Posts from our progressive community

By now the entire country  knows what happened here in BC…the re-election of the Provincial Liberals (or Con-Lites) …to say that  I am depressed is to  state the case in an all-too delicate way.

If I can derive any tiny bit of  satisfaction  from the election, it is that… a) my old home riding, Kitsilano in Vancouver, did not elect Christy Clark  as their MLA – and this is Gordon Campbell’s old riding, where we fought long and hard to unseat him (unsuccessfully, I should add)… and b)   Vancouver Island, my current  home base, stubbornly true to form, went almost all NDP,  and even elected our first Green MLA, leaving only one seat left for the Fiberals  in,  inexplicably, the Comox Valley……

So, here’s my plan for the future..that the Island declare Independence  and break away from the rest of the Mainland, becoming their own  Province…and why not?  We have a very large land base, and grow an increasingly large amount of our own healthy food. We have a thriving  tourist industry, beautiful natural places (that we want to maintain and protect) and we are willing to fight hard to protect, and work with, not destroy, our  well-appreciated  natural resources. We have elected politicians willing to thumb their nose at the status quo and protect children’s health and education, and show some respect for our  seniors…

I have a strange sort of feeling that other  places might actually wish to join us..the Gulf Islands, Haida Gwaii, etc….(well, Haida Gwaii as a friendly sovereign nation, then)

It will take me a long time to recover from this  major defeat of principles and social justice..but, of course, the work continues, because I just know that  the Feds will look on this  rightwing triumph as a green light for the pipeline push…and that is something that should be fought with everything we have…it’s the only important fight we have left.

Sideshow Steve Harper and his British counterpart, Austerity Dave Cameron, may be widely disliked by their citizens, but they are taking care of business.

Cameron, according to documents leaked to The Guardian, is running interference for Steve with the same E.U. his party is constantly threatening to divorce.

The E.U. is contemplating restrictions on high-carbon transport fuels, which is code for Athabasca bitumen.   The European commission has proposed labelling Alberta heavy oil as "highly polluting" to deter countries importing it.   Cameron is moving to derail that initiative.

But of six options put to EU countries in April on how to implement the proposal, the UK chose the two that would make no differentiation between the carbon content of fuels.

"Based on the findings so far, it seems clear that [these two] seem to meet the policy aims of the directive with the least risks of unexpected consequences," the UK said in the documents. It firmly rejected others that allowed a difference.

Charlie Kronick, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace, said: "Labelling oil from tar sands as highly polluting would strongly discourage tar sands imports into the Europe and possibly other markets. It could also discourage planned tar sands extraction projects in other parts of the world, such as Madagascar.

"If you're not serious about keeping tar sands oil out of Europe, then you're not serious about climate change."

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Michael Babad takes a look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data on wages and employment levels - reaching the conclusion that the corporatist effort to drive wages down does nothing to improve employment prospects. But the absence of any remotely plausible policy justification hasn't stopped the Sask Party from "modernizing" the province's rules governing work by setting them back upwards of half a century.

- Meanwhile, Pat Atkinson rightly notes that the most important problem with the Cons' push for temporary foreign workers is the "temporary" part. And Nicholas Keung and Dana Flavelle report on the start of an investigation into the permit granted to convert RBC jobs in Canada into outsourced jobs overseas (with the "temporary" part consisting only of the transition period).

- The Star takes aim at the Cons' attempt to posture against tax evasion while slashing the resources the Canada Revenue Agency needs to do something about it:
Revenue Minister Gail Shea warns that miscreants with undeclared taxable assets offshore should come clean and “declare all their assets now before the agency (Canada Revenue Agency) comes after them.” Her colleague Max Bernier, minister for small business, boasts that a “SWAT team” is being readied to chase them down. Certainly, that’s what hardworking, taxpaying Canadians might hope. There’s nothing more demoralizing than seeing people scam the system.

But for all that, Ottawa’s crackdown looks to be more bark than bite. The opposition New Democrats and Liberals have ridiculed it as “window dressing” and a “shell game” designed to defuse public criticism more than anything else.

