2009 will be marked as the year that those hopeful for change, those who believed in the natural order of things, learned a valuable lesson.  It is a year in which Americans admonished but ultimately supported millionaire auto executives who flew in private jets to Washington DC to beg for public funds to bail out their enterprises;  a year in which executives from wireless carriers whined that people were overusing their services;  a year in which the music industry continued to sue people who loved their product so much they wanted to share it with others;  a year in which we learned two equally unfortunate definitions for the term “teabagger“;  a year in which banks and insurers boldly awarded executives millions of dollars in performance bonuses after taking billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts;  a year in which a sitting US President running two foreign wars was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the eve of announcing another surge of troops, this time into Afghanistan;  a year in which the hax0rz of 4chan demonstrated the capacity for greater investigative depth than the declining ranks of real journalists;  a year in which 1,200 limousines and more than 140 private planes converged on the city of Copenhagen for discussions, but no conclusions, on mitigating climate change.  In short, in the immortal words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, it was a year in which the bastards won.

It is difficult to look back on 2009 and remain hopeful.  In fact, according to a recent Pew study it is difficult for many of us to look back on the first 10 years of our new millenium and find much cause for optimism at all:

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Much of this negativity must surely stem from the growing realization that in modernizing societies, wealth is being redistributed from the middle class to the rich in an increasingly open manner — and as a result, the hypocrises of the rich seem less and less offensive and uncommon. In China, where the UN recently warned that the gap between rich and poor is wider now than in the pre-Maoist era, resentment is growing according to a recent study published in the China Daily.  America and much of the rest of the West are not far behind this curve.

This level of wealth redistribution actually threatens long-term economic development, and democratists have long feared the rich as a corrupting force.  As he observed the growing influence of what was at that time the nation’s growing industrial-military complex at the close of the US Civil War, Abe Lincoln wrote:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
— U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

‘Money power’ is a Euphemism for the rich, specifically large corporations, which began to rise at the end of the Civil War and which flowered until their total collapse in the late 1920s, leading to the Great Depression.  Only a government willing to step in and underwrite the entire economy of the state was able to get the world economy back on its feet in the 1930s.  In the meantime, oil barons had fully hooked the Western world on their product in the form of cheap plastics, agribusiness, and transportation –an era which has lasted more than 100 years.  This legacy continues today, propped up by assertions like Peak Oil and maintained in constant crisis by wars and oppressive totalitarian regimes at home and abroad.

The point of which is to say that 2009 was more than just a lost opportunity for change.  “Change Theatre” events such as Copenhagen, Nobel Week, and countless Senate hearings and Royal Commissions nurture our growing apathy toward the decline of modern society instead of angering us — a condition one can only describe as a massive outbreak of “Stockholm Syndrome“.  In the meantime we seem to have ceded our will to power in favour of consumption.

From The Economist: 2010 could be a year that sparks unrest.

Yet still, like the shimmying flame of a candle in a hurricane, optimism lingers.  Much of this hope is embodied in the Internet, and its general ability to democratize speech.  Yet this, too, was under attack in 2009.  There are three mechanisms by which the Internet’s ability to sow disruption of the status quo are being challenged as the year turns:

1. Free Speech as Defamation
   In an obscure, tawdry case that none of us should have cared about, supposed model Liskula Cohen sued Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger, who turned out to be an acquaintance named Rosemary Port.  Ms. Port had set up a blog via Blogger.com to post some embarassing photos of Mrs. Cohen and accused her of being a “skank“.  Google attempted to defend the order to unmask Port, as did Port’s lawyer, however the judge ruled that the blog was worthy of a libel suit and ordered google to reveal her identity.  Fortunately for the rest of the internet, Cohen did not proceed with a defamation suit after unmasking her accuser, however this was the first parry in a long battle and has set a dangerous precedent for those who might otherwise speak the truth when shielded by anonymity.
2. Free Speech as Copyright Infringement
   In April 2009, Warner Music issued a DMCA Takedown notice to notable free speech activist, former Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, and founder of the Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig after he used one of their songs in a presentation.  This particular takedown challenges the concept of “Fair Use”, and for certain Larry will have a strong case; however not so for Britons accused of copyright infringement should that country’s “Digital Economy” bill pass into law.  The bill proposes, among other things, that alleged infringers not even be subjected to legal process from their accusers — instead they would just be disconnected from the internet after three “strikes”.  Similar proposals are being made by RIAA-backed lawmakers around the globe, including in France, the US, and Canada.  Just as the DMCA has been abused by Scientologists, among others, to squelch free speech, so too will laws such as Digital Economy.
3. Gaming Google
   As the algorithms which drive Google’s ranking of search results are better understood, they are increasingly gamed by those with commercial interests to advance or protect.  This makes it tougher for individuals to get attention amid a sea of MegaCorps, however this is one area where we made progress in 2009.  First, Microsoft and others have launched serious challenges to Google’s domination of Search — as these grow this means it’s no longer possible to dominate search rankings on all engines at once.  Second, Google this year redoubled its efforts to stay ahead of so-called SEO mavens and chose to even further favour content from blogs and from services like Twitter.

