Posts from our progressive community

Assorted content to end your week.

- Paul Krugman draws a much-needed connection between austerity politics and Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine:
What Smith didn’t note, somewhat surprisingly, is that his argument is very close to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, with its argument that elites systematically exploit disasters to push through neoliberal policies even if these policies are essentially irrelevant to the sources of disaster. I have to admit that I was predisposed to dislike Klein’s book when it came out, probably out of professional turf-defending and whatever — but her thesis really helps explain a lot about what’s going on in Europe in particular.

And the lineage goes back even further. Two and a half years ago Mike Konczal reminded us of a classic 1943 (!) essay by Michal Kalecki, who suggested that business interests hate Keynesian economics because they fear that it might work — and in so doing mean that politicians would no longer have to abase themselves before businessmen in the name of preserving confidence. This is pretty close to the argument that we must have austerity, because stimulus might remove the incentive for structural reform that, you guessed it, gives businesses the confidence they need before deigning to produce recovery.

And sure enough, in my inbox this morning I see a piece more or less deploring the early signs of success for Abenomics: Abenomics is working — but it had better not work too well. Because if it works, how will we get structural reform?

So one way to see the drive for austerity is as an application of a sort of reverse Hippocratic oath: “First, do nothing to mitigate harm”. For the people must suffer if neoliberal reforms are to prosper.- Meanwhile, Esther Hsieh writes that Norway's rejection of laissez-faire economics has resulted in the most productive economy on the planet - with social support for skilled workers (such as universal child care) and income equality serving as key drivers of that economic success. And the Canadian Institute for Health Information observes that universal public health care serves as an important form of income equalization in Canada.

- Michael Byers and Purple Library Guy each offer an assessment of the lessons to be drawn from British Columbia's election results. And Alison reminds us what Christy Clark has sounded like when she hasn't been trying to neutralize her party's penchant for environmental destruction.

- Finally, Thomas Walkom recognizes that the problems with Canada's Senate go far beyond Mike Duffy. And Michael Harris notes that the scandal surrounding Duffy includes Stephen Harper and his inner circle (no matter how much they scramble to escape accountability now):
But we do not live in a better world, we live in this one. Stephen Harper’s inclination is to make up the rules as he goes along. I for one do not see this as loyalty to his minions, but rather as a show of power. When, for example, the ethics commissioner has caught a cabinet minister or two in a breach of the rules, the PM has been known to simply dismiss the finding. The cases of Christian Paradis and Jim Flaherty come to mind.
So Harper’s initial instinct was to save Duffy. He began that process by taking the public on a mind-numbing sojourn into the rules and regulations of the Senate. He used the escape clause of the Deloitte audit, that by Senate definition, knowing where you live is a brain-twister. And he has never had a problem dismissing the ethical part of any problem if it collided with his agenda. Look what he did to Kevin Page for the high crime of outing the PM’s lie over the cost of the F-35s.
But dry-cleaning Duffy quickly turned into a sticky proposition. For one thing, this one has gone right up the nose of the public and people are gagging. And then there are those two mutually exclusive stories about how the senator’s debts were paid off....One enduring question is this: Why did Nigel Wright bail out Mike Duffy before the sharp pencil boys from Deloitte had even finished their damning audit?
But there is an even bigger issue. If Stephen Harper doesn’t see anything wrong with his chief of staff making a $90,000 gift to a sitting Conservative senator engulfed in scandal, is there anything he wouldn’t endorse for partisan gain?

In his column this morning, Thomas Walkom suggests that Mike Duffy's current scandal-plagued problems are representative of much deeper ones in the Senate, namely that our much-cossetted members of that 'chamber of sober second thought' are appointed, not because of their expertise (many of them have none), not because of intimate knowledge of a particular province (Duffy has none, having lived in Ottawa for over 30 years and not even legally qualified to represent P.E.I.), but because the Senate has become, under both Liberal and Conservative governments, a repository of party strategists and bagmen where they can continue their partisan wizardry.