While that may be harsh, the Conservative government does appear to be trying to spook wealthy tax dodgers into voluntarily declaring their assets with a crackdown on the cheap. Of the $30 million Shea announced for new measures to track down tax evaders and aggressive avoiders — spread over five years, no less — just $15 million is new money; the rest is recycled. And the so-called SWAT team is shaping up to be a 10-person outfit at best. Meanwhile, the CRA is expected to trim $300 million from its budget in the next three years and cut 3,000 jobs, a prime victim of federal deficit-cutting.

While it’s good to see Ottawa taking some action, it’s hard to believe this modest initiative can have much impact on a hugely complex offshore tax-dodging industry. Canadians for Tax Fairness, a group that campaigns for sharing the burden more equitably, estimates that affluent Canadians have put $160 billion into offshore havens, costing us nearly $8 billion a year in foregone tax revenues. The scofflaws among them have a lot invested in not being easily rattled into declaring their assets.
...
(G)lobally, offshore tax havens have burgeoned into a $20-trillion business that in the government’s own words encompasses everything from “complex corporate schemes, individuals using offshore jurisdictions of concern, ‘tax havens,’ or tax shelter schemes that are used to avoid or evade tax.” Are we to believe that a small CRA team is going to be able to police so wide a waterfront? That’s a stretch.- Chris Plecash writes about the Cons' choice to slash public and social services based on nothing more than blind faith in the free market. And Frances Russell is right to point out that social impact bonds look to make for a particularly toxic mix of corporatism and laissez-faire social policy - though I do have to wonder why she thinks for a second that the Libs are part of the solution rather than the problem given their own corporatist positioning.

- Finally, I'll have a bit more to say later on about B.C.'s alarming election results. But Bill Tieleman offers an overview of the lessons to be learned from yesterday's election.

It must be very comforting indeed to the increasingly odious Senator Duffy that his relationship with the Prime Minister is so 'special' that the latter is willing to exercise unethical, perhaps even illegal interference on his behalf during the Senate's investigation into his fraudulent expense claims.

For the rest of us, the stench of corruption has reached near-asphyxiation levels.

Recommend this Post

Tom Walkom writes that when it comes to residency, Senate rules are unambiguous:

The constitution act is crystal clear on this. It says a senator must be at least 30 years old, own $4,000 worth of real estate in the province he represents and be “resident in the province for which he is appointed.”
And, try as he might, the Artful Dodger can't dodge certain facts:

As the Senate’s own internal economy committee found, Duffy does not hold a P.E.I. health card. He does not pay income tax to P.E.I. He spends only 30 per cent of his time in the province. How then can he be resident in P.E.I.?
And if he’s not resident in P.E.I., he cannot be a senator from that province. Indeed, the constitution act specifies that if a senator is found not to live in the province he was appointed to represent, his seat is deemed vacant.
The Senate has always been a home for political partisans. But, under Stephen Harper, the Senate has become the last defense against the will of the House of Commons. Micheal Harris reminds his readers that it was the Senate which enforced Harper's denial of climate change. It was the senate which killed

by stealth Bill C-311 after the House of Commons had passed the climate change bill. And this under a prime minister who once promised that he would never allow an unelected Senate to go against the will of the majority of Members of Parliament.
Walkom puts the case succinctly:

Mike Duffy came from P.E.I. It is a heritage of which he is justly proud. He vacations on the island. But he doesn’t really live there any more. And because of that, he cannot — by law — represent P.E.I. in the Senate.

 

As you know I have long believed that Stephen Harper's Cons are not a political party like any other Canadians have ever known.

That they are more like a cult than a party.

But even as their deranged leader drags us into his ghastly  darkness, muzzles the truth, lies about everything, and bullies his opponents, still some of my friends say to me: Simon, don't exaggerate, it couldn't happen HERE.
Read more »

After breakfast in our room with our own goodies, we went into the old city - Ciutat Vella in Catalan - to the Museu Picasso. There are Picasso museums in many cities and I'd love to see them all. He is among my very favourite artists. The Barcelona Picasso museum was planned by the man himself, a gift to the city of his birth, and focuses on his earliest work - when he was a child, and then an unknown artist developing his own styles - and on a collection of later works he left to his friend and secretary, Jaume Sabartés.

