 125 years after building started.

Sepia to silver screen: The incomplete Tower Bridge features in the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, where Holmes battles with his adversary Lord Henry Blackwood.

And contrary to popular misconception, the images reveal the bridge is a sturdy steel frame beneath the instantly recognisable stone-cladding.

Mr Berthoud said: ‘When my neighbour gave me a disk with the images on I just couldn't believe it.
‘I spent hours going through my books to see if these pictures were already around, but I couldn't see them anywhere - they are totally unique.

‘Quite simply London Bridge is the world's most iconic bridge, and it's the only bridge over the Thames which has never needed to be replaced at some point.

Discovery: Peter Berthoud was gobsmacked when his neighbour showed him the haul of photos. He spent hours going through books to find something similar, only to discover they are unique.

Transformation: The bridge took eight years to build and at the time was a landmark feat of engineering, combining elements of a suspension and high level bridge and a bascule.

‘It combines elements of a suspension bridge, a high level bridge and a bascule which allows it to open for ships to pass.

‘Nothing had ever been made like it before, and nothing since.

‘People are always surprised when I tell them Tower Bridge is a steel bridge, as the stone cladding is so recognisable.’

According to the tour guide, the bridge's original architect, Horace Jones, wanted to clad the bridge in brick, however, following his death he was succeeded as architect by John Wolfe-Barry who decreed the bridge should be clad in stone.

Development: Photos show the progress in the construction process, from basic structures to something easily recognisable as Tower Bridge as we know it today.

Unique: Many of the 50 sepia prints are in good condition, despite dating back to 1892. Several are even dated, making it possible to trace the progress in construction.

Although many of the century-old pictures are in a state of disrepair, around 20 are in good condition.
Many of the 12 by 10 snaps are dated and clearly show how the bridge was put together over a space of eight years.

Memorable scenes include turn-of-the-century labourers taking orders from a site foreman in a bowler hat, and a shot if the bridge's original steam-powered engine room, which could open the bridge in less than a minute.

In one poignant picture flags decorate the body of the bridge and a hand-written pencil note reads: ‘Note, flags denote Mr. Hunter's wedding day’.

Mr. Berthoud said: ‘My favourite pictures of the simple, humble guys building the bridge, unaware that what they are making will be so historic.

‘People are so used to seeing images of the Empire State Building being built, but this is part of British history being created 50 years earlier.’

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She let the outsiders in

2012-01-12T21:09:00.001-05:00

National Post, January 10, 2012

By David Frum

That joke about the political associations of Margaret Thatcher is usually attributed to former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, himself an Old Etonian. “Estonians” here was a euphemism for Jews, of whom many traditional Conservatives thought Prime Minister Thatcher over-fond.

Thatcher was elected from a heavily Jewish north London constituency, Finchley. Altogether, five Jews served in her cabinets, including her strongest Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, and her ideological mentor, Education Secretary Keith Joseph. She was served by a Jewish chief of staff, David Wolfson.

Thatcher’s sympathy for Israel especially worried and frightened British officials.

When she became party leader in the mid-1970s, she succumbed to pressure and resigned from pro-Israel groups (as David Cameron was pressured to resign as honorary chairman of the British chapter of the Jewish National Fund). Yet she had her revenge on the civil service. One of her favorite ministers, Malcolm Rifkind, went on to serve under her successor John Major as the first Jewish foreign secretary — voiding the taboo that had descended after the creation of the state of Israel against Jews in UK national security positions.

An episode of Yes Minister in the mid-1980s satirized the attempt by anti-Israel civil servants to manipulate a pro-Israel prime minister:

PM: I gather we’re planning to vote against Israel in the UN tonight.

Foreign Secretary: Of course.

PM: Why?

Foreign Secretary: They bombed the PLO.

PM: But the PLO bombed Israel!

Foreign Secretary: Yes, but the Israelis dropped more bombs than the PLO did.

In the episode, the prime minister has the last laugh, entrapping his virulently anti-Israel foreign policy adviser into appearing for once sympathetic to Israel — destroying the poor man’s career by appointing him ambassador to the Jewish state.

Margaret Thatcher fought (and won) many of those same battles, alongside her great American partner, Ronald Reagan.

Margaret Thatcher is remembered as a conservative’s conservative, which of course she was. She was also a pathbreaker’s pathbreaker, a woman who opened the way for women, Jews and other minorities in British politics, especially Conservative politics.

Among Thatcher’s successors as party leader was Michael Howard, the first Jewish party leader in Britain. (Benjamin Disraeli was baptized in the Anglican church as a boy.) Next the Labour party chose a Jewish leader, Ed Milliband. Milliband’s most likely successor, Chuka Umunna, would be the first non-white party leader in British history, son of a Nigerian immigrant. They are all Thatcher’s heirs.

Since Margaret Thatcher, Britain has had its first female head of its famed intelligence service, MI5. More than 20% of Britain’s Members of Parliament are women — and fully half of the 28 MPs under age 30 are female. These, too, are Thatcher’s heirs.

Under Thatcher’s leadership, the British economy was de-cartelized, made more competitive, more open to talent. When I visited Britain as a boy, my parents’ friends complained about the weeks of waiting for the state-owned telephone service to install new lines. The huge state-owned enterprises were long ago privatized — and British cellphone service is more sophisticated and reliable than North America’s.

Almost 60% of the British workforce are employed by small- and medium-sized enterprises. The richest man in Britain is an Indian immigrant who has built the world’s largest steel company. And these all can be considered Thatcher’s heirs.

Margaret Thatcher did not solve all of Britain’s problems. What leader does? Post-Thatcher Britain now faces new challenges of its own, very different from those that confronted Thatcher. But as we make sense of her legacy, now glamorized by the movies, we should see her as she was: the leader of one of the great waves of democratization that have shaped modern Britain, elevating talent above privilege and opening the doors of opportunity to all.

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http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/01/10/she-let-the-outsiders-in/

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A country too big to fail

2012-01-12T20:41:00.001-05:00

Financial Post, December 22, 2011

By Jack M. Mintz

As we go into 2012, the world faces the twin sovereign debt problems in Europe and the United States. Just what will happen if some countries are too big to fail?

