Yank My Chain If You Will

I guess there is probably one thing that will get me to react faster and more vociferously than anything else: giving credence to a conspiracy theory.  Today, Salon ran an utterly idiotic piece on giving conspiracy theories a chance.   It is such crap that I refuse to link to it (even though it is easy to find).

It was trying to distinguish unworthy conspiracy theory (Sandy Hook) from more worthy (JFK, 9/11).  While the article is fully flawed, the two big logic bombs are these:

• "“Conspiracy” theories develop, first and foremost, because the official version is obviously bogus."
• That they develop and are relatively credible when there are people out there who can gain from the event--the defense contractors after 9/11 for example.

First things first: conspiracy theories develop not because the conventional wisdom is bogus but because some people do not want to believe the conventional wisdom.  They are motivated by their prior beliefs to disbelieve events/policies/whatever that challenge their views.*  In retrospect, I am not surprised about Sandy Hook conspiracy stuff because this was a family that fit the general model of the NRA--Mom was a fan of guns, taught the kids, worried about losing the guns, etc and then the kid killed the  Mom and shot up a school, pretty much verifying the idea that guns in "good homes" are dangerous, too.  So, rather than believe that view of events, which would be ... the reality, the truth, the folks who do not want this to be true, make something up.

Same goes for 9/11.  This is about people not wanting it to be true that government failed to protect us, that Arabs/Muslims could be so clever to pull this off, and all the rest.

The second hunk of illogic is arguing that if someone benefited by something, they wanted it to happen.  Americans wanted World War II to happen since it made the US a world power with no equals?  Yes, Haliburton and the rest of the Bush Administration gained heaps of influence and such in the aftermath of 9/11, but that does not mean that they caused it.

I know I am wasting my time with this, as most of my readers are reasonable folks who see conspiracy theories for what they are: distraction sauce.  The folks who buy into them tend to be reality-averse so logic, facts, etc. will not persuade.

*  I am sure there is a heap of psychology and sociology on this but I only have time to rant, not read.

Following the Wrong Role Models

I posted at CIC two weeks ago about the Canadian Forces and Department of National Defence falling back on denials rather than answering question so often that it has become the first response.  Well, my old employer, McGill, seems to be using the Canadian government as a role model.  Students, student journalists and others have ramped up the number of access to information requests that they have made of McGill, and now McGill is essentially asking for permission to deny these folks their rights to get access. 

Sure, some of it may be gratuitous or abusing the system, but a university is supposed to be a creator and disseminator of information.  It should have little to hide and be more transparent than pretty much any other public institution.  Carleton, my current employer, resisted the attempts of newspapers to get info about their Political Management program.  Once they released the info and revised the agreement with the donor, the problem went away. 

McGill should respond to the access requests, provide the docs and move on.  Covering up/resisting becomes the story and not one that is going to be favorable to the university.  If it uses heaps of staff time, then revise/fix how information is stored.

I am familiar with ATIP processes as I have asked the Canadian government for documents and have been mostly pleased by the responses.  Sure, lots of stuff in the Canadian docs on Afghanistan have been redacted, but I could see most of the stuff I was looking for.  It took awhile at times.  I am currently waiting for a Privy Council document, and I am curious as to how long it will take. 

Anyhow, McGill, Carleton and other public universities are government institutions in both good ways and bad--they are obligated to be transparent, they are run by people who want to evade the spotlight, and when they try, the spotlight gets stronger.  This is a lesson that people never seem to learn.  On this one thing, the Borg were right: resistance is futile.

Different Outlets, Different Responses

My piece on Canada and its support of the French efforts in Mali got tweaked and reposted at the Globe and Mail website yesterday.  While CIC has become the go-to site for Canadians interested in the world and the world interested in Canadian foreign policy, it gets less traffic than the Globe and Mail, perhaps Canada's premier newspaper.  This leads to the second big difference--comments on my CIC pieces are few but often quite sharp and incisive.  The comments at G&M? Well, not so much.  They fit into the following categories?:

• Canada is not obliged by its alliances/Canada owes France nada (despite my writing that France's moves into a more dangerous spot in Afghanistan allowed US to reinforce Canadians in Kandahar;
• It is all about the oil companies (suitable for all occasions);
• I am just out to cause mischief;
• While I am mildly critical of Stephen Harper in the piece, it gives folks with an anti-Harper view an axe to grind.
•  I need to put my money where my mouth is and join the Canadian Forces--because only those who serve have authority to speak?