Seeing the young Pablo's work was so interesting. He was clearly very talented at a very young age, winning admission to prestigious art academies, then quickly realizing that formal art training had nothing left to teach him. He spent time copying the styles of famous painters to understand their techniques... and then he went to Paris. It was also cool to see him toying with different signatures, until he developed what would become one of the most famous signatures in art.

The best part of this collection, for me, was the small cubist section - maybe 6 or 7 wonderful cubist paintings - and Picasso's Las Meninas cycle. Picasso took Las Meninas, a very famous painting by the Spanish master Velasquez (see here), and riffed on it, creating 45 new versions, many focusing on one or two details, and none of them looking anything like the original. You can see some of them here.

This was really a marvel. However, the museum gets huge points off for not having a single reproduction of the original Velasquez painting for reference. Could it be that The Prado (the museum in Madrid where Las Meninas lives) won't let them? It was a terrible omission. But a terrific small museum.

After leaving the Picasso museum, we wandered a big more in the Barri Gotic, and found a tiny cafe for lunch. I think I now understand the difference between pintxos and tapas. Traditional tapas is a small plate of something - sausages, cheeses, fish, olives, whatever. The tall creations of combinations of food, on a piece of bread with a toothpick through the whole thing, displayed at the bar or on counters, is pintxos. But when the host or server is adding up your bill, they will say "tres tapas" for the three pintxos you ordered, using the terms interchangeably.

Pintxos look very appealing, all piled up the counter. The server will point and explain each one. You can't necessarily tell what they are, as the combinations are unusual, and some things are made into croquets or otherwise disguised. We had these: a croquette of octopus and shrimp, a piece of breaded chicken cutlet with a fried egg on top, and smoked salmon topped with brie. Plus a cafe con leche for me and a vino tinto for A.

After lunch we walked around the old area looking for Roman remains, both through our guidebook and historic markers posted around town. There is a section of Roman wall, some arches now built into the cathedral but originally part of an aqueduct, and some amazing intact columns, now hidden in an alley, but once incorporated into the meeting room of a local hiking club! A huge Roman excavation is now part of the museum of the history of Barcelona - a giant room of pieces of columns and arches and such. We didn't go in, but it looks very nice.

We also passed a small but spirited demo, in front of a bank. The demonstrators were all middle aged or older, and they looked very organized and very angry. The object of their anger: the ladrones banqueros - bank thieves.

We then walked further down into the Born district, adjacent to the Barri Gotic. It's a very old part of town that's been gentrified and upscaled. Allan wanted to see Santa Maria del Mar, a church from the 1300s. (I just peeked in, then rested on the entrance steps.) The neighbourhood is full of very upscaled tapas and pintxos bars, with huge plates of inventive pintxos piled up on the bars. We did go into this very clever and silly candy store: Happy Pills.

We walked across town to the Palau de La Musica Catalana, a crazy modernist concert hall, right near El Bixto, the wonderful place where we had dinner the other night. I took a lot of pictures of the exterior, but we had missed the last interior tour for the day.

Then it was back to the room to rest, then back to the Barri Gotic for dinner. First, we ducked into a store we had seen in our first hour here, Vaho, which sells all sorts of bags, backpacks, wallets, totes, and such, made from recycled vinyl posters that were hung in Barcelona. I absolutely loved them, and we had a mental note to come back and shop. For a cute visual story of how these "trashion" bags are made, go here.

The restaurant we picked out for dinner was - of course - not there, but the search for it took us down many tiny, narrow, out-of-the-way streets in the Barri Gotic. And by narrow, I mean pedestrian or cycle only. Historic markers said we were in the Jewish Quarter from the 12th and 13th centuries, near the central synagogue. That can only be up to the 13th century, before Jews were expelled from Spain, one way or another.

