Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 40

I’m starting to feel like I’m getting stuck in a rut with my writing, doing nothing on my blog but ranting about the stupid shit perpetrated upon we the people by our purportedly benevolent governments.  With that in mind, let’s have some good news for a change:

• Huntington defeats Oppal in B.C. election recount (CBC.ca)

(If you’re surprised to hear good news from the CBC — and you should be — bear in mind that those statist Quislings probably see this as a bad thing.)

Those of you from outside my fuckin’ groovy province, dude, may not recognize the name “Wally Oppal”.  He’s what used to pass for British Columbia’s Attorney General, notable mostly for the facts that he doesn’t approve of free speech on the grounds that it’s just too goddamn American and that he figures provincial prosecutors should be immune from the consequences of their actions, even when those consequences murder their estranged families.  I’d rather see him burnt at the stake, but I’m enjoying the irony of him being defeated in an election he tried to rig.

Adios, motherfucker.

——

While I’m on the subject of politics, I note with approval the Canadian Governor General’s multicultural sensitivity and willingness to appreciate the points of view of some of our most frequently ignored but historically important citizens:

• Governor General’s seal snack sparks controversy (CBC.ca)

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean snacking on a slain seal’s raw heart has sparked criticism from the European Union and animal rights groups.

That is fucking awesome!

(from the CBC’s article)

So not only is the Governor General a better carnivore than I am, but she just tossed a bucket of piss-scented sisu all over PETA and the governments of the European Union.  If she follows this up by going shooting with totalrecoil, I’ll become a monarchist.

And while I’m indulging in schadenfreude:

“It amazes us that a Canadian official would indulge in such bloodlust,” Dan Mathews, senior vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, told the Toronto Star.

Shut up, you bedwetting furry

But wait, Mathews has more:

“It sounds like she’s trying to give Canadians an even more Neanderthal image around the world than they already have.”

Waitasec… I just read an article about how the rest of the world thinks that Canadians are Neanderthals who should be shunned and ignored:

• World yearns to visit Canada, survey shows (columbusdispatch.com)

(No, I don’t get it either.)

——

If any of my readers are also university students in the greater Vancouver area, they’ll be aware of the U-Pass programme.  This is essentially a heavily-discounted transit pass for enrollees of certain campuses, the purchase of which is mandatory and rolled into one’s student fees.  I am a cheerful beneficiary of this programme, but cannot understand why students who don’t take the bus are being forced to participate in this programme.

Nevertheless, markets are everywhere (as Tyler Cowen notes) and some of these students have been selling their U-Passes — at a loss, no less! — on Craigslist.  Some people, including the despicable Bolshies at the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, seem to think of this as a bad thing:

• Illicit reselling of U-Passes common on Craigslist, CBC investigation finds

Blunt Object, Inc. is pleased to report that its littoral operations have been certified by the EPA.  Dear CBC:

The fee for the passes ranges from about $100 to $150 for a fourth-month semester, depending on the institution. The pass allows unlimited transit on all TransLink buses, the SkyTrain and the SeaBus and is automatically tacked on to students’ tuition fees whether or not they use public transit.

Regular transit users pay $544 for a similar universal multi-zone pass.

My goodness.  What a disparity!  Aren’t price disparities like this evil and unfair and stuff?  Surely it’s horrible that Translink is charging working-class families more for bus passes than they are trust-fund college brats who can even afford a riced-up Acura Integra fergawdsakes!

The CBC News investigation found 35 students flogging their U-Passes on the classifieds website Craigslist even though [blah fucking blah].

Problem… solved!

TransLink spokesman Ken Hardie guesstimated that the prohibited reselling of U-Passes by some university students costs the transit authority tens of thousands of dollars a year.

So you’re no longer thieving from students to the tune of far less than one percent of your annual budget?  Gosh, Ken, that’s just about close to a fucking shame, now, isn’t it?

That fire, there?  Die in it, Hardie.

——

Speaking of Canadian government-mandated payouts, we find this gem:

• Auto bailout costs soar (Globe and Mail)

You don’t say.

The cost to Ottawa and Ontario of the GM rescue package is now expected to be about $10-billion. The two governments are expected to receive an equity stake in a much-shrunken GM in return for the financing to keep GM operating during restructuring.

It’s somewhat demoralizing to think that I’m paying higher taxes so that people who earn four times what I do can keep their jobs producing shitty cars that no-one wants to buy for more than it costs to make them.  I mean, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I pay higher taxes so that elected officials who earn eight times what I do can keep their jobs, but at least those are… I mean, if we didn’t have… well, yes, but if it weren’t for… no, I’m still outraged.

