San Bernardino Slaughter: The only balanced reporting I have seen.

When horror hits, few report only what is known, preferring to star in a politicized drama.  This example hits the spot without pandering.

"So what do we know? It appears to be a case of premature detonation".  Everything I've read to date is acknowledged and yet Nicki at The Liberty Zone cuts a new path.

UPDATE: Although a perfect example above of how to write about something while information is missing, more is coming in.  Notable that the couple met Al Qaeda types in Saudi Arabia, that she pledged allegiance to Al Baghadi of ISIS after the attack, that the mother-in-law lived in the apartment where they were making bombs, that the press got into the apartment and filmed stuff including shredded documents, that the on-line presence of the couple was mostly "deleted" just before the event.Also, the FBI is calling this a terrorist investigation.










There is this, however, a new attitude to reporting when Islam is the trigger:

News from Outer Space, November 2015

Spectacular photos arrived from Pluto.

Snakeskin-like surface on Pluto

And from its moon, Ceres which has a dynamic surface that erases meteor impacts. 

Bright spots on Occator crater, Ceres.

Planet wide canyon on Charon

The moon, Charon, has cracking lines and a younger side that has been resurfaced as well as tar? stains at the pole.

Our sun's sunspots are flat-lining with prospects of some cooler climate ahead.  There's increased policy awareness (DARPA) of hardening infrastructure on earth from extreme electromagnetic pulses from the sun's fire.
On Mars, some sedimentary rocks are noted and the Curiosity Rover visited a small dune field.  There's further mention that Phobos can expect to decay and break up against Mars in the near future (30 million years).
The Philae comet lander woke up a bit and communicated with it's mother satellite (Rosetta) as the comet came around the sun.  They know within a couple hundred yards where it ended up on the comet.
Voyager1 has moved further beyond the solar system (beyond the heliopause) but the debate is still on about how far the system's field stretches since the whole darn thing has a bow wave as the earth does in the sun's field.
Planetary exploration now is galaxy-wide and recently inferred a field of cometary debris ( or an alien megastructure) around one sun and the outlines of a weather system on a planet of another sun. Papers like to tout stories about the first earth-like planet but they're getting ahead of themselves.

"The odd nature of the energy pulse is matched by
the odd locations of the start/finish of the pulse".

A mysterious pulse was picked up propagating through our atmosphere and others from outside the galaxy.  Astronomers are having difficulty ruling out artificial origin. It's probably natural.  Our species has advanced to the point of leaking photons and electromagnetic fields into space for a brief moment and may stop leaking such stuff within a hundred years.

Black holes are almost ho-hum these days but it was news to have come across a sun being torn apart at a black hole boundary.  This is being watched in real time.

Closer to home,  Elon Musk almost brought two rockets back to earth for recycling and Bezos brought one back.  (Not quite comparable rockets).  Perfect this and the cost of getting off-planet plunges.
A good spot to go for solar system updates is Astro Bob who specializes in things you can see with a good amateur telescope.

Drink Trivia

Rum and coke can be found on tap in Australia.

Hyderize.  You've been Hyderized if you cross the border from Canada into Alaska and down a 150 proof shot in one gulp at the Glacier Hotel in Hyder.  Comes with a certificate.  The Glacier Hotel has over $50,000 in autographed  bills on the walls and the only way out of town is back through Canada.

P.C. Asshole Tells Comedian To Loosen Up

Slyest writing ever on politically correct termagants:  Here's an excerpt only because the whole page must be savoured at McSweeney's, The Death Of Comedy.

“So a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a bar…”
“Stop, stop, stop!”
“What?”
“That’s not funny.”
“But I haven’t even done the joke yet.”
“Yeah, but it won’t be funny.  .....

“And the one guy says to the other guy…”
“Wait a minute — are they gay or straight?”
“They’re straight”
“Good. Are they Christians or Jews or what?”
“They’re atheists”
“Even better. This is going to be so funny now. I can feel it. OK, go ahead and make the   joke.”
 ..... 

Read the whole tickler.

Democracy 2.0 Unintended consequence of universal suffrage.

The vote was given to all citizens by men who thought they'd thereby win righteous leverage over wealth and hereditary power.  They didn't foresee they too would lose control.  In the last dozen years, anyone cheaply can make a pitch to the masses and the great unwashed can pitch right back (right click, enter).  Democracy 2.0 means the middle and poor classes can decide who rules.   The elite and the merely educated who dreamed big vote tallies would give them an advantage over  insider cash, are going to be gravely disappointed.  Carson and Trump and for that matter, Fiorina and Cruz are the evidence that appealing to the masses and all the LIV people too, is here to stay.  Expect more shocks.

How many decisions do you make by show of hands?  We decide who makes the decisions by show of hands, or paper ballots actually. When the crowd has a mind of its own, the unexpected happens.

Trudeau, serial hand-hugger.

