On Voting

I'm pissed I might have to vote in the upcoming Federal election. I haven't voted in a federal election since, let me think, shit I have to check wikipedia. In 1993 I voted for the Marxist Leninists in London North. They didn't win.

I am, like the majority of Canadians, a non-voter. I guess I am political for a non-voter but all that "If you don't vote, don't complain" bullshit bothers me so much I never ask people if, or how, they vote. You can always complain. It's a human right. The trick is finding someone who will listen. I don't know how political most non-voters are. It might be that all the most politically opinionated people I know are also non-voters. Anyway, back to why I might be forced to vote.

When I was young and exciting about participating in the democratic process I used to vote in every mayoral election. Mostly because a crazy person named Agnes Shaw ran on a two point platform - legalize prostitution and build a huge landing pad for alien spaceships. Both these ideas are so self-evidently right I felt I had an obligation to do what I could to help. And that was the beginning of my disenfranchisement. Londoners kept electing klepto business people instead of a woman of vision. It is worth pointing out two of London's three previous mayors have been indicted under corruption and fraud charges (and the other was booted out of office for letting her husband run an illegal business from her office) and London still doesn't have a UFO landing pad.

Reading Noam Chomsky's analysis of the American political system pretty much guaranteed I would never vote again. Chomsky's point (one of them and you should read him rather than take my word for it) is elections are theater. There purpose is to make you feel like you have a say. You don't. Only 20% of the population have any influence in American politics. They are the people in charge and all the policies of both parties are formulated specifically to keep them happy. So if you aren't in that 20% it makes no difference to you who wins. I think that 20% number is way too high but it doesn't change the argument. I'm not one of those people.

I think of American presidential elections as a race to 55 million votes. Each vote has a price. In 2000 it was approximately $7. By 2008, it was $14. Now it's about $20. Inflation is a bitch. All the debates, all the speeches, all the rallies - they are just the show you can choose to pay for. The true election is the race to $1.1 billion. This isn't a perfect rule: in 1964 Lyndon Johnson won while spending only 55% as much as Barry Goldwater (but Goldwater was a creepy nazi). And in 1996 Clinton spent less than Bob Dole (but only 1% less). Your vote by itself is worth nothing. Your vote and $20 is worth about 1/25 000 000th of the President's time and attention - so you are still going to be reckoning with units borrowed from physics. You get the point.

So no matter what happens in the next election I'm not getting any richer, any happier, or any closer to realizing my dream of living right beside the world's largest UFO landing pad but, and this is the thing, I really don't like Stephen Harper. I also don't like elections where I have no choice but to vote against something I dislike rather than for something I like but, landing pad.

Canadians have never managed to define what we are but we are very good at saying what we aren't. We aren't Americans. And Harper doesn't represent the Canada I believe in - I've been reading that one a lot on FB recently. What is the Canada I believe in? Apparently not Stephen Harper. I might have to vote because of how much I dislike Stephen Harper. I hate his sweaters. I hate his face. I hate his politics and his pro-business, pro-oil economic agenda. I hate how he can blow through tax money like a sailor on shore leave but still keep his reputation as a "fiscal conservative" because, well I don't know why that is. Mostly I will vote against him because he is a jerk to librarians. I've written about the current government's rules re librarians before and, seriously, fuck that shit. You pick a fight with librarians, you pick a fight with me. And yes I know, the hot woman with the glasses and the uptight demeanour who is really a total slut is a porn only fiction but still, librarians. So fuck you Harper. I will show my disrespect for you in the only way I know how - by voting for the first time in 22 years.

On Politics - Canadian and American

Who cares about Canadian politics? I'm Canadian and I don't. I care about politics but not as the word is applied in Canada. I used to think this was because Canadian politics is just so damn boring. We don't have completely insane people running for office anymore. We used to - W. L. Mackenzie King was certifiable. His top two advisors were a portrait of his dead mother and his talking dog. But since the economy just kept improving while he was prime minister, people just kept voting for him (a policy I approve of). Now we have sensible politicians running just to the left of centre and just to the right of centre. Not much to get excited about.

Most people I know are either vocally terrified or silently hopeful that Stephen Harper will win another election. I don't like Harper, I don't think his politics represent the best Canada but I can't get that excited about it. That he is a dick has been amply documented. He has no respect for the rights of citizens, his government has silenced scientists, jumped on every war America has suggested, and generally been for the wrong shit and against the right shit is well known. But still, who cares?

There is a reason no one ever talks about the Canadian dream. It's because the Canadian dream consists of only two things: a rational and reasonable government and beating the Americans at hockey. American politics is so wonderfully bizarre because there are competing and completely different versions of the American dream. That is doesn't matter at all who sits in the Oval Office is immaterial. It is theatre and it is entertaining. There is a Canadian election right around the corner and an American election a year away and still the American version is better. Where is the Canadian Donald Trump? Or Bernie Sanders? Or Michele Bachmann?

Also, I think I would care more about Canadian politics if the people running for office did more illegal shit. Americans have committed treason to win the presidency. No Canadian seems to care that much. If you want to be my prime minister, you should be willing to commit a capital offence to get my vote. I would like to see a story in the news about Elizabeth May having her staffers murder people to win more seats.

There is a kind of fatigue that sets in that saps the ability to care about problems when the answer is known to everybody but no one fixes them. For instance, first past the post vote counting. This is just stupid. Everyone who reads about alternate methods of vote counting thinks, "that's a great idea, we should do that." But no one does and so you just get tired of saying it and tired of hearing it. Similarly gun control in the US. Some people don't think it's right that some American citizens shouldn't be allowed to own semi-automatic weapons. Fuck them. Some Canadians don't think it's right that child porn should be illegal, we don't call for a national debate about it. So when the problems and the solutions are all out there and still nothing gets done all that is left is theatre. And Americans do that better than Canadians.

On the Honda Civic

Yesterday on my way home from work I got cut so hard by a Honda Civic I almost wound up in the ditch. Five minutes later, the same car stopped traffic in both lanes by trying to merge and winding up stuck at a forty five degree angle to traffic flow. When I got off the highway I got in behind another Honda Civic who blew through a solid red without slowing down. Then, on my way from the parking lot to my front door there was a head on collision right in front of my building - which is really rare on a one way street. Care to guess what kind of car was heading in the wrong direction?

Honda Civics are the Hannibal Lectors of the highway. And, like Hannibal, they can be very unassuming. My Mom bought one when she was in her sixties. You know that joke people make about used cars, "Used to be owned by a little old lady who only drove it to the grocery store once a week..." that was my Mom and her Civic. Still, if someone is going to do some completely psychotic shit to you on a highway - you know what they will be driving.

Maybe the psychos are attracted to the reliability, the reasonable price, and the high resale value.

When you spend time on the highways brands and models of cars take on personalities. Everyone thinks BMWs are the cocks of the road. And, while it is true I have met some, the shit people seem to associate with Beemers is mostly done by Toyotas. I think this is because most taxis are Toyotas. The mechanism that allows the assholery of cabbies to transfer itself to the brand as a whole remains a mystery. One presumes scientists are working on it.