As explained in The Lords of Finance, the Pulitzer Prize winning book on monetary problems faced by European countries after the First World War, tax levels too low to fund the unexpected length of the war virtually impoverished Germany (which was also charged with war reparations) and led to the secular decline of Great Britain. To get out of the massive debt burden of that time, Germany and France inflated, while Britain and U.S. bit the bullet to force the price level down.

Today we are in a similar situation with large debt burdens in big countries arising from unfunded public expenditures. International investors are increasingly nervous that some governments are unable to deal with their fiscal problems unless they devalue their base currency through inflation. European sovereign debt is particularly a risky asset.

In 2008-09, the world faced the possibility of a global credit crunch as major financial institutions succumbed to mortgage defaults due to bad lending (and borrowing) practices. With trillions of financial losses, several distressed financial institutions either had to be saved by bailouts or went bankrupt, the most prominent failure being Lehman Brothers, who sparked the fall 2008 stock-market downturn.

Out of these shattered finances came new forms of financial regulation, some aimed at financial institutions that had become "too big to fail." With the argument that each large institution through its own risky decisions fails to account for the overall impact of its actions on market risk, governments sought new tools to reduce risk-taking behaviour.

Some proposals included new bank taxes on financial transactions or value-added, both studied by the IMF but largely rejected internationally. The most prominent proposal has been to impose higher capital adequacy ratios on large financial institutions. According to a reported agreement this week, banks will generally need to hold 7% of their financial assets as capital, with large institutions needing to hold 9.5%.

If special policies deal with large banks, what rules could be imposed on countries that are "too big to fail"? After all, what is sauce for goose is also sauce for the gander. Through their own risky actions, large countries can hurt others for the same reasons large failing banks hurt other parts of capital markets.

The recent attempts in Europe to backstop profligate countries like Greece and Italy provide some inkling as to the kind of rules that are needed to reduce imprudent risk-taking behaviour by countries.

Unlike the banks subject to government fiat, there is no clear mechanism to enforce rules on governments themselves. Even if countries agree to a treaty, no one can really enforce it. The 1992 European Maastricht Treaty has four monetary and fiscal rules, almost all broken today: inflation kept below 1.5%, deficits below 3%, debt below 60% of GDP and long-term interest rates no more than two points above countries with the lowest inflation rates.

These rules are insufficient to reduce risky behaviour by big governments since it is their micro decisions that have the biggest impact ultimately on their solvency. If Italy and Greece cannot collect taxes to pay for rich social and pension benefits, it is not surprising that they cannot keep their fiscal and monetary promises.

Germany has it right. If Europe is to settle its fiscal plight, it cannot shift it to future generations by borrowing more to spend today. Nor will other countries want to shoulder Europe's problems. The only path for Euroland is to accept deeper fiscal integration. This could include some micro-policy agreements such as financial regulations, corporate tax harmonization and pension reform.

The biggest case of a country "too big to fail" is the United States. So far, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats get it. The Republicans resist any increase in taxes that will surely be needed to deal with a gross debt burden rising beyond 100% of GDP. The Democrats focus on redistribution rather than major structural reform to ramp up the economy. The one thing saving the United States from its inept government is a dynamic economy that is home to some of the top companies in the world.

The current debate over temporary payroll tax cuts is almost ludicrous: Neither a two-month nor a one-year extension of the holiday will stimulate the economy. As a job generator, few employers will run out to hire workers with a small temporary reduction. Besides, it is a well proven fact that temporary tax cuts do not buoy up consumer demand. Instead, a temporary payroll tax cut reduces the amount of money available to pay for an already underfunded social security system, thereby aggravating the worrying debt burden facing the United States.

Instead, the United States needs significant restructuring of its public services, regulatory procedures and tax system, an approach that is working in the U.K. and Ireland. Whether it is social security, health care or Freddie Mac, the U.S. can make its public services more effective and efficient, getting rid of the special perks that Congress so much enjoys putting in place. Its politicized regulations are hurting investment and its tax system is highly complex and anti-competitive. There is a solution to all this, but it won't be found today in the White House or Congress.

Unfortunately, no one can impose discipline on the U.S. government except for its voters. The U.S. is truly too big to fail and should it do so, the global economy will be in serious trouble. Let's hope that, in 2012, saner heads prevail.

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Jack M. Mintz is the Palmer Chair of Public Policy, School of Public Policy, at the University of Calgary.

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/country+fail/5896605/story.html

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The Ottawa Protocol on Combating Antisemitism

2012-01-12T20:16:00.001-05:00

Preamble

We, Representatives of our respective Parliaments from across the world, convening in Ottawa for the second Conference and Summit of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism, note and reaffirm the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism as a template document for the fight against antisemitism.

We are concerned that, since the London Conference in February 2009, there continues to be a dramatic increase in recorded antisemitic hate crimes and attacks targeting Jewish persons and property, and Jewish religious, educational and communal institutions.

We remain alarmed by ongoing state-sanctioned genocidal antisemitism and related extremist ideologies. If antisemitism is the most enduring of hatreds, and genocide is the most horrific of crimes, then the convergence of the genocidal intent embodied in antisemitic ideology is the most toxic of combinations.

We are appalled by the resurgence of the classic anti-Jewish libels, including:

- The Blood Libel (that Jews use the blood of children for ritual sacrifice)

- The Jews as “Poisoners of the Wells” – responsible for all evils in the world

- The myth of the “new Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – the tsarist forgery that proclaimed an international Jewish conspiracy bent on world domination – and accuses the Jews of controlling government, the economy, media and public institutions.

- The double entendre of denying the Holocaust – accusing the Jews of fabricating the Holocaust as a hoax – and the nazification of the Jew and the Jewish people.

We are alarmed by the explosion of antisemitism and hate on the Internet, a medium crucial for the promotion and protection of freedom of expression, freedom of information, and the participation of civil society.

