Politics

Bob Rae announced that he will be seeking the leadership of the Liberal Party today. "I'm running because I believe I have the judgement, the character, the values and the experience to lead at a very difficult time in the life of our country," said Mr. Rae.

It's not exactly clear which leadership he's talking about. If he had said "a very difficult time in the life of our party," I would probably be in agreement. He and Michael Ignatieff are both pretty strong candidates, but I think Mr. Rae stands a better chance in a federal election. I find Ignatieff to be a little distant... he might very well make the best Prime Minister, but that's no good if you can't win an election. I also don't think Mr. Rae's much-discussed stint as Ontario premier is anywhere near the liability that it's been made out to be.

But watching today's press conference, I got the distinct impression that Rae is saying that he's got what it takes to be PM during hard economic times. So he's got some magic plan to win the leadership race and topple Harper's government in the next nine months or so — that would be quite a feat — or he expects the recession to last a good three to four years, the most likely time we'll be called to the polls again.

Now this downturn may very well last that long, but it sure doesn't look good to come out looking like that's your expectation. Looks like poor judgement, which makes the statement self-contradictory.

I kind of like republican Presidential candidate John McCain — as a person. He seemed to have great personal integrity until last week, when his campaign started running attack ads against his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

Unfortunately for him, this ill-advised manoeuvre seems to have been engineered by a bunch of old dinosaurs who are completely out of touch with the reality of the Internet. I guess nobody told them that big television advertising dollars no longer get you exclusive access to the attention of the populace. Oops.

The McCain ads sandwiched Obama's image with those of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, deriding him as a mere celebrity, not ready to lead. I've always maintained that Ms. Hilton plays her public image as a lot dumber than she really is (don't get me wrong, I'm not giving her Rhodes Scholar either), and this week Paris Hilton shot back at the use of her image in that ad.

Analysts have said that the main advantage of the McCain ads were that they got widespread news coverage, and that having segments of them lead the news gave them huge extra exposure at no cost. Unfortunately for them, it looks like Hilton's spoof, likely shot for a few tens of thousands of dollars and featuring McCain being referred to as "wrinkly white-haired guy", is going to get almost as much exposure.

In general, I think attack ads are crass and desperate (particularly when run by a party that is in power outside an election, but that's another post entirely), and it's good to see them backfire. The only real downside of this parody is that there will probably be an embarrassingly large number of ballots filed in November with Paris Hilton as a write-in candidate.

To conclude, here's the Internet 101 summary for anyone contemplating an attack ad:

In a wired world, be careful about where you lob the muck. It's a lot easier to fight back than you think.

This weekend the Toronto Star announced the death of the SUV. One of the reasons this came up has to be the closing of the General Motors truck assembly line in Oshawa. It seems that as the price of gas gets above about $1.25 per litre (or $4/gallon in the U.S.), the number of people who "need" an unsafe gas guzzling SUV drops off pretty quickly. Now these same people "need" to unload their luxury land barges. There's nothing like a flexible definition of needs.

This is a good start. There's going to be a lot fewer road trips in the family road boat this year. Some people will argue that this is a bad thing, that families should be able to get out there with their kids to see all that this vast country has to offer. These people haven't actually seen a family in one of these vehicles. The parents are happily enjoying their time "together" while each kid is in their own isolated space with individual DVD players and noise-reducing headphones. They see as much of the countryside in their basements. Besides, a lot of travel options remain open. Our geography is every bit as dramatic from a train. Better yet, on a train it's a lot easier to get your kids to come out of their multimedia shells and look at something without risking a major accident.

Earth Hour has come and gone. Overall it was pretty successful: the statistic I heard was that electricity consumption in Ontario was down by 8%.

What does that mean? From a pragmatic viewpoint, not a hell of a lot. From a political viewpoint, it's pretty significant. I don't have the numbers that project the percentage of the population that participated, based on an 8% reduction, but I'll guess it's somewhere between 15% and 25%.

That's a lot of people sending a message. At this point it seems the big environmental problem is politicians. Most individuals get it, most corporations get it, but the politicians, who can actually manage the process of real change, just aren't there yet.

Maybe having as many as one in four voters demonstrate their commitment to change through Earth Hour will be enough to wake them up. I'm not holding my breath though.

There was a time when the events unfolding in Tibet would have caused rapid worldwide outrage, followed shortly by a flood of withdrawals from the Olympics.

But that was when China was of little economic importance.