Well, at least we’re getting equity in GM, so we’ll end up making a profit when the clever technocrats in all of our respective governments turn the company around and start churning out Ladas the eco-friendly hybrids that everyone wants to buy we’ll all make a profit and it’ll surely be passed on to the taxpayers, right?  Right?

Riiiiight.

——

So, okay, taxes and mandatory-participation public-transit schemes and so on.  But at least it’s all equitable, right?  I mean, .gc.ca is paying off General Motors on behalf of the CAW, so if you’ve lost a fortune in the credit crisis our ballyhooed social safety net is going to take care of you.  Right?

As they say on the Web 2.0 these days: hahahahahahaha lol n00b!

• Thousands of Canadians taxed on ‘phantom income’ (CBC.ca)

Thousands of Canadian workers who purchased stock options from their employers before the market downturn are expected to pay millions of dollars in taxes on income they haven’t received because the shares have lost their value.

“I had to take out over a hundred thousand dollars in loans, plus interest, in order to pay off taxes,” said marketing manager Shannon McLeod, a tech-industry worker in Vancouver who faced the same situation several years ago.

That must be how they pronounce “stimulus package” in Ottawa.

Well, at least Michaëlle Jean eats raw seal heart.  I suppose it’d be worse if she were a vegan.  *sigh*

Random linky bullshit

Please stand by for my life to get less tucking refardedly busy.  Until then, here are some pieces of blog that’ve been raising my WHARRGARBL:

• Ballyhooed new CAFE standards riddled with Hummer-sized loopholes (Jalopnik)

*headdesk*

Did anyone see this coming?  Yeah?  Well, go ahead and feel smug towards your humble blogger — after The Obamessiah threw the gays under the bus*, I should’ve seen this one on the way.

Yeah, it turns out that “domestic” car companies can still flout CAFE standards by building SUVs under the bureaucratic ægis of the “light truck” designation.  And small clean diesels?  No we can’t has them; not ours.  So I have a message for California and DC:

Okay, let’s take a careful step back from the fact that nobody writing CAFE standards has ever taken an economics course and engage a somewhat more abstract question — why do Democrats hate gay people?

• The Fierce Urgency of Whenever (The Daily Dish)

Here we are, in the summer of 2009, with gay servicemembers still being fired for the fact of their orientation. Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options (unlike most non-Americans with HIV who have no options at all).

And what is Obama doing about any of these things? What is he even intending at some point to do about these things? So far as I can read the administration, the answer is: nada. We’re firing Arab linguists? So sorry. We won’t recognize in any way a tiny minority of legally married couples in several states because they’re, ugh, gay? We had no idea. There’s a ban on HIV-positive tourists and immigrants? Really? Thanks for letting us know. Would you like to join Joe Solmonese and John Berry for cocktails? The inside of the White House is fabulous these days.

Let’s wake up and smell the fucking reality here, folks: Obama doesn’t give a shit about gays.  He never has, and unless it becomes politically dangerous he never will.  Somehow, Democrats have by and large adopted the fallacious notion that, simply because the Republican leadership keeps bitching and moaning about zOMG teh faggits!, their candidates must (by negation) be open-minded and supportive of what passes for “the gay agenda”**.  T’ain’t so.  All things considered, I’d vote for whichever candidate is least inclined to forcibly disarm the Pink Pistols.

Okay, back to environmental issues.  Why the goddamn fuck do we care about bioethanol these days?

• Lose-lose on biofuels (The American Enterprise Institute)

Dear California: FUCK YOU. When people say “biofuels” lately they mean “bioethanol” and exclude “biodiesel”.  Biodiesel is fifty-seven varieties of awesome sauce.  Bioethanol is your fucking fault, because you keep kicking the awesome diesel cars off of the goddamn continent.  Please die in a fire this summer, kthxbye.

And why do narrow-minded California hippies like bioethanol?  Well, it’s obvious:

Forcing the market to produce large amounts of renewable fuel will harm consumers in two ways: it will increase prices at the pump, because biofuels are more costly than gasoline, and it will drive up the price of food, because it diverts crops into fuel. The impact of food price inflation will weigh most heavily in developing countries where food purchases comprise larger shares of consumption. Food expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of household consumption among lower income groups in the developing world.

Oh, sorry; it’s not so obvious.  But at least bioethanol burns more cleanly than recycled dinosaurs, right?

