The Sixth Estate

This week America’s last space shuttle landed for the last time. There will be no genuine replacement. NASA hoped to replace the shuttle with Orion, capable of traveling to the Moon and Mars. But the Orion program was first scrapped, then revived as a spacecraft supposedly useful for low orbit and Mars, but not the Moon. This makes little sense, and anyone with any policy experience can tell that the lunar and Martian projects are both going to be scrapped for the foreseeable future.

I don’t want to give either NASA or the Space Shuttles themselves too much undeserved praise. I realize that the space program’s initial political goals were just as petty as those of the anti-space program people today: get there before the commies do. And the Space Shuttles themselves were ostentatious wastes of money: lumbering behemoths that pioneered all manner of important space travel concepts except for the most important one of all, testing the potential for manned flight beyond low Earth orbit.

Nevertheless, the effective ending of the American manned space flight program is highly symbolic. It is symptomatic of an age when every possible vision of collective progress is being ruthlessly stamped out by those who tell us we can no longer afford such frivolities, and would be better off anyways as individual consumers unsaddled by taxes, even while nominally conservative but actually kleptocratic governments build up giant deficits which will have to be paid off through tax increases and while steady economic growth makes us as a people wealthier than we have ever been.

It’s worth asking why, despite being richer than ever before, it can also be true that we “just can’t afford to do big things anymore.” Why, in both good times and bad, the public purse is equally so strained that there is no room left in it for sweeping projects or even just a little compassion. Why, at a time when our knowledge and capabilities are greater than ever before, the national newspapers can seriously argue that the only important questions worth asking are which taxes to cut and which programs to slash.

In the end this cheerful malaise is simply the herald of permanent cultural decline. I am not sure whether some other culture will arise elsewhere or whether humanity as a whole will end up caught in the same net. But either way, the slow, agonizing death of Western culture will be a certainty if we are unable to maintain even a moderately functional space program. If nothing else, the next major asteroid impact will do us in. But at least we and our descendants will enjoy low taxes until then, right?

You may have noticed in what passes for “news” the announcement that the Canadian Forces has completed its inquiry into the crash of a Griffon helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2009, in which three soldiers died. The crash occurred when a helicopter was taking off from an American forward operating base, the overweight and overheating helicopter’s pilots lost their bearings in the dust their craft kicked up, and drifted into the base’s security wall.

The government’s own news release says only that the Board of Inquiry found that pilot error and poor conditions in the landing zone, which is true but only half the truth. The report also mentions some other important factors, like the fact that key guidelines for pilots were amended to exaggerate the capabilities of their aircraft. It concludes that the aircraft got into trouble as it left the poor-quality American landing zone, and then did not react properly to the problem, causing the crash.

But here are some interesting things that I noticed, which the media hasn’t bothered to. All of them are examples of the growing and inexplicable paranoia in the upper echelons of the government:

• The members of the board of inquiry are classified. This makes it a little harder to take it seriously, since they could literally be anybody. Other BOIs on the website don’t have this sort of secrecy. Given that it involves operational units in Afghanistan, there is a negligibly plausible rationale here, except that…
• The soldiers killed in the crash are classified. This one is truly bizarre. And also pointless, since the names of those who died are already a matter of public record: Pat Audet, Martin Joannette, and Ben Babington-Browne.
• This report was completed on August 10, 2010. Why is it being released now? Exactly what needed to be done before the public could be told what happened?
• The military says 12 of 18 recommendations are “already” implemented. This, presumably, is why the government suppressed the report for a year. But I think if there’s any point holding it back for that reason, we at least deserve to know which ones are going to be ignored. Increased flight training? Improvements to the landing zones? Corrections to the doctored flight guidance? Did they only pick the “easy” recommendations, like a reminder to helicopter crew to wear their seat belts?

The breathtaking inanity of Canadian energy policy can be summed up no better than the statement expressing the shared beliefs of natural resources minister Joe Oliver and all of his provincial counterparts, except Ontario minister Brad Duguid: Alberta’s oil sands are a responsible and sustainable major supplier of energy to the world.