Finally, as the year drew to a close we were treated to our last piece of Security Theatre courtesy of would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, despite being on a list of more than 550,000 known or suspected terrorists, boarded a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam and tried to blow it up by lighting his underwear on fire.  The real terror came from the United States TSA, whose major acheievements for 2009 seem to have been the disposal of thousands of gallons of hair care products confiscated at airport terminals and, of course, the posting of its entire operations manual online in-the-clear.  In the wake of the underwear-bombing attempt, the TSA brought new restrictions into place which were cunningly concealed from passengers and deliberately inconsistent between flights, just to ensure that the only remaining people willing to put up with the heinous inconvenience of flying commercially will be the terrorists themselves.

Which leads us to contemplating the ultimate hypocrisy of all.  As Benjamin Franklin once said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

For the coming decade, let us fight vigorously against hypocrisy and oppression.  Let us hold accountable those who betray our wishes and their own words.  Let us be emboldened against scoundrels, pirates, and criminals of all kinds.  Let us balance the special interests with the will of the majority.  Let us embrace dissent as a form of patriotism and citizenhood of the world.  Most of all, let us reverse the damage that our perversions of democracy and ideology of all kinds have wrought on our nations by addressing critical shortfalls in education and social well-being.

Indeed it was a year in which we not only rewarded, but in fact we celebrated, hypocrisy.  Let us ensure that we neither celebrate, nor tolerate, hypocrisy in any form in 2010 and beyond.

… and here’s the actual speech from which this iambic pentameter was excerpted:

Well, maybe I’m right about Sarah Palin.  Now returning to watching the evil media exert its power to influence and informing the electorate, don’tchaknow.  At least she hired a speech writer this time.

UPDATE *** NBC in their infinite wisdom deleted this fantastic promotion of their new Tonight Show from YouTube, invoking a cat & mouse game with the evil demons of the interweb … I’ll try to update this with working versions over the next few days.  There is also, of course, a version on Hulu that is only available to Merkins.

Which one are you?  The ancient parable of the fox and the hedgehog has come into increasing view in popular culture lately.  And while its origins are somewhat ambiguous, the allegory has been applied to entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, playwrights, business leaders, economists, and even US presidents.

One of the fables goes something like this (sorry, no link to a source … I am paraphrasing a story from my childhood):

A fox and a hedgehog were strolling through a country path.  Periodically, they were threatened by hungry wolves.  The fox — being blessed with smarts, speed and agility — would lead packs of wolves on a wild chase through the fields, up and down trees, and over hill and dale.  Eventually the fox would return to the path, breathless but having lost the wolves, and continue walking.  The hedgehog, being endowed with a coat of spikes, simply hunkered down on its haunches when menaced by the wolves and fended them off without moving.  When they gave up, he would return to his stroll unperturbed.

According to the great liberal (before that was a dirty word) historian and thinker Isaiah Berlin who in 1953 wrote the Essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox“, interpreting the works of Tolstoy, Foxes are complex thinkers who account for a variety of circumstances and experiences while hedgehogs have the keen ability to focus and drive along a single path.  As examples, Berlin flags such thinkers as Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust as Hedgehogs and slots Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson as Foxes.

More recently, Jim Collins (author of “Good to Great“) took this concept into the business world in his book and it is one of the central unifying themes of his work.  In his book and other writings Collins comes down pretty hard on Foxes:

Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.