We finally gave up on our restaurant search and chose another place we had seen in the book, La Vinateria del Call. (The Call was the old Jewish quarter.) This one served traditional tapas, where you choose plates from a menu. We had a plate of incredibly delicious smoked fish (salmon, cod, herring, eel), jamon de pavo (ham made of duck), traditional catalan sausage called bull, and a potato fritata, and of course plenty of wine. Then we made a mistake: we ordered dessert paired with more wine. I only tasted the Catalan creme caramel - somewhere between creme brulee and flan - but I did drink the sweet vino de naraja (oranges). Remind me not to do that again!

After dinner, which began around 10:30 p.m., Allan whisked us to the subway and up to La Sagrada Familia, as he wanted to see it at night, lit up. (This is amusing, as I usually eat dinner very early and am getting ready for bed at 10:00 or 10:30.) When we exited the metro, part of La Sagrada was lit. Allan took a couple of pictures and... the lights turned out. Damn, too late! While we were there, a group of young men arrived by taxi, jumped out, took their picture in front of the dark church, and jumped back into the cab and sped away.

Then we had a bit of a mad race home, as the subways were about to close for the night. We took the very last train. The station master was waiting til we left to close the Tetuan station. Whew.

It was the New Dems' election to lose and that's just what they did.  They lost to a government that was roundly despised with a record rich in corruption, scandal, manipulation and dishonesty.

Tonight the public's distrust of the NDP trumped its disgust for the Liberals.   Tonight the NDP showed just how soft and unreliable its support can be and how easily even a rotten rival can pry those voters out of its hands.

Adrian Dix wasn't some firebrand socialist.   He was genuinely moderate and woefully lacking in the killer instinct of the blood sport of politics.   Dix foolishly took the high road and refused to engage, blow for blow, with Christy Clark's negative campaigning.

He needed to remind people every day all the reasons they had to loathe this woefully corrupt government but he wouldn't and didn't and his party, not to mention our province, paid the price for that.

I think something else we learned tonight is that New Democrat support is soft and unreliable.  It's a lesson that Tommy Mulcair and the federal Dippers should heed.  Jack Layton brought the NDP to official opposition on a groundswell of voter support in Quebec.  Where is that support today?  It's evaporating.

Well at least the night wasn't a total write-off.   My party, the Greens, won their first seat in B.C. provincial politics.    And what a win that was.   Andrew Weaver, U. Vic. professor and world renowned environmental scientist, will now replace the inept New Dems as the government's opposition on climate change and the security of our coast.

sdnxry5z7g

I’m not terribly interested in speculating, at least for the moment, about why the pollsters would be devastatingly incorrect — again — about a provincial election campaign. My guess is that in this case it has something to do with young people not voting, but again, the answer will become clear over the next couple of weeks. Mainly because that’s what the media will be focusing on.

Instead I have something else to get off my chest. I’m disappointed every time a far-right anti-government political party led by ignorant, unimaginative, corrupt, pro-global warming oligocrats wins an election. But to be honest, I’m not entirely surprised, and I’m actually surprised I’m not more disappointed. Being a leftist of my generation — I’m almost 30 now, so I can no longer truly claim to speak for the youth, but I am part of a generation that elects not to vote in unprecedented numbers — is a lonely lot. It’s also a thoroughly depressing lot, to the point that you sort of get inured to this kind of thing.

In my lifetime, I have not witnessed the creation of a single truly significant social program of any kind. I almost share a birthday with the Constitution, which I revere, but it’s pretty much downhill from there: the erosion and now open elimination of universal healthcare; the rise of free trade and the consequent devaluation of Canadian citizenship; the selling off of most of the profitable elements of the public sector at both the federal and provincial levels; the beginning of the end of Employment Insurance, public pensions and Old Age Security; the rise of a political culture of naked deceit and overt criminality of a sort not normally tolerated in democratic countries with the rule of law and not seen in Canada for a century; the slashing and burning of public education…

And, last but quite the opposite of least, the great turning away from scientifically informed climate policy. That one may sound a bit unfair, since my lifetime also saw the rise of scientifically informed climate policy. However, since the year I was old enough to vote, there has been nothing but setbacks on the question of whether dangerous climate change will be mitigated, let alone prevented. Emission regulation ideas surfaced, and were defeated by the right on the grounds they were inefficient. The carbon tax arose, and was defeated by the right on the grounds that it was a punitive move. Cap and trade arose, and was defeated by the right on the grounds that it was unnecessary government intervention in the economy.