Right?

An article published in Sciencemagazinein 2008 found that “corn-based ethanol nearly doubles greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.” Another article in Scienceconcluded that crop-based biofuels create a “biofuel carbon debt of 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the greenhouse gas reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels.”

Well… FUCK!

Fortunately, our well-informed benefactors in Washington knew about this ahead of time.

What can justify a policy that deliberately increases the price of food and fuel? Calling passage of the bill the “shot heard ‘round the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it would improve the “health of our children.” But this is questionable at best. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis suggests that the switch toward renewables will decrease ammonia, carbon monoxide, and benzene, it also predicts “significant increases in ethanol and acetaldehyde emissions” and “more modest increases in nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, particulate matter, hydrocarbons, acrolein, and sulfur dioxide.” Citing time constraints, the EPA did not do a full analysis of the net health effects of these emission profiles, but a reasonable assumption is that the detrimental health impacts from increased particulate matter will at least offset the health improvements from the predicted reductions in the other pollutants.

Supporters of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) also claimed that it will reduce greenhouse gases. Both Speaker Pelosi and then-President Bush said the bill will help reverse global warming. Indeed, much of the early enthusiasm for biofuels was based on the belief that their use would reduce greenhouse gases.

I… I… I… WHARRGARBL

I propose a new piece of legislation: if you don’t have a hard science degree, you shouldn’t be allowed to breathe my fucking air run for office.  (I kid, I kid! Kinda.)

Believe it or not, this isn’t this week’s Misanthropy.  Tune in tomorrow for more bellicose bullshitting.

——

* Hold on a sec, I’m getting there

** Which translates, as far as I can tell, to “leave us the fuck alone, willya?”

Against innumeracy: special issue on TJIC links

(Might as well put the hat-tip in the subject line.)

First of all, this explains a lot:

• Poll: How many millions are in a trillion? (econ4u.org)

(TJIC source)

I don’t have to explain why this is relevant, right?

In one chapter of his book Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter bemoans the fact that people tend to have abysmally poor intuitions for large numbers.  We didn’t evolve in situations where we had to deal with quantities greater than, say, a few dozen, and when numbers like “one-point-four trillion” are thrust upon us we tend to treat them all as simply “big”.

Tyler Cowen provides an intuitive model for numbers in the trillion-dollar range:

• How much is a trillion? (Marginal Revolution)

Next, TJIC reports on an outbreak of dumbworms at Fox News*:

• units (Dispatches from TJICistan)

Given the results of the first poll, however, I can’t be sure that the reporters cited above aren’t just well aware of their audience.

——

* Another cheap joke: how can they tell?  In all fairness, the story might’ve been sourced from Reuters

Funny is funny

I approve of the “Tea Party” protests.  I believe that taxation is theft, and that the only difference between a mugger and a Revenue Canada bureaucrat is that the mugger needs enough sisu to risk s/h/its life and/or freedom while the bureaucrat can hide cringingly behind the shield of other government thugs with guns.  I’m rather exasperated with the Republicans (most of ‘em) who have, like the prodigal son, only returned to their fold after fucking the dog long and hard enough to get their lesions infected, but like the Biblical dad* I’m pleased to see someone returning to the small-government community.

Nonetheless, I giggle like a schoolgirl every time I come across the epithet “tea-bagger“.  How can you not? It’s fucking funny.

• Don’t apologize for funny (The Liberty Papers)

——

* Sort of — I’m most emphatically not a Republican, and won’t be until they can cure themselves of their irrational hatred of gays, atheists, and immigrants.  Still, there are enough parallels for the analogy to hold.

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 39

We begin this week in Laval, Québec.  Laval is a suburb of Montreal, a city (er, “urban region”) famous for its relaxed attitude and storied hockey team.  This week, Laval has become famous for its abuse of police authority:

• Woman cuffed for not holding escalator handrail (Globe and Mail)

I regret to report that the above headline is an understatement, not an exaggeration, of what happened.  In fact:

Bela Kosoian, a 38-year-old mother of two, says when she didn’t hold the handrail Wednesday she was cuffed, dragged into a small holding cell and fined.

[...]

Ms. Kosoian [...] was riding an escalator down to catch a 5:30 p.m. subway from the suburb of Laval to an evening class downtown when she started rifling through her backpack looking for a fare.

[...]

When [Ofc. Camacho] told her again to hang on, she says she replied, “I don’t have three hands.” Besides, she had been sick and feared catching a new bug.