 The big lesson: confirmation bias is bad for reading comprehension. There were a few comments that were pretty thoughtful and raised issues about the context.  But many of these comments will appear in anything I write in a newspapers, regardless of the stance I take.  I tend to see myself as a Liberal, not in Canadian terms, but in IR terms--that policy is caused by interests and institutions, those interests are primarily domestic, that international institutions matter.  In terms of how I see Canada in the world, I tend to emphasize things like: its alliances matter, that its power is limited, and that war is neither bad nor good, but (dare I say it?) an instrument of policy that can sometimes achieve ends (such as addressing the direct problem or exerting influence or enhancing influence) and sometimes not so much.

People will want to accuse me of being a fan of Harper, whereas this piece indicates that I think the policy is ok but I don't like how Harper handled it.  I am not anti-military (which offends people), I am critical of the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence (which bothers other folks) but perhaps not sufficiently so at times.  The fact that I am neither forcefully pro or anti makes it easier, I suppose, for people to make me their strawman.   Which is fine.  After all, the only utilities I really want to maximize are being read and getting cited.

Annoying Canadian nationalism

Yes, there are Canadian nationalists.  And one strand in Canadian nationalism can get tiresome: the smug part about how Canada is better than the US because of American crime or inequality or the rest.  This morning, I woke up to not just various reviews of the Inauguration but to this piece.  The title itself, which may not be the writer's fault, is annoying enough--that we could brag, but will not and then the article goes ahead and does so.

Yes, there is a bit less hoopla at the American parties and the Canadian party still rocks out because everything is wonderful in Canada.  Hmmm, why no austerity programs in Canada?  Oh wait, there are some significant budget cuts--talk to the teachers and students in Ontario.  I am still wondering how my daughter will have any extracurriculars on her colleague applications next year when the teachers are refraining from supporting such activities this year due to their strife with the province.  Oh, and perhaps Canada's good situation is partly/largely funded by its oil wealth?  Which is fine except that it makes Canada a leader in climate change--causing, not fighting.

One can go back and forth about the respective virtues and vices of the US and Canada.  Both do tremendous good in the world, and both do some bad stuff as well. The US does more bad stuff because, well, as a much more powerful country, it can.  The US has heaps of stains in its history--slavery and treatment of the Native Americans stand out; but Canada still has some problems with its First Nations, does it not?  In some ways, American institutions are failing--the political parties (especially the Republicans) have turned checks and balances into deadlock.  But Canadian institutions are a mystery to many Canadians--what is the role of the Governor General and the Queen?  And Westminster systems generally mean that they have the opposite problem of the US--instead of tyranny of the minority, they have tyranny of the majority.  Which one is better?  Depends on what you expect to be, I guess.

Any nationalism will have multiple strands and people will disagree about the relative weight and meaning of each strand.  Canadian nationalism is more than "the US sucks more than we do" but sometimes that particular strand stands out and actually diminishes all that is good in Canada--its multiculturalism, its multilingualism, its good public spirit, its positive role in the world via both peacekeeping and warfighting, its role in banning landmines, and so on.  I have enjoyed the past ten plus years here, having been most welcomed, even in Montreal when my ability to speak in French was insufficient.  So, I don't want to rain all over the Canadian parade, but it would be nice if the Canadian nationalists did not try to sleet on yesterday's parade in DC.

