Pierre Claude Nolin Strikes Back

2:35pm: Senator Nolin (QC) is breaking ranks with his Conservative caucus and speaking out against electing senators. Whew! It's been a while coming and I'm glad he's finally found his public voice on this issue.

That's four dissident Torys so far.

What It Comes Down To

Mr. Layton has not said yet how he will deal with the 12 MPs who voted with the government. Does he whip a private members’ vote? Or does he allow the registry to be killed?

Why Can't The Liberals Do Stuff Like This?

And the rest is here.

Even when the Liberals score a comparable tiny triumph, it looks a bit scuzzy.

Pity that the NDP are a bunch of hapless dreamers. Might be worth voting for them otherwise.

Stockwell Day Calls RBC Bombers Terrorists

...blames them for G8/G20 security costs.

The first part of that statement I have no problem with--indeed I wonder if the gov. will actually put its money where its mouth is and charge whatever suspects are rounded-up under our terrorism laws.

The 2nd part is, of course, bullshit.

PS. BCer quantifies the exact amount of bullshit at issue. Is Stock really saying those four anarchists cost the nation an extra 800 million?

A Ghost Story

One result of my Xmas time computer crash is that I've been sorting through CDRs, looking for electronic copies of my old published short stories. As they are found, and in the absence of much real news, I might occasionally post links here. This one, if I am remembering correctly, was published back in the 1990s in a little magazine called Rictus, now long gone. Its actually an attempt at fictionalizing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Really. It's called The Crossing, and is about 3,000 words.

Hudak's Confused Messaging

Tim Hudak won’t promise to repeal the Harmonized Sales Tax but he promised to try and limit its reach if elected premier next year.

Yet here he's still flogging a petition to kill the thing outright. But of course since its is already being implemented, signing the petition is just wasting pixels.

That's no way to run a tax revolt. No wonder it hasn't gained traction.

Now this guy knows how to run a tax revolt. You gotta chuck logic to the winds.

They Painted It; Then They Ate It

Since Genyornis's extinction date has been traced to 40,000/50,000 years ago the painting probably dates to around that period, which would make in Australia's oldest known example of cave art. Since the beast's numbers declined very quickly after humans arrived in Australia, the most popular explanation for their demise is that they were hunted to death. Here's another picture:

About the same height as an ostrich, but twice as heavy, so about 500 to 700lbs.

Devinder Shory Update

He's the Tory MP for Calgary Northeast, and remember:

Devinder Shory has not been accused of fraud, but of negligence. He allegedly oversaw legal proceedings on five mortgages that, according to the documents, he should have known were being transferred to straw buyers.

New Zealand's Mystery Moose: A Canuck Connection?

So, for reasons that entirely escape me,

A group of North American moose (Alces alces), ten in number, were released in 1910 in New Zealand.

Last official encounter was in 1952, when some poor moose ate a bullet, but there have been alleged contacts ever since, including this one potential ( photographed above) back in March.

So, my Canadian brethren...because us Canucks know Moose like Bo Knows baseball...is this a very young Canadian Moose gone Kiwi...or just a deer?

Note: most of those in the "young moose" camp point to the "horse like snout". To me (whose actually seen a few moose close up in my time), the big eyeball seems more persuasive evidence.

Oil Spill Sunday

...in an otherwise fine article about the financial troubles of British Petroleum, this statement

BP has being very aggressive about addressing the latest catastrophe, spending as much as US$930-billion, including claims and federal costs, on the spill, according to an estimate from the company in Friday.

...proves to be on the high side by a factor of 1,000.

Meanwhile, if you want to know what the news will be 24 to 48 hours from now re the Great Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, read The Oil Drum (also good for Peak Oil stuff and material on how the energy sector and the environment interact, usually to the detriment of the latter). Seriously, "Top-Kill" failed on Thursday; the lamestream reported that on Saturday, even when BP was already readying LMRP on Friday. Mind you, they're mostly oil industry and engineering types writing and commenting over there, and they do nothing to dispel the stereotype of engineer as arrogant dick.

This guy has also been following events with a sharp eye. And that explosion noted the other day does indeed seem to have been an explosion type thingy rather than dirt kicked up the ROV (BP's submersible) moving around.

Who Said It?