That’s when the officer demanded identification so he could write her ticket, she said.

Ms. Kosoian started arguing. The officers handcuffed her and threw her into a small holding cell. The officers searched her bag and gave her a $100 ticket for failing to hold the banister and another $320 ticket for obstruction.

When people get handcuffed, imprisoned, and fined for failing to observe the State’s idea of safe conduct, I think we can use the term “Nanny state” without irony.  And the State, in this case, arrogantly insists that it did the right thing:

• Police justify cuffing commuter (Globe and Mail)

Police in Laval, Que., are denying allegations by a subway commuter that they went too far when they cuffed and ticketed her for refusing to hold onto an escalator handrail.

“There is nothing here to indicate that the police officers didn’t do their job correctly,” Laval police spokeswoman Constable Nathalie Lorrain said yesterday. “I understand that there is anger here, but the rules have to be enforced.”

My goodness.  Can you imagine what would happen if commuters thought they could simply not hold handrails? Why, there would be riots in the streets!  Complete breakdown of social order!  I mean… rules are by their very existence morally justified, aren’t they?  If they weren’t the right things to do, they wouldn’t be the rules!

But wait!  In a later press release, the Laval police decided that this was a matter of compassion.  Yup, Ofc. Camacho cuffed, imprisoned, and fined Ms. Kosoian because he just cared that goddamn much about her safety.

• Police say escalator fine a first for department (Globe and Mail)

“Our goal is to make people feel secure on the metro. We’re not there to terrorize people, we’re not conducting operations to stop people from riding the escalator without their hands on the rail. He just wanted to make sure she did not fall.”

Lt. [Daniel] Guérin says Mr. Camacho earlier this year had to tend to an elderly man who fell down the long, steep escalator and gashed open his face.

Police maintain Ms. Kosoian was off balance when she searched her bag for fare on the escalator. She refused to give her ID for the ticket, saying she’d done nothing wrong.

So it’s not about enforcing the rules any more — it’s about kind, caring officers who’re willing to go the extra mile.

But just a minute: if Ofc. Camacho wasn’t “conducting operations to stop people from riding the escalator without their hands on the rail”, why was he policing the metro?

Mr. Camacho, a six-year officer who works the metro looking for fare-jumpers and other scofflaws, was walking past Bela Kosoian when he suggested in French that she hang on to the handrail.

(Emphasis added.)

Let’s quote from that first article again:

Ms. Kosoian [...] was riding an escalator down to catch a 5:30 p.m. subway from the suburb of Laval to an evening class downtown when she started rifling through her backpack looking for a fare.

(Emphasis again added.)

Yup.  Our heroine was terrorized, cuffed, imprisoned, searched, and fined because she was trying to comply with the law being enforced.

Paging Mr. Gilliam; Mr. Terry Gilliam to the white courtesy phone please….

——

Meanwhile, across the pond, Great Britain easily stays one step ahead of the authoritarian pretensions of its upstart former colonies:

• Disturbing the Peace (Reason Magazine)

(Hat tip: Coyote blog)

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having “excessively noisy sex.” The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her “shouting and groaning” and her “bed banging against the wall of her home.”

[...]

So how did Cartwright’s expressions of noisy joy become a police case, which later this month will be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England?

Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)—a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people’s behaviour—that forbade her from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in England.

Let me get this square in my head: in Great Britain, the state can regulate how much noise you’re allowed to make during sex?  And their queen’s on my money?  I’m fucking leaving.

——

After those two articles, my outrage is pretty much spent — but here’s another pair of links from the We(s)t Coast for your indignation and amusement:

• ‘Gold-plated goodbyes’ for departing MLAs (CBC.ca)

The 17 MLAs who either were defeated or did not stand for re-election will share close to $9 million in pensions, benefits and severance, the government watchdog calculates.

Want more fail?  Reward it handsomely.  Remember, these are the people who couldn’t get reëlected even with the advantage of incumbency.

• 54 B.C. passport applications lost [in the mail], some with personal documents (CBC.ca)

My tax dollars at work.

Fast cars: not dead yet

By now we must all have heard about Obama’s “Malaise 2.0″ fleet fuel-economy standards, gunning for 39mpg cars and 30mpg trucks by 2016.  This of course makes the development work put into, say, the new-model Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger rather less than cost-effective, but since GM and Chrysler are basically government departments now we oughtn’t be surprised that they’re retroactively pissing away money.