We are concerned over the failure of most OSCE participating states to fully implement provisions of the 2004 Berlin Declaration, including the commitment to:

“Collect and maintain reliable information and statistics about antisemitic crimes, and other hate crimes, committed within their territory, report such information periodically to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), and make this information available to the public.”

We are concerned by the reported incidents of antisemitism on campuses, such as acts of violence, verbal abuse, rank intolerance, and assaults on those committed to free inquiry, while undermining fundamental academic values.

We renew our call for national Governments, Parliaments, international institutions, political and civic leaders, NGOs, and civil society to affirm democratic and human values, build societies based on respect and citizenship and combat any manifestations of antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.

We reaffirm the EUMC – now Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) – working definition of antisemitism, which sets forth that:

“Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective – such as, especially but not exclusively – the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy, or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.
Applying double standards by requiring of it behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

Let it be clear: Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, and saying so is wrong. But singling Israel out for selective condemnation and opprobrium – let alone denying its right to exist or seeking its destruction – is discriminatory and hateful, and not saying so is dishonest.

Members of Parliament meeting in Ottawa commit to:

Calling on our Governments to uphold international commitments on combating antisemitism – such as the OSCE Berlin Principles – and to engage with the United Nations for that purpose. In the words of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “It is […] rightly said that the United Nations emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust. And a Human Rights agenda that fails to address antisemitism denies its own history”;
Calling on Parliaments and Governments to adopt the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism and anchor its enforcement in existing law;
Encouraging countries throughout the world to establish mechanisms for reporting and monitoring on domestic and international antisemitism, along the lines of the “Combating Antisemitism Act of 2010” recently introduced in the United States Congress;
Encouraging the leaders of all religious faiths – represented also at this Conference – to use all means possible to combat antisemitism and all forms of hatred and discrimination;
Calling on the Parliamentary Forum of the Community of Democracies to make the combating of hatred and antisemitism a priority in their work;
Calling on Governments and Parliamentarians to reaffirm and implement the Genocide Convention, recognising that where there is incitement to genocide, State parties have an obligation to act;
Working with universities to encourage them to combat antisemitism with the same seriousness with which they confront other forms of hate. Specifically, universities should be invited to define antisemitism clearly, provide specific examples, and enforce conduct codes firmly, while ensuring compliance with freedom of speech and the principle of academic freedom. Universities should use the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism as a basis for education, training and orientation. Indeed, there should be zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind against anyone in the university community on the basis of race, gender, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation or political position;
We encourage the European Union to promote civic education and open society in its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and to link funding to democratic development and respect for Human Rights in ENP partner countries;
Establishing an International Task Force of Internet specialists comprised of parliamentarians and experts to create common indicators to identify and monitor antisemitism and other manifestations of hate online and to develop policy recommendations for Governments and international frameworks to address these problems;
Building on the African representation at this Conference, to develop increased working relationships with parliamentarians in Africa for the combating of racism and antisemitism;
We urge the incoming OSCE Chair, Lithuania, to make implementation of these commitments a priority during 2011 and call for the reappointment of the Special Representatives to assist in this work.

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http://www.antisem.org/archive/ottawa-protocol-on-combating-antisemitism/

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The banker, the deal, his wife and their cover

2012-01-11T22:15:00.001-05:00

National Post, FP Comment, January 11, 2012

By Peter Foster

The resignation of Swiss National Bank chairman Philipp Hildebrand over his wife Kashya's currency transactions may be seen as a personal tragedy or a national embarrassment, but it also raises questions about one of the other organizations from which Mr. Hildebrand has resigned, the Financial Stability Board. The FSB is the organization of which Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney recently became chairman. Mr. Hildebrand's resignation inevitably cast a pall over Mr. Carney's first FSB press conference on Tuesday, but perhaps not for the right reasons.

Mr. Hildebrand's problems arose from his wife's betting against the Swiss franc shortly before he imposed restrictions that caused the franc to tank. The franc had been subject to an influx of money seeking a safe haven from the euro fiasco. Mr. Hildebrand declared last week that his wife, whom he had met when they both worked for a New York hedge fund in the 1990s, had a "strong personality" and "her own thoughts."

However, one thought she didn't appear to have was that it might not look good to be speculating in the currency of which her husband was custodian. Mrs. Hildebrand has apologized to all and sundry for her "error of judgment," but the optics are horrible. Similarly, Mr. Hildebrand's donation of US$79,000 to charity - apparently as expiation for the ill-gotten (or not) gain - makes things look even worse.

The more significant point is that Mr. Hildebrand was a leading light in the FSB, an organization designed to oversee and sometimes override global financial markets, and yet he couldn't oversee his own wife. That is not a cheap shot. It points to the ridiculousness of the notion that keeping tabs on the financial dealings of somebody who shares a bed with you is hard, but regulating the activities of millions to beneficial effect is manageable.

The FSB came into existence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a name-changer. That's not "game changer" with a typo. The FSB had previously been the Financial Stability Forum, which was set up under the aegis of the unwieldy G20 to make sure that crises such as 2008 didn't happen. The response to the FSF's manifest failure was to make it more expansive and give it a new moniker. The FSF/FSB's very existence invited questions - which were never even officially asked, let alone answered - about why the existing international financial institutions, in particular the IMF, had done such a lousy job.

Still, the FSB, like the FSF before it, wasn't about mere prudence, it was about "macro prudence," the notion that bureaucratic wizards could rise above the complexity of markets and address those markets' alleged flaws, which in 2008 turned out to be in reality the fruits of misregulation, low interest rates and lousy housing policies. The stability wizards had either missed the implications of the collateralized debt obligations and the credit default swaps hitting the fan, or had issued warnings to which nobody was paying heed. However, the regulatory dream could not be abandoned. All that was needed was larger and more frequent meetings between officials of the FSB, the G20, the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel Committee, the IMF, central banks, finance ministries, etc., etc., all based on the useful fallacy that global markets require global regulation.

The euro crisis that has exploded since the FSB got its new name further reveals the folly of trusting government regulation, since it is the governments themselves that are out of control. Meanwhile, the FSB has had to deal with a constant stream of shifting priorities from its political masters, from restricting bankers' pay, through imposing financial transaction taxes, to possibly factoring in Gross National Happiness.