No doubt Walkom is correct as far as he goes. But the above, it seems to me, are simply symptomatic of two much deeper problems in public life, the widespread disengagement of our citizens, about which I have written before, and the shocking dearth of integrity in those who achieve high office.

For example, all of the events surrounding the Duffy porkbarreling have, quite rightly, provoked widespread outrage. However, when the abuses and betrayals of the public trust are not so obvious or so sensational, far too many citizens just shrug their shoulders and say that politics doesn't interest them. This marked indifference is precisely what has permitted, even encouraged, the depradatory environmental, science, economic and social policies the Harper regime has so avidly embraced and promoted. It is this indifference that enabled Harper to prorogue Parliament twice. It is this indifference that enabled, without even a hint of contrition, the excesses of Treasury Board President Tony 'gazeebo' Clement. I could go on and on.

A sleeping public enables, even encourages the unethical, the unprincipled, those for whom integrity is an alien concept, to prey upon and erode the public good.

I have always tried to live my life with principle and integrity, as do so many others throughout the world. Because we inhabit a world requiring adaptation and compromise, integrity and principle are ideals toward which we strive, providing, as they do, a moral compass and the recognition that the solely material and secular things of this world often come with a price too high to pay.

I will close this post with a quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth, a man who learned that hard truth far too late, recognizing, as the end of his life approaches, that he has sacrificed everything of enduring value in his lust for power and pomp:


My way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

-- Act v, Sc. 3




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Two of Stephen Harper's senate appointments have been shoved out of the Conservative caucus. The Senate was their reward for doing the Prime Minister's dirty work. But one of life's axioms is that what goes around comes around.

Patrick Brazeau helped Stephen Harper kill the Kelowna Accord. It was Brazeau, the deputy national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, who supported Harper during the 2006 election. The Assembly of First Nations backed Paul Martin and the Accord. Michael Harris writes:

It was the age-old battle over reserve and non-reserve aboriginals and the differing treatment they receive from the federal government. Harper got his first minority government in 2006 in part because Brazeau, then CAP’s deputy-national chief, helped kill the Kelowna Accord. Two years later, he was in the Senate.
Mike Duffy also performed an essential service for Harper during the 2008 election. Lawrence Martin reminds his readers that:

Duffy has been a favourite of the PM’s. He was viewed as having done the Conservatives a great favour in the 2008 election. At the end of the campaign, when momentum could have tilted either way, Liberal leader Stephane Dion stumbled in responding to a CTV question he couldn’t understand. The CTV reporter promised Dion he wouldn’t run the clip — but Duffy turned around and made a major story of it. The Conservatives later acknowledged it really swung votes their way in the final days. It wasn’t much later that Duffy was named a senator.
Stephen Harper would not be where he is today without the assistance of Brazeau and Duffy. But henchmen come with their own baggage. Mr. Harper operates on the assumption that he exercises complete control over his minions. The problem is that minions eventually screw up. And men like Brazeau and Duffy screw up big time.

Henchmen are their own curse.

He has been drunk as a skunk in public.

He has given women and children the finger.

He is a crass, vulgar bigot, and the worst Mayor Toronto has ever known.

Now let Rob Ford explain this one. 

A cellphone video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine is being shopped around Toronto by a group of Somali men involved in the drug trade.
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Well he's finally been kicked out of Con caucus.

Senator Mike Duffy has resigned from the Conservative caucus and will sit as an Independent amid controversy over his living and travel expense claims.

Even as the scandals keep on coming.

Sen. Mike Duffy attempted to influence the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s upcoming decision involving the right-leaning Sun News Network, a source has told CTV News.

But now at last we can understand why the boys in the PMO were so desperate to try to make the problem go away.
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Mike Duffy has departed the Conservative caucus.

"...the Prime Minister’s Office appears to have been blindsided by Duffy’s claims that he had arranged his own loan with Royal Bank of Canada to cover the repayment.