This is understandable.  Collins, a former Stanford University Business Professor, comes from a hedgehog factory.  He has made a career of spooling hedgehogs into mainstream companies at the mid-management level and consulting with large, heavily-matrixed companies on business strategy and leadership.  In many respects he lives in a world constructed by and for hedgehogs — so it makes sense that he could see the “Great” companies he writes about in his books (all typically fortune 500 players) as hedgehogs.  On a long enough timeline we are ALL wrong, but it is worth pointing out that a number of Collins’ “Great” companies have suffered badly from (and others have caused) the current economic downturn, eg. Circuit City.

As Nicholas Kristof describes the dichotomy in the NY Times:

Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

John Kerry is clearly a Fox: A self-doubting; complicated; unable to present absolute, sound byte-friendly answers to complex questions.  George W. Bush, however, presents himself as a hedgehog: simple, direct, ideological, and absolutely assured of his correctness.  In 2004, America signed up for its second term of 4 years of hedgehog leadership to substantial effect.

In our industry, hedgehogs have the benefit of focus and the ability to keep their heads down and companies out of trouble during tough times.  They succeed through the avoidance of substantial risk and through the ability to see things through.  When they fail, it’s because their conservatism holds them back, and markets move past them; or because they can’t release their death grip on that singular idea and move on to the next thing.

The Fox has the benefit of broad vision and the ability to perceive the complex interaction of seemingly dissonant ideas, and they succeed because they are able to travel outside of marked pathways with their ideas and make substantial gains.  When they fail it’s because their reach exceeds their grasp, because they are too far ahead of the market, or because they have difficulty maintaining focus to see things through.

The one problem that Mr. Collins cannot cop to is that while Hedgehogs are mass-produceable through training and discipline (this is what MBA factories do), Foxes are not so easy to come by:  their behaviour is learned but it is most likely interdisciplinary and tangential.  As a modern example, one could strongly argue that Steve Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and many successful tech entrepreneurs are foxes.

On the other hand Bill Gates, who at one time was the richest man in the world:  pure hedgehog.  Rupert Murdoch?  Count the spikes.  There are many successful hedgehogs in the mainstream business world and far fewer Foxes.  The structure of businesses, after all, are generally designed around hedgehogs. In general larger corporate structures aren’t great at absorbing foxes.  It’s why Jobs quit Apple, before going back as CEO under a mandate that embraced his wide-ranging aspirations.  It’s probably why entrepreneurs such as Evan Williams, who blew out of Google as soon as he could after selling blogger.com to them, generally can’t wait to get out of the mother ship after a their lock-up periods are done.  A friend and the CEO of a company acquired by Microsoft always referred to Redmond as “they” and never “we” even while he took down an amazing salary serving as a VP for two years.

Innovation is a concept which we modernists tie into every description of a person’s thinking process.  Wikipedia says there are a few different types of innovation:  “It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.”  Perhaps the razor cuts this way:  Perhaps hedgehogs deliver incremental changes while foxes deliver radical, revolutionary changes.

As a fox, I know that many of my successes have come when paired with hedgehogs.  A hedgehog can pluck a singular concept from the maelstrom of energy emanating from the fox and run with it along a narrow path.  Steve Jobs had Wozniak on the engineering side, and just as significantly Mike Markkula on the financing and business affairs side.  The latter two are quintessential hedgehogs.

While it’s valuable to know whether you’re a fox or whether you’re a hedgehog, it is not particularly constructive to assign a static value judgment to one versus the other.  At varying points in the arc of a business, a prevalence of influence from either a fox or a hedgehog can make or break a company.  Witness the foxes that artificially inflated hyper-economies at Enron (Jeff Skilling) and AIG (Joseph Cassano) to great personal benefit but ultimately destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth.  And meet the Hedgehogs, Gil Amelio and John Sculley, who sapped the growth of Apple, diluted its brand value, and very nearly bankrupted the company.

So figure out what you’re good at, chase the visions you believe in, and if you’re fortunate enough to work in an environment that embraces and supports your particular attributes, you’ll ultimately be successful.

Gutfeld, who also publishes a ponderous blog called the “Daily Gut” was responding to a report issued by the Canadian Chief of Land Staff Andrew Leslie that the Canadian Military would need a break before redeploying to another hotbed in order to retrain, repair, and rebuild forces after their withdrawal from Aghanistan in 2011.