Mr. Carney is declared to have credibility because Canada faced and dealt with its own problems of fiscal unsustainability in the mid 1990s (when Mr. Carney wasn't around). However, as a recent report from Scotiabank pointed out, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin dealt with the country's problems the old-fashioned way: by cutting government down to size. That seems to be the one solution that most troubled European nations are still trying to avoid.

Mr. Carney Tuesday reportedly declared that countries "must guard against a negative feedback loop" from sovereign debt. No arguing with that, whatever it means.

The FSB's press release was a monument to wonkspeak and Pollyanna semantics. The world should apparently be comforted that endless assessments, peer reviews, plans, co-operation agreements and "next steps" are in the works (or "workstreams," as they are now called). However, while the FSB drones on about its ever-expanding "architecture," around it in Europe all heck continues to break loose in distinctly unco-ordinated fashion. The Greeks are playing games, knowing that everybody else is terrified that they will default. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are still privately at loggerheads over the role of the European Central Bank as a sucker of last resort. They seem agreed, however, on one way to deal with the euro crisis: punish the British financial sector. The issue that never seems to reach the table is how far this unfolding fiasco is due not merely to countries spending like drunken sailors, but to the deluded mentality embodied in the FSB.

At least the Swiss authorities have been quick to act in at least one respect in the wake of the Hildebrand affair: They are prosecuting the individual who leaked the details of Mrs. Hildebrand's trading.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/banker+deal+wife+their+cover/5977187/story.html

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The new Russian fury

2012-01-11T21:49:00.001-05:00

National Post, January 9, 2012

By David Satter

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia is again in political crisis. The 60,000 people who protested in Moscow last month signal the rebirth of political opposition. The regime of Vladimir Putin will not fall overnight. But it is vulnerable, and Mr. Putin's goal of being president for life is no longer assured.

The immediate cause of the Dec. 10 demonstration, and the one on Saturday before Christmas, was the evidence of vote fraud in the parliamentary elections. An analysis of the vote by the Russian monitoring group Grazhdanin Nabludatel - based on polling places it monitored, where no violations occurred - suggests that the pro-Putin United Russia party received 30% of the vote, not 49% as it claims.

Fraudulent election results and tactics - bribery, ballot stuffing, multiple voting and falsification of protocols - are hardly new in Russia. What was different this time was that the evidence came to light only 10 weeks after Mr. Putin announced that he would run again for the presidency, with current President Dmitry Medvedev willingly standing aside.

This convinced many Russians that the Medvedev presidency, in which they had placed their hopes, had been little more than a masquerade, and that Mr. Putin planned to remain in power until 2024. The only serious reform Mr. Medvedev carried out as president was to change the presidential term from four years to six.

The prospect of Mr. Putin in power for another 12 years is one reason, according to a recent poll from the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, that 22% of Russians want to leave the country. In the 1824 age group, the number was almost 40%.

Another reason is the most inescapable fact of life in Russia today: rampant corruption. After the chaos of the 1990s, during which many government institutions barely functioned, Mr. Putin succeeded in establishing the authority of the state. But criminality didn't decline - it merely migrated to the organs of the government.

It is normal in Russia to bribe bureaucrats for routine approvals. Within the system of state procurement, kickbacks account for as much as 50% of the cost of purchases. Russians pay bribes to register property, fix a traffic ticket, avoid the draft, and secure places for children in school. According to Transparency International, Russia ranks 154th out of 178 countries in corruption - on a level with Cambodia and the Central African Republic.

Russians are also plagued by a fear of terrorism. Last January, a suicide bombing at Domodedovo Airport, Moscow's main air hub, left 36 dead and 160 wounded. Doku Umarov, the self-styled emir of the North Caucasus Islamic Republic, claimed responsibility for the attack, which came nine months after the suicide bombings of two Moscow metro stations. According to press reports, the government received anonymous warnings in early January of an impending terrorist attack on one of the Moscow airports, but it took no extra preventive measures. Instead, the number of police at Domodedovo was cut by 50% and many of those left devoted themselves to extorting bribes from arriving passengers from Central Asia.

After the attacks on the Moscow metro, Mr. Putin vowed to reach the terrorists "in their sewers." But neither this nor any of his previous threats have improved the situation. The cost of his drive to crush Chechen separatism and to dominate the North Caucasus by force has been an expanding insurgency fueled both by separatism and Islamic extremism. The number of terrorist incidents grew six-fold between 2000 and 2009, to 738 from 135, and Moscow remains the only European capital to be hit repeatedly by terrorists.

Russian insecurity also derives from the absence of the rule of law. A striking example was the second conviction, in 2010, of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos Oil Company, for stealing some 200 million tons of oil from Yukos subsidiaries. Years before, at his first trial, Mr. Khodorkovsky had been convicted of failing to pay taxes on the sale of the oil he was now accused of stealing. In both trials, Mr. Khodorkovsky was an obvious victim of selective prosecution - Kremlin retribution for his political independence and efforts to transform Yukos into an enterprise with Western standards of corporate governance.

But Russia's unfair legal system touches ordinary citizens, too. The acquittal rate in Russia is less than 1% (compared to 15% in U.S. federal courts and 15%-40% in state courts). Many convictions are obtained with the help of beatings, intimidation and blackmail. For this and other reasons, Russians file more complaints with the European Court of Human Rights than people from any other of the 46 countries in the Council of Europe.

Many questions shadow the first Putin presidency. These include the 1999 arrest of Federal Security Service (FSB) agents for attempting to bomb an apartment building in Ryazan, an incident that was never explained; the government's decisions to use force in hostage situations - first in a Moscow theater in 2002, in which 129 people died, and then in a Beslan school in 2004, when 332 died including 186 children; the nuclear poisoning of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London; and the unsolved murders of Russian journalists, in-cluding Anna Politkovskaya.