My personal theory - nothing scientific about it - is owning a Toyota is such an awful, soul-killing experience the drivers need to spread the pain around just because they start to hate and resent the whole damn world.

And if you are going to get stuck behind someone doing 20 kph less than the rest of the traffic - they will be driving a Nissan. I would have said that clunking looking mini minivan would be the worst offender for this but it isn't. It's all Nissans except the supercar version.

My advice is this - don't get stuck behind a Nissan, in front of a Civic or beside a Toyota. If you have a choice nestle up close on to the bumper of one of those crossovers that looks like a jumped up hatchback (but not a Nissan Rogue or a Toyota Rav 4). Those people have a surburban sense of entitlement. They have worked hard for everything and they have and they aren't going to wait in traffic! And they really really really don't want to get a scratch on their brand new hatchback thing.

Toronto's Chinese Condo Boom

Every Sunday I get up early to sit and enjoy the silence of no construction going on around me. I live on the edge of the gaybourhood and construction sounds have been so continuously present (except Sunday mornings) that I don't even notice workers cutting steel with grinding wheels anymore. And that is an annoying sound. WEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEW.

I used to know exactly how many condo projects were underway in Toronto and how many tower cranes there were and a lot of other relevant statistics. But then I got a job where knowing those things wasn't important (not that it was important for any previous job I had). If you care you can check the UrbanToronto website. It was a lot of condos and a lot of cranes and a lot of other numbers that were counter-intuitive or just plain excessive. And if you talk to anyone about the condo market for more than half a minute they will tell you most of the units are bought by Chinese investors. How would anyone know that? If you are the best condo salesperson in Toronto and you sell 90% of all the condos by yourself - ok you would know. Maybe. You would know the name on the mortgage (or the name of the person who handed you a sack of cash / big cheque / other method of payment). Plus it's against the law (or so I've read) to release information like that or possibly just to keep track of it. I'm not a lawyer. It makes sense that you can't just tell the newspapers who owns what and when they bought it. At the very least it would be bad business. So unless this whole China buys condos thing started by someone drinking too much and telling tales out of school I don't see it.

This seemed to me like a simple urban myth. The condo market doesn't make sense. People like things that make sense more than things that don't make sense. Someone says it's overseas Chinese and people start telling each other that because it makes them seem smart or knowledgable or whatever and people believe it because it's easier to believe than the other prevailing theory (ie. that in two years the population of Toronto will be 175% larger than the population of the whole world or is it that everyone in the world will own 175 condos in Toronto?). Simple. Who else could be buying all those condos? Maybe George Soros is buying them all as part of his plan to take over the world through the UN. Or maybe I've been watching too much Alex jones on Youtube.

I don't know how I feel about this theory. I don't believe it. Sure some of the condos are being bought by actual Chinese people from China. Some are probably being bought by actual Paraguayans from Paraguay. China is bigger than Paraguay therefore...

At its root this theory feels a little racist. Because of that whole inscrutable thing people like to believe. I have never found Chinese people to be less scrutable than anyone else (except those I have dated). But that's part of our mythology so it's going to interact with other myths (semi-myths, pseudo, or part myths). More importantly it says something about the construction of the fake world we wander around with in our heads.

40 years ago strange, improbable, and maybe threatening things were either the US acronym agencies or the Soviets. 20 years ago it was the Japanese (although mostly in fiction and / or gameshows). Now it's China - the land of boundless weird. Anything that is too complex to understand but doesn't involve heavyweight physics, the answer is going to be China. Maybe not in so many words but still, China. 1.2 billion people of disputed scrutability, crap news agencies, a vague and menacing government, a whole lot of mystery and a whole lot of money.

Read apocalyptic fiction - the Chinese are doing fine after the End of the World. Or at least they haven't been reduced to eating each other. Or know one knows because China.

And while I feel bad about the racist part, the whole crazy maybe myth - maybe truth of this makes me feel vaguely hopeful. We are like a small town on a planetary scale; China is that weird house on the end of the street that sometimes seems deserted and sometimes seems like a giant party and G*d only knows what they are doing in there...

Paolo Bacigalupi

First, let's get the obvious out of the way - he needs a new name.

That said The Windup Girl is a fantastic book. PB (there is no way I am typing Bacigalupi more than twice) has, according to the blurb on the back page, written a lot of short stories that won awards and acclaim and some people read. I didn't TS:DR. So Windup is kind of like a first book. Fuck, google him if you give a shit about his biography. I want to talk about TWG.

Yes, this is going to be filled with acronyms. Live with it or go back to looking at kittens that look like celebrities.

TWG takes place after two significant events: the end of oil and global warming fucking everything up. So instead of measuring energy in joules or watts of whatever, they measure it in calories. Easy to forget the calorie is a unit of energy. When characters in the book think about industry they wonder how anyone could get the calories to power such a great enterprise. Which brings us neatly to PB's first wonderful invention - the calorie man. This is the derogatory name for employees for one of the big agri-combos that control most of the worlds food production. They are almost omnipotent in most of the world but Thailand has successfully kept them at arm's length.

Setting the book in Bangkok was another brilliant idea. Anywhere else and the action would have to take place in several different cities but Bangkok is the political, religious, and economic center of Thailand so one stage fits all. And, to my very white, very North American eye the politics and social realities of Thailand could be as fictional as the Windup Girl herself but I wouldn't know. It's extremely weird and very sci-fi to read about murdering rapists deeply shocked by a perceived insult to the Child Queen.

The agri-combos competitions with each other have introduced new pestilences and plagues that have forced most of the world to the brink of starvation and humanity's future is measured in planting seasons. Generippers (genome hackers) try to keep one step ahead of them but everything they come up with must be hidden and protected in case it infringes on the agri-combo's patents. Everything the characters eat is ripped one way or another - by the combines or the generippers.

Up against the calorie men and the Ministry of Trade and just about everyone else are the White Shirts - the kamikaze attack squads of the Ministry of the Environment. The White Shirts combat invasive species, including plagues. They're preferred tool is the torch. They are hated and feared and corrupt as hell.

The other great sci-fi invention is the Windup Girl. Japan have the opposite problem than the rest of the world - too many jobs, more than enough calories and not enough people. So they created New People. And, being pragmatic, they anticipated the desire of New People's owners to fuck them senseless. Think genetically engineered Geisha. They are called windups or heechy-keechy because they were engineered to move in a stuttering / clock work kind of way so no one could think they were human. Except they are people - smarter, healthier, faster, and more intelligent that "from the womb" humans.

What stands out, even in a book that is filled with invention, is PB's view of humanity. It is bleak but not brainlessly so. Some sci-fi I have read recently takes the position humanity being what we are means everything we do must finally be fucked up by our small-mindedness, short-sightedness or other-flawedness. There is nothing so passe as a hero in TWG and no clear villains either. People are self-interested, selfish, flawed and still interesting. The end is bleak but not completely so. If one accepts oil running out will fuck us up and global warming is a threat and yet, senselessly, we are doing nothing about either, PB's view of humanity isn't hard to accept or endorse.