Not since they demeaned to put Rachel Marsden on the air has Faux News offended Canadians so deeply.  Gutfeld weighs in with his obviously astute knowledge and understanding of international politics and warfighting.  What he fails to observe is that Canada has so drastically overcommitted itself to a deployment in Afghanistan that it is wearing out equipment faster than it can be replaced.  It has made a number of emergency interim equipment purchases and leases including tanks, transport aircraft, tactical transport helicopters, mine-protected vehicles, and blast-resistant transport trucks.  We have spent tens of billions of dollars helping George W. Bush perform his best impersonation of Emperor Nero against increasing resistance at home as young men and women return from what can fairly be perceived as an aimless fight in bodybags.

It fairly sparked the ire of Peter McKay, Canada’s Defense Minister, who appeared on CTV to demand an apology.  Really, though, Fox needs to consider whether a program like RedEye, which as the Tyee points out, is apparently “designed to appeal to the demographic most likely to be found on a beer-soaked dormitory couch at 2 a.m.” and “is chock full of fart gags and homoerotic innuendo” is befitting something that purports to call itself a news network.  Thinning pretense of news at Fox notwithstanding, stirring up this sort of controversy is dangerous for American and global politics, as it further widens the gap and reinforces a fundamentalism of American ignorance.  If you’re going to attempt to distort the truth, at least pay your audience the respect of starting from the truth.

Gutfeld is a clown, not a journalist — without the polarizing politics that are driven by America’s right-wing Taleban who converge around Fox News, he would have neither the audience nor the medium with which to reach them.  He is proof that neither a basis in education, nor in service, nor in intelligence is required to assert the airwaves in what shred remains of American journalism.

Like many whose scars were more than skin deep my grandfather, John Cunningham Aitken, returned from serving as a corporal with the Royal Scots to his family in Port Glasgow, Scotland and never spoke of his wartime exploits again (though he received the Belgian Croix de Guerre in 1918, among other decorations).  I never had the chance to know him, as he died when my mother was 15.

On the other end of the spectrum my great grandfather returned to Manitoba from Vimy Ridge just as deeply affected by what he saw and experienced and sought to share the grim realities of war with all who would listen.  As a writer and an educator, he did what came naturally.  Of going over the top in the final battle at Vimy Ridge William Markle Pecover (Grandpa Mark to me) wrote:

“The conquered area through which we passed seemed strangely quiet. Here death reigned, and the agony of pain.”

He kept a meticulous personal diary all through the Battle of Vimy Ridge, making extensive daily entries on preparations, the actual attack, and the aftermath.  He was in the fourth wave, which went over the summit of the ridge and chased the Germans into the valley below.  These memoirs, now prized by our family, formed much of the backbone of Pierre Berton’s book “Vimy“, which Grandpa Mark helped him with just prior to his death.  He revisited Vimy later with his son, falling and breaking a few ribs while scrambling up a trenchline, which would make him the only Canadian soldier to be injured at Vimy Ridge twice — separated by several decades.

Perhaps no one in my life has had greater influence over me spiritually.  A giant man with huge boxer’s hands at six feet tall (seemed so much taller to me) and in top top shape even at his death at the age of 92, when I was 15; a jovial schoolteacher with a career spanning the advents of radio, television, and the personal computer; a gifted craftsman and writer; a renaissance man who took his long retirement and pensions from two wars and decades of teaching and traveled the world.  I am not one quarter the writer that was Grandpa Mark; a mere nuance of the man that he was through his entire life.

I am writing about him today because I will be thinking about his service tomorrow (remembrance day, not his birthday or his last day, is the day I choose to honour him yearly).

I am also reminded, in part because of his writing and Pierre Berton’s important contribution, that wars will be more difficult to contemplate and far more infrequent if we keep sending thoughtful people, as journalists and as soldiers, into areas of conflict.  Canada has made no small number of contributions in documenting the tragedy that befalls the innocent during war:  I speak of people like Romeo Dallaire, Peter Jennings, Arthur Currie, Graeme Smith, and John McRae.

When systems like America’s Back Door Draft supply the troops for the battlefront, not only are the rich largely insulated from the effects on families of wars fought to preserve their interests; but the opportunity for the art, photography, literature, and music that are essential to our understanding of war is lost.  The poor have little access to the means of production or distribution to these things, even less time to trouble themselves with the travails of those whose shattered lives they have witnessed.

So I am grateful (for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons) for William Markle Pecover’s having survived World War(s) One and Two; but we are all bettered by the way in which he was able to greatly broaden our understanding of the brutality — and futility — of war by taking his experiences and sharing them with us.