“There are a growing number of questions about Mr. Duffy’s conduct that don’t have answers. Mr. Duffy will have to answer as an independent senator,” a government official said Thursday night.
Duffy’s claim that he had secured a bank loan was a complete surprise to senior government officials and appears to have sparked his departure from the Conservative caucus.
Senator Marjory LeBreton, the government house leader in the Senate, confirmed he was out of caucus.

“Senator Duffy has informed me that he has resigned from caucus to sit as an independent senator,” LeBreton said in a statement.

Duffy said in a statement the controversy around his repayment had become a “significant distraction to my caucus colleagues, and to the government.”

And then this curious statement from senator Mike who refused to cooperate with auditors, refused to hand over bank statements and other records, and claims to have been ordered by the Prime Minister's Office to dummy up:

“Throughout this entire situation I have sought only to do the right thing. I look forward to all relevant facts being made clear in due course, at which point I am hopeful I will be able to rejoin the Conservative caucus,” he said. 

Mike, the auditors were asking you to make the "relevant facts" clear and you wanted no part of it.   You gave them the slip.   Sorry, Duff, but you've been marooned.

After reading Dawg's excellent piece about the man who was appointed by the Harper Cons as Librarian and Archivist of Canada, all I can say is, "Heck of a job, Danny!"

In March 2012, Christy Clark gave the opening remarks to the Ottawa Manning Centre Networking Conference, the yearly "conservative family reunion".

She was introduced by her then chief of staff, former senior Harper advisor, Enbridge lobbyist, and Alberta 'firewall manifesto' signatory Ken Boessenkool, who was her very first campaign manager back in 2010. 
"We have a duty to Canada" to easy the flow of products to Asia, she told her audience at the Manning Centre [a year ago]. "We support pipelines in British Columbia." BC Conservative leader John Cummins was not invited.
Manning has in the past said he doesn’t support the political ambitions of Cummins, who was elected as a Reformer with Manning in the 1993 election, because vote-splitting on the centre-right always makes it easier for the NDP to assume power.One-time Harper government cabinet minister, Jay Hill, also said Friday he’s backing Clark’s leadership. “I’ll do whatever I can to support her and support the B.C. Liberals."
Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and President of the Manning Centre, is also a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.Jay Hill was in charge of the Cons 200 page dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt and stonewall parliamentary committees back in 2007.
Also helping Christy's campaign was Chuck Strahl, former BC Reform and Con MP, now chair of the Manning Centre and chair of CSIS watchdog the Security Intelligence Review Committee since last June, at which time he had to give up working for Christy.

The only pollster to accurately predict Tuesday's election result was Christy's principal secretary and ADM in charge of "Intergovernmental Relations" till a year ago and now on contract to Christy, former Reform and Republican policy advisor Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Premier’s Office targeted crucial election ridings for the B.C. Liberals — all on government time and your dime
"Premier Christy Clark’s former principal secretary, Dimitri Pantazopolous, and former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad were among those involved in a comprehensive strategy that used government staff and resources to try to win swing ridings for the BC Liberals ...  serious misconduct by government employees and misuse of government funds.  “Dimitri was the driving force behind the swing teams, from its inception through to the operational phase."Pantazoploulos also runs the Manning Centre Municipal Governance Project and is mentioned by Calgary developer Cal Wenzel in the now infamous cel vid about buying the campaigns of developer-friendly municipal candidates in order to defeat Calgary Mayor Nenshi.


On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - former Christy chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign. 














and a quick tweet from Rob Ford's chief of staff Mark Towhey:











You do remember Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research,  don't you ? 

In addition to being Rob Ford's election architect, Kouvalis is a regular speaker at ... wait for it ... the Manning Centre yearly bunfest.