Logically, a sustainable resource is one that is renewable at the rate they are being harvested, or one that is infinite. I’m sure the energy ministers realize that the oil sands are not renewing themselves. I am forced to conclude, therefore, that the future of Canada’s energy policy at a  time when climate change is the most important threat facing humanity has been irresponsibly placed in the hands of a group of business-backed morons who are so criminally stupid, so scientifically illiterate, and so incapable of basic elementary logic that they actually believe there is an infinite amount of oil somehow hiding under the northern prairie.

I would be more inclined to forgive them this slip as a mere bit of deceitful but typical political sophistry if not for the fact that everything else about this conference feels wrong. For instance, the press release I linked to claims that a full report from the ministers can be found on the conference website, called Canada as a Global Energy Leader. At least as of afternoon Wednesday, this is simply a lie. I looked. For another, the conference’s website inexplicably contains a tourism section promoting Banff and Fort McMurray. And finally, and most importantly, this “ministerial conference” was bought and paid for by the oil industry via the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the event’s “gold sponsor.”

There will be a new chief  for the RCMP named soon, and the field of candidates appears to be notably weak and controversial, at least from the scanty coverage in Postmedia. One of the people on the list is Ottawa police chief Vern White, for instance, which is good news for cops who like to beat up women in jail and less good news for women who need to report a sexual assault. He may come in under a bit of a cloud given that he just signed a three-year extension on his Ottawa contract, too.

And yet despite all that, White is the best one on the Sun‘s list, mostly because the implications of the other ones scare me. At least according to Postmedia, the Harper regime’s other choices are a former CSIS officer now at the Border Services Agency, and an army general. That’s followed by some mishmash about the need for leadership in the police force, which frankly Postmedia reporters should be intelligent enough not to churn out (but apparently aren’t), but it’s the claim that the government is seriously considering putting the national police force under the charge of a military officer that bothers me.

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Continuing my regular series of hopelessly bad government press releases, let me just say that if this is what human resources minister Diane Finley thinks is strong affirmative action in the face of blatantly illegal mass layoffs by American call centre company IQT falling the closure of their Canadian operations, then that is a strong indication her personal morals are as bad as her husband’s, Doug the Election Finance Launderer, and a rejection of the very idea of responsible government.

You might think that when the government announces it is “reaching out” to ex-IQT employees, at the very least it was either forcing IQT to meet its legal obligations to pay its employees or perhaps even set up a special channel for providing social services to the newly unemployed. Nope. It’s just publishing a reminder that ex-IQT employees, like all former employees who have been laid off by a company, are allowed to apply for Employment Insurance payouts.

What really pisses me off, though, is that Finley goes so far as to say that “we are doing everything we can” to help the workers in question. This is an obvious lie — even if most people think it is appropriate that the government do nothing to help the workers, it is openly deceitful to claim that doing nothing particularly special is actually everything that can be done. Ms. Finley, you and your husband are a disgrace even by the generally low standards politicians are expected to rise to.

That definitely is the leading possibility, as a new report from the Fraser Institute has finally updated the listing of that group’s Editorial Advisory Board to reflect the total number of dead members, which now stands at six. The Fraser Institute, for those who are unaware, is a radical think tank which, among other activities, has taken money from the tobacco industry to oppose cigarette taxes and to suggest that secondhand smoke does not cause lung cancer.

It is possible that the Fraser Institute has made this move entirely independently, but I doubt it. The Editorial Advisory Board, supposedly the “final arbiter” in the Institute’s BS peer review process, consists of a number of mostly old scholars, some of whom were dead. After I repeatedly poked fun at them for this, they updated their Advisory Board list to indicate “Members” (the living ones) and “Past Members.” The Past Members were Current Members as recently as a few months ago, even though some have been dead for almost 20 years.

Only one problem: Sir Alan Walters was still listed as a current member, despite the fact he has been dead since 2009. I happily pointed this out, correctly (in my opinion) noting that this was probably an indication that the Editorial Advisory Board doesn’t actually do much editing or advising. Well, I am now happy to report that Sir Alan Walters is listed as a Past Member.

Not because he’s dead, I should stress. Walters should have been listed as dead two years ago. He was listed as living and active as recently as June. Given the average age of the Board, it’s a certainty that a number will pass away over the coming years. When that happens, it will be interesting to see how long they linger as active members before the Fraser Institute finally lets their souls depart.