It is painful for me to write that with this garrote of a blueprint, the government I generally support is flirting with moral and political catastrophe. My respect for the Prime Minister prevents me from being any more explicit here about the implications of failure to reconsider the government's course on this issue.

Hint: I'm leaning towards allowing him to keep his snowflake. And this...this is quite truly an interesting thought:

The whole concept of prison should be terminated, except for violent criminals and chronic non-violent recidivists, and replaced by closely supervised pro bono or subsistence-paid work by bonded convicts in the fields of their specialty. Swindlers and embezzlers, hackers and sleazy telemarketers are capable people and they should serve their sentences by contributing honest work to government-insured employers.

Grassroots Guergis, Part II

"If it is my only option, say if something happens in the very near future, yes, I will run as an independent," Guergis said.

Hmm. She won with 55% in 2008. I wonder if she could pull enough of the vote as an Indy to tip it Liberal?

Boom! Part II

Video of explosion and possible rupture at BP's oil-spill cleanup site:


From here.

Note: Some specualtion as to whether what we're seeing here is the result of the robot camera backing away and panning up, with the debris falling from the camera itself. Possible, but towards the end of the vid you see the debris moving fairly decisively towards and past the camera lens (a bit like a tv space-ship moving through an asteroid field), which suggests its being propelled from the leak.

PS. The best explanation of why this may not be an explosion/rupture is here. And, oh, by the way, BP's 2nd attempt to plug the well has officially failed.

Oil Spill Update: BOOM?

It appears that British Petroleum's attempt to cap their oil spill has gone seriously lateral.

Their robot camera is looking studiously in another direction at the moment, but at about 9:10 AM the live feed was showing what looked like a cloud of flying stones. From the industry experts at The Oil Drum:

What the hell just happened?

Was watching - monitoring ROV turned camera away and then whoosh -- the chunky debris has me suspecting a sizable rupture in that kinked and perforated section of the riser.

And here's a low res screen shot from somebody's twitter account:

That's just one piece of debris. Watching an hour ago, there was lots more of it.

And here it is, courtesy youtube. Shit starts to happen around the one minute mark:

Update: or were they just trying to knock mud off the ROV (Robot vehicle?)?

Update to update: Nope. Something exploded. Frame by frame here.

Coalition Now? No!

Its time to throw some cold water on talk of an NDP/Liberal Coalition. Lets start with blogger Dan Arnold, expanding on pollster Frank Graves' claim that an NDP/LPoC merger would not be "perfectly efficient"--that is, not all NDP or LPoC supporters would migrate over to the new political entity:

I'd say "not perfectly efficient" is a gross understatement. When the Alliance and PCs merged, they managed to keep a whopping two-thirds of their 2000 vote (from 44.3% combined in 2000 to 29.6% in 2004)...this, despite being given the gift of Adscam. And remember, that was a reunion - this ain't. By Graves' own numbers, just 37% of Liberal voters list the NDP as their second choice, while 35% of NDP voters list the Liberals as their second choice.

Let's run a quick experiment on the 2008 vote totals. Let's say 80% of the Liberal vote decides to vote for the new Liberal Democrats and their catchy Red and Orange colour scheme, 10% votes Conservative, and 10% stay home and watch American Idol. For NDP voters, I doubt the transfer would be quite as fluid - after all, the new party would be led by a Liberal and if NDP voters really cared about stopping Harper or being in power, they'd just vote Liberal in the first place. So, maybe half of them go along with the deal, a quarter vote green, and a quarter stay home. In terms of popular vote, that would actually work out to a 73% vote transfer to the new party...above the Alliance-PC merger rate.

Another point: negotiating a merger would be a long, fraught process. A race for the new party's leadership would be required, and a convention, and etc. etc. Lots of money, lots of of time, and no reason for Harper not to drop the writ at an inconvenient moment. If you worry about preventing a CPoC majority more than you worry about the fact that after a mere four years on the outside, some Liberals are jonesing uncontrollably for a return to power, then this is a mess to be avoided. Remember, the Reform/Progressive Conservatives occurred in the shadow of a majority government; they had plenty of time to get their act together. Our new entity would not have this luxury.

Crafting an NDP/LPoC working arrangement should our next election give these parties the largest block of seats in the HOC would be something I could get behind. But why worry about it now? People talk about the recent partnering between the U.K.'s Cameron and Clegg; remember, however--this did not become a viable option until several weeks into that particular election campaign. None of the major U.K. parties were willing to assume and prepare for their own defeat in advance.

