Politics

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.

DNA testing has given sperm banks an interesting challenge. The concept of an "anonymous donor" has gone out the window. Now a simple, affordable DNA test can verify parentage. Perhaps of more concern is that as more people contribute DNA to public databases, it's becoming easier to identify previously unknown siblings, which leaves just a short step to the father.

With genetic manipulation becoming such an easy thing to do, how long will it be before sperm banks start offering "synthetic" fathers? A few genes from this donor, a few from that, and a few more from over here to finish the job. A baby born from the resulting DNA could theoretically have any number of fathers, none of them traceable to an individual.

Of course it might be a tricky business if there's more interrelationships between genes than previously expected. Then again, given sufficient care, the outcomes of various combinations could be tracked, selected for deireable traits, and in no time the banks would be out in the market with competing "superbaby sperm".

Now there's an ethical mess.

The odds are that Paul Martin, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, will never read this but here goes. I'm sure nobody in the heat of the election will read all of this, so here's the executive summary:

1) Start telling Canadians that this is the "new" Liberal Party, that you're the new CEO, so to speak, and that you'll continue to find and purge people who can't respect the public trust. Here's the trick: you're running against Cretien's Liberal Party, not the other guys on the ballot!

2) Please stop doing this indirect "hidden agenda" crap when talking about Steven Harper. Come right out and call him a Western Separatist. Put the cards on the table or get ready to sit in opposition.

3) Use Harper's proposal to cut the GST to illustrate that he's willing to do anything, to say anything, to get into power. A GST cut runs completely against Conservative fiscal policy. The last guy who pulled this kind of stunt during an election campaign was Cretien, and Cretien the cretin has to be the most loathed living politician in the country... so link them together. Say "hey, you want a guy who will compromise his principles just like Cretien, vote for Harper." If you do a good job at distancing the Martin Liberals from the Cretien Liberals, this will stick. Harper's rising in the polls because he's pulling planks from the Liberal platform and you're sitting on your hands letting him do it. He's lying through is teeth and the majority of the population is so desperate for an alternative to the "old" Liberals that they can't see that.