For a long time, none of this seemed to have a serious impact on public opinion. Russians were aware of the corruption and abuses, but Mr. Putin retained support because during his two terms as president the economy grew at an average annual rate of 7% (driven largely by high oil prices), and officially measured poverty was cut in half, to 14% in 2008 from 30% in 2000. Mr. Putin also reinforced his position with military success (particularly the extremely popular 2008 war with Georgia), anti-Western propaganda, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union.

That nostalgia was ironic. Though Mr. Putin restored the Soviet anthem, glorified the Russian state and ignored efforts to memorialize Communism's victims, he failed to learn the lesson of the Soviet Union's fall: A stable regime needs guiding values. The Soviet Union had an ideology that it imposed by force. As long as it defined the mental categories for millions of people, the regime was secure. When it was discredited, the fault lines began to appear and the totalitarian regime fell.

The weakness of today's Russia is that Communist values were never succeeded by genuinely democratic norms. Without these norms, Mr. Putin's desire to rule forever is unrealistic. Even the effect of relative prosperity begins to wear off for a population forced to live with rampant lawlessness. This is the reason that the waves of protest in Russia will continue - and that, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians have another chance to gain the democracy that they sought but didn't achieve after Communism's fall.

- - - -

David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His latest book, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, is just out from the Yale University Press.

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Russian+Fury/5965499/story.html

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Bring back the Iron Lady

2012-01-11T21:36:00.001-05:00

New York Times, December 7, 2011

By Richard Vinen

MARGARET THATCHER has long been reviled by the British left, so much so that the singer Elvis Costello once fantasized about stomping on her grave in his 1989 song “Tramp the Dirt Down.” But Mrs. Thatcher achieved more than any other British peacetime prime minister of the 20th century. It is rumored that, when she dies, she will receive a state funeral — an honor rarely accorded to anyone except monarchs. There are also plans for a public celebration.

Her life is the inspiration for a new movie that opens later this month, starring Meryl Streep as “The Iron Lady.” It chronicles Mrs. Thatcher’s divisive policies as prime minister as she led Britain through the economic doldrums of the 1980s. It was a time when the country faced financial ruin and politicians were compelled to make hard choices.

Mrs. Thatcher was a tough, adversarial leader. She was never liked, even by those who supported her policies, and she was hated by those who opposed her.

Yet her political style may be just what Britain needs right now. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis that will force the government to make difficult, unpopular decisions. And that is what Mrs. Thatcher did so well. Facing long-term economic decline and the brooding menace of the Soviet Union, she broke the trade unions, sold off nationalized industries and helped imbue British capitalists with a confidence that they had not felt since the death of Queen Victoria.

She was at her best when the odds seemed against her or when she had clear enemies. In 1982, she sent an armada to fight the Argentines in the Falkland Islands. And in 1984-85, she held out against a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, which had been powerful enough to bring down a government 10 years before.

Although Mrs. Thatcher has become a respected symbol of statesmanship outside Britain, she remains a reminder of social division within it. In 2008, the future foreign secretary, William Hague, sought to reassure American officials that he and David Cameron, soon-to-be prime minister, were “Thatcher’s children.” When his comment leaked, the Labour opposition seized upon it, keen to circulate the quote in the hopes that it would stir up old anti-Thatcher feelings. And despite being in power today, Conservative leaders still worry that they are associated with the bitterness of the Thatcher years. They speak of changing their image as “the nasty party” and the need to “detoxify the brand.”

One reason British politicians feel uncomfortable with Thatcherism is that Britain has been relatively prosperous in the last two decades, at least in part because of things the Thatcher government did: tax cuts, financial-sector deregulation and weaker unions all made Britain a more attractive place to do business.

A new generation of politicians who grew up in an age of prosperity has ceased to think of politics in terms of hard choices and scarce resources; Mr. Cameron belongs to that generation. He was just 12 years old when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979 and he became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, when the current economic storms seemed almost unimaginable. Even when Mr. Cameron became prime minister last year, the financial crisis still felt, to most of the British electorate, like something short-term and vaguely unreal.

But British politics has lost something with its post-Thatcher embrace of consensus and optimism. Thatcherism was a galvanizing force. It mobilized right-wingers to do things, such as selling off huge state-owned corporations, that many of them would once have considered impossible. It also mobilized the left to develop radical alternatives: during the 1980s, the Labour Party veered toward support for unilateral nuclear disarmament and increased state intervention in the economy.

Unlike today, voters in 1983 faced clear choices. A vote for Thatcher’s Tories was a vote for large-scale privatization; a vote for Labour was a vote for socialism. A Conservative vote meant keeping Britain in the European Economic Community; a Labour vote meant withdrawal. A Tory vote meant stationing American cruise missiles in Britain; a Labour vote meant that they would be stopped.

There are no longer such clear-cut choices. Explicit talk of class interests and inequality have been replaced by a vaguer and less divisive language of “fairness” and “equal opportunity.”

The major political parties look remarkably similar today. All are led by clean-cut 40-somethings who blend social liberalism (support for same-sex marriage and opposition to the death penalty) with acceptance of the free market. Indeed, the Conservatives now find themselves governing with strange bedfellows, in a coalition with the small Liberal Democrat Party, whose president recently described Thatcherism as “organized wickedness.” Mrs. Thatcher hated coalitions. She most likely would have preferred to lose an election than to govern without an outright parliamentary majority.

Unlike Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Thatcher came to power at a time when people felt desperate. This desperation, and the sense that she might be the last chance to restore Britain’s fortunes, accounted for much of her success.

Thatcherism was not an alien invasion. It reflected a consensus by many members of the British establishment that things could not go on as they were. This is why so many supported Mrs. Thatcher’s policies, even when they disliked her personally.

Mr. Cameron is certainly a more likable figure than Mrs. Thatcher, but likability may not be enough when the British people realize that their current predicament — requiring government spending cuts at a time of rising unemployment and financial chaos in Europe — is actually worse than the crisis when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979.

In these circumstances, it will take a bracing dose of Thatcherite ideological confrontation to revive British politics.