Fun fact :  Founding directors of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy :

• Nigel Wright, Harper's chief of staff, currently in the news for cutting Con senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to cover money the Duffster owed to the Senate for inappropriately claimed living expenses for the past four years while Duffy was being investigated for it,  and 
• Gwyn Morgan, Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin til May 2 this year, the company being investigated for fraud in four countries on three continents, was Steve's choice for heading up his brand new Accountability commission in 2006.

.

…are readying the frying pan, I suspect. Michael Den Tandt has never been one of my favourite scribes, but his column on the whole mess is frankly masterful. Go read it.... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Forty-Nine to One is not Fifty-Fifty.   Climate change denialists like to spread it on thick and claim there's some fierce debate over the reality of anthropogenic global warming and there are a good many disinformed, misinformed and simply delusional types who think there is no consensus and it's a toss up.

That's simply garbage served up by people who manufacture garbage for people willing to consume garbage.

Yet another peer-reviewed study into the great body of climate change research studies finds 97.1% endorse the consensus view while a miserably underwhelming 1.9% reject the consensus.

That is the finding of a University of Queensland-led study that surveyed the abstracts of almost 12,000 scientific papers from 1991-2011 and claims to be the largest peer-reviewed study of its kind.
 The report's lead author, John Cook, a fellow at the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute and founder of the website skepticalscience.com, said the scientific consensus was overwhelming, growing and had been around since the early 1990s.
  He said that while the number of papers rejecting the consensus was "vanishingly small", his research suggested the public was under the impression the debate was split 50-50.

"When people think scientists agree, they are more likely to support a carbon tax or general climate action," he said.

"But if they think scientists are still arguing about it, they don't want to do anything about it." Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are about 400 parts per million and rising – the highest in more than 3 million years.

Mr Cook said scientists now found less need to state their position on climate change in abstracts summarising their papers, "just as geographers find no reason to remind readers that the earth is round".

Science is a discipline that is not quick to embrace consensus which is one reason even phenomenon such as gravity are still treated as theories.  Therefore, when you hit 97% agreement, you truly are ringing all the bells.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last few months, the National Post’s Matt Gurney has a useful summary of Mike Duffy’s corrupt antics in the Senate, up to and including the decision by the Prime Minister’s Office to bail out Duffy with $90,000 in cash from Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, which Duffy then used to pay back his $90,000 in ill-gotten gains bilked from the taxpayer via fraudulent expense claims. At the time, the PMO praised Duffy for “voluntarily” paying back the money. It now turns out there was nothing less than a conspiracy to rescue Duffy from having to make good on the expense accounts, and then to cover up the truth.

It’s illegal for Duffy to accept these sorts of payments in connection with his job as a Senator, so Gurney’s colleague, Andrew Coyne, is probably a little off base when he suggests that the matter wouldn’t have been nearly so awful if Duffy had disclosed the payment when it was made. In any event, I do thoroughly endorse the calls from both Coyne and Gurney (and many, many others) for Duffy to resign.

But there’s a broader observation to be made here, and I’m going to draw on another recent and scandalous episode in order to make it: where the hell has Stephen Harper’s admittedly self-interested sense of ethics gone?

Some of you will be scoffing that he never had one. This isn’t entirely true. Back when Harper was Leader of the Opposition, he believed sincerely in accountable and transparent government — or, more to the point, he believed that talking points about Liberal corruption, of which there was plenty to go around, played well with voters. And after getting elected, too, he passed some serious reforms to the ethics, lobbying, electoral finance, and other laws, even if those reforms have since been criticized for being full of loopholes so big you could drive a truck through them. And ministers could get dismissed for gross indiscretion from time to time, although those times have gotten noticeably fewer and some of the offenders (I’m looking at you, Max Bernier) have been pardoned and welcomed back into the fold.