Reading this again it sounds like an amateurish book review. Which I guess it is. I'm trying not to drop any spoilers because TWG is really worth reading if you like sci-fi and so is the follow up The Water Knife. I can't really think of anything profound or even amusing. I blame the fact I'm listening to Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell while I write this. Fucking love this album. So hopelessly cheesy and wonderfully great at the same time. Also Todd Rundgren is a genius.

Fuck it. Buy the book. Read it. Enjoy. Also listen to Bat Out of Hell more. You can skip Two Out of Three Ain't Bad. I give you my permission. If you want to read something at least a little inspired about modern fiction - try my thing about Murakami called "Piblokto Madness". It's a good one.

On Smart Phones

I own a smart phone but I don't use it. I use a stupid phone. The stupidest cell phone I could find: Motorola's FONE. Google it if you don't know what I am talking about. I bought it because it is a phone and that's all.

I don't like coffee makers with clocks in them. I own a clock and a coffee maker and I like it that way. In the words of Master Tsunetomo, "It is not good when one thing becomes two." I wanted a phone that was just a phone. Not a camera, not a calculator, not a computer, not anything other than a phone and FONE was as close as I could get.

Someone gave a a smart phone out of charity and, I think, the deep suspicion that anyone without a smart phone must be cripplingly poor. Or that not having one was wrong in a fundamental, existential way. But I don't use it because the manual is two inches thick and that just describes the functions. To learn how to use them you have to download a 15 GB pdf file. My life is confusing enough, thanks.

Everyone in the construction industry has a smart phone. Or at least a cell number. It is bizarre to encounter someone who doesn't. While I do have a cell (and consequently a cell number) I don't give it out to people I work with. For one thing FONE is too dumb to hook up to hands free (or I am too dumb and I am just blaming FONE). Most people's cards have their work number, cell number, alternate number, fax number (what? no telegraph number?), email address, alternate email address. Mine has my work number and the firm's mailing address. And my name spelled incorrectly.

I don't like the way cell phones make you permanently available to every single person who wants to reach you. I figure if my firm wants me to have a cell number, they should buy me a smart phone and teach me how to use it. I could then call it my "work phone" and turn it off whenever I want.
This is the thing with cell phones smart and stupid - if you don't answer it the person calling you will assume you are screening them. People who are not middle aged will probably not understand this but I have a few hours every day and at least one day a week I guard very jealously. In that time I don't want to see anyone, speak to anyone, or even consciously ignore anyone. I want to be left alone. And my being alone during that time shouldn't hurt anyone's feelings. I have structured my entire life to protect those precious hours of solitude. I don't have a wife / partner / significant other, or kids, or pets, or anyone who can reasonably demand my attention in that time. When my jobs demands as much time as it is now the only way I can protect my solitude is driving around (a poor substitute but what I am left with). A smart phone, or stupid phone I carried with me, would wreck that.

The cell phone has a very strange and unprecedented place in most people's lives. It is the first thing they grab in the morning and the last thing they put down. I misplace mine for days at a time.

So I am that guy who sits in site meetings without first putting my phone on the table. I never carry it with me. In some ways this is aspirational. When you are important enough you don't have to carry a phone - someone else carries it and relays the messages to you. Someone (I forget who) remarked no celebrity can dial a phone. They all have people who do it for them. They just say, "Get so-and so for me!" and they are handed a pre-dialed phone. I wouldn't mind that.

This isn't me saying, "look how special I am." This is me saying, "If you want to reach me, email" Kurt Vonnegut took a job at a University because they let him choose the writers who would be invited to a conference and he really wanted to introduce William Styron to Pablo Neruda. He and Styron were just leaving his office when Neruda arrived on the campus - some grad student picked him up at the airport. So Vonnegut introduces them and stands back. Let the magic begin! They say hello to each other and the conversation just collapses. Both of them are trying desperately to think of something to say and failing. So they start walking. About five minutes later Styron turns to Neruda and says, "So you're from Chile! It must be nice to come from a country to long and narrow."

The point is even really smart people say stupid things if you don't give them a chance to think first. Phones are a bad way to communicate generally and every extension of them makes the problem an order of magnitude worse. I am currently dealing with some severe fall-out from a conference call. Something that would never have happened if we had been emailing and will probably cost someone (but thankfully not me) about $60,000. I email. I'm good at it and I take perverse pride in that. And I want to do it from a big screen I can fucking look at, thank you.

On Doctors

I don't know if I've mentioned this before but I work on schools. Pre-K to 12 - I do it all. And here's the thing about working on schools: you can design the most beautiful school in history, one all your friends and associates and architecture students and architecture critics and magazines love, and it could be so good that every student who goes there wins a Nobel prize and you can bring it in for $8 a square foot and have everyone in the world think you are the greatest genius to design a building since Mies van der Rohe and F. L. Wright knocked each other up BUT if it isn't ready on the first Monday in September your clients will hate you. So from May 24 to Labor Day I work 12 plus hours a day, 7 days a week. Which means, like a dumb ass, I let my prescriptions run out.

I'm not going to list the medications I'm on. It's not your business. If you really want to know I'll give you a hint: I've talked previously about the problems lazy people have in a world that doesn't understand laziness is a medical condition. Seriously, mind your own business. Anyway,

My doctor will see you as a walk in if you don't have an appointment. But you have to wait. Typically the wait is about an hour. Today it was more than two. And when I finally get in to see him he expects me to feel bad about how long the wait was but he expects me to feel bad for him. He kept saying, "You think you're busy!" I thought that was funny. Brightened up an otherwise kind of shitty Monday.

Sometimes I wonder about doctors. I think spending your working life having to deal with people who have real problems like cancer or leprosy or some other nasty shit really fucks with your sense of proportion.

I have terrible skin. No kidding. It is like having the worst dandruff in history but all over my body. I also have the worst dandruff in history. It is embarrassing as hell and I'm very self-conscious about it. So I'm writing about it on the internet because that makes sense. I've tried everything I ever read about and everything I could think of to fix it. Nothing worked. If you aren't from Canada you probably think our socialized medical care is great (and it is) but try getting an appointment with a dermatologist if you live in a small town. You can hang it up. It's not going to happen. So when I moved to Toronto, I finally got an appointment to see one. And she told me, "It's dry skin. Live with it. Some people have real problems."

Which is true. But also, fuck her.

And when I was unemployed (long story) I got depressed. So I went to see a psychiatrist. Here is our conversation - slightly condensed:

Me: I'm depressed.
Dr: Why do you think you are depressed?
Me: Because I'm depressed.
Dr: What are your symptoms?
Me: Depression.
Dr: You sound like you are suffering from depression.
Me: Really?
Dr: You should take these pills.
Me: What are the side effects?
Dr: In some cases they cause depression.
Me: How often?
Dr: It's rare.
Me: More rare than clinical depression?
Dr: Clinical depression occurs in about 5% of people.
Me: And how often does the drug cause depression?
Dr: About 5% of the time.
Me:[laughing]
Dr: Are you feeling better?

He helped me about as much as the dermatologist but at least he had a sense of humour.  

Really? Actually? Literally?