I Cannot Help Myself

Of all the pics I have seen (aside from the great gif on my previous post), I think I like this one best:



Why?  Thomas looks miserable, Scalia seems quite unhappy, and Roberts is thinking of being somewhere else.   Meanwhile, Kagan seems quite happy while Sotomayer is, what?, impressed by the moment?  Probably reading too much into this, but the Thomas face and Scalia's are just so very, very appropriate....

H/T to Erin Simpson for the tweeted link.

Just Another Day?

In the US, it is both Martin Luther King day and Obama's 2nd inauguration.   In Canada, it is just a very cold day.  No day off, so I missed the speech, Beyonce, and much twitter snark.  Some complain that the event is too much like a coronation, but I don't mind because it really represents the peaceful transfer of power.  Yes, Obama I to Obama II rather than Bush to Obama or whatever, but the potential was there last fall. And when there is a dispute, we litigate.

This day, because of Obama's previous emphasis on perfecting the union, reminds me of the preamble of the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

When I read this, that this is the purpose of the Constitution and of American government, I think that the founders, for all of their sins, did have some good ideas.  This document is really the thing that binds and unites Americans (white, black, red, blue), not despite but because it is subject to interpretation (thanks to an interpretation in 1803: Marbury vs. Madison if I remember correctly) and revision (amendments).

Today is as much a celebration of the Constitution as it is of this particular President.  As a distant American, I am pretty proud today.  Tomorrow, I can go back to whining about this and that.

Hypocrites or Class Warfare: Universities, Adjuncts and the Tenurish Folks

I posted last week about the idea that the IRS is perhaps the best hope of adjuncts.  This week, folks on the right have noticed the same story and suggest that the blue universities are hypocrites:

But beyond alerting us to one of the many problems that implementing Obamacare will cause, this news provides a depressing look at the underbelly of the academy. Universities are citadels of blue model thinking and most faculty members are relentlessly liberal in their politics. But the reality is that these same universities are some of the nastiest and most exploitative employers in America. The exploitation of adjuncts is an ugly feature of contemporary American academic life, and the smug complacency about it among many beneficiaries of the two tier system should remind us all that moral hypocrisy can co-exist with impressive degrees.

  The funny thing is that many (not all, we are not as uniform as the right wing often suggests) university profs have been advocating for health care reform that would not benefit profs.  How so?  Profs have tended to have excellent (compared to other folks) insurance provided by their employers, but many professors understood that the status quo ante sucked for the populace. 

Anyhow, the real oversight here is that tenured folks like myself have long been upset at the increased reliance on adjuncts.  This is not just about job security and job markets for PhDs but that the reliance on adjuncts has been a deliberate cost-cutting measure, that universities do not give adjuncts benefits.  Professors have long recognized that having a bunch of adjuncts work in the place of a tenure-track faculty member due to cost savings is not good for the tenure track folks, is not good for the students, and is pretty lousy for the adjuncts.  This is not really "news."  That universities would act like the businesses for which many profs have contempt as they alter hours to evade Obamacare regs is not that surprising.  Appalling, sure.  Surprising?  No.  And I wonder what the right wing would suggest in lieu of Obamacare for the adjuncts, whose situation sucked before the advent of Obamacare . 

Sure, there are problems with implementing Obamacare, but perhaps if folks were not so dedicated to returning to the past, they might work on improving it so that folks do not have these nasty incentives.  Oh, and for most of these business that are doing this--they are doing it more out of spite than due to the 50 cents they might have to add to their pizzas.  Me? I prefer to have the folks in the service industry get health care--since they touch our food, interact with our kids, and do all kinds of things that would expose us to their health challenges.  Not to mention it is simply the right thing to do.

Political Cartoon of the Week

Yes, I pad my number of posts by throwing in a cartoon from Brian McFadden on a regular basis, but this one is too good to drop the habit now.:

It definitely puts the crimes of Lance Armstrong into sharp relief.  Jon Stewart had a great bit addressing the various claims and showing that the NRA says--hey, enforce existing laws while simultaneously pushing their friends in Congress to limit enforcement.  Is the NRA the most mendacious lobbying group?  Hard to think of another one, now that the tobacco industry has been on its heels for a while.