No death I’ve experienced has taken as much away from me as Grandpa Mark’s.  I am however grateful that his came late enough for me to know him, and for us to have been friends.  In the end, my family’s sacrifice was smaller than most.  The real sacrifices were all his.

Thank you.

In one graceless arabesque, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that does little more than delay the inevitable, seamlessly nationalizing risk while privatizing benefit. I didn’t think it was possible to achieve this, but it is at once a perversion of both of the two dominant political and economic systems on the planet: Socialism and Capitalism.

Said economist Bill Spriggs:

“The folks on Wall Street scream louder, which is why their problems were attended to, but the American people don’t know how to scream, becasue they have been told throughout the Bush years that the market will clear all this, this is no a problem, but it has oviously manifested itself into a huge problem.”

Ya don’t say?

Of course, in voting down this bill on previous occasions, your representatives were safeguarding your best interests, right? Well, uh… apparently that’s not quite the case. What really seems to have held up this legislation is the absence of a bunch of pork which various congressmen slid in under the wire while nobody was looking — to the tune of billions of dollars. These are ridiculous provisions such as tax reductions for wooden arrows used by children and income tax breaks for the owners of racetracks (oh how tragic the suffering of those folks must be during this downturn).

I’ve gone soft on U.S. politics of late but this bailout, itself an epic mistake, has got me apoplectic. Heaping all of these pet pork barrel projects onto this pivotal piece of legislation is just taking the piss.

America, your government has ceased to function. It is little more than very expensive dinner theatre, and a mechanism by which taxpayer dollars are siphoned off to the rich. Unless you take steps to change this, you’re fucked.

And while your candidates cumulatively spend more than two billion dollars in a race to star in this grand ponzi scheme, you’ll be lucky to hang on to your home.

Frankly, I’m not sure anything can be done to fix it. I think your opportunity to correct a grievous error of democracy was in 2004. But you all were still too pissed off about the twin towers to think straight, weren’t ya?

“Mission Accomplished” indeed. Shame on you.

“30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world’s overall grain stocks.“    

This is, however, the cornerstone of Bush’s energy policy.  He views biofuels as an alternative fuel source technology, and technology as his “way out” of the end of Peak Oil.  It’s a strategy that recklessly fiddles with the levers of supply and demand, and pays no attention whatsoever to the fundamental laws of nature.   As The Economist also points out, it’s also a source of rebalancing power, in essence breathing new life into rural communities and lining farmers’ pockets.  This might be true were we all to ascribe to the Republican notion of the hardscrabble farmer, mining the earth for its nurturing treasures to support his struggling family.  This Rockwellian picture, however, is no longer particularly accurate.  It’s a facade perpetuated to make the lining of the pockets of Agribusiness palatable to the electorate — what invariably happens is that subsidies and price optimizations end up in the coffers of companies like Monsanto.We are left in a position where government intervention has therefore had three key effects:

1. Depletion of natural resources (farmland) at an accelerated rate and;
2. Quixotically, less food available for us to consume at higher prices and;
3. Indentured servitude of harvesters at the hands of megacorps in the agribusiness.

It’s just another wealth transfer that is picking the planet clean.  Corn is only economically viable as an alternative fuel source because of subsidies and incentives.  Corn itself was originally subsidized to offset decades of grain subsidies.  The result is that little else is grown on arable land in America these days.  These subsidies discourage the growth of more natural crops and foodstuffs that could feed us efficiently and naturally, instead driving the farmer toward lower-hanging fruit, pardon the pun.  Corn is in everything we eat.  High-Fructose Corn Syrup has replaced sugar and natural sweeteners, and as our bodies seem incapable of processing it we grow fatter.  Grains are used to feed cattle and we are encouraged to gorge ourselves on high-fat, disease-infested beef.  Fundamentally, though, we should simply not be burning our food in gas tanks.  We will ultimately starve ourselves for it.  We need to nix the subsidies and diversify our foodstuffs, we need to educate and reward people for eating healthy foods, we need to pursue rational energy policy and quit looking for stopgaps, and we need to accept that fossil fuels will not represent our future.

Case in point:  Recently, Microsoft announced they would build a research and development centre in Vancouver, and in turn use that operation to recruit and nurture smart people from around the world who were being prevented from entering the US due to immigration hassles.  Microsoft said it as plainly as they needed to:  they had effectively tapped out the supply of smart software people trickling out of U.S. universities, and thanks to increasing costs and constrains imposed by the U.S. INS,  it was just too difficult to fill that void with educated foreigners ; both  which circumstances put U.S. -based tech companies at a pretty significant disadvantage.