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Richard Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London, is the author of “Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/opinion/bring-the-iron-lady-back.html

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France’s ‘Red Tyrant’

2012-01-11T21:21:00.001-05:00

"Few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history. Richelieu was the father of the modern state system, …"

National Post, December 9, 2011

By Jean-Vincent Blanchard

Take a look at his portrait. See the poised authority of the statesman, the gaze that stares back with lucid intelligence, and maybe a touch of bemused irony, as if he had just been asked a question ignorant of the magnitude of his responsibilities, the immense task of making France a powerful and prestigious land. Notice the blue ribbon and cross of the Order of the Holy Ghost, elegant gesture of the hand, the studied theatricality of the décor.

These are not just effects born under the flattering paintbrush of the painter Philippe de Champaigne. ArmandJean du Plessis - Cardinal Richelieu's full name - was a leader of the government of France, a chief of diplomacy, and a war commander. Born in 1585, he became a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 1622, and then Duc de Richelieu in 1631, in recognition of his outstanding service as principal minister to King Louis XIII, the father of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

Among the many exploits that earned Richelieu elevation and fame was the 1628 siege of La Rochelle, where he subdued those French Protestants who threatened the political unity of the kingdom. His career at the service of the French king continued for many years, during which he untangled the intrigues of the high nobility, and fought the hegemonic ambitions of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. For generations, the French have learned that the cardinal strengthened the monarchy, shaped the character of their nation, and was a crucial actor in a chaotic conflict, the Thirty Years' War, out of which modern Europe emerged.

"Few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history. Richelieu was the father of the modern state system," asserts Henry Kissinger in his opus, Diplomacy. The cardinal was a pragmatist who thought rational political decisions and "natural right" were reconcilable with God's designs. This was in marked contrast with the thinking of most other European rulers, including the Habsburgs, to whom religious orthodoxy and dogma were the foundations of politics. Richelieu wrote: "The natural light of thought makes it obvious to anyone that man, having been created reasonable, is bound to act using this power. Otherwise, he would act against his own nature and consequently offend his Creator." Even though he defeated the French Protestants - or, as they were often called, the Huguenots - at La Rochelle, the cardinal was content merely to obtain their loyalty to Louis XIII, and he did not seek to eradicate their religion. He sought alliances with German Protestant princes and the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, to counter the ambitions of Holy Roman emperors Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III during the Thirty Years' War. Thereby, it is argued, Richelieu created a balance of power in Europe and contributed to the rise of nationalism. Richelieu was to statesmanship what Machiavelli was to political theory, Galileo to science, or Descartes to philosophy, with the caveat that his greater aim still remained the triumph of Catholicism. "The kingdom of God," he wrote, "is the principle of government, and, indeed, it is such a necessity that without this foundation, no prince can ever reign well and no state can be happy."

Such was his daring statesmanship. Then there was Richelieu's style. One contemporary observed:

"In all fairness, this man had great qualities. He carried himself with high poise and in the manner of a grand sire, he spoke agreeably and with amazing ease, his mind was focused and worked with subtle ease, his general manner was noble, his ability to handle business inconceivably adroit, and finally he put a grace in what he did and said that ravished everyone."

The cardinal personified politics with what his countrymen call le grand goût (the grand taste). Richelieu was a brilliant orator, and his persuasive talents were valuable aids to his governance. He lived in superb palaces, patronized the theatre, and founded the Académie Française with a mission to perfect the French language. This style is why, like Colbert, Napoleon, and Général de Gaulle after him, Richelieu is understood to have influenced not only the history of his country but also its civilization.

Nevertheless, any reader who is familiar with Alexandre Dumas's epic The Three Musketeers might ask about another side of the man: the disquieting Richelieu for whom the ends justified the means. To his detractors, indeed, the cardinal's realpolitik appeared to be a betrayal of higher ideals of justice, French tradition, and morality. They decried his network of spies and secret police, viewed his trials as political shams, and lamented how his administrators in the kingdom's provinces enacted his iron will with no concern for local tradition. The punishments Richelieu meted out against those whom he considered threats to the power of the king were often violent, and many thought that this rigor represented brutality more than justice and exemplarity.

Other critics argued that the cardinal took advantage of Louis XIII's feeble nature and quashed any dissent in a relentless quest for personal power. The man would show no mercy toward enemies of the state, and the state's enemies were his own. Richelieu seemed high-strung, harsh, and vindictive. A diplomat described his fits of wrath as "canine." Cardinal de Retz, another priest-politician of his time, put it bluntly: "He struck down humans like lightning rather than governing them." The scandal, of course, was even worse when these critics thought he used his moral authority to cover political and personal crimes. Guy Patin, one of Richelieu's contemporaries, called him the "red tyrant": the scarlet colour of the cardinal's robe, instead of signalling that he stood ready to shed his blood for the love of humanity, had come to represent the blood of his victims.

How did Cardinal Richelieu govern with a principle of human rationality, a "reason of state," while still thinking that he was doing God's work? Did character influence his decisions, and were his personal ambitions truly limitless? The historian who wishes to answer these questions faces many challenges. Because Richelieu promised Louis XIII early on that he would "use all the resources necessary, and the authority that he would care to give [him], to ruin the Huguenots' party, to humble the high nobility, to bring all the subjects to know their duty, and to raise his name in all the foreign nations up to where it should be," nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French historians often readily recognized a sense of purpose throughout his career. To be a republican and nationalist hero, Richelieu needed to be a clairvoyant political genius: "Richelieu was one of the greatest politicians of modern times, and one of those who did the most for France's grandeur and unity," said the Dictionnaire Universel. It is always crucial, however, to beware of hindsight in writing a biography, especially in the case of a man who always took great care of how his own life and legacy would be perceived by posterity.

Richelieu died in 1642. Consider, then, that it took six years of skillful diplomacy for his successor, Giulio Mazarini, to ratify the Treaties of Westphalia that terminated the Thirty Years' War (1648), and 11 years of military action to sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees that brought a satisfying conclusion to France's war with Spain (1659). Consider, last but not least, that France was roiled from 1648 to 1652 by a civil war known as the Fronde. How is it that we consider Richelieu's political action to have been so decisive, and having laid such firm foundations for French power? Even those contemporaries of the cardinal who did not hate him with a passion could still hold a surprising, if not dim, view on the real outcomes of his ministerial career. Surely they were less susceptible to hindsight than we are.