I am dismayed at how flexible our collective principles are when it comes to the economy. It seems that the only time when a political leader has to be concerned about minor trifles — say for example, killing off a few tens of thousands of people from that pesky tribe next door — is when they're not either producing oil or keeping those same tribe members working 16 hour days to make cheap clothing.

So it is with China. Most of the West is enjoying a great standard of living(*) thanks to China. Their leaders know this well. They may even be rubbing it in our faces. Or maybe they're just rubbing the 1938 games in our faces and laughing.

Are we going to actually support the principles of Human Rights and take a stand? What, and pay more for consumer goods as a result? In the pocketbook versus principles battle, it looks like pocketbook wins, no contest.

If politicians are unwilling or unable to act, it's up to the people. A small step though it may be, I'm opting out of the Olympics this year. This summer I'll be watching something else.

There's also a few companies who have lost my business: Coca-Cola, GE, Johnson&Johnson, Lenovo Group, McDonalds, UPS, Panasonic, Swatch, Samsung... at this point, the Olympic logo on any product is an icon for "don't buy me".

Last but not least, there's a Facebook group that expresses similar sentiments. I don't agree with everything they say, but they're close enough and are the largest of a handful of similar groups. Join them and be counted.

* I mean this in the "wow, this is inexpensive" sense, not in the formal economic sense.

OTTAWA -- In a bold and unprecedented move, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has crossed the floor to join the Liberal Party.

Canada has a significant proportion of it's military involved in a combat and reconstruction role in Afghanistan. In principle, the mission is a good one: get rid of what's left of the Taliban; help rebuild the damage done by war; establish a stable political system that allows the country to become self-sufficient.

Everything sounds pretty good except for that last part. Try holding a gun to someone's head and saying "right, form a stable civil state or I'll shoot." It's not going to work.

I just fielded a call from Ipsos-Reid, a large and reputable polling firm. The subject was Canada's "diplomatic and development" role in Afghanistan. The sponsor of the survey was the Federal Government. It began by asking what aspects of the media's coverage I was aware of. Then it went on to ask about how I felt about the role, conveniently ignoring anything to do with the military's current combat operations. Then it asked if I agreed or disagreed with various aspects of our non-military activities. After going through all of these items, it asked again how I felt about the overall role (still restricted to diplomacy and development, of course).

The repetition of the question is fascinating. You expect that really what's being measured here is this question: "If we keep telling Canadians about all the good things, will they change their opinion to support the mission, conveniently ignoring the occasional body bag (which we'll hide by blocking the media from showing them)?"

But that's not the reason for this entry...

I read a blog post today by Simon Phipps (DRM and the Death of a Culture) which was a well reasoned complaint about the constraints that DRM can place on use of content. Yet no matter how well reasoned, nor argued from which position, these arguments on DRM don't matter. They don't matter because DRM will never work on static content. This is so basic, so obvious that I'm not sure why anyone ever thought it would. In fact, let's make it more general: all copy protection technologies, past, present, and future do not and will not prevent copying of non-interactive media. In fact they're a colossal waste of time, effort, and money that only serve to inconvenience legitimate users (and as Phipps points out, kill culture).

I did a quick search for the title of this post and mostly found references to "asymmetric warfare", meaning warfare where there's a large difference between each side's military capability or methods of engagement. It's a term frequently used to refer to terrorism. Then there's economic warfare, which can be part of a military effort or completely non-military in nature.

It's interesting to note that Osama Bin Laden's version of terrorism makes for some pretty fine economic warfare in and of itself. One wonders what Bin Laden's total investment has been in his adventures to date. Probably nothing over a few hundred million dollars or so, including labour, materials, equipment, etc.

But what has the rest of the world invested in fighting him? The U.S. tab is probably well over a hundred billion dollars. Add the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus in investments by other "coalition partners" like the U.K. and it's not unreasonable to double that.

So that's a thousand to one return on investment, conservatively. Worse yet, given a reasonably well established and autonomous organization, Bin Laden's cost of ongoing operations is a fraction of his investment to date. Yet the cost of overthrowing governments, replacing infrastructure, improving economic opportunities and installing a resilient democracy remain astronomical. Moreover one can be cerain that the U.S. has invested a mere fraction of its final cost in Iraq so far. What's that take the terrorist return on investment to? One to 100,000?

As far as I'm concerned the USSR collapsed under the economic weight of the cold war. With a far less efficient economy, it was only a matter of time before the West won. Now we find ourselves in a similar situation. All terrorists have to do is motivate the world's larger military powers to mobilize their resources a few times and then wait. We'll fall under the weight of being dramatically less economically efficient at the game. Asymmetrical economic warfare indeed.