Contrast that Harper with the Harper of this year. The Harper of this year isn’t exactly open about the corruption of his government, but he makes only slight attempts to hide it, and when caught out, he’s thoroughly unapologetic. When Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue was caught with his hand in a rather large cookie jar, the PMO defended him. When it turned out that they couldn’t simply brazen away massive violations of the electoral finance laws, Penashue stepped down, but only to run in the resulting by-election with a public promise from other Cabinet ministers that he would be reinstated into Cabinet following his re-election, plus some rather appalling guff of his own about he had deliberately (ab)used his Cabinet position by sabotaging government projects elsewhere in the country in order to gather pork for his own riding.

And now Mike Duffy. Duffy, as has been known for some months now, collected $90,000 in expenses for living in his house in Ottawa — a house he already owned and lived in when he was made a Senator, and hasn’t left since — on the dubious pretext that his vacation cabin on PEI was actually his “primary residence.” This declaration was made despite the fact that Duffy pays income taxes to Ontario, has an Ontario health care, and is registered to vote in Ontario; he subsequently claimed that he had made an error when filling out the form. A couple of months ago, while an audit of Duffy’s books was underway, he suddenly announced that he was going to repay the $90,000 in a spirit of generosity. At the time, we put it up to the Conservatives trying to put away the story before it got out of control.

Which was right, in a sense, but also wrong, in a sense. We now know, courtesy of some convenient press leaks, that Duffy worked out a deal with the Prime Minister’s Office. Under the terms of this deal, he “stayed silent” during the investigation — silent about what, we still don’t know — and, in exchange, he received a $90,000 “gift” from Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright, which he used to repay his fraudulent expense claims. So Duffy didn’t actually lose a cent by way of punishment. The Conservatives are adamant that Wright used his own money, not taxpayers’ or the party’s, for this incredibly seedy transaction.

Now, first of all, this seems like a useful time to point out that it’s simply untrue to say that “all politicians are the same.” Chretien’s Liberals, corrupt as they certainly were, were never charged with national electoral money laundering. When ministers were implicated in bilking the public, they were shipped off to Europe as ambassadors — which is bad enough, in its own way, but not nearly as bad as endorsing them as by-election candidates (a la Penashue) or promoting them to the Treasury Board (a la Tony Clement, whose proven exploits already dwarf the Sponsorship Scandal in its size). It’s hard to imagine Chretien not only declining to oust from his party a Senator found guilty of defrauding the taxpayer, but bailing him out of trouble with $90,000. Mulroney might have done it, but only if the cash had been stuffed into a brown envelope and exchanged in a New York hotel room.

As I wrote already, some readers will no doubt be already scrolling down to the comment section to interject that Harper was corrupt all along. I don’t contest this. There was, for instance, Harper’s attempt to bribe terminally-ill independent MP Chuck Cadman with a $1 million life insurance policy in exchange for a vote against the Liberal budget. The difference is, Harper used to angrily deny such allegations, and engage in ludicrously heavyhanded censorship tactics to suppress them — in the Cadman case, he sued the Liberals for libel and demanded $3.5 million in compensation, although the suit was later quietly dropped, presumably because the allegations were true.

The detectable (but gradual) difference is that after making some cursory efforts at denial, the Harper Conservatives no longer make serious attempts to defend their claims to integrity or accountability. During the Penashue by-election, it was openly claimed — unsuccessfully — by the Conservative Party that it would reward Labrador for supporting Penashue by putting him back in Cabinet and directing a steady stream of government investments into the riding. It was also indicated that if they declined to support Penashue, they would be punished: federal funding for the riding would dry up overnight. Given that Penashue had openly admitted to massive violations of the electoral laws in 2011, it’s amazing that he would have been allowed to run under the Conservative banner again in the first place.

The Duffy scandal didn’t have to be a scandal. The Liberals turfed their own cheating Senator, Mac Harb, long ago, even though he was guilty of much less than Duffy. Yet to date, Harper and the Prime Minister’s Office have not repudiated Duffy. Instead, they bought him out, and now, they have the temerity to claim — in obvious disregard of the ethics code — that the huge payment made to Duffy, much more than most of us make in a year, is actually a sign of how generous and friendly the Harper government is. It’s stunning, callous, and pathetic.