Anyhow, better to use this cartoon than to ponder the ironies and lessons to be drawn by the number of people shot at gun shows yesterday during Gun Appreciation Day.  Isn't always Gun Appreciation Day at American emergency rooms?

Contrasting and Contesting 2nd and 3rd Order Effects

The events this past week in Algeria plus Mali's civil war have made it clear that (despite my first publications) stuff does spread.  Arab Spring not only spread across boundaries (well, sort of), but fed dynamics that have caused conflict to spread throughout the region.  The Libyan intervention fostered the flow of arms and people to Mali.

The questions this is currently raising are: did the Obama administration and others know that their actions would cause such second order consequences (side effects)?  Should they have acted in 2011 to stop Qaddafi's attack on his people?  The answers are: probably and probably.  That is, the various folks probably did consider a bit that acting in Libya would have effects on the neighborhood--both positive and negative.  We are noticing the negative ones.  Perhaps positive ones might include restraint by some but not all threatened autocrats (this impact is probably lessened by the selective support for some autocrats--Bahrain, Saudi Arabia).  It is not clear that not acting in Libya would have been better than the current status quo.  Mass killings in Benghazi would have also had second and third order effects--refugee flows to Egypt and Algeria (not to mention more to increasingly xenophobic Europe), and so on.

The reality is that the Western governments were reacting to Arab Spring, not causing it, so the choices were quite limited: (A) support dictator x, (B) stand aside, (C) help depose dictator x.  The policies have been inconsistent, with some of a, some of b and some of c. We do know that in the past that choosing A has consequences sometimes decades later (Argo!).  Each of these choices has second and third order effects that may or may not outweigh the initial policy.

My favorite example, of course, is when the US invaded Iraq, it achieved its goal as narrowly defined as toppling Hussein.  The second and third order effects included undermining the effort in Afghanistan, undermining the American economy, weakening the US standing in the world, and empowering Iran.  Now those are some knowable, anticipated consequences that could have been avoided.  Of course, we do not know how the world would have been different otherwise.  Would Libya have given up its chemical weapons or would have faced a Syria in Libya?  Not sure.

But the point is that the Bush Administration, which I admittedly love to pick on, had more choices and could have taken more seriously the possible downsides of invading Iraq.  The Obama administration was faced with allowing a humanitarian disaster to occur on the edge of Europe (which matters more, of course, since Europe cares more about refugee flows that affect it) and with allies putting significant pressure to do something.  Could they have done a better job in limiting the flow of arms and people beyond Libya?  Not so sure.  Our efforts at controlling borders has been lousy in places where we have 100k troops (Afghanistan).  And the US was involved in trying to strengthen the Mali government's ability to deal with armed extremists.  It didn't work out too well.

What this really demonstrates are two uncomfortable realities: that American power is and always has been limited--the US cannot just impose its preferences upon the world--it cannot always get what it wants or needs; and that governments are often faced with lousy choices and picking the least lousy is very hard.  

When the Arts are Not So Liberal

It has been an interesting hour on twitter.  First, Jon Western posts a great piece on how teaching at a Liberal Arts college is different from that at a research university.  While I think he underestimates the time-sucks at research universities (we fall behind on the current lit, too), it is a strong piece about how teaching at a small, teaching-focused place is different.  Funny that he starts it with the "If you went to a place Oberlin ...., you would want to end up at a liberal arts college...."  As that is exactly what I thought about 25 years ago.  I wanted to go to grad school and then teach at a liberal arts college.  The job market had other plans.  I did interview at a couple but over my career I had many more interviews at research schools.  Oh well.

Anyhow, the second tweet referred to this article at the Montreal Gazette.  My old place, McGill, is cutting 100 courses in the Faculty of Arts (that would be the equivalent of an American school's College of Arts and Sciences minus those pesky sciences).  So, the Dean in the story, Chris Manfredi was my dean, and, before that, my department chair.  So, the tale is this:

Manfredi said the decision was taken in order to respond to student interest in having more courses taught by full-time instructors.
“We’ve always believed that the quality of teaching programs is better when they’re taught by full-time, permanent teaching staff, as opposed to part-time, temporary teachers – that’s well documented in the literature on the university pedagogy,” Manfredi said.