So William Gibson published a new book earlier this summer, The Peripheral. I've been thinking about writing something on it for a while now. I even made some notes trying to figure out if there is some kind of pattern or meaning I could attribute to single versus multiple narrative POVs. But, fuck it. Two things.

First, you know things are completely fucked up when a Gibson book ends, "and then everyone got married and started living a healthier lifestyle (watching what they eat and how much they drink), some people had kids who will grow up to be caring adults and useful members of society, and everyone started doing yoga and shit because it's good for you."

Seriously, look at how Gibson's books end and watch the pattern emerge. There is an inverse correlation between the ending of his books (the beginning of the unknown and unknowable future from the perspective of the private universe of the novel) and the actual unknown and unknowable future from the perspective of the author. When the real future is kind of chaotic and dangerous as hell but still exciting and a cause of optimism the narrative future is dismal and bleak. And vice versa. Or maybe Bill is just getting old. Who can say?

The second thing is Gibson has been infected with the virus that causes him use the word "actually" way too often. "He was actually quite excited...", "She was actually sick...", "It was actually big...". It isn't as bad as "literally" but it's still annoying. And when I thought about it for a while and realized he meant "really" instead of "actually" it got even more annoying.

[Author's note: Since I haven't been writing in this too often I ACTUALLY proof read this one and found I had ACTUALLY used the word ACTUAL above, "the ACTUAL unknown and unknowable..." I did, however, use it to mean what it ACTUALLY means.]

My theory is people use actually instead of really because saying actually is kind of fun and saying really feels silly. AK-chewly. Or, if you are Canadian and pronounce your diphthongs like you are supposed to, Ak-chewel-ee.

Really sounds like everything else that ends in EE - like a stripper name of a word made up for little kids.

My theory about literally is people say it for the pauses. "It was...literally...something that wasn't figurative".

And my theory about all this micromanaging of our own vocabularies, our syntax, our speech, is because of the fucking internet. Twenty years ago there was no way for "literally" to enter our consciousness as something you should make fun of people for. The trolls have us policing our own speech to the extent we now use actually just because it sounds smarter than really. But on the other hand, porn. I guess we call the whole internet thing a wash.

Throw in DLing music for free and the internet starts to look like a win. Maybe. I'm still going to bitch about it tho.

A Hierarchy of Firms

When I was a student I heard Peter Clewes (sp?) lecture. I don't remember anything he had to say except for his neat hierarchy of architecture firms. He said there are three types. Type one are grinders; they take every job they can get and generate product. They are workmanlike and architecture is just a job to them. Type two are the boutique firms who can turn clients away if they don't care for the project (or the client). Type Two firms usually have another source of income (teaching, publishing, inheriting, etc.) because it is very difficult to run a boutique firm on architect's wages. The third type are the firms who take what they can get and then try to do it better. His firm Architects Alliance was a Type Three Firm (and might still be but I don't know if it is still his or if they are still Type Three!!!). When I heard this I immediately thought two things - that is really true and I want to be in a Type Three firm. I also thought I was the one making value judgements and turning his typology into a hierarchy.

Which goes to show what a dumb shit I was and probably still am since it took me the better part of a decade to figure out what complete bullshit that is. It is true there are boutique firms. And it remains true I don't really respect them (even when I admire the shit out of their work, like Williams Tsien). But almost everyone I have ever met in this profession is trying to do it as well as they possibly can. The only thing that makes a distinction between One and Three seem plausible is economics. Some firms have people who can sell. Sell the client on a project, sell the product to the media, sell the firm to potential employees. Sell sell sell.

There are also more ways of doing really good work than are apparent to people like I was at that time - people who consume architecture thru books and magazines. There are firms I could mention whose idea of a really good project is one that runs right on schedule and has almost no change orders. Just very professional work all the way through. And if you don't know how difficult that is to do on a big project don't think it is "less than" because it isn't.

I used to work for a firm that are well on their way to having the ability to turn away potential clients and they are very talented people who work extremely hard. Between the group of them they collectively possess brilliant designers, artists (who make the pretty pictures to sell the projects), big thinkers, poets, and a facility with selling themselves and their work many architects would kill for. And the people I work with now would dismiss them as dilettantes and amateurs. Which is okay because they would dismiss the people I work with now as ambitionless hacks.

I think the reason I fell for Clewes simple typology was I like rules that are easy to remember. The world is too fucking complicated and I crave simplicity. Except, in my experience almost nothing you can say about architecture without pausing at least once for breath is really worth remembering. Well, you could say, "Bjarke Ingels is over-rated and his only real talent is manic self-publicizing". That at least, remains true.

How to Exponentially Increase Your Chance of Winning a Governor General Medal for Architecture

Move to Saskatchewan.

I was going to write a bunch more about the political reasons for this but if you are the sort of person willing to move to Saskatchewan for the sole purpose of increasing your chances of winning a GG - have a safe trip and good riddance.

On my (non-triumphant) return to the internet and HOV lanes - in that order

So, been a while since I wrote in this thing. There is a reason for that. I don't want to turn this into one of those "I deal with my psychological / medical / social problem by blogging about it" things or some kind of assignment from my therapist but I do have a condition that makes it difficult for me to work a one thing for an extended period. The technical term is laziness. I know it looks made up but it's a real thing - you can Google it.

I decided to start writing here again because 1) my Facebook status updates were getting way too long and 2) someone requested I do it. If you are thinking 2) is weird and not very believable you are right - although in this case it happens to be true. And it wasn't my therapist. He told me to up the dose on my meds and stop complaining.

So there's that.

I live in Toronto. A few years ago some people here thought it would be fun for this city to host the Pan Am Games. If you don't know what those are you are not alone. What I know about them is this: they fuck up traffic. The city had three years to prepare a plan to deal with the anticipated increase of several thousand additional drivers on the highways during July and August. The plan they came up with was to ask commuters for a "voluntary 10% decrease in the number of cars on the road". No shit. I commute. That's one care. Or, using the math of the Games Organizers, 1.0 cars. I have tried to figure a way to get to work and back in 0.9 cars but it won't work.

I would like to know which cars belong to the 10% of people who are out on the highways at rush hour voluntarily. That is a fucked up hobby.

Anyway, the Organizers knew this wasn't a plan so much as a complete lack of a plan and so they added a couple hundred kilometers of HOV lanes. Three lanes going each way and one is reserved all day for vehicles with three or more occupants, taxis, and official games vehicles. Parenthetically, I have yet to see an official games vehicle - unless they are all driving modded Honda Accords. I've seen plenty of those with one person in them in the HOV lane.

The most annoying thing about this (and it is the top of a very long list) is the media have all agreed not to shit on the games because Go Canada! The traffic report now takes 50 minutes of every hour but the other ten are callers who love the HOV lanes because they are car-pooling. Fuckers.

It's not okay to gloat about car-pooling. It's like bragging about how much you recycle. Not cool. On the plus side, it has helped me understand why some Americans are so dead-set against socialized health care. It's obviously better than a private system but you just know some asshole is going to wreck it by gloating about not dying.

The Moriyama RAIC International Prize

Raymond Moriyama and the RAIC have created a new prize for architecture - $100K awarded every two years for buildings that "reflect the values that are so important to Raymond: humanism, equality, and inclusivity." You can read more about it here.