Even with the Queen.
'The "Hand Hug" is seen as an invasion of intimacy when done by people who have just met'.
The Daily Mail calls this a "patronizing handshake".   If anyone besides my dear departed grandmother did that to me, I'd say, "Get your hands off me and get the hell out of my space".

Hand Hug: The hand hug is popular with politicians, and is when they choose to wrap your hand with their left hand creating this warm cocoon protecting your hand. When done to the right person, they are perceived as being warm, friendly, trustworthy and honest, and sometimes this handshake is reciprocated creating a pile of 4 hands. However, this type of handshake is only done genuinely with people who share close bonds, as similar to hugs, this handshake is seen as an invasion of intimacy when done by people who have just met.

With Her Majesty

With the Governor General

With Blair  
Cameron

Instability is the best prediction.

So Turkey shoots down a Russian jet.  WW1 started from less.  Putin says he told Washington the flight path and Washington passed it to Turkey.  As a NATO member, Turkey's Erdogan can ask NATO to hit back if Russia hits him.  Why the hell did he shoot down the plane in the first place?  Because Russia's target included Turkmen and because, Oil.  Putin may be right this is a deliberate provocation.  He just moved up his most advanced missile system to a Syrian port by Turkey's border.

Because Turkmen:  They were being targeted and are inside Syria and related to Turks and want Assad out.  Only Kurds and ISIS are allowed targets from Turkey's viewpoint.  Putin wants Assad in, making all three good targets.  Obama, weakly, wants Assad out and ISIS degraded while weakly supporting Kurds.  Shooting the plane while attacking Turkmen is Turkey's signal for Russia to back off. Did you watch the video of Turkmen firing at the parachuting pilots?  Did you know Russia mounted a Seals type raid and recovered the surviving pilot?  The jet was either in Turkey for up to seventeen seconds or a five mile exclusion zone inside Syria where Turkmen live and that Turkey wants to defend but no one else recognizes.  Protocol is to push back angry, not hit the kill button.

Because oil: In the last week there have been the first two bombings of the oil tankers that fund ISIS mayhem, one by the US (which dropped leaflets telling the drivers to run away) and one, less fussy, by Russia. The oil money adds up over a hundred million dollars in a year.  Who is buying this oil?  How about Erdogan's son?  Those tankers have been an easy target for ages.  (If you check the Russian story, the numbers are b.s. but the raid was real.)

How can anyone make sense of this when the facts above were heavily processed before release? Far more facts were overlooked.  Instability seems the best prediction, rather than confidence that any one outcome will prevail.    The bedrock motives of man include defending ties of blood and greed.  I highlighted Turkmen (blood) and the son's oil (greed).

UPDATE:   That the Turks shot down the jet and did so within 17 seconds – with the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saying he gave the order to fire himself – suggests very strongly they were waiting for a Russian plane to come into or close enough to Turkish airspace with the aim of delivering a rather pyrotechnic message.

An American View: "Canada's new, liberal Prime Minister immediately moves to cripple their energy industry"

The headline is the story.  The goal is to "formalize a moratorium on crude oil tanker traffic on British Columbia's North Coast". 

A quarter of our exports is petroleum.   Kneecapping the Northern Gateway pipeline and rolling over happily for the cancelled Keystone pipeline,  Trudeau the Second  can steal prairie oil for below market "sale" to Montreal and Toronto.  When you can't ship south and you can't ship west, that just leaves east towards Ottawa's voter pod.  Sounds like NEP the Second.

PM Justin Trudeau likes to be liked.  He's on safe territory here.  My cousin who goes to stop-the-tanker rallies will be delighted, but even if everyone in Canada kissies up to the moratorium, Canada will still be diminished because, Math.

The Magna Carta rolled back the creation of National Parks

The Magna Carta has clauses constraining the government from setting aside national parks without compensation. For "government", read "king".  For "national park", read "royal forest".  The forests were game refuges, not necessarily treed expanses and were intended for the outdoor recreation of the crown.  In Canada, "the crown" has no face even though, in British Columbia, the crown owns 83% of the land.  In jolly old England of 1215, the crown was King John.

Source

Reluctantly, King John agreed to un-create the royal forests of his day.

Clause (47) "All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly."

This topic resonates with me personally because my maternal ancestors brought the name "Woodworth" or Wood-warden" with them from England.

Paper Gold and Real Gold Parting Ways

Noted at Zerohedge: Over a third of all the COMEX gold stored in Hong Kong was moved to mainland China this week.  So far, gold taken physically costs about the same as paper gold.  That is unsustainable because so little real gold matches up with notional gold.

From a Kyle Bass interview:

"We went and looked at the COMEX which at the time had about $80 billion in open interest between futures and futures options and in the warehouse they had 2.7 billion of deliverables. So, $80 billion in open interest and $2.7 billion in deliverables, we’re going to own it for a long time, you’re on the board, you’re a fiduciary, what do you do? Well that’s an easy one, you go get it." (He advised U of TX to take delivery of $1 billion in gold bullion.)