Um, sure.  The funny thing is that before I left, the poli sci department, and others, were cutting the the number of courses taught by non-tenured/tenure-track profs due to budget cuts, not because of a renewed interest in being a better teaching environment.  That this cut comes at a time where Quebec is cutting its funding of the universities quite drastically in the wake of backtracking on the previous provincial government's efforts to increase tuition is probably not an accident. 

I tweeted "you get what you pay for."  That if tuition remains very, very low, and if the province cuts back on its financing of universities, the universities have to make hard choices.  Ditching the temporary profs is an "easy" choice since they do not have much of a voice, that their contracts are usually year to year, and it does not hurt very much other folks on campus--professors and administrators. 

The story says that the aim is to cut the smallest classes, which sounds fine.  The idea of keeping every classroom full at all hours was something in motion before I left.  But the students I knew already had a hard time meeting their graduation requirements because they could not get into crowded classes.  It was not my popularity that made my classes full every year (perhaps my rep as an easy grader?), but that the big intro class of 612 students was a prerequisite, and the senior level classes I taught always maxed out at the 80 student limit because we offered so few of them.  Indeed, I had banked enough "credits" that I could have taught one less class my last year, but I chose not to, knowing that there was a decent chance I would never use them, because I felt guilty about how little we offered our undergrads. 

For a variety of reasons, I only taught undergraduate classes my last few years at McGill, and had no regrets doing so--I was filling a need and they were a heap of fun.  It sucks that the province and the politics means that they will have fewer and fewer options down the road.  I don't blame the McG students since they didn't protest like those elsewhere.  While I joked here that the McG students sucked at math, they got it, and they understood that less money means something.  And that there would not be a magical source of more money that would compensate. 

Sensible Comparisons for a Better Tomorrow

Funny or Die apparently does not need to take a course in comparative analysis:

NRA - Stand and Fight Parody - watch more funny videos     

Over-Confidence Will Be Your Un-Doing

I am mighty miffed right now about a 21st century problem that really should not be that big of a deal.  I almost could not check out of the grocery store this evening because my credit cards with chips were not working well.  A new policy means that the store cannot swipe the magnetic strip (why have one anymore if you are not going to use it?).  I had to resort to my debit card, which I don't like to use for groceries. 

What frustrates me is that the chips in the cards have yet to reach any level of reliability that would make me think that they should be REQUIRED for a purchase.  I have two cards with chips, one has never worked and the second one worked until today (although it could be the new chip readers at the store).  So, I get to call the card companies and get new cards,  and we shall see how long the new chips last.

Just very frustrating that the banks are overly hopeful that their technology works so well that they eliminate flexibility/discretion.  I almost left a cart full of groceries at the store--which would have done the bank and the store no favors. 

What is Wrong with Ottawa?

To be specific, what is wrong with Ottawa football teams?  First, the old Canadian Football League had two teams, including Ottawa's, named the Roughriders.  Really.  One eight-team league, two teams with the same name.*

*Yes, South Park played with this as well.

I don't know what happened old Ottawa Roughriders, but they are gone.  Now, there will be a new Ottawa CFL team.  And the name?  It is likely to be The Red Blacks.  Yes, really.  Apparently they cannot go back to Roughriders since the remaining RR franchise now has a veto on a new team's name, so the old colors instead?

What is it about Ottawa that produces entirely unimaginative names for their football franchise?  Again, Red Blacks?

This inability to give an Ottawa football team a decent name approaches bags of milk as the least sensible/most confusing aspect of Canadian life. 

Snow is Cold, Sky is Blue, College Sports Are Expensive

This story demonstrates something that we have known for quite some time--that despite the argument that universities make money from the big sports, the reality is that the big sports are often huge money pits.  I have long been annoyed at how much the athletics tail can often wag the academic dog.