I can appreciate why Moriyama and the RAIC think this will raise the profile of Canadian architecture (presuming a Canadian wins at some point) but it remains to be seen whether or not it is a good idea. Moriyama is of a very particular era, speaking only of his work as an architect. After WWII people genuinely believed architecture could play a significant role in social change and they were right. The war had destroyed whole cities in Europe and Asia and there was a tremendous "peace dividend" in North America, where everyone "knew" real estate was the only truly safe investment. Architects had the opportunity not only to employ new technologies on a large scale for the first time but they could also step in a create entire cities from scratch. The entire world was being rebuilt and architects had enormous social power.

Our circumstances have changed. Not even architects believe architecture is as powerful now as it was 50 years ago. What this award is likely to do is bring international attention to one very good building every two years and, while that isn't bad it doesn't really qualify as good either. I talked about this before in my spiel on niceness in architecture but award winning buildings are important to only a tiny minority of people. Architects themselves, architecture students, people who write about design. Hard to think of anyone else. The important buildings are different for everyone and about the only thing they have in common is no one pays any attention to them. And you can be absolutely certain no one wins $100K for them.

This award will be meaningful or not depending on who wins and why. It is a near certainty that none of the winners will actually need $100K. In that sense it is kind of stupid but I guess if it was only $20 the media would pay even less attention to it than they will now. If this award goes to the kind of building I think it is going to go to (the best example of the work of one of maybe ten or fifteen firms world-wide) then it will be meaningless. Or at least as bad as the Pritzker. It would be a different thing entirely to give $100K to a firm that was just starting out and could use the money. Or to split it into 10 prizes in different categories. Or to award it retrospectively to buildings that are not less than, say, ten years old. It's very difficult to tell how well a building will age and, given that this award is about quality in construction and "not a beauty contest", it seems like waiting to see if how the building ages might be a good idea. It would be embarrassing as hell to give the award to a building that fell apart six months later.

Having chosen the Aga Khan Museum as the site of the award ceremony does give me a tiny bit of hope the prize will be something more than an architects-only circle-jerk. The Aga Khan awards are about the only genuinely interesting architecture contest going. The jury consistently finds work that provides the architects of the world with bucketloads of details to steal (and is even more valuable for the world's architecture students). The work recognized by the Aga Khan is typically cheap, interesting, and innovative as hell. Part of that is because they recognize so many buildings. One building every two years just doesn't seem like enough. Another point in favour of the Aga Khan's is the buildings are from parts of the world The Architecture Record and Architecture Review don't visit very often. We'll see. If this turns into another occasion to celebrate the same office everyone else is celebrating that year, Moriyama wasted his money. If one of my friends wins, it will instantly become the best award since Alfred Nobel started blowing shit up.          

On Building Codes

NOTE: the absolute necessity of changing the way we design and build most new buildings is obvious to me and the current way building design is controlled by the government's concerned is through various Building Codes. So they will have to be changed. The basic concept behind those changes is equally obvious - both construction and operation of all buildings must consume less energy. As for how that might be achieved, I'm spit-balling here.


Sometime soon, probably in the next ten years, every Building Code in North America will have to be completely re-written. There are two simple reasons for this; one is very simple, the other slightly more complicated.

The first reason is energy consumption. Architecture is very energy intensive. We have been designing buildings for the last 60 or 70 years that are predicated on a circumstance that no longer applies, and hasn't applied in a long time. Concrete and glass buildings made sense when it was cheaper to heat and cool a building than insulate it. This was because we didn't calculate the true cost of heating buildings, just the user cost. Now we know the true cost is much higher - and possibly unimaginable. So building codes will become more prescriptive by necessity. If you are involved in either the building industry or the environmental movement that will be kind of self-evident.

The dominant type of large building in every city, big and small, in North America changed decisively because of the invention of air conditioning. Prior to air conditioning buildings were designed with thick skins and relatively small amounts of glazing - a delicate balance between dark interiors are stifling hot spaces. After air conditioning that balancing act was no longer necessary. Buildings were turned into giant windows with enormous cooling loads. There is almost no subjective difference between a building with relatively small windows and one with floor to ceiling glazing. The only time it really matters is the first time someone walks into the space and gets a chance to say, "I love the view." Then they hang shades over all the glazing to prevent the glare from blinding everyone. But the cooling load isn't changed by the shades.

So one very simple way to make buildings many times more energy efficient than they are currently is to start designing them like architects did in the 1930s. More articulated plans (the "T" and "H" plans being very effective), thicker walls off materials like stone and brick, and much smaller windows (preferably operable).

The second reason is the current structure or ideology of building codes. Pretty much every building code in the world is based on the lowest allowable standard. When people talk about something being "not up to code" it can sound like a bureaucratic complaint. Really, it's a pretty stunning indictment since the code defines the absolute lowest quality a building can be and still be legal. There are a lot of auxiliary guides (recommended practices and so on) that set a higher standard but they are strictly optional from a legal perspective. A client can demand a building that conforms to best practices but the legal authorities can only demand code compliance. This makes sense in a stupid kind of way. The law defines only what is legal and illegal. It does not define proper and improper or even good and bad. So less than the given standard is illegal but the standard is not necessarily typical or desirable.

Building codes have to address buildings as complete wholes and not address the isolated components within them. For instance, it isn't enough to specify the minimum R-value for a wall assembly and a roof assembly and so on. The total energy consumption of the entire building should be calculated in life-cycle cost and regulated based on a combination of volume, life span, and program. The problem with making this kind of measurement the basis of a legal code is no one has, to the best of my knowledge, created an acceptable measure for life-cycle costing. It is a measure that is surprisingly tricky. Take aluminum. It requires a massive amount of energy to get aluminum from the ground into a building but, once that energy has been spent, it requires surprisingly little energy to recycle the stuff. Steel is much cheaper (in terms of energy) to get from the ground to the building site but recycling it is surprisingly inefficient - the only net change is the energy spent getting it out of the ground.

I can imagine a set of codes devoted to energy budgeting. A certain type of building of a certain size is allowed a maximum amount of energy - one number for construction and another for yearly consumption. If you want to use more than that, you have to generate your own. It's not really difficult to make a building that generates its own power - we had many different ways of doing it prior to the invention of the electric turbine and we have even more now. You can choose the relatively simple (sticking solar panels on the roof) or the fairly expensive (like ground source heating and cooling) or relatively complex (check out this building by Baumschlager and Eberle) The point, to me, is we know how to make these. It isn't rocket science. It is a set of components and procedures that requires nothing more than a small additional expense during the design and construction phases and which, if we built every building as efficient as this example, would have an enormous effect on our net energy use.

Of course that energy would just be used some place else and the planet is still going to overheat on schedule and force the human race into a condition not unlike that portrayed in The Road Warrior or The Walking Dead. Shit, did I type that? I was trying to be constructive for once and write something that was only moderately bitchy but it just kind of slipped out.