So far only Postmedia seems to have noticed that Conservative York-Simcoe MP and Cabinet minister Peter Van Loan was caught by Elections Canada overspending his campaign finance limit in 2008. What they are downplaying so far, though, is Elections Canada’s absolutely inexcusable decision to postpone announcing his accounting irregularities until after the election, presumably so that Van Loan would not have to face voters over the matter, even though it signed a formal settlement with his agent over the matter before the election.

The fact that Van Loan is a government minister is not important here. What matters is that Elections Canada was willing to help any Member of Parliament, of any party, hide from the Canadian public during an election campaign the fact that he had broken the law during the last election campaign. This is especially true because the “compliance agreement,” a ridiculous little device that allows MPs and their staffs to avoid being prosecuted like ordinary Canadians, contains specific commitments by Van Loan to reduce his spending to almost $4200 below the legal cap during the 2011 election. Did he, or not? We won’t know until the fall, after the deadline for submission of election records.

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As sort of an opening flourish to announce my return to full-time blogging, I’m happy to note that Canada’s official protest of the alphabet has been escalated  to an all-out boycott, which foreign minister John “Chucklehead” Baird describes as a “principled stand.”

The issue in question is the appointment of North Korea for four weeks as chair of the Conference on Disarmament. As I said before, this is an idiotic protest because every country gets its turn in the automatic alphabetical cycle as chairman of this moribund talk shop. But now it’s even more idiotic, because we waited until North Korea’s term as chair was halfway over before we announced that their automatic appointment was so offensive to our delicate sensibilities that we weren’t going to show up until he was gone.

Way to go, Baird. Please retire and crawl into a hole somewhere.

Or so I’m forced to conclude:

New Facility to Produce Wonder Material From Forests and Farms

It’s super strong, it’s green and it’s providing new opportunities for business in Alberta. It’s called nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) and Alberta is about to become a leader in its production and study.

Oh my god! Yay!

The only possibly worse coverage comes from the local radio news:

It’s stronger than it’s steel and it’s made from plants and now Edmonton will be leading in its production. Its official name is nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC)…

Minister for Advanced Education and Technology, Greg Weadick, says it’s also extremely green.

Not just green, but extremely so!

I’m happy to announce new findings that show that if BC returns to the old Provincial Sales Tax (PST) following the referendum, probably as many as 12 million jobs will be created. This estimate is based on Sixth Estate’s personal exploration of how economics is a worthless bullshit profession which only gets worse when you add political controversy to the mix. For example, see yet another business lawyer advocating for HST in the Globe & Mail, Tony Wilson.

Tony states that if we don’t keep the HST, the healthcare system will collapse because there’s just no other way government can raise revenue other than through a sales tax. This is such an idiotic argument that I feel soiled simply having to point out that if people can’t afford to pay income tax, they’re not going to be able to pay sales tax, either.

Wilson says he’s worried that the HST opposition has been hijacked by anti-tax nutcases, and to an extent I agree. But the pro-HST group has also shown a callous disregard for truth-speaking from day one, when Gordon Campbell flatly lied to the public about his intention to bring in the HST. We haven’t yet cleared away the debris of political corruption and dishonesty, and in my mind, we can’t have an honest discussion about whether or not HST is a good idea on its own merits until after we’ve wiped away everything else. Including Vanderzalm, incidentally, who has done a fascinating job of resuscitating his political career but who should now crawl back into the hole in which he was rightly dumped 20 years ago.

For an example of why I find Wilson’s crowd impossible to join, see farther up in his article, where he introduces in quick succession two studies which supposedly forecast 24,400 new jobs due to HST, and 113,000 new jobs for the same reason. Unsurprisingly the bigger number comes from the right-wing propagandist Jack Mintz, whose public policy school’s research agenda is for sale. Which one is right? How big can they go? Mintz’s own published projections for the Ontario HST job increase ballooned 100 times upward, from 5900 in a 2008 study to 591,000 in a study published just one year later.

Oh, and one more thing. The C.D. Howe Institute isn’t independent, Mr. Wilson. Neither are you. Neither am I, really. That is a falsehood which think tanks repeatedly proclaim, and which people in the media are far too willing to uncritically repeat.