This was most obvious two stops ago on my academic journey at Texas Tech.  I never did feel pressure to pass failing athletes, but it was obvious that the big sports were sucking money away from the rest of the poorly managed institution.  But it is not just TTU--it is endemic.

Between 2005 and 2010, on a per-capita basis, the report found, athletic costs increased at least twice as fast as academic spending at institutions with top-tier athletic programs.

Yow.  And, of course, the most expensive sport is football:

Football consumes much of the athletic budget. At institutions competing in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision, the report found, median athletic spending per athlete was $92,000 in 2010, compared with median academic spending per full-time student of less than $14,000. In the other Division I subdivisions, median athletic spending per athlete ranged from $37,000 to $39,000, compared with median academic spending per full-time student of about $11,800. 

And this does not even build into the budget the costs of the concussions the student-athletes are accumulating.

One of the nice things about Canadian universities, even though they have significant sports programs, is that the sports programs do not seem to have much power or influence, at least not when compared to those in the U.S.

When the IRS is Your Best Hope

When the IRS is your best ally, then you know you are in a world of hurt.  The IRS is now pushing universities to more accurately count the hours adjunct faculty work.  Why?  Because universities seem to be as scummy as some of the big businesses that are cutting back on the hours of workers to evade the requirements of Obamacare. 

Of course, this should not be surprising since the proliferation of adjunct positions is in large part due to the strategies of universities to avoid paying the expenses (that would be benefits) that accrue to tenured and tenure track faculty. 

A series of companies have announced that they would be firing workers or cutting hours to avoid Obama care, and my reaction has been to say: well, I guess that is the last time I eat at Wendy's or whatever.  The problem here is two-fold: I don't know which universities are and are not manipulating hours to evade Obamacare; and the only threat I really possess is not sending my daughter to such a place.  That is a one shot threat.  On the other hand, I already have a strong preference to send my daughter to a school that is less reliant on adjuncts.  Why?  A) Because of my preferences as a professor--I do not want to encourage schools to rely on the non-tenure track; B) I have a belief that adjuncts have much less time to do their job well.  If they get paid, on average, less than $3k per class, then they need to teach how many classes to get by?  A heap of them.  Sure, tenure track folks care about research and have to do service, and big classes can mean that profs do not learn students' names, but I still think that folks like myself can pay more attention to the students with our two or three course load, compared to someone teaching five courses and driving all over the place to teach them. 

I do wish that universities, when promoting themselves to potential applicants, would not just list the %  of teachers who have terminal degrees (PhDs, MFA's, whatever) but list % of tenure and tenure track folks.  That is the 21st century signal that the place cares about the quality of education.  Hiring adjuncts to fill in gaps is one thing, but when they become the modal way to deliver classes, then it is clear that cost structures are a higher priority than the creation/dissemination of knowledge.

Again, I am biased in all of this, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  Instead, consider that the adjuncts need to rely on the IRS.  That says it all.

Credible? Only Sometimes

This article is quite disturbing for all kinds of reasons--a guy who helped give solace to some of the kids who escaped the gunfire at Newtown now faces attacks because he is providing evidence that conspiracy theorists do not like. Yes, there are folks who argue that nothing happened at Sandy Hook or that it was the creation of the gun-hating government.

I just want to highlight one thing--that among the conspiracy nuts (I hate the word truther since it suggests that truth might somehow be involved) is at least one professor trying to lend legitimacy to the claims.

To be absolutely clear, while profs are supposed to be experts in the areas they study (something we have addressed before), just because any single prof or a small collection of profs says something means not too much.  You can always find a crazy, stupid, mis-directed, or evil professor spewing lies/false information/utter b.s. because profs are ... people.  Yes, hard to believe, but true.  And in any group of people, there will be a few who do not see reality but see the world in a very different way, such as seeing the Sandy Hook massacres as anything but a mass killing by a disturbed person.