But it’s calculated. We have to assume it’s calculated. Despite their frequent missteps, the Harper government lives by tactics, not grand strategic vision. That is why they micromanage. That is why it’s hard to imagine Harper wouldn’t know about the payment to Duffy and even have approved it (without any semblance of a paper trail, of course). And that is why it’s worth asking what was going through their heads at the time that they judged the political risks of secretly funneling money to a corrupt senator were less than the political risks of simply firing Duffy at the outset and washing their hands of the whole thing, the way they did when another Harper appointee to the Senate, Patrick Brazeau, was recently charged with sexual assault.

On its face, this sort of calculation seems absurd. Harper himself would have had a field day with the issue if the Liberals had done anything remotely like it during their dying days. The conclusion must surely be that they believe the political fallout from being thoroughly implicated in corruption is actually negligible.

Once again, that may seem absurd on its face, but I’m not so sure. 40% of Canadians won’t vote anyways, so it doesn’t really matter what they think, although probably it’s something on the order of “don’t know, don’t care.” Of those who do vote, it’s now quite apparent, after six years of Harper rule, that at least 60% will never vote for the Conservatives anyways. The PMO can afford to write off these voters, because experience has amply demonstrated that you can win a majority government without them. Lots of these people are no doubt very angry about the Duffy scandal, but they weren’t going to vote for the Conservatives anyways, and Harper knows this.

Of the remaining group, the majority — let’s say at least 30% — will vote for the Conservatives anyways, because they consider themselves right-wing to the core, even though there’s no indication that the Harper Conservatives have more than a passive interest in any plausibly “conservative” political agenda. This is actually a surprisingly small percentage of our population that consider themselves too staunchly conservative to vote for any party that doesn’t label itself as conservative — adjusting for the mass of non-voters, less than one in five is a staunch conservative loyalist.

Despite current polling levels, I am quite confident that this represents basically a lower bound and I will stand by my judgement. Even in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives imploded in spectacular fashion, they still captured 16% of the popular vote, and the Reform Party took another 19%. Plus, voter turnout was higher. Adjusting for that, about 25% of Canadians voted for an openly right-wing party in 1993, which is actually higher than the percentage that voted for the Conservatives in 2011. Of course thinking readers will want to also adjust for the fact that the PCs were not as right-wing in 1993 as they are now, and that by 1993 the Liberals were already a right-wing party in their basic policy outlook if not in their rhetoric.

So that leaves a total of about one in twenty Canadians who will vote for somebody and might vote Conservative but could plausibly be talked out of it. Of this already very small group, only a minority will (a) watch the news regularly, (b) read subtly enough to realize that this sort of graft would probably not be committed by other political parties, (c) put a high enough priority on government accountability that a scandal like Mike Duffy’s, or Tony Clement’s, or Peter Penashue’s, would cause them to change their vote, and (d) will receive such a strong impression from scandals like these that it will still influence their voting intentions two years down the road.

Now, it could be that the cumulative weight of successive scandals will end up costing the Conservatives dearly, the way it did for the Liberals, and the way it did for the PCs. I am not convinced of this, however. Mulroney’s extravagances were so extreme that it sparked the rise of a new right-wing party, whereas today, the vast majority of Conservatives show no interest in leaving Harper, at least on the mere grounds of routine lawbreaking, fiscal incompetence, or heavy-handed secrecy and censorship. The Liberals were buried by a full-court press by the conservative media, whereas today the media can generally be counted on to act as cheerleaders for right-of-centre parties, regardless of their indiscretions. The Globe & Mail is may be already working on the first drafts of their 2015 endorsement of Stephen Harper. At the time, people of all political parties and at all newspapers agreed that the government was subject to the rule of law. Sadly, that no longer appears to be the case.

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.... people showing such contempt for my intelligence really inflames me:

A senior PMO official told Fife that Duffy couldn’t afford to repay the $90,000 and did not want to borrow money from a bank, fearing that his wife would be stuck with the large debt if he died suddenly from a heart attack. Duffy has battled cardiac problems over the years.