I cannot wear a poppy on Remembrance Day.

Obama is not a mass murderer but he has been unplugging the safety stops that hold back barbarians, like a madman roaming the holds of the Titanic and locking open the flood doors.  I've never been so angry towards a leader in my life.   When discrimination is out,  judgement is out too and the indiscriminate have the upper hand.    Trudeau and Obama are incapable of saying "Islam commends killing khafirs and Jews".    As Ann Coulter tweeted, "Donald Trump was elected president tonight".  Trump acts rudely but stands his ground.     When you read what world leaders say, discard all observations that ignore that the Paris attacks were inspired by Islam and carried out by real Muslim believers.

Obama's inscribed wedding ring which he wore
before he married too:  "There is no God but Allah"
The same guy who said in 2007
that the Muslim call to prayer is
“one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Because of Obama's dereliction while holding exceptional power, I hate him and hate the blood which will be spilled by millions in his wake.  ISIS and its litter-mates are militarily weak but the safety barriers between us and their fervour are weak or missing.  I find I can't wear a poppy on Remembrance Day because of the wave of grief that overwhelms me.

Do All Our Leaders Need Attention? Even America's Lovable Carson Has Creepy Self-centred Home

There's the painting of Jesus putting his hand on Ben Carson's shoulder, the ginormous photograph of Ben on the wall, the marble-carved bible quote about humility,  every medal and plaque displayed, and the long photo walls of Ben with somebodies.  Carson is genuinely warm but it's creepy.  Are only giant egos, narcissists, and the attention-starved going to run for high public office?  More at the Guardian where the photos are posted. 



Is there always "Love of Attention"?  In Canada, our new leader wants so much to be liked that he can't speak in public without futzing every statement to see if you are going to like it before cautiously making the point.

Helmet Hoax in the Nanny State

Bicycle helmets are a fashion statement and otherwise useless.  A Canadian study found one dumb thing and three valuable things you can do to be safe.   Most valuable is to be a woman. You'll have one third (!) the injuries because you generally cycle a bit slower on quieter roads.  Next up is to cycle where cars and bikes have separate paths.  Third is to cycle in bike-dense areas where drivers and cyclists have learned to behave around each other.  (The study covered thousands of injuries per year in various provinces. including BC which has a helmet law.)

You already know the useless one: Wearing a bicycle helmet.  "Helmet legislation was not associated with hospitalisation rates for brain, head, scalp, skull, face or neck injuries" (from the Abstract).

I am fed up with people telling me what to do for my own good and charging me for it. I don't want my money spent on their priorities.  Hopefully these warriors have moved to other battlerfields, wielding the sword against microaggression, scaling the walls between washrooms and defeating free speech near university safe spaces.

People were wearing helmets before the helmet law.  The legislation increased their numbers and complicated lives while taxing individuals $30 to $300 each for a plastic hat from a private company.

Head injuries are serious.  The helmets are not.  If you're a gent, find a lady to cycle with, keep off the busiest roads and enjoy the outing.

Tip of the hat to Kate at smalldeadanimals.

Media Once Controlled The Stage Lighting

When left-wing operatives with a byline* turn one spotlight onto the public stage, you see exactly what they want you to see.  The rest of the stage is dark.  Bloggers, Rebel Media, Blogging Tories, Twitter and Facebook are throwing some low cost light onto the same stage.  So are groups on the left who want highlights on their pets.  This doesn't resolve who is true and right but it lights up enough of the public stage that the public can form better informed conclusions.



 The blind-sided and the hidden players are more visible, payoffs and paybacks make the light of day.   This is what I call competition in the market of politics.  More Low Information Voters become Medium Information Voters.  We may not have more truth but we will have fairer calculations of advantage and more participants.

The Media have been called the fourth estate. They muscled in on the "three estates of the realm, clergy, nobility and commons".  They  appropriated political power by owning technology that made it easy to disseminate information, but not too easy, since not everyone could have a printing press or a TV station. The fifth estate, which is much larger than the fourth, is lighting up its narratives and gaining power. That includes the bloggers and commenters on this page.  This change is in its infancy.  The way politics is done will change to suit. over the next five federal elections.

* For this line I owe Instapundit:  "Journalists are democratic operatives with bylines".

For a parting thought, a quote from Mark Twain:

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

Money talks. It says "Goodbye".

The stunning turnabout in capital flows, a 16% plunge in the last year, is Made In Canada.  Canadians are shipping Canuck bucks out of country, looking for better opportunity.  It's not evil oligarchs pulling their loot out. There's better money to be made elsewhere and not just because a barrel of oil is cheap.  The polls have been saying for months that Liberals were gaining ground in Canada and the NDP coup in oil-rich Alberta has put the kibosh on a lot of oil projects.