From the perspective of those seeking to put Vancouver on the map as far as software and product development is concerned, this served as a tremendous endorsement, and a opportunity which could be seized upon by the local tech community.

The conditions themselves, in turn, couldn’t really be better for any company big or small to operate a research and development centre in a Canadian city in general, when the strength of the dollar, the numerous government incentives such as SR&ED, and Canada’s liberal immigration policies regarding talented individuals such as Engineers.

These are conditions that Canada should capitalize on, specifically by relaxing further the immigration policies regarding software engineers and marketers, creating temporary work visas which can be turned around at the port-of-entry and can serve as a gateway to permanent residency (such as we have with NAFTA), and actively promoting the Canadian tech industry to workers abroad.

The benefits of these preconditions are obvious: diversity of talent equals an increasing wealth of ideas, knowledge, and research — which would ensure that tax credits like SR&ED pursue increasingly meritorious ideas and opportunities. It would also take advantage of a significant mis-step by our friends south of the border.

On my personal blog, I rarely restrain myself from criticism of the Bush government and US foreign policy. So my bias is well-known.. 🙂

As the US Economy is jerkily shifting from a decades-long manufacturing cycle, as the UK did through the 1980s, to a nation that generates the greater part of its wealth from intellectual labours, their leadership is ignoring the obvious: the country lacks enough talent to conceive and build this new intellectual, cultural economy.

It says something about Bush’s vision for America that while he posits an amnesty bill for the millions of illegal and largely unskilled immigrants coming from Mexico and Latin America, he imposes and reduces a cap on legal immigration visas for skilled workers, such as the H-1B.

They U.S. is turning away creative minds (including engineers) at the border, throwing millions of babies out with the bathwater, as they attempt to ebb the flow of “good” jobs being taken from America’s labour force and handed to foreigners. At the same time, those jobs are in turn being fully-outsourced to foreigners residing overseas, as companies attempt to cope with the fact that they can’t meet hiring goals for specialized positions.

In today’s market we compete equally for dollars and for workers on a global stage. When a company outsources its call centre, which uses largely unskilled labour, to India that should not be considered a problem for an advanced nation like the U.S. But when a U.S. company outsources R&D to India (or in this case, Canada) it should be considered a crisis. Microsoft’s move, from a U.S. perspective, is just exactly that. And it shows the grit which companies like Microsoft will go to route around the damage that is Bush’s immigration policy.

The Bush government, by limiting H-1 Visas and making it generally difficult to become a productive, creative resident of their country, has created a window which Canadians can and should exploit to bring talent to our nation: talent which will be trained and coached at the expense of U.S. companies, and will eventually spin out of these R&D centres and create their own new companies sparking new innovation.

This process can be exemplified by the number of Canada’s technology startups (meritorious or not) created by former Nortel executives throughout the last 10 years. That these have all represented a substantial increase in value for Canadian economic development, and the collective intelligence of our software community in general, would be tough to question.

With the quantity of resources available to technology entrepreneurs in cities such as Vancouver, the real challenge today is spending it effectively by hiring talented individuals.

So as our dollar approaches parity with the U.S. dollar making our salaries competitive, as our quality-of-life (particularly in Vancouver) far exceeds that of technology meccas like Seattle and Silicon Valley by all apparent measures, and as our government’s financial support for entrepreneurship continues to give a stage-to-orbit boost for many different ideas, the only pennies needing to drop really are a more sophisticated approach to valley-style Venture Capitalism and continuing expansion of immigration policies to support innovation.

With those two tweaks to our existing structure, a lot will change in the fortunes of Canada’s (specifically Vancouver’s) technology entrepreneurs.

In the meantime, bring more Microsoft’s to the suburbs of Vancouver. They will import some of Canada’s more brilliant Entrepreneurs and their co-workers at U.S. expense for our future benefit.

-Ian.

But that economy is not a reflection of the ecosystems to which it is very closely tied, nor is it tied to the priorities that we, as societies, must maintain. We have always paid more to fuel our vehicles than we have to fuel our bodies, but this quixotic miscarriage of effort was not particularly problematic so long as our food and our fossil fuels came from different places. Rice paddies to not typically compete with oilfields.