The memoirist Claude de Bourdeille de Montrésor squarely attributed the few successes he was willing to recognize in Richelieu's endeavors to sheer luck:

"Cardinal Richelieu's enterprises owed much more to good fortune than the state owed to his counsel and prudence."

One can marvel at how many times fate helped Richelieu, when, for example, Gustavus Adolphus lost his life at the Battle of LuÐtzen, just as the Swedish king was turning out to be an unreliable ally, and even a threat to the cardinal's grand design for a European balance of power. At the very least, telling the life of Richelieu is to find out what political genius really is. It could well be, as expected, a superlative sense of prudence, doubling with an ability to manipulate emotions, notably by deft management of appearances. Or could it be something entirely different, a force whose nature makes it difficult to capture the essence of Richelieu's action and legacy?

In any case, the problem warrants consideration into the life of Richelieu the man. When it comes to character, the historian ventures on even more daunting terrain. The cardinal was born more than 400 years ago, and, as just noted, he carefully crafted his public image.

Yet historians do pay attention to the life of the cardinal as a private individual. That is because 17th-century Frenchmen did not dissociate politics from the personal, and to understand what they said about the cardinal one must consider this emotional and ethical life of the statesman. Central to Richelieu's action was his complex and oftentimes tense relation with the dark and enigmatic King Louis XIII. "The six square feet of the king's private study gave him more worries than all of Europe," wrote a contemporary historian. Persons who feature prominently in Richelieu's life are the choleric and stubborn queen mother, Marie de' Medici; the seductive and at times disloyal consort, Queen Anne of Austria; the happy-go-lucky and lethal brother, Gaston d'Orléans. These French royals spent their lives betraying each other, with consequences for both domestic and international politics. Richelieu's existence, as it turns out, was a constant fight for survival.

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Excerpted, with permission from Éminence.

Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France. New York: Walker and Company, 2011.

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/France+Tyrant/5965498/story.html

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Quebec at it again!

2012-01-10T21:13:00.001-05:00

By Kim McConnell

January 8, 2012

Now that all the festivities are over and we’re well into the new year, it’s time to get back to work!!! The French extremists are at it again - complaining about French interests being swamped by non-French interests. These people are so pathetic that they forget that NOT everybody shares their anxiety about the dying French language. They have managed to con Canadians into believing that, unless they are given front and centre stage, they will disappear as a language and a culture!! On that basis they have managed to legislate themselves into positions of power and they are over-represented in ALL Federal departments and in the provincial governments of New Brunswick and Ontario where they make up just over 4% of the population. Until and unless we can get rid of the OLA or at least, force them to only apply it “where numbers warrant”, the power of French-speakers will continue to grow. Canadians in general are so cowed by the French fact that they are sending their children to French Immersion without considering the harm that is being done to them. Helen Sikora wrote an insightful essay, entitled, “Pavlov’s Dog” in which she quotes two Linguistic authorities, Prof. Otto Weininger when he was at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE.); and Dr. Hector Hammerly,Prof. of Applied Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. French Immersion;Myths and Reality, published in 1989. Copies are available upon request.

Anyway the latest comedy being played out in Montreal over the fuss made over the hiring of an English-speaking coach can be read here:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/01/07/montreal-separatist-habs-protest.html

The mainstream media is still full of writers who are wringing their hands about “what to do about Quebec?” Jeffrey Simpson is one of those writers – from the old Liberal school of writers who think that Canada should spend more time worrying about Quebec than we’re doing. Someone from out West who read his article could not refrain from sending him her views on this article:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/jeffrey-simpson/with-separatism-on-hold-what-next-for-quebec/article2281051/

"a mixture of tension and co-operation." What you really mean is tension and political blackmail, now isn’t it, Mr.Simpson. You may be able to fool yourself about cooperation because you see how people in Ontario have traded their dignity for a kind of political alliance with Quebec to control political power in Canada. But as for those of us out here in the Regions, there is little more than contempt for the demanding and ungrateful Frenchmen of the Quebec Nation.
Michael Den Tandt is another of those Liberal writers who think that we should do more to court Quebec and find out what we can do to get them onside with Canada:

Den Tandt appears to be yesterday's man. If he is hoping to achieve better results by resuming the failed policies of the past few decades, then he is either a cynical pro-Quebec advocate or a misguided, well-meaning dolt who is a victim of his environment (e.g. Citizen workplace, etc.)

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Tories+miss+opportunity+Quebec/5890336/story.html

Tories miss opportunity in Quebec

Ottawa Citizen, December 21, 2011

By Den Tandt

Quebec could be fertile ground for the Conservatives in the years ahead, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said in year-end interviews. And he's right.
The cratering of the Bloc, internecine squabbling within the Parti Québécois and a weak New Democratic Party foundation in Quebec arguably have created the greatest opportunity for federalism since the near-death experience of 1995.

Which would be good. But if it's true, why has this near-perfectly bilingual prime minister spent the latter half of 2011 salting the wells and bombing the bridges while pulling his legions from Quebec, figuratively speaking, in disarray?

Harper, we must remember, is the original transformational Grinch -his heart having swollen from two sizes too small, to two sizes too big, where the French fact in Canada is concerned.

The Reform party, in its infancy in the late 1980s, was deeply annoyed about bilingualism and Quebec. A Reform riding association meeting,circa 1990, didn't properly get rolling until someone began ranting from the floor about Brian Mulroney's unholy concessions to Quebec.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2005, where a polished Stephen Harper is gunning for Quebec votes. In the French language debate in Vancouver,he wows his audience.
Not only is he fluent but his choice of words and accent are uncommonly sophisticated. Indeed, Harper's command of French in that debate exceeded that of Liberal leader Paul Martin, who is from Quebec and was deemed perfectly bilingual.