Supporting points in the linked lead article:  RBC is investing billions to buy a US bank.  Nine of ten top performing companies in the TSX have favoured buying abroad over expanding at home. Canadian Mutual Funds have been plowing wealth into global choices for the last six months.

"Canada’s basic balance - a combination of the capital and the current account: a measure of national accounts that spans everything from trade to financial-market flows - swung from a surplus of 4.2% of GDP to a deficit of 7.9% in the 12 months ending in June."

Also from Bloomberg as quoted by FP and zerohedge.com:

"Money is flooding out of Canada at the fastest pace in the developed world as the nation’s decade-long oil boom comes to an end and little else looks ready to take the industry’s place as an economic driver."

Both post the chart below from BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research.
Another factor, no fault of Canada's, is the boost the US dollar gets for being the unit of account at a time that other trade areas are handling their finances worse than the US.

Democracy ritualizes violence

From Jim Butcher's latest, h/t Instapundit.
...   "We're a civilized society, are we not?"
... "Since when, miss?  We are a democracy.. The heart of democracy is violence. In order to decide what to do, we take a count of everyone for and against it, and then do whatever the larger side wishes to do. We’re having a symbolic battle, its outcome decided by simple numbers. It saves us time and no end of trouble counting actual bodies — but don’t mistake it for anything but ritualized violence."

Battlefield by the numbers
The strategists and generals are in parties
We are the voter fodder.

Democracy lets more viewpoints be represented on the battlefield.  When a more violent group prevails, it suspends elections or lets presidents run extra terms, and fewer viewpoints are represented.   When the election rules are followed, the market for power is more efficient.

I confess having read only one of Butcher's, but just downloaded Cinder Spires, first in a new series.
Added: Read part of the book and abandoned it. A lot of text goes to developing pretend scenarios without advancing the characters.

Good news from Canada for Jeb and Hillary

A society in decline puts family members in public posts.
Viewed by American cartoonist, Bok.

<


And a bonus of Halloween humour, hat tip to Powerline.
Our little snowflakes are not particularly nice people.

 

Running against the media: NBC Temporarily Loses February Debate. Reibus shows It was worse than you thought.

The media beat Harper but in the States, maybe the balance just shifted.  Reibus' letter this morning firing NBC is posted on-line.  Besides the gotcha questions we saw, Last week, CNBC broke hidden promises.  The first question was to give each candidate an opener economics question but didn't.  (Trump got the clown campaign jibe).   Equal speaking time was promised but not delivered.  (Trace candidate Kasich, the only guy who liked the panel, had more time than Carson, Trump and Bush)  The evening's theme was promised "job growth, taxes, technology, retirement and the health of our national economy" and it wasn't.  Reibus goes on to enumerate the other failings which we already knew about, the ones the audience booed.

This is neither too little nor too late.  Reibus holds out the olive branch at the end of the first paragraph, "We simply cannot continue with NBC without full consultation with our campaigns.". Note he is saying that if the candidates, not the NRC, can be persuaded, the debate is back on track.  I expect it will.

The other network bosses are busy reading this letter with their morning jo.   Milton Friedman explained how it is with politicians and it's the same for the Journolist crowd:  "Make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing." (50 second video clip).

RNC leverage over NBC group:  "14 million people watched, easily making the much-derided debate the most-watched program in CNBC's 30-year history. Because advertisers paid $250,000 apiece, it was "also the most profitable night in the network's history,"

Added: It's unfair of me to blame the media for the whole mess since Harper's team neglected to update itself and to do so warmly.

Update:  Riebus was pushed:   "Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee".

Not Halloween Hocus Pocus. Wrap your mind around this.

While we're making sense of October 19th, Syrian refugees booking in, and and F35's being booked out,  physicists this week removed almost the last spooky scintilla of doubt that something can be in two or more places at once until seen. "Spooky entanglement" is mainstream science, not Halloween hocus pocus.  Keep it in mind while speaking up for a better Canada. What matters today in politics isn't the big picture.

"Particles do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. Until then, they can exist simultaneously in two or more places. Once measured, however, they snap into a more classical reality, existing in only one place."

No Lefty War Protestors showed up. Hypocrisy is not a bug, it's the game plan.

From brilliant David Burge:

We got Obama Lite

Analyst, David Solway, writes painfully about the "spectacularly unqualified" Trudeau and our path to the Socialist Republic of Canada. The only thing he left out is the lacklustre Conservative campaign.  We didn't all vote to favour the ideas of Trudeau fils,  Some were just fed up.

 Read the rest here. citing a dozen portents.

"A nonentity whose CV would in any sane society have generated howls of laughter. ..  He is, in short, Canada's Obama, and the nation, like the U.S., will rue the day it put so reckless and inept a driver behind the wheel of national policy".