Jennifer Ditchburn and Steve Rennie present an alternative view of The Puffster's finances here.

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My Duffy post earlier today seems to have drawn the attention of some Ottawa outfit called the Government Telecommunications and Informatics Service.  Anyone know anything about them?

We are relaxing recuperating in our room in the Hotel Molinas in Granada, in the south of Spain. File this day under all's well that ends well.

Our last night in Barcelona, we had a tapas dinner at El Bixto, where we had gone two nights earlier. We got caught in the pouring rain on the way home, the first bad weather we've seen on the whole trip.

In the morning we took the metro to pick up our rental car, then braved a minor nightmare making it back to the hotel, what with poorly signed roundabouts, one-way streets, no parking, and Allan re-learning how to drive a stick shift. (It now seems amusing to call this a nightmare, given the major driving nightmare that would bookend the day.) We packed up the car and I navigated us out of Barcelona and onto the highway. I don't drive a stick shift, so on any of our European trips, all the driving falls to Allan.

Barcelona to Grenada is about 860 kilometres (535 miles). It's the longest drive of the trip, the only one of this kind of distance. Once we were on the highway, it was very easy going. There were vistas of the Mediterranean, rolling farmland, some foothills and mountain tunnels. Easy, pleasant driving. But, I think, a lot for one person. So as the day wears on, Allan is getting tired. We are both ready to get into town.

We had a bit of a surprise when the toll road turned out to be 30 euros! We stopped at a rest stop for lunch, serving all manner of freshly prepared food, and picked up some cookies and chips... which turned out to be dinner.

The last few hours of the drive wound through dramatic country. First we drove through thousands of acres of vineyards, an area of Spain that produces standard table wine, and lots of it. Eventually this gave way to orchards on both sides of the highway, more orchards than I have ever seen, including in California. We were driving through a valley, and the orchards went up steep hills, into the foothills of mountains. It seemed like every bit of land that was not completely mountainous rock was planted, including on dramatic steep hillsides. The orchards didn't stop until the mountain went straight up. We were both amazed at such steeply hilly country being completely planted. I don't know what was growing, although we also passed a processing plant of some type and the air was rich with the smell of olives.

By the time we reached Granada it was growing dark. There's a huge amount of suburban sprawl, which surprised us. We had no idea the area was so populous. We turned off the highway, following directions to the hotel... which quickly did not correspond to reality. Before we knew it, we were driving on tiny, narrow streets, pedestrians overflowing from the sidewalks, intersections not marked, and absolutely no idea where we were or what direction to go.

This is absolutely not a town to drive in - and in fact the streets in the oldest part of town are closed to traffic (except taxis and buses) until 10:00 pm - but many tourists have no choice. We were hopelessly lost. I couldn't even call the hotel, because we lacked any point of reference to tell them where we were. At one point we found ourselves on a ring road heading up into the hills, out of town, in the pitch dark.

Poor Allan was exhausted. He had already driven 9 hours, and now he's bumping down impossibly narrow streets, motorcycles cutting us off, taxis honking behind us, people walking in front of the car with no warning. It was a nightmare. I was debating whether we should just stop at any hotel and try to get a room, but it was after 10:00 pm and that can be an even more frustrating experience. We had booked our Granada room online while in Barcelona. It was a great deal, they were holding the room for us, but I was starting to wonder if we'd ever find them, and if we did, would the room still be available.

Allan spotted a large hotel with a brightly lit sign, and we pulled into their check-in/unloading area. I took a chance, called our hotel and said we were lost. A very nice young man gave me verbal directions, which I wrote down, but they were like gibberish. We needed a map.

Then I went inside, and another very nice young man saved the day. He knew the hotel we were looking for, and said it was all but impossible to find. I felt a bit vindicated when he said that folks with GPS get especially lost! He took out a map, and gave me detailed directions, both written and verbal, then went over the whole thing again. While there, I also asked if his hotel had a vacancy... it did not.