Nothing for a long time

I've been away, attending to things that require more than 15 minutes of thinking and typing. I have been keeping up with my climate science reading list and things are just getting worse - as predicted. But in the time I've been away from this thing (whatever it is) I've been having a lot more flesh and blood interaction. It has become devastatingly clear having some idea of the true state of climate science makes me a less than ideal conversationalist.

I remember the first Gulf War - Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. And among the things I remember is how the US used the (frankly insane) speeches Saddam Hussein started giving after the USAF started bombing his country back into the stone age as a pretext for the bombings themselves. Hussein started raving about rivers of blood and a carnage that would be remembered for a thousand years and so on. Commentators in the States began crowing, "We told you this guy was a maniac!!!" And a lot of people were swayed by that. It is worth remembering the first Gulf War was very unpopular until it was won (with some very cool pyrotechnic displays brought to us live by CNN). George Bush not the Lesser needed all the PR pushes he could get in the early days of the conflict and Hussein seemed to be playing along - acting the part of the comic book villain at just the right moment (right before American and coalition troops were to start the ground offensive.

For a lot of people Hussein's posturing seemed incomprehensible. His country was being destroyed. His military was hopelessly outmatched by the US. More precisely by the USAF. Every military in the world is hopelessly outclassed by the USAF. Gwynne Dyer put in perspective for me. He said, "Once you have the United States Air Force on your case, all the rest is details." Hussein could act penitent or insane or he could dance a jig and it wasn't going to change a thing. The USAF was going to destroy his armed forces ability to resist and then it was going to destroy everything else.

That's kind of how I feel right now. Once you have fucked the planet's climate so badly it will no longer support human life, everything else is details. There is no correct behaviour for this situation because nothing we do at this point is going to make a lick of difference. Chief climate apocalyptic Guy McPherson is trying to change our behaviour because he believes there is a chance that really radical changes might be able to preserve other species. I think he is fooling himself. When the wheels come off humans will not go gentle into that good night. We will take everything we can with us. We will eat everything that can be eaten, burn everything that burns, destroy for the sake of destruction. That is if history is anything to judge by.

All of which has reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's prophetic Cat's Cradle. The shortest Book of Bokonon is called (and I'm paraphrasing) "What Can a Reasonable Person Expect for the Future of the Human Race Given Three Thousand Years of History as a Guide" and the complete text of the chapter (and this is a direct quote) is: nothing.

The NDP should listen to me more

For those of you watching Canadian politics (an even smaller audience than those who care about my environmental dooms-day-ism) Thomas Mulcair finally made the national news. How? By doing what I told him to do. Specifically, by attacking new finance minister Joe Oliver for his record on the environment. Mulcair said Oliver is, "an embarrassment and that he should be named minster of finance for Canada is a real shame." Then Mulcair called Oliver a racist.

While Oliver was minister of oil he attacked climate science with the vitriol and dishonesty that characterizes the best of Canadian politics (American style). In his zeal to sell bitumen to whoever was buying he attacked Al Gore, whose claims he described as "wildly exaggerated", and James Hansen, whose predictions re environmental costs of the Keystone Pipeline he called "frankly nonsense".

So, Mr. Mulcair, if you read this you have to be prepared for the overblown, contemptuous, histrionic reaction of the Harper government. They will say you are unstatesmanlike. They will say you should be ashamed. They have already called on you to apologize. Take a lesson from the Right. When they say contemptible and idiotic things and are called upon to retract them, they never do. They double down. What you said was nothing more than the simple truth. Oliver was paternalistic and racist as a minister of the federal government. His shilling for the petrochemical industry is disgraceful. Many many people wonder if he even believes in anthropogenic climate change. Don't back down, double down. Attack him again. And again. And again.

When you hit him, you hit Harper. So keep swinging. Hit everywhere and every way you can. That this attack was launched against a minister who has publicly announced the Harper government's position on the environment makes it so much sweeter.  

George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language"

I admire the hell out of good essay writers. Orwell is one of my favourites. I've written before that the first time I read an anthology of his essays I was depressed for weeks because he wrote over and over about how WWII would force England into a kind of "Capitalism with English values" - a form of Socialism with the State controlling all means of production. And in that he was very obviously wrong. Reading his essays again, I'm more struck by the breadth of his topics than his politics. He published on the cost of reading books, the mating cycle of common toads, boys magazines, good bad books, other writers, the Americanisation of England, English public schools, and cet. His most common topics, politics and writing, come together in the fabulous and famous (tho not famous enough) essay Politics and the English Language.

In it Orwell contrasts the common uses of language and its political uses. It is commonly used for communication but its political use is to obscure, mislead, and generally lie. Near the end of the essay he gives six simple rules every writer should follow:

1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word when a short one will do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive [voice] where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or a jargon word if you can use an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell's main theme in Politics is canned metaphors and stock phrases exclude proper thought. It is not only the reader who is lost; the habit of misusing language eventually leads to sloppy thinking. Orwell challenges his readers to use language correctly and creatively.

The reason I am so fond of this essay, aside from my semi-professional interest in language, is the implications it has on architecture. I should follow Orwell's example and grab a sample of archi-speak to critique. Problematically, the architecture community in Canada is very small so the probability I would know the author is quite high. Let me see if I can grab something international. This is from Architizer's A+ Awards:

Each wing has its own qualities, different from each other and yet seamlessly connected to the next. In this way the building acts as an embodiment of the journey of education, with less distinction of any prescribed boundaries between disciplines. The colour strategy reinforces the identity of the academic disciplines, universally enhanced by the richness of natural materials, such as locally recycled timber. Planning allows the building’s circulation to constantly return to the library at its heart, and in this way is physically and experientially in parallel with the educational ethos of the school.  

You want to take a shot at what that really means? I don't. I think I could puzzle some kind of meaning out of it but whether or not what I came up with was what the author intended, I have no idea. The more I read it, the more inconclusive it becomes. 

This kind of writing is typical of architecture. The problem, very generally, is architects are trained to think visually and spatially. There is a vocabulary that has been invented, borrowed, or stolen from other disciplines to allow architects to write and talk about what they do but it is difficult to use with precision. So words that have specific and important meanings get tossed around until they become as meaningless as "fascism" is today. As an interesting experiment, try substituting "oogeyboogeymanism" for "fascism" in anything you find on the internet and you will notice how infrequently the meaning of the sentence changes. 

Architecture is difficult to write about at the best of times. When the meaning of the words we use for the most fundamental concepts are debased by misuse it becomes impossible. 

How the NDP can (maybe) win the next election

Way back in the 1940s George Orwell wrote about the debilitating effects of being a permanent and pensioned opposition. The problem, as he saw it, was relegating yourself to the role of the perpetual critic means an inevitable decline in the quality of your ideas. It is far easier to just attack everything the government does than propose meaningful changes that reflect how things ought to be done. One could argue this is more true for the parties opposing the Harper government than it has been for any other opposition. Everything Harper's government has done is so readily available for attack it would make the most rigorous thinker a little sloppy. How hard is it to land punches on the guy who targets librarians as potential political enemies?