He's actually quite a nice family guy, but shallow.
Perhaps, as this old picture suggests,
he can be led about by handlers.

The Solar KO's of AD 775 and 994 would disable the modern world.

The solar explosion in 2012 missed us and the Carrington Event in 1859 that started fires in telegraph offices was tiny compared to the solar storms now confirmed from AD 775 and AD 994.  Ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica show those solar storms "far exceeded any known events observed by instrumental measurements on Earth".

Forget about carbon dioxide (which is plant food, after all) and worry about this.  No tax money can be diverted to make the sun behave although money should go to hardening our com lines, data bases, and power grids.

Carrington event won't be benign in 2016

Gatekeepers Are Losing Control

The cost of reaching for the levers of power has come down by an order of magnitude.  Carson and Trump are cruising on earned media and Trump doesn't have to cuddle up to money bags.  Canada would have more choice in leaders if voters weighed in on who gets to be PM as well as who represents the riding.   The LPC, CPC and NDP party gate keepers have more control on who gets to be boss here than under a presidential CEO system.

Digitally-powered emails, blogs, facebook, twitter, texts and a proliferation of channels and websites have multiplied the doors into the public eye and brought the cost of contact to pennies-per-thousand-people.  Blogging Tories is part of this revolution.

Carson has been a neurosurgeon and manager but never part of inner circle politics but here he is leading in recent Iowa polls.

Money Bags Or Small Donors: Who Backs Whom And The Outlook For 2016

Last time the candidate with the most small donors won. Obama beat Romney.  The three who fit that bill this time around are Carson, Cruz and Trump and, oddly, they are the front runners.  The trend is to favour thousands of small over dozens of large.

Three data troves show it:  The ratios October 16th for all Republican candidates, the historic ratio of big donors to small ones for the last five presidential contests, and the ratios for all congressmen in 2012.

In the second chart, Romney had seven times more fat than lean donors while his opponent, Obama, had three times more lean than fat.  Obama won.  So far this cycle in the first chart, only Carson, Cruz and Trump raised more money from little guys and Trump is asking his to be ended.  Oddly, they are the front runners.

"Small donor" means $200 in the first chart, $2000 in the second chart, and increments of not more than $200 in the third.
It's worth noting that money bags played a bigger role in past presidential elections than they do now, thanks to digital media and on-line funding. (2nd chart)
It's sad to note that the congressmen chart  (the 3rd one) shows that fat money plays an outsize role in who gets elected, only 1/6th of the candidates being more popular with the common citizen than with the insiders.  The big givers are 1% of the 1% in America.

Story at Huffington Post October 16th

Posted at scout.com

Posted by The Sunlight Foundation

"Arctic waters unpolluted". 31 Bits of Plastic.

Partisan headline:  "Plastic Litter Taints The Sea Surface, Even In The Arctic"
Alternate headline:  "Arctic waters unpolluted"

The sky is falling.
One plastic floater every 180 miles

Researchers found what they looked for after peering from the bridge while covering 5600 km by boat in the arctic.  They concede "the number sounds low".  The people from the Wegener Institute spotted 31 bits of plastic debris, less than one old Javex bottle or fishing float every 180 kilometers. That is so low, a better report would say, "Arctic waters unpolluted".  They point out plastic can break into smaller pieces too small to see from a boat.  They remind us that there is more on the bottom than on the surface and there are six known clumps of garbage on the world's oceans.  But give me a break and stop pushing the alarm button to get attention and research money.

First Past the Post in 2020

Three things are equal in influence:  A leader who thinks he is right, a majority of the governing board, and a majority of the voters. We got two out of three this time around: Trudeau has the big hat and Liberals hold 184 out of 338 seats in the House of Commons. The voters will have no great influence on Canada's next five years unless they rally to a flag. 

The scales are tipped to favour the majority in Justin's head and the other one in the House of Commons.  As Wikipedia posts on the election: Harper won last time with 39.62% of the popular vote (An outrage that 60% of Canada was opposed to) and Trudeau won this time with 39.47%  (A sigh of relief for all of Canada and a repudiation of Harper).  [These numbers were posted at smalldeadanimals but the post has disappeared]

The leader was picked in a 50% plus one convention.  The MP's were picked in a first-past-the-post ballot.   Despite Trudeau's boast, the next federal election will be decided the same way as the last one because the Liberals would have won 49 fewer seats in a proportional system. 


June 17th headline at the National Post: TRUDEAU ANNOUNCES PLAN TO KILL FIRST-PAST-THE-POST BY THE NEXT ELECTION.   This promise just passed it's Best-Before date.
October 19th results re-cast proportionally, as published in the Vancouver Sun:

"Whatever you do to my daughter"

From PJ Media, "Whatever you do to my daughter, I'll do to you".