Then, post-victory, comes linguistic surprise No. 2: In November2006, Harper, under pressure from the Bloc Québécois and Liberal leadership-aspirant Michael Ignatieff, proposes that "the Québécois" form a nation within Canada. It's a hair's breadth away from the old joke that Quebecers want nothing so much as an independent Quebec within a strong and united Canada. It goes over brilliantly in Quebec.

Now, we know where it all begins to go awry: Conservative blunders in the campaign of 2008 - cuts to arts funding and strident attacks on "the separatists" - torpedo those early gains. Conservatives are held to 10 seats in Quebec and their popular support in the province drops to just above 20 percent. The decline continues apace in 2011, in the face of Jack Layton's Orange Crush, with the Tory seat count dropping to four.

But a week, let alone six months, is a lifetime in politics. Layton's sudden passing last August changed the dynamic yet again, with polls since showing NDP support in the province slipping. With the Bloc on its heels and the PQ in disarray, late 2011 became a moment ripe with possibility for Conservatives to retake lost ground.

But what has Harper done? In August, he restored Royal appellation to the Canadian military. In September, he introduced the nine-in-one omnibus crime bill,C-10. In October, he moved to scrap the federal long gun registry. Also in October, massive federal shipbuilding contracts - $33-billion worth - went to yards in Vancouver and Halifax, with Quebec's Davie yard the odd man out.

In November, he appointed a unilingual anglophone, Michael Ferguson,auditor general, and appointed a unilingual anglophone, Justice Michael Moldaver, to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Without question, many anglophone Canadians are fed up - have been since the Mulroney era - with Quebec's bottomless appetite for special status.With respect to the gun registry, the Conservatives had no realistic option but to keep their promise to scrap and delete. Making the Canadian Forces Royal again was a good idea, long overdue. The shipyard decision was also the right thing to do,regardless of any regional hurt feelings, because the Davie shipyard wasn't up to the job.

But the government's pressing of C-10, especially its minimum-sentence provisions, has been pointlessly ham-fisted, bull-headed and irrational. Likewise the unilingual appointments. These cut deep. For they undermine the voices of federalist Quebecers who have argued since Trudeau (the elder) that official bilingualism is an effective and honourable compromise that safeguards and protects the French language within Canada. If that tacit contract is breached too flagrantly and too often, Quebecers will begin to feel- rightly - that their voices don't count, after all. This is, of course, what spawned the Parti Québécois and its referendums to begin with.

We are long past the era, surely, when anglophone Canadians get vexed about the cost of French translations on cereal boxes. Aren't we?

It seems odd that, at a time when the Harper Conservatives could be pressing their advantage, they are so determinedly shooting themselves in the foot in a province that is still home to one-quarter of the population.

mdentandt@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/mdtmobile

Michael Den Tandt

Here is a Response from a Westerner:

Michael:

"We are long past the era, surely, when anglophone Canadians get vexed about the cost of French translations on cereal boxes. Aren't we?"

Not even for a moment. You say that with such a tone of desperation, Michael. I don't blame you because you know that anglophones have reached the absolute end of their tolerance for both the French language and Quebec. The daily diet of waste, corruption and just general whining that emanates from that part of Canada, and decades of Ottawa pandering, have done that to us all. And by the way, would you like me to send you the cost of those French translations on cereal boxes, Michael? Maybe you can convince Generation Y how important it was to have those hundreds of billions in French translations that nobody ever read when they are paying the bills for them over the next couple of decades.

Anglophones right across this country, especially in Ontario where they are besieged by petty pressures from French language bureaucrats to adopt all sorts of nonsensical French language inroads just to appease Quebecers, are utterly fed up with the flagrant waste that this country is being put to in order to cater to Quebec and its dying and dead language. It has swallowed billions of taxpayer dollars in the last century and a half and English Canadians are determined that its juvenile, self-willed, myopic demands will not rule the next century and bankrupt us all - not just Ontario, as it appears to have done.

The CPC can court all the votes they want in la belle province but if they carry on down the path you are suggesting the Alberta independence movement will flourish. Frankly, I hope this happens because there are many of us that simply can't wait for things to get so bad that the case for Alberta independence will be made for us.

There was already considerable alienation among Alberta's electorate for Harper's pandering to Quebec during the previous two elections that ended in minorities. We waited patiently for a majority telling ourselves things would improve. There has been some relief since the CPC was able to win amajority without Quebec. Alberta voters realize still that he willhave to cater to Ontario, now, to stay on top. We regret the power of Ontario but bite our tongues about it for one reason only ~ because Ontario has always, till now, carried its own economic load and then some. But there is no appetite for the sink-hole of the cost of Quebec and the French language at all among Albertans and those of us who want nothing to do with either Quebecor its demands will make sure we keep the language issue right there on the front burner. Actually we have plenty of navel-gazing Francophones (e.g.Gilles Caron) who do that for us, anyway.

The path you are suggesting that Harper and company take would lead us right to where many of us want to go. And, worse, Michael, Saskatchewan and BC just need a little shove, any excuse, to join us. Better that Harper keep promoting English language bureaucrats and giving the symbolic finger to Quebec as much as possible if he wants to keep the west from closing ranks on him and his government. And, just think - you can well imagine where this country would be economically if the Alberta independence giant began to mobilize. Talk about national bankruptcy. Balancing any budget would be a faraway, distant dream.

Sharon M.
Edmonton

WOW, Sharon. That was so well said!!!

More people all over the country are speaking up against the dominance of Quebec and the French-speakers; you just have to read the comments following any article where the French language zealots make themselves front and centre of any issue. In New Brunswick, the Official Languages Act is due to be reviewed this year and already all the French elites are getting organized to push it even further. Only the French are being asked about the changes they want made. English-language groups are not consulted, even though they make up the majority!!! The English-speaking politicians are so afraid of speaking up that they are all struck dumb on this issue.

For those who are able to attend one of our language meetings, the first one this year is on January 11th at the Ron Kolbus Community Centre,Ottawa.

Call Barry at613-721-5826 for details.

Our speakers will be Jurgen Vollrath, Beth Trudeau, and Jean-SergeBrisson.

Kim

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