Speaking of the economy, it’s worth noting that so called “centre-right” political parties have correctly judged that the vast majority of Canadians are simply not interested in voting for anything other than a promise of budget cuts, tax cuts, and job growth, basically at the cost of anything else, whether it’s social services or accountability or even a minimal level of integrity and honesty in politics or the environment or our international reputation or anything else. This is precisely the result which my series on evolution and the future of humanity was building towards, so I’ll probably feel a little vindicated on that front if nothing else. These people will be basically evenly split between those who don’t bother voting at all and those who vote for whatever party they have a vague hunch will move in those directions.

Which is why, if there was an actual far-right-wing party, one defined by an actual commitment to the free market or an actual commitment to social conservatism or anything like that, it would actually garner very few votes. Because nobody would vote on principle for that either. I believe that most people assume that the social services they personally require will always be there for them, just as they assume that the environment they need to survive will always be there for them. And they vote, or don’t vote, accordingly.

Tweet

Canada learned a lesson tonight on how fiercely negative campaigning can salvage the electoral fortunes of even a dishonest and corrupt government.

The British Columbia NDP, by everyone's assessment, was to win a strong majority government tonight.   The governing BC Liberals were to be left with a weak minority.

Upset.   Despite having been 20 points down in the polls at the beginning of the election campaign, the Liberals pulled out one of the most amazing upsets in Canadian politics, not only winning another majority but picking up an extra three to four seats.  Those seats were lost by the NDP.

This resets the clock on British Columbia politics.   Adrian Dix chose to take the high road in this campaign.  That was a colossal blunder.

Kitchen help cats.

As promised, I am steadfastly avoiding discussing the Globe & Mail, and its latest partisan salvo — a preposterous endorsement of the BC Social Credit-turned-Liberal Party that reads like it could have been written by said party’s PR hacks — doesn’t help matters. (The Globe describes the NDP leader as a “business-minded socialist,” which is sort of like calling someone a “nonpartisan Globe & Mail editor” — it’s an oxymoron. I do, however, continue to read the comment pages, because it’s unfair to punish them for the sins of the editors, and mostly because I just can’t help myself.

Which is why I feel compelled to respond, despite my sort-of boycott, to a recent op-ed by McGill economist Chris Ragan on the subject of climate change. Ragan and I appear to have very different political opinions, but he’s a serious, intelligent and responsible writer, at least so far as I know. Which, again, is why I felt compelled to write.

Ragan’s concern is that conservatives are not participating in the climate change debate. (On this part we agree: by and large they aren’t, even though they should be.) He goes on to argue the following: first, we need to have a “real conservative” alternative to the “left of centre” big-government types who currently dominate the climate change scene. Second, the conservative option would involve a mix of market-based pricing and taxing solutions as opposed to regulation. Third, we need a nonpartisan think tank-style commission to steer the debate away from hyper-partisanship. Fourth, ideally, that commission should be led by economists.

Now, it should be immediately apparent here that the real problems are (1) lack of education and (2) hyperpartisanship on the part of people who call themselves “real conservatives.” I’m not the slightest bit interested in judging whether Ragan’s “real conservatives” or the pro-global warming crowd that also call themselves “real conservatives” have a better claim to the label, but it’s worth noting that reality-based thinking is not really a defining feature for the conservative crowd by and large, so it’s maybe kind of a moot point anyways.

Consider, as a starting point, Ragan’s points in order. First, it is not immediately apparent that we need a “real conservative” alternative to “left” solutions to climate change. Right now, the Conservative Party — who presumably have as good a claim to the title “real conservative” as anyone else — would be the first to admit that preventing and mitigating climate change is not exactly their highest priority. Maybe it should be, and it’s useful to understand why it isn’t — a point I’ll be getting to in my series on science and the future soon. I have no idea how to go about making them see it as a priority, though. The point is, it’s unclear what possible contribution could be made to the climate change discussion by conservatives who have thus far abstained from participating in it.