"Harper - The Accidental PM". and "Empty Suit worse than Mulcair". An American View.

From Dillian's investment newsletter :

"Harper, in some ways, had an accidental 10-year reign. Canada is about 60% left-wing and 40% right-wing, but has two left-wing parties (the Liberals, who are center-left, and the NDP, who are allegedly far left) that have been splitting their votes in every election.

Canada is slipping into recession, and Harper, sort of a Canadian Sean Hannity, has worn out his welcome over time with his hawkishness/paranoia.

Trudeau, I think, is a little further left than people give him credit for, with a clear authoritarian streak.

Canada’s budget—which is basically balanced—will, in a few years, reach a deficit of 10% of GDP.  That’s not good for the Canadian dollar, which has been in a two-plus-year bear market. And I am aggressively shorting it.

Trudeau has a reputation of being somewhat of an empty suit, a know-nothing—and these are the sorts of things that his own supporters acknowledge. Canadian investors have told me privately that they believe this outcome to be even worse than if Mulcair had been elected, which is really saying something."

Jared Dillian's newsletter is an occasional top up to the free weekly newsletter from John Mauldin.

Defeat the Media Party before the next election, never mind Trudeau fils.

We always have LIV's but who steers their vote?  Low Information Voters are swayed by the same Media Party that registered to campaign against Harper in the election, the Media Party that slants news and opinion every day of every year, not just 78 days every fourth year. ( The journalists reporting our election belong to a union registered to lobby for the other side.)

The premier equalizer is the speed-of-light internet with blogs, twitters and facebook posts that creep every day past the gatekeepers of the news.  Videos of what politicians actually said today and in the past are accessible.  Blogging Tories is one tool that weaponizes conservative citizens to be heard widely despite having no war chest filled with lucre.

The late journalist, Liebling, came up with
the freedom of the press quote.

Scarcely ten years have passed since the smartphone revolution and politics-as-usual will be shaken to its core for at least two more decades. The government scene must yet bend to accommodate some millions of new voices.

 Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" is the old truth.  The new truth is that any citizen with a will to be heard can publish freely and cheaply. The market price of political influence is dropping as competition is added.

Cheers for Blogging Tories and behind the scenes to Stephen Taylor and Craig Smith.

Modern man gets less sleep? UNTRUE.

I was convinced we sleep less at night than pre-industrial man ..... that the electric light, phones, tvs, and busy schedules shaved hours off every day's rest. It appears to be untrue.  Sleep time is a species characteristic more than a cultural one. 

Jerome Siegel of the University of California (Los Angeles) decided to measure sleep time in three hunter gatherer tribes, two in Africa and one in the Bolivian jungle. The lean men pictured from the San tribe in Namibia don't look like world wide web people.  Sleep averaged out six to seven hours!  People didn't go to bed until several hours after sunset and generally got up a little ahead of dawn.

Conrad Black: Time for a Time Out.

He co-founded the National Post to help Conservatives win but says Conservatives failed to renew themselves and deserve time out Tuesday.  

After making the best summary I've seen of the great good done by Stephen Harper at home and away, he follows with a harsh take-down.  The consolation prize is that Justin Trudeau may grow in office. The prize is small.

Politicians need a new incentive to leave money in your pocket.

Bureaucrats are penalized if they don't spend their budget every year.  Politicians are one step up the food chain and are rewarded for spending all the money they can collect from you.  Why would they stop before you squawk when they are praised for spending money in the riding?  Tax collection is a rigged lottery.  Everyone buys a ticket but not everyone gets a prize.  Winning tickets go to the fixers, not to the lucky girl and boy.

Friction is a bug in a motor, reducing efficiency.  Friction is a feature in government because it feeds those who make a living doing government stuff.  How can you expect those civil servants and MP's and lobbyists to ask for less to live on? Sadly, the more friction there is, the more you need a fixer to tweak the tax code or cut a cheque, to get by the obstacles of government.   Greater spending is rewarded and inefficiency keeps people employed.  Better incentives are needed.

I'm viewing lawmaking separately from redistributing money  to make this argument.  (It's worth remembering that some countries with lots of oil don't rely on taxes.) We have a wonderful job in our country, "The Receiver General", defined by his ability to receive any given amount of our money.  He should be rated the same as charities: What percentage of funds raised goes to administration?  In some programs, administration is the main benefactor.  In others that mail a redistributed cheque to every parent or every pensioner, the "pay to the order of" party is efficiently favoured.

Ask for more taxpayers to participate in the government market

The starting point for reform is to increase the influence of taxpayers on spending and to simplify the redistribution of the take.   The layers of management needed to get a job done has shrunk in business, not so much in governments.   Remember when you needed a bank but now just need a bank app in your pocket?

The incentive to leave money in our pocket is competition from the taxpayers.
The fall-back is to bribe politicians with rewards into the millions of dollars when Canadians prosper and unemployment plunges.
In short,
open the market to more tax-payiing customers
or create a legal market in kickbacks for pols.