Anyway, it’s all for the good of the planet, isn’t it?  Not necessarily, no.  Making driving cheaper by increasing fuel economy standards… you in the back, I see you twitching — I’ll get to it, hold your horses.  As I was saying, making driving cheaper by increasing fuel economy simply means that people will do more driving.  This will of course inflict more wear and tear on roads, highways, bridges, and other infrastructure that rarely gets fixed because (a) people voters complain about roadwork, so promising more of it is unlikely to get one elected, and (b) it’s not a big shiny project upon which one can hang one’s legislative name.  Will this damage cancel out the lower-than-expected benefits of more fuel-efficient gasoline-engined cars?  Probably not entirely — and in any case, no-one’s likely to measure it, so politically speaking it’s a non-issue.

Furthermore, increased fuel economy standards don’t necessarily translate into increased fuel economy.  The EPA’s economy testing is, um, somewhat less than perfectly representative.  Witness for example the 2009 VW Jetta TDI, which according to the EPA averages 30/40mpg city/hwy but comes in well over 60mpg in actual road testing.

Not that the fuel economy of diesel sedans — which is usually somewhere between impressive and jaw-dropping — is going to matter, since California hates them for reasons known only to aging ideology-addled hippies.  Until that bloated pustule of a state drops into the Pacific, we’re probably going to be stuck with mediocre gas-engined bastard cages.

If we cast our thoughts back in time to last summer we can obtain an inkling of what might work.  Gas at $3.50/gal did a bang-up job of changing people’s driving and car-buying habits, and likely prompted the development of these 50mpg-plus diesel sedans that California won’t let us have.  If we’re desperate to reduce fuel consumption, imposing a carbon tax would be a fantastic way to go about doing so.  (It would of course drive up the cost of any and all shipped goods — such as food.  Then again, we don’t seem to have a problem with driving up the price of food: witness this absurd corn-ethanol boondoggle.)  A carbon tax will never happen, of course, because it’s far too honest and transparent to be politically viable.  That change, alas, is mythological.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, one of Jalopnik’s editors is convinced that the new CAFE standards are nailing down the coffin lid over the feeble kickings of fun cars:

• Obama kills fun cars, unveils 35.5mpg fuel economy plan by 2016

I’m not so sure. (Once again, though: if we want to have powerful, fuel-efficient diesels, we probably have to kick California off the continental shelf.)

If you’re not convinced that diesel sports cars are made from win and awesome, I present this rebuttal to the Toyota Prius and its cult of sluggish boxlike hybrids:

• Corsa Motorsports to debut hybrid ALMS racer (Green Fuels Forecast)

Oh, and there’s another idiosyncratic European racing series you may have heard of:

What fun could those possibly be?

Multiple Racegasms

So, what might one want to do on a lazy Sunday bisecting what Canadians are privileged to call the Victoria Day long weekend?

SpeedTV gives us the answer:

1. 0900h PST: MotoGP 250cc French GP at the Le Mans Bugatti circuit
2. 1000h PST: MotoGP French GP at the &c.
3. 1100h PST: FIM World Superbike South Africa at Kyalami
4. 1300h PST: Rolex Grand-Am Verizon Festival of Speed at Laguna Seca
5. Take a nap, restock beer
6. 1900h PST: American Le Mans Series Utah Grand Prix at Miller Motorsports Park

Let’s also keep in mind that the 24 Heures du Mans is a mere month away, and that the Monaco Grand Prix is a mere week away.

Andy Williams be damned; this is the most wonderful time of the year.

Shut your face, hippie

(If you don’t recognize the title, you’ve been watching the wrong movies.)

Here’s an argument I’ve heard a lot of lately, one which puts my dick in a tight figure-eight knot that would make my climbing instructors proud:

“Oil is really cheap right now, but gas is expensive.  Therefore, capitalism is a fraud, and the “supply and demand” model is worthless.”

Um… right.  Those circumstances would almost lead one to think that one can’t simply pump crude oil out of a hole in the ground directly into one’s waiting Hummer Prius.  That, perhaps, there’s some extra step that needs to be done, some change that needs to be made, to turn crude oil into useful gasoline.

Of course, this is idle speculation.  If that were the case, as those fat-cat oil execs would smirkingly have us believe, there would be giant factories to turn oil into gasoline.  Well, they wouldn’t call them factories, but something different — changeries, maybe.  Nah, that’s too prosaic: maybe something like reneweries or refactories or refiner– well, you get the idea.

If only there was some way to find new information on the Internet!

Now…