//
//

// ]]>Second, and to continue on that point, if “real conservatives” are defined as those who favour carbon taxes and carbon pricing schemes, it’s worth pointing out that the NDP and the Liberals are the only “real conservatives” on offer in the Canadian political arena. The Conservatives have what Ragan calls a left-wing policy (since they currently favour a regulation-based approach rather than a tax- or trade-based approach). So in Raganian terms, the Conservatives are leftists and the NDP are conservatives. I know what Ragan is trying to say here, but I think he’s assuming that somehow conservative = free market capitalist, and that equation obviously doesn’t correlate to political reality in contemporary Canada.

Third, yes, it would be nice if we had a nonpartisan commission to study the climate change issue. In point of fact, we had such a commission. We called it the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. The reason we no longer have such a commission is because the Conservatives abolished it.

Fourth, if we were to re-establish this commission, I fail to see why it ought to be dominated by economists. You can only decide which discipline’s expertise is best suited to a leadership role once you’ve decided what sort of questions the commission needs to answer. I think it’s safe to say that people who think the climate change debate is irrelevant or that climate change is bunk, whether they call themselves conservatives or not, are lacking first and foremost in science education. It doesn’t particularly matter what sorts of possible solutions a commission could contrive if they don’t think that climate change is a serious problem worth solving in the first place.

//
//

// ]]>On the other hand, conservatives have painted themselves into an anti-intellectual corner with their paranoid anti-science rhetoric over the past few years. I don’t think any assortment of scientists, assembled by any government(s) to compile a careful and measured summary of what we know about carbon and climate change, would be taken seriously by large numbers of self-professed conservatives. Many right-wing commentators essentially equate concern about climate change with political leftism. That closes a nasty but effective political circuit on the political right: climate change alarmism is a feature of the radical greenie left, conservatives are responsible and independent thinkers who oppose radical leftism, therefore by definition conservatives are not alarmed about climate change.

Tweet

Thomas Walkom explains why.Recommend this Post

With each story that I read about her, my respect for Elizabeth Warren grows. Would that Canada had someone similar to inspire us.

Recommend this Post

The Harper Cons are trying to spin their loss in Labrador as negative for Trudeau. How pathetic is that?
Mia Rabson writes: The Conservatives who are trying to spin that this is no big deal because well, majority governments don't often win byelections and well, the Liberals didn't win it by as much as one poll said they would a few weeks ago so really Trudeau messed things up and this is a sign he is in over his head, is just nonsense and kind of smacks of sore losership.

I realize that books have to be flogged, but lately these people, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon, have been all over Canadian media with a 'new' take on fetus fetishist strategy.

Actually, it ain't new at all, but hey, those women's studies MAs (pdf) don't write themselves, you know.

The thesis is that the anti-choice movement in Canada is getting 'sophisticated', co-opting pro-choice language, framing abortion as 'harming women', moving the *undebate* into a discussion of free speech and democracy, claiming that it's a 'youth movement', and playing the 'silenced' victim card.

The anti-abortion movement in Canada, while increasingly enlivened and sophisticated, remains a small minority. Clearly phrased polls show that Canadians do not want the issue re-politicized. This is precisely why Harper promised not to do so. He knows that it is a toxic issue for his goal of mainstreaming conservatism. The anti-abortion movement has also understood that the old arguments and positioning have not worked. They are therefore increasingly seeking to frame the issue in ways that piggyback on values, issues and rhetorical strategies traditionally used by progressive movements (and which have greater traction and resonance in Canadian society).
Veteran fetus fetishist watchers (ahem) recognize all these tactics. They've been trying them forever.

The 'abortion harms women (AHW)' meme originated over a decade ago with the 'Moses' of the 'post-abortion movement', quack David Reardon. They try, amusingly, to back this up with sciencey stuff that we here at DJ! love to debunk. That abortion causes breast cancer, insanity, substance abuse, etc etc.