ISIS warriors get a haircut

Jihadis have been shaving off their beards and running from Aleppo for the Turkey border. See striking photos.  Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are changing the rules with force and can prevail in much of Syria.  The Saudis will then have to defend their role as Keeper of the Holy Places.  

Trumpaholic II

I think I'll have another drink.  

Exhibit 1   Does he negotiate well?
Trump called his top rival Carson and they co-signed an ultimatum to CBS to limit debate to two hours and include opening and closing statements. The other Republicans were grumbling that they hadn't been consulted, the debate was too long and there were no statements.  Trump recruited an ally and leveraged his advantage (eyeballs watching CBS for advertising revenue) while the rest wimped out. The Art of the Deal.  CBS blinked.

Exhibit 2  Did he treat past winners well on his Apprentice show?

"When Fortune surveyed most of the winners from the original, pre-celebrity series, they praised his loyalty, attention to detail, and willingness to share practical advice once they came to work for him. One described Trump as “a guy who held up his end of the bargain,” adding, “he truly took me under his wing.”

Exhibit 3   Will he be hard to bribe?

"One odd thing about the Republican presidential race is that the strong front-runner, Donald Trump, isn't fundraising. Soliciting contributions takes a huge amount of the time for most candidates, and the quarterly reports of how much they have raised and how much cash they have on hand become carefully-watched measures of their campaigns' viability. None of that applies to Trump".

    (He has received a little over $5,000,000 unsollicited.  His biggest expense is T-shirts & hats with use of his own airplane coming second.   He phones, he tweets, people come to his apartment and he earns a lot of free media.)

Signing his income tax return, posted on Twitter by himself.

Dem debate snapshot

The popular vote by a landslide goes to Sanders with Webb 2nd and Clinton a distant 3rd. (400,000 voted at Drudge). Sanders raised a ton of money immediately after and gained 35,000 twitter followers..   Despite this, Bernie Sanders "went face first into the tank for Hillary on her emails" and you know he'll drop out before the finish line if he won't attack her sneaky character and judgement error.  This fetched an unfeigned smile from Hillary.  As Trump (who tweeted and was bored by the whole thing but picked up 70,000 twitter followers) said, "she did what she had to do". It was a good night for her. Then she made herself a target by saying she was proud of making Republicans her enemies.  That looks after half the country. When Sanders said we should stop talking about Clinton's emails, the press cheered.  Most also stayed in their seats when the national anthem was sung, confirming why Instapundit calls them "Democratic operatives with bylines."   In evidence, CNN is deleting critical comments by Sanders supporters from its post debate site.

Fifteen million watched compared to twenty four for the GOP.  This is being mocked on line but is a Dem record.

Big Government Is Your Destiny

Despotic altruism with other people's money is baked into the pie.  Lefty policy keeps coming out of the oven and is always inedible.  You can blame having more parents per kid than ever before.   Where two parents may have cared for four kids, now it's possible for four parents to be caring for one kid (on alternate weekends), an eight-fold increase in supervision.  Kids hardly play without a controlling adult present and enter college ready to cry about micro-aggression, choosing tattling over managing.  That ratio of supervising adults to children is trending higher for the foreseeable future.  Today's children will become adults who think it normal for the state to micromanage all citizens, treating them as children.

Baked in

Policies that give government more say will be popular with them.  It's baked into the demographic pie.

Remember too that singleton children grow up differently than we did.  They don't run around squabbling, building forts, taking turns skipping rope, playing pick-up baseball, and learning how to get along with dozens of other free-range kids in the neighbourhood.    Instead they went to T-ball and art class and swimming lessons in Mom's car.  They were sent to summer school, tutored and taken on escorted tours to Europe for spring break.  In China, because of enforced abortions, they raised a generation known as "Little Princes".  We're next, producing an entitlement generation that will vote for entitlement politics, preferably using someone else's money to secure their own comfort.

"Demographics is destiny".  There is a hopeful corollary.  These same new adults are going to be extraordinarily long-lived with 130 being a normal life-span.  They are going to be more conservative voters because they'll have something worth hanging onto: a little property, a network of relationships and values they have counted on for decades.

Does despotic altruism with OPM work?  It's baked into the pie for the foreseeable future and will continue to emerge and re-emerge whether it works or not. 
There you have it: two conflicting trends, both arising from demography and more deep-seated than questions of High-Information-Voters versus Low-Information-Voters.

Making shit up and calling it Behavioural Science. UPDATE

Of 100 published papers recently tested, only one third could be reproduced.   One of the duds had been cited 2000 times.  Replication is the bedrock of science and it is sand in Behavioural Sciences.  Data from tiny sample sizes of white American college students (often paid to participate) is massaged to find significant correlation by professors who vote 95% Democrat, occasionally cheat, and gain nothing reporting negative results.

Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to repeat an experiment and get the same findings is supposed to be a cornerstone of scientific knowledge. It’s the way to separate real information from flukes and anomalies. These 100 studies had cleared the highest hurdles that social science puts up. They had been edited, revised, reviewed by panels of peers, revised again, published, widely read, and taken by other social scientists as the starting point for further experiments. Except . . . Nearly two-thirds of the experiments did not replicate, meaning that scientists repeated these studies but could not obtain the results that were found by the original research team.”

Statistical significance works in large random samples but not in small non-random ones. You can always find some connection, like "sixteen amazing parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy", if you keep sorting for significance.  This is like the joke that  an infinite number of monkeys typing forever would eventually tap out the entirety of Shakespeare.

More than 70 percent of the world’s published psychology studies are generated in the United States.  Two-thirds of them draw their subjects exclusively from the pool of U.S. undergraduates, according to a survey by a Canadian economist named Joseph Henrich and two colleagues. And most of those are students who enroll in psychology classes. White, most of them; middle- or upper-class; college educated, with a taste for social science: not John Q. Public. This is a problem​—​again, widely understood, rarely admitted. College kids are irresistible to the social scientist: They come cheap, and hundreds of them are lying around the quad with nothing better to do. Taken together, Henrich and his researchers said, college students in the United States make “one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens.”

Publication bias, compounded with statistical weakness, makes a floodtide of false positives. “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue,” wrote the editor of the medical journal Lancet not long ago. ..... The literature, continued the editor, is “afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance.”

The WeeklyStandard article is well worth reading in full.

UPDATE: Economics papers don't replicate either.  This puts half into fake or slovenly territory.

"Economics research is usually not replicable."
That's the conclusion of economists Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li in a new study released as part of the Finance and Economics Discussion Series at the Federal Reserve. Analyzing research from thirteen top economics journals, Chang and Li were able to replicate the findings of just 29 of the 59 papers they scrutinized, and that was with the assistance of the original authors.

Elections Canada Cock-Up - Six times slower

You've seen Canada-wide reports of long lineups for the early bird polls.  It's an enormous cock-up brought on by Elections Canada rule changes.  A poll worker told me that last election, 30 seconds would advance one voter but now it's three minutes.  That's a six-fold reduction in efficiency for a phantasmagorical gain in security.  Yesterday my aunt stood in line for three hours.  An older neighbour drove to the poll station three times Friday and five times Saturday before giving up and joining the line up.  Since I had to vote early, I picked a quiet time on Saturday and stood in line for an hour and a half.  Thirty people managed to vote in that time.

If your car put out one sixth of normal power, you'd have it towed to a mechanic.  How can you tow Elections Canada anywhere?  I've never in my life heard anyone talk about illegal voting in Canada and never in my life have I for a moment thought there were dirty tricks in the polling booth I attended.   How can this new layer of handwritten copying and a rule that the voter ahead must  vote and leave before you can check in  be justified?  How can this possibly be that you are not allowed to check in before the person ahead has finished and left.   Fast food drive-throughs have had this figured out for half a century.  You check in at one location and do your at a second station.

If we were talking about our American neighbours, this would make more sense.  Many jurisdictions ask for no ID,  there are stuffed ballot boxes,  dead people voting,  out-of-date voting rolls that let people vote from two different addresses, entire precincts in Philadelphia that vote 100% for one candidate only.  We're not America, thank God.

Unfortunately, we are what we are.  The polling booths I heard about near Victoria had only one ballot box and the same complaint.  If you're lucky, come October 19th there will be six times more staff manning the ballot boxes than last time.  Keep Hoping.  And do vote.

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/early-bird-voters-incensed-by-long-waits-new-rules-1.2082629

School rules are a joke on most reserves.

First Nation kids get a bit more school funding than other Canadians but, except in Nova Scotia, their parents may not get value for it and are liable to being ripped off by Band politics.  Wouldn't you want your kids to graduate?  The Fraser Institute has this (shocking to me) summary:

Many Canadians would be surprised to learn that schools on First Nations reserves are not statutorily required to provide the same services and functions as provincial public schools in Canada—they do not have minimum number of attendance days, no requirement for teacher certification, no required curriculum, and they are not governed by overarching legislation or a school board that allows students on reserve to achieve a recognized high school diploma following the completion of Grade 12. This lack of structure and comparability with provincial public schools has resulted in a system on reserve that is failing First Nations children.

Average per student funding on reserves: $13524
Average per student funding off reserves: $11646

Read more at the Fraser Institute link

Nova Scotia just renewed their agreement.  Words about culture and consultation are less effective than rules for finance and governance.  PEI has an agreement, too, but it seems to be the squishy stuff.

Yukon First Nations school graduates 2009
Wouldn't you want your kids to graduate?