In my adult life the NDP has had two great leaders. One is of course Jack Layton. The other was Ed Broadbent. Old Ed never came close to winning an election and, in a way, that was the source of his greatness. It never seemed like he tried to win elections. To do that, you have to do the things Jack Layton was willing to do. You have to move away from organized labour. You have to appeal more to the middle class. You have to think in terms of power politics and vote scrounging and back room dealing. No one thinks winning elections is as noble as they made it seem on The West Wing. There is no one left who still believes politics is about an honourable presentation of different priorities or even conflicting ideologies. It is about winning.

The next federal election is going to come down to whether or not the Liberals can take Quebec back from the NDP. There is going to be a lot of talk about strategic voting in Quebec. "If Quebec goes to the NDP again we will be stuck with another Harper government." That is what the Liberals will argue and it is difficult at this point to argue with them. Harper is untouchable on the prairie. He will do well in Ontario but even without looking at any numbers, it is easy enough to predict a strong Liberal showing here. Harper will control Ontario the same way he did in the last election - picking out the 'must have' ridings and visiting all of them more than once. He will get the ridings he wants because of the make up of the constituency. These are the people in Toronto who voted for Ford and would again. They are small government, low tax ideologues. The polar opposite of people like me. They don't care about the systematic destruction of libraries or research stations. They don't care about environmental regulation. They don't care about very much at all except what this government is going to cost them and there is simply no way any party can beat the Conservatives in that game.

I don't know what will happen in BC or in the maritimes and I don't really care. It isn't important. The election will be decided by who takes Quebec. Ontario (Liberal) and the Prairie provinces (Conservative) will cancel each other out and the Conservatives will win unless the Liberals take Quebec. That is the situation everyone is planning for and it's a huge mistake for Mulcair to let it play that way. Yes, he has an opportunity to actually gain power while losing seats provided the Libs win enough of them to form a minority. But that is a bad bet.

What Mulcair needs is a new consensus. I think the NDP have made a calculation that the youth vote, such as it is, will go to Trudeau. And if Mulcair keeps on as he is going, it will. At least in Ontario. But these are not the same youth as those who voted for Trudeau Sr. These are the kids who were Occupiers. Who were part of the pots and pans revolution in Quebec. There is a consensus out there waiting and no one is trying to get it.

To win Mulcair needs a coalition of the young, the green, and the poor (and scared). He needs to frame the terms of the debate by constantly being the loudest and by hitting his issues every time he sees a microphone. Even when there isn't a microphone he should still be yelling about them because you never know what will wind up on Youtube. The problem he has now (other than a depressing lack of personality) is he has no issues!

To win Mulcair needs to make a commitment to freeze tuition and make a substantial reduction in student debt. He should promise to reduce tuition by 30% over the next four years. He should promise to forgive all student debt above $30K and cut the interest rate on all student debt to prime. Both the Cons and Libs are available to attacks on this front. And this doesn't just win young votes, it wins the votes of parents who are wondering how the hell they are going to put two kids through university.

To win Mulcair should scream about everything Harper has done to scientists and librarians during his government. He should make the immediate repeal of those laws his first act. He should form a parliamentary commission on climate change to make the current data available to MPs and every Canadian and he should promise to fund climate science particularly in the Arctic. He should also promise to kill the Keystone Pipeline. I don't know how he feels about making promises he can't keep but he should attack the Keystone Pipeline at every opportunity. This would be both good governance and good politics. The Americans can make it happen if they really want to but our government should make it as hard for them as possible. The Cons record on environmental issues is so miserable this is really a no brainer. This should be a constant source of misery for Harper. Mulcair can force Harper to take a position that will cost him seats in both Quebec and Ontario to protect his core in the prairies. Even if the strategy is to go for a minority with the Libs, these should be core issues for Mulcair.

Mulcair should promise a complete overhaul of our tax system and the creation of two more income tax tiers. The system should be redesigned to move the onus from low and middle income families and place it on corporations and the people who run them. Mulcair can make this attack because multimillionaires don't donate to the NDP anyway. And this is the kind of move that will free those in the middle class who vote their wallets but would like to vote their conscience to do so.

The last thing Mulcair has to promise is transparency in government. This means subpoena power for parliamentary budget oversight. Everyone else has lied to Canadians about a transparent government, now it't the NDPs turn. The ugly fact is the NDP are the only party who can promise this without being faced with their previous broken promises.

This is a coalition that can gain seats for Mulcair. He can keep what Layton won in Quebec and build in the other provinces. But he has to become more forceful to do so. He needs to be on the attack all the time. Every time he is near Harper he should hit him on the environment and on the structure of the tax system. Every time he is near Trudeau he should hit him with a lack of ambition - all style and no substance. He should be pounding taxes, tuition, transparency and the environment but he won't. I wish I could find a synonym for environment that started with a 't' but I can't. Actually it works better if you communicate the concern for the environment as support for science and scientists. People still, stupidly, argue about the environment but most Canadians are offended by an American style attack on science.

Mulcair should support these issues because they are right. I have made no secret about my support for them and my distaste for those who attack them. But more importantly, he has to fight for something. Canadians like to think we are the friendly nation but the truth, if you look at our electoral record, doesn't support this. We like fighters. We loved Trudeau and he declared martial law. We loved Chretien (who was best described as "looking like the guy who drives the get-away car" and was manifestly crooked). We loved Harper and that pains me to say but the guy has been in total control over his party forever and the nation for far too long. We love fighters. It's what we loved about Jack Layton. He took Quebec on two things: sympathy for his illness and the fact he took absolutely no shit from anyone in the debates. Mulcair needs to get dirty. He needs to become a scrapper. I don't think Trudeau will. He will put up just enough of a fight to make it clear he has no patience with Harper but, on the whole, his strategy will be charm and the occasional bon mot.

Frankly, I think the deal is already done. I think the best the NDP are betting they can do is prevent Trudeau from forming a majority and that's a scary thought because we don't know how Trudeau will stand up as a party leader in a national election. We know Harper will be a machine in a sweater. With a plan. And money. Trudeau remains an unknown. Given the performance of the last three Libs to hold the top seat, I think it would be a huge mistake to bank on them doing anything. And if the NDP throws and Harper wins another government, I'm not only never voting NDP again - I'm leaving the country.

On the NDP's National Day of Action

After the last federal budget the NDP's Thomas Mulcair announced a National Day of Action. This is the kind of thing that gets my lefty heart pounding. Finally, citizens getting a chance to talk about substantive changes not just to the budget but to the whole idea of what government means to Canadians - what we are willing to pay and what we expect for that money. I was imagining a Nation wide debate, held at the local level but simultaneously with engaged and interested citizens mooting their own ideas and discussing issues that matter most to us. Instead, Mulcair decided the issues under discussion - and I'm not making this up - would be 1) ATM fees, 2) Credit Card interest rates, 3) Payday lending schemes, 4) corporate collusion and gas price fixing, and 5) companies adding a surcharge for mailing out statements at the end of each month.

Holy shit. It's lucky no one was killed in the resulting complete lack of interest. Why did they bother to stage a media event when they could have just stopped in to any Tim Horton's in the country and heard the exact same bitching? And got the exact same result. Nothing.