I think that most of us intuitively agree with the fact that food sustenance is a much more important priority than transport. And while the two are interdependent, corn subsidies have knocked the whole dependency chain deeply out of alignment. The thesis I attempt to draw your attention to here is that without those subsidies, at least for the time being, the whole notion of “growing energy” in fields would be akin to mania. And without them, at least in the interim, the whole notion of our food supply competing for arable land with our fuel supply would be a non-issue.

Agflation is here. The cost of raw materials such as grains, rice, and especially corn is rising across the board. This means the cost of your daily meals will soon be rising as well, and the culprit is likely you — or at least it’s the twats you voted for. It’s not a good sign for a foundering U.S. economy, either, as “official” inflation reports tend to track just those sorts of items when measuring prosperity and struggle in inflationary markets.

Our planet, thanks to global warming and a mixture of other predicaments such as population growth and rampant warfare, barely has the resources to feed us all through agriculture, much less power our vehicles, industry, and cities. And while economic systems are supposed to be causing our allocation of resources etc. to fall into a natural balance, in this case there is substantial governmental interference which is creating an artificial economy around corn. Furthermore, many experts say that our past century, even when taking the extended drought of the 1930s into account, was unusually ideal for agriculture, and these days we ain’t doing so well. As the chart below illustrates, drought is the rule, rather than the exception to it, on the Great Plains.

There’s a perfect storm here which is diverting resources from your lunch plate to your gas tank. The basis for this imbalance are the subsidies for corn farmers in Canada and the U.S., as I’ve pointed out before. Corn is evil. And we wouldn’t grow as much of it as we do in North America, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so heavily subsidized. The numbers for the U.S. alone are staggering.

No wonder farmers have been turning over rice and wheat and sugar crops to grow corn. With subsidies, they’re able to sell the corn on the market at prices substantially lower than it costs to produce. Of course, that’s especially fun if you’re a Mexican Farmer trying to grow maize as your family has done for hundreds of years, and there happen to be no subsidies in your own country. This has happened to Canada, mostly because of NAFTA and its proximity to the U.S. But it’s tempting, in the face of stiff competition from subsidized American farmers, for regulators around the world to attempt the same meddlesome subsidies in order to sustain their industries.

The second driver in the emergence of Ethanol also owes itself to interference by politicians and lobbyists: it can be traced back to a key loophole in the supposedly stringent fuel economy requirements placed on automobile manufacturers, called CAFE. As Timothy Carney points out:

“In 1975, following the Arab oil embargo, Congress created CAFE standards to force automakers and car buyers toward more fuel-efficient cars. An automaker’s ‘CAFE’ is the average miles per gallon of its entire fleet (weighted by number of sales per model) for a given year. … Current law requires all automakers to have a CAFE of 27.5 mpg for cars and 22.2 mpg for light trucks.”

Sounds great, right? Only problem is that auto manufacturers need only pay fines in order to escape the strangulation that CAFE restrictions would otherwise place on their big SUVs. The U.S. government has collected about $500 Million from the manufacturers.

The loophole is more recent, and it’s driving ethanol into the mainstream, which doesn’t bode well for those of us who like our corn-on-the-cob, not in our tank. In 1988, the US congress enacted the “Alternative Motor Fuels Act, creating an exemption from CAFE standards for auto manufacturers interested in developing what we now call “Flex-Fuel” vehicles, which run on E-85, a mixture of 85% ethanol (derived from corn) and 15% gasoline. It’s also why most of these Flex Fuel vehicles are big gas guzzlers, like GM’s Silverado and Suburban (listed here). Thanks to the AMFA, those bad boys are now exempt from the dreaded CAFE, saving millions of dollars in annual fines. This is of course regardless of whether you choose to use E-85 at the pump or not. As Carney adds,

“the federal government would multiply ethanol’s mileage by 6.6 and assume all flex-fuel cars would use ethanol half the time. This means a car that gets 20 mpg on gasoline and 15 mpg on ethanol would be treated for CAFE purposes as if it got 60 mpg.”

Typically, true alternative motor fuels such as Hydrogen, Electricity or Flux Capacitor were not invited to the AMFA party. It was strictly focused on E85. And now, with higher CAFE standards in the works, the U.S. Congress is poised to drive even more car models to the road using E85.