It worked. The directions were perfect and we found the hotel. The young man at the desk (who I had spoken to earlier) could not have been nicer. He showed us to our room in an adjacent building, met us at the parking garage around the corner, and booked our tickets for the Alhambra for the next day. We were so tired we could have cried.

The hotel itself is hip and stylish, the room bright and roomy - and crazy cheap. Our room in Paris was 200 euros per night, much more than we usually spend, but I wanted to stay in a nice neighbourhood, and many of the better discount hotels were fully booked. Our room in Barcelona was 80 euros a night, a terrific deal in a nice neighbourhood. And this room in Granada is 55 euros a night! And it's really nice. It will be interesting to see what transpires from now on.

On the way here, I was fascinated to see highway signs in both Spanish and Arabic. Is there still an Arabic community in southern Spain, or do Muslims make pilgrimages to see these ancient holy sites? Either way, it's wonderful. We're seeing the Alhambra late in the day, just relaxing and hanging out until then. We'll also book our next couple of nights, and maybe book ahead in Madrid.

The DSM-5 is out, and it’s a 1000-page whopper. Shrinks have discovered a plethora of new mental illnesses—such as grieving the death of a loved one—and no doubt they have a pill and other “therapies” ready and waiting for anyone... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Who knows? With a little modification, Robertson's advice to the wife who has been cheated on might offer a new spin direction for the Harper regime, especially in its current troubles.

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With the launch yesterday of the X-47B from the deck of the USS George HW Bush, the case for the F-35 just got a lot weaker.



The X-47B is a prototype of a U.S. Navy UCAV or unmanned combat air vehicle.  It's a stealth light bomber which is pretty much the same sort of aircraft as the F-35 only without the guy inside.

The X-47B is intended to penetrate hostile airspace, undetected, drop a couple of bombs on a heavily defended, high-value target and then try to get back out again.   The F-35 is intended to penetrate hostile airspace, undetected, drop a couple of bombs on a heavily defended, high-value target and then try to get back out again.   The big difference is that if the F-35 doesn't succeed, you're probably going to lose the airplane and the pilot.

But don't you need a pilot to bomb an enemy target deep inside the bad guy's territory?  Nope.  The Americans have been using air launched and submarine launched cruise missiles for many years that fly ground-hugging profiles and hit their targets with great precision.  All you have to do with the drone is programme it to find its way back out.  It's a lot like a reusable, two-way cruise missile.

Now the defence-guys at Wired.com are suggesting that the XB-47 might just be the best option of laying a God-fearing whipping on those godless Chinese that we all know we're going to be bombing sooner or later.

And wouldn't you know it?  Guess who also seems to be fielding something along the lines of the XB-17?  Why the Chinese, of course.





The picture caused Aviation Week's Bill Sweetman to quip, “What’s Chinese for, ‘Here we go again?’”

The folks at UpWorthy have published a photo-perspective showing the faces of soldiers taken before, during and after war.  Here's one example.   Follow the link above to see the rest.

Check this out.  It's a twitter-based map of racism in the United States.


 
A team of geographers from Humboldt State University has developed a map of the United States which plots the intensity of discriminatory speech in social media, including racism, homophobia and ableism.

The team -- headed up by Dr Monica Stephens -- used a database of geotagged tweets called DOLLY to scan the Twitter output in North America between June 2012 and April 2013. They were scanning for a list of words along with the sentiment attached to those words -- this was done manually, with undergraduate students Amelia Egle, Matthew Eiben and Miles Ross reading the tweets to deduce whether a word was being used in a positive, negative or neutral way.

I'm not sure about this.  Obviously the results are higher in regions with higher population density and appear lower or even non-existent in sparsely populated states.  It's an interesting example, however, of how social media can be used to profile regions and populations.  Big Bro is Watchin' You All.