My five topics for a genuine National Day of Action? 1) Reducing income inequality to pre-1970 levels, 2) implementing a meaningful carbon tax for polluters, 3) the text of the apology to be delivered to scientists and librarians employed by the federal government as well as a repeal of all the insulting legislation the Harper government passed to curb their freedom of speech, 4) the creation of a new top tax bracket for incomes over $300k per annum and the elimination of a two decades worth of corporate tax breaks, and 5) giving subpoena powers to the parliamentary budget office.

and 6) reopening the Experimental Lakes Area with full funding. And one more for good luck 7) a federal commission on climate change run by climate scientists and funded by the federal government to provide the most up to date info to any member of parliament (to remain in effect until the climate stops changing or the world ends, whichever happens first).

Seriously, if I was a member of the NDP I would be very pissed off about this. What Mulcair is doing is taking the nation's pulse on issues that, by selection, belong to the conservatives. People who really think those are issues of importance are always going to vote for the conservatives because they are small issues that amount to, at most, a couple hundred bucks per year. And the conservatives will save them more than that by cutting taxes and services. Sure, those costs disproportionally hurt poor people but they are hurt far more by a government that keeps reducing its influence and ambition for the sake of reduced taxes.

People who support the NDP support big government - or, at least they are willing to provided the government has big ideas. The genuinely weird thing about Canadian politics, seen through the lens of American politics, is we are willing to pay more to get more. Canadians don't share the American fanaticism about small government. Most Canadians want a bigger government if you ask them on an issue by issue basis. When the sum of these issues is a government that takes a large and active role in our national life, people are not just willing to accept it - they welcome it. In 2004, the CBC started a contest to choose the "most influential Canadian". Most people thought it would go to Wayne Gretzky or Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester Pearson but it went to the Prairie Giant, Tommy Douglas. The father of socialized medicine in Canada. If the NDP wants to gain seats, if it wants to hold on to the ones it has, Thomas Mulcair better start thinking bigger.  

Nice work if you can get it.

This is a piece about how climate change denial is being funded by the same people who brought us the Harper Government. Every time I see something like this my first thought is, "That's disgusting" and my second is, "I could do that".

For the record, the IPCC (a tremendously conservative body) included in its conclusions that climate scientists are 95% certain climate change is both real and anthropogenic. Of the scientists who contributed to it, 97.1% agreed its anthropogenic. Here's a take on those numbers in the middle of a really good attack on the media for it's fair and equal presentation of ideas. Here is an interesting article on the lay deniers who argue winter is positive proof the anthropogenic argument is wrong and how that should replace, "Hot enough for you?" as the standard culture signifier for an annoying loudmouth.

Still, there seems to be a consensus there is very little we can do as individuals except try to find the best way to survive the coming changes. The people who we need to be at the head of the movement for change are the same people who are funding the attacks against the science demonstrating the need for change. The fight is fix, as Leonard Cohen told us a long time ago. Things are so bad here is Canada, the government sends chaperones to sit with Canadian scientists at press conferences to ensure they stay "on message".

Since you don't need an advanced degree in climate science to attack it and anyone who wants to take a crack at "debunking" climate science already has the winning combination of an audience who want to be convinced and backers with deep pockets I might be approaching this issue completely backwards. The way I see it, I have two separate but related problems. I need to make money. That's problem number one. It's not as important as problem number two but it is far more immediate. Problem two is, of course, the fact we might have already locked in a climate change that will make the Earth uninhabitable.

This piece was published almost two years ago and it's a really interesting take on the new world order and our reactions to it. After connecting the current crop of apocalypse fanboys (including me, I suppose) to the people who were reacting similarly to the Mayan prophecy of 2012 (which I didn't credit for a second) or Y2K (which I also completely ignored), the author throws the king-bastard of all bummers on the unsuspecting reader:

"Imagine a future in which all the trends I've just sketched out [increasingly frequent disasters and a less and less assistance from the government and the community] just keeps getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end - not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future; that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won't be your job's turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic good and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I've just sketched out, and you know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced."

I can't deny I have a strange fascination with this potential apocalypse I would have probably scorned two years ago. The extent I'm willing to believe the potential for global catastrophe seems directly correlated to the mess in my personal life. I don't know if that makes me as petty is it sounds. It probably does.

On Certainty

If you're a scientist or know anything about science you will probably want to stop reading this right now. I'm about to try to explain alpha errors and will almost certainly make a has of it.

Anyone who has been reading my latest entries will know I'm going a little crazy trying to figure out how much attention I should be paying to the scientific doomsdayers who say a + 4º planet is not fit for human inhabitation and would therefore result in Near Term Human Extinction. I was trying to talk to someone about it and, my first advice, don't do that. No one wants to hear about it. Literally no one. People have regular lives with a million little things built into them specifically so people can worry about sensible things and not craziness like human extinction. People worry about their kids, the schools their kids go to, the economy, their pensions, their next week at work, the state of their mortgages and other debts, many many normal things. They really don't need a lunatic like me dumping human extinction onto the pile and upsetting everything. Second thing, the concept of certainty requires explanation.

This is my best guess because I am not a scientist. I took some science as an undergrad but not much. Just enough to understand alpha and beta errors. So when scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, it means they know something is happening and they are 95% certain it means what they say it means. Or, if they are predicting, it means they are 95% certain about their model. There is a huge difference between measuring and predicting (obviously) but the more important question is, "How certain is 95% certain?"

That 95% is a very important number because by itself it tells us a lot about the state of climate science. It is the statistical representation of the probability of a false positive. That's what alpha error is, a false positive. Reporting something is happening when it isn't really. The kind of opposite of alpha error is beta error and that's a false negative - reporting nothing is happening when something really is. No one needs to worry about beta error at all so long as we are talking about climate change because everyone agrees something is happening.

Alpha is typically expressed as a decimal but it gets converted into a percentage for public consumption. When I was an undergrad, we were taught that in most cases an alpha of .2 was acceptable. Meaning the results are accurate 4 times out of 5 and the corresponding certainty was therefore 80%.  If you wanted a higher degree of certainty, you could make alpha .1 (or 9 times in ten, 90% certainty). So a 95% certainty is an accurate result 19 times in 20 or an alpha of .05

When you express it as a percentage it completely changes how people will perceive the number. 95% certain seems 5% more certain than 90%. And it is, kind of. But 1 error is 5 is twice as many errors (statistically) as 1 error in 10. And 1 in 10 is twice as many as 1 in 20. So 95% certain is not 15% more certain than 80% certain -it's four times as certain.  An alpha of .2 is four times as high as an alpha of .05 - and that's the alpha they are using.

So when climate scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, they mean they absolutely and conclusively know something is happening but there is a 5% chance their results are occurring because of a selection bias.

I don't know how climate scientists deal with selection bias. When I was dealing with alpha and beta errors the biggest problems were geographical and historical - people in different parts of the world are different and that causes problems for generalizing results in the social sciences. But weather is always different in different places. It has to be. That's the definition of weather and it happens because we have an atmosphere (without which we would be even more completely fucked than I think we are).

I'm going to try to get an expert to explain this to me and I'll report back.