Finally, lets assume (and its a pretty good assumption given the current state of the polls) that our next parliament looks pretty much like this one. That is, a Tory minority, probably with a few less seats than they currently hold. What happens then?

Well, most likely Stephen Harper retires. Jack Layton too; he's been NDP head for a long time, and the party's support with him in that position has most likely peaked. He has also been fighting cancer. Most intriguingly, there have been rumors that, should Elizabeth May not win a seat in the House (and she won't, given that her opponent is Garry Lunn), she will step down as Green Party Leader. That leaves Michael Ignatieff as the last person standing (assuming Liberals don't panic and dump him, or he doesn't quit and retreat into academe) and the other parties in some turmoil. Green voters would be especially ripe for plucking because, lets face it, after Lizzy May they're back to a gang of aging hippies raising money by selling dream-catchers and holding salmon bakes.

In short, for the Liberal Party of Canada, patience may bring opportunity. Panic inevitably precedes a rout.

"Top-Kill" Has Failed

BP is moving along to "Junkshots" and other more desperate measures. They're saying this at The Oil Drum, and NYT has picked it up here. If its true, and junkshot fails (very likely at this point) then every couple of days = one Exxon Valdez, for the next 90 days, until they drill a relief well, if they get the relief well right the first time.

They're talking about deliberately torching the Louisiana Coastline to burn off oil that's washed ashore. Can't find the link right now, but they are.

Planning to go South this year? B.C. is a nice alternative.

And The Heads Exploded Far And Wide

Richard Warman has launched his own website to, as he puts it, "counter some of the nonsense out there". Suck on that.

Wise Words From Bourque

Especially the last bit:

Two months ago, the Tory government told Canadians that security costs for the two summits would be less than $200-million. In just eight weeks, those projections have nearly quintupled. The Harper government should be shame faced over either the sudden escalation of costs or their initial less-than-forthcoming estimates. And they might want to think twice before criticizing cost overruns by the previous Liberal government, such as the $1-billion gun registry.

Blogs & Twitters & The MSM

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, like the Nieman Journalism Lab, is engaged in a number of very cool projects trying to understand the various interactions between new and old media. Their latest research attempts to ascertain:

What types of news stories do consumers share and discuss the most? What issues do they have less interest in? What is the interplay of the various new media platforms? And how do their agendas compare with that of the mainstream press?

On the question of Interplay, the news is rather bad for bloggers out there hoping to crash the news cycle:

...social media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response. Across the entire year studied, just one particular story or event – the controversy over emails relating to global research that came to be known as “Climate-gate” – became a major item in the blogosphere and then, a week later, gaining more traction in traditional media.

Well, the article only considers one mechanism by which a blog story might get "picked up" in the MSM: there is a frenzy of activity over an issue in the blogosphere--a "blog burst", to use the lingo; MSM reporters look around and see a bunch of outraged or faux outraged bloggers all writing on the same topic, and they think: "Hmm! If it interests them, it must be interesting to a broader population!"

I think more often, though, a story might appear on a single blog, or a small group of blogs, and then be seized upon by an MSM outlet not for its raw prominence, but because whatever reporter stumbled over the piece thought it had intrinsic news interest. Since the resultant MSM piece would not typically acknowledge the earlier one or two blog postings, a connection between the two realms would not be noticed by the Pew Research project's methodology.

Like this story, perhaps.

Ancient Kalamari

Nectocaris pteryx, one of Stephen Jay Gould's "weird wonders" from the Burgess Shale may have found a home in the Family Tree O' Life:

Long thought perhaps a shrimp ancestor, a newly-found fossil reveals the creature was instead an ancestral cephalopod, albeit with two-tentacles instead of eight seen in modern octopi. The find, "extends the cephalopods' fossil record by over 30 million years, and indicates that primitive cephalopods lacked a mineralized shell, were hyperbenthic (seabed-dwelling), and were presumably carnivorous," says the study.

The giveaway? A funnel under its eyes, used to jet around like modern cephalopods.

Note that, with only two tentacles, Nectocaris would not have been a favorite of Pre-Cambrian Sushi joints.

PS: more info and a few more pictures here.