As Russia had its East Germany, so the United States has its Canada

In the bad old days of NATO and the Soviet bloc, East Germany was the snarling dog of the Communist world.

It was East Germany that had the Stasi, and the tightest control over the thoughts and actions of its people. East German athletes went the farthest in terms of steroid usage in order to bring glory to the country through athletic accomplishment.

Today, Canada is moving into that role for the United States. Where even the US is talking about engaging with Iran to formulate a response to ISIS in Iraq, and Britain is set to reopen its embassy, Canada remains opposed to talking with Iran. Canada's position with respect to Israel is now so far to the right as to be indistinguishable from the Likud.

The role of the snarling dog is to appear so unhinged as to make its "master" seem reasonable.

World Gold Council discovers reasons to invest in gold

In today's astonishing publication, the WGC has announced that it has discovered that gold is poorly correlated to equities and is impacted by the business cycle differently than other commodities; consequently it may be good for something other than jewelry.

Link here.

Is there a connection with this story?

A friendly letter to the media

Dear BBC, WaPo, CBC, et al.

I wish to lodge a complaint. What you present is news is nothing but a lousy pack of lies.

Please don't misunderstand. I am well aware of your role in society, and understand the lying is what you do. That isn't what I am complaining about. What I am complaining about is the lousiness of your lies.

It is becoming increasingly easy to find contradictory evidence disproving your lies posted on various social media, blogs, and alternative media sites. The fact that your lies are so easily seen to be lies offends me--it makes me think you don't think very highly of my intelligence.

It wouldn't bother me that much, but to be honest, I'm worried for you. If you don't shape up, you may be retired (in the Blade Runner sense of the word).

Do try to do better. Lots of us are rooting for you.

Cheerio!

The warriors then and now

There has been a spate of editorials in the local papers recently decrying the lack of mental health care for our vets returning home from Afghanistan. The suicide rate among Canadian war veterans is about 50% higher than among civilians.

Most of the commentary has found fault with the military's treatment (or lack thereof) for returning soldiers. I think the problem is deeper than that--it is in the assumptions the military has made in training these soldiers. Military command has not really evolved since WWII. We, as a society, are very different.

In the 1940's, very few North Americans knew much about people in other countries. Consequently, it was relatively easy to desensitize them to the notion that they would be killing other human beings. All you had to do was tell them that the enemy du jour was killing babies and drinking their blood, or something similar, and the majority of your recruits would accept it.

Nowadays, most people have internet friends in other countries, and most of us have grown accustomed to the idea that people who live in other countries are real honest-to-goodness people, with goofy, lovable children, cute pets, eccentric hobbies, and goals and aspirations which, while different from our own, are nevertheless worthwhile. Nearly everybody sees this, and once it has been seen, it cannot be unseen. Our military, with its 1940s mindset, assumes that all they have to do is tell the raw recruits that the Taliban are evil incarnate, and these recruits will cheerfully rain death on an Afghan (or Iraqi) village as ordered. Even though they may not have any Afghan facebook friends, once you have accepted that others are human, I submit that you can no longer rain death on hapless villagers with the enthusiasm that your forebearers in the '40s might have.

Yes, there are animals out there, and you will always find some of these amongst your recruits: those who kill (and worse) joyfully. But the majority of us are fundamentally different than the people in the 1940s,

A clear example . . .

. . . of the extremely rare "high-heeled-shoe" formation.

Data sourced from van de Wal (2011). The inferred data are accessible from the supplementary material (instructions to retrieve are in the paper, which can be found here).

The heel is a transient signal which is almost certainly an artifact of the method of approximation used by the authors. Even that spike transient, on the scale of our investigation, implies it takes the natural system at least 2000 years to reduce atmospheric CO2 from 400 ppm (roughly today's value) to 380 ppm.