Warawa's Wank, aka #M408, is a variant on AHW with the new twist that abortion harms 'preborn' women.

Co-opting language, been there, done that.



Free speech, democracy, and human rights? Yep. Comparisons of abortion to slavery, genocide, and the Holocaust abound.

Youth movement? Sure, especially since they're now admitting that Catholic schools pay to bus kids to events like March for Lies.

Hilariously, they've been trying to 'hip'-ify their activities for years too.

Martyrdom has always been big with them, recently celebrated with
Jubilee medals courtesy of the Canadian government.

Silencing? Old hat.




In trying to work up a new take on a dying movement, these new kids on the block give the fetus fetishists waaaay too much credit. It's the sameold sameold, no matter how many books they have to sell hard they try to spin it.

It is a small change for Harper. But how is taxpayers' money being spent? Maybe Harper built another fake-lake. This time for himself.

He's back.  Donald Rumsfeld has written a leadership guide entitled Rumsfeld's Rules that is being released today.  Wired has a review.

Who better to impart life lessons than the only defense secretary in U.S. history to screw up two wars at once? True to confident form, that’s what Donald Rumsfeld attempts in his new book on leadership, Rumsfeld’s Rules. He actually has good advice — so much that you really wish he would have taken some of it at the Pentagon. 

“If you expect people to be in on the landing, include them in the takeoff” is good advice. “When negotiating, never feel that you are the one who must fill every silence” is great advice. “We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it” isn’t exactly advice, but it’s the kind of thing that gets you fired up to ace that meeting or take that hill, which is probably why George Washington said it in the first place.

But then there’s the onslaught of irony that comes from any advice book written by a man whose name has become synonymous in defense circles with Epic Fail. “Those who think that they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge” is a pull quote in Rumsfeld’s Rules attributed to Margaret Thatcher. It’s also a serviceable epitaph for Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon during a time when the Bush administration elected to invade Iraq based on (to be charitable) mistaken premises, diverting resources from the war against al-Qaida, ignoring an incubating insurgency in Afghanistan, and ultimately mismanaging all three efforts.

When dealing with the press, Rumsfeld cautions, never put out misleading information. “During the Bush administration, we took care that the information we put out was accurate,” except apparently if it was about Saddam Hussein allying with al-Qaida or coming on the verge of a nuclear bomb or possessing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

I don't see myself buying Rummy's Rules any time soon.  If, however, you do, please pass along some more of his bon mots.

It turns out that the Chinese Communist leadership and the Canadian Conservative leadership believe in a lot of the same stuff.

They both want economic liberalism but political conformity and suppression of dissent.

China's leadership has now sent out a notice to crack down on the introduction and spread of dangerous Western values.

The Chinese government has confronted demands for democratic reform from activists emboldened by Mr Xi's vows to respect the law. In recent days, some activists have cited rumours that the party issued a warning against seven ideas that are considered anathema, including media freedom and judicial independence. But the official summaries did not include such language.

Officials must "fully understand the dangers posed by views and theories advocated by the West," said the account from Chongqing, which said they must "cut off at the source channels for disseminating erroneous currents of thought".

"Strengthen management of the internet, enhance guidance of opinion, purify the environment on the internet, give no opportunities that lawless elements can seize on," it said.
Reports on other local party committee websites in north-east and south-west China also described the directive, although in less detail.

The demands for ideological conformity show that Mr Xi and other leaders want to inoculate the public from any expectations of major political liberalisation, even as they explore loosening some state controls over the economy, several analysts said.
 Do you think we don't have elements of these same pursuits within our government?  Both governments seek to advance ideological conformity.  That's the whole purpose behind Harper's secrecy and information control.  It is precisely why he has severed communications between the public and their public and armed services.  It is why he has transformed all branches of the government into his partisan political agencies.  It is why the Harper government hides in silence.
Harper's instincts are to control the internet, to curb media freedom and to undermine judicial independence.  Perhaps if he had his way, Harper would prefer to preside over Beijing on the Rideau.