There are more than a few profs who are 9/11 conspiracy theorists--does not make that movement any more credible.  So, while we profs like to be seen as credible and want to have whatever expertise we got to come into play when it is relevant, be warned--not all profs are reliable.  The people that understand this best, of course, are professors  as we have all had to work with the reality averse.  I have had colleagues that see conspiracies everywhere, and others that admired North Korea as a political/economic system. 

Anyhow, be wary of professors making absurd claims and beware of newspaper articles and the like dropping the fact that a prof supports a particular claim. We are not all reliable.  Indeed, some of us are quite unreliable.

Is Canada Going to War in Mali?

I got into a twitter conversation last night about this topic and it got me thinking, so here is my CIC column of the week.

Short Afghan-a-thon

Just a couple of thoughts on recent news about Afghanistan:

• First, Hamid Karzai returned to Afghanistan after assuring the Americans that he would work to get immunity for American troops present in Afghanistan after 2014, and then when arriving in Afghanistan said it would be up to the elders.  This is actually not as contradictory as Karzai often can be.  He didn't say that he would decide when he was in the US, unless I missed something.  So, he basically made the same kind of commitment that an American President might make when negotiating something--well, you know, Congress might have to act as well ...  So, not such a big deal.
• Second, ah, but now we are surprising our European allies with the "zero option" that the US might have no troops in Afghanistan after 2014.  Well, this should be of surprise only to those who didn't notice what happend in Iraq in 2011.  The US left entirely when it could not get a Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA] to its liking--mostly about immunity of American soldiers.  Well, guess what, the US might not stick around in Afghanistan if Karzai cannot commit his successors (since he is term limited, well, sort of) to provide immunity to American soldiers.  
• Second, part B: The US often surprises its allies by changing its mind.  They are used to it.
• Second, part C: One could argue that the zero option is just a ploy to get Karzai to compromise. If so, two things can happen.  The bluff works or it does not.    Interesting times.

Anyhow, it is increasingly likely that the US stance in Afghanistan after 2014 will be much smaller than folks anticipated a year or two ago.  Given the green on blue stuff and the budget crisis back home, this really should not be much of a surprise.

X-(Wo)Men

Yep, Marvel is going with a version of the X-Men that has only female leads.  This would be swell and interesting if not for a few things:

1. I hate re-launches.  If the writers wrote themselves into a corner, then write themselves out of it.  If nothing is ever at stake because everything is re-launched again and again, well, who cares who lives/dies/romances/whatever.
2. Seems like an excuse to have just another X-book per month so that sales go up.  I stopped collecting 17 years ago precisely because I didn't want to pay a heap of dollars every month to follow one group (X) or hero (Spidey) if the tales required six books per month to tell.  
3. If they were handing over the comic to a female creator, that would be kind of cool.  But not, just a male with female characters.  The drawing of the cover makes me feel a bit more optimistic since it is a bit less boob-a-licious than many comic book covers that feature female body parts more than female stories.

But that might change once they start fighting.  To be clear, I was quite the Kitty Pryde fan, and Like Rogue and Storm (depending on how they are characterized), so this would be cool if done well.  I am just suspicious and pessimistic.

Ah well, someone buy these and let me know how it turns out.

Semi-Blind Spew: The Least Canada Can Do

I had a heap of meetings/class/deadlines today so I was not connected to twitter as much as usual.  So, I seem to have missed Canadian folks making noise about the deployment of a C-17 (a single transport plane) assisting the French intervention in Mali.  My favorite go-to guy on things Canadian military, Phil Lagassé of the University of Ottawa, had a string of tweets including this:

The C-17 deployment also highlights the difficulties that may arise if HoC approval of military combat missions is ever put into statute.
— Philippe Lagassé (@pmlagasse) January 14, 2013

Lots of issues come up. First, and most importantly, this deployment does not mean that I lose my bet with Phil.  I wagered awhile back that Canada would NOT deploy a battlegroup into combat before the end of 2014.  One transport plane is not a battlegroup.  Plus it is not going into combat.

Second, the wager's specifics tie into Harper's statement--