The result of this will be an even deeper investment in Ethanol, and further diversion away from the production of actual food on our farms. Surprisingly, even usually intelligent folks like Vinod Khosla and Tom Daschle have jumped on the Ethanol Bandwagon. Khosla has bet big on Ethanol, and the two waged a propaganda war, penning an OpEd piece in the NY Times called “Miles Per Cob” and speaking on radio shows like the one below:

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The reality is far from the rosy picture they paint of America growing its own gasoline in perpetuity. It takes precious energy to produce Ethanol from crops, and of course since the cost of the raw materials is artificially deflated, there is little to advise the value of E85 once the true costs of the fuel are accounted for. And the emphasis on E85 as any sort of saviour is actually diminishing efforts to develop sustainable alternative fuel strategies, as it substantially displaces their economic benefits.

An unexpected benefit of all of this diversion of corn into the fuels market might be a return by our candymakers and soft drink manufacturers to real sugar, as maize prices skyrocket. The omnipresence of High-Fructose Corn Syrup, as I have asserted, is probably a major contributor to the North American obesity epidemic.

“You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.”

Isaacson later claimed that he was buckling under pressure from CNN’s corporate interests, which exclaimed that the news was “too negative”. Failing to understand his own irony, he also later stated that he didn’t want CNN to be used “as a propaganda platform.” In actual context, the number of deaths occurring on September 11th pales by comparison to those civilians who’ve paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan, to say nothing of Iraq (which now accounts for as many as 70,000 civilian deaths).

Much more disturbing, the mainstream US Media bought and then massively resold the administration’s link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda without any hard evidence and without any further in-depth investigation. While even reporters, editors, and producers themselves were disinclined to believe the US Administration’s line they reported it breathlessly regardless of their concerns. Bushists and their army then descended upon the media to repeat the phrase “but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” which was an obvious manipulation of the public’s fear of a bigger, badder 9/11 — they were given a virtually infinite quantity of air time as a podium to sell the war, and very little in the way of counterpoint. In the history of mankind, there has rarely been such an abject failure of the Fourth Estate.

But today I’m not writing to indict the Bushists. Of far greater concern to me are the millions of born-again Hawks who channeled the anger, pain, and shock from the 9/11 attack into a seething, raging vengeance. Insodoing they allowed themselves to be manipulated by the dubious aims of an administration bent on war and naively seeking U.S. dominance of the Middle East (as though that is even a feasible goal).

Many of these faux-hawks (I’m attempting to hijack the phrase for comedic effect here) are now, with the benefit of hindsight, claiming that they were “lied to” and “manipulated”, as though that warrants immediate exoneration. This is the problem.

Why was I able to form an opinion, amid the froth of propaganda following 9/11 and leading up to the wars, that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, that there was likely no nuclear program in Iraq, and that there was no real justifiable reason to invade Iraq? Am I smarter than everyone else? Surely not.

The answer is simple. While I watched CNN and occasionally Faux News, I also read other articles, such as this one from Knight-Ridder. I’d also read a few books on Middle-Eastern and specifically Iraqi recent history to understand the longer-term context, and I did a hell of a lot of Googling. I read newspapers from around the world, I read and watched opposing viewpoints, and I discussed the issue with friends. I read the back pages of the NY Times and Washington Post, to where most of the cautionary reporting was relegated. In essence, I sought out perspective, and through no matter of luck I found it, and it turns out to have been the correct one.

This is the job of every citizen of a democracy — I would hazard to say every citizen of the world. I cannot forgive those who merely lapped up that which was spoon-fed to them, who were entirely governed by their emotions, and who abandoned their responsibility as citizens and voters by failing to protest — loudly — the march to war. Through inaction, and this is at times the worst crime in a civilized society, they permitted a culture which has survived for thousands of years in the birthplace of humanity to endure its most trying disparagement.

A hockey coach of mine once said that the hardest-working player on the ice should always the guy who just screwed up. That rule also applies here. If you succumbed to the rhetoric of the Bush sycophants and joined the march (to send other people) to war only to realize your mistake later, you owe more to your fellow man than to simply claim you were lied to. You need to, at last, take action to stop the injustice in which you were complicit.

Paint a sign, write a blog post, march in a parade, or simply raise the quality of your discourse among friend. Do anything to combat this blunder and make up to your fellow patriots and world citizens alike. No President or Congress can instigate a war without the support of the population. So whose fault is the current Iraqi debacle?

Well, maybe it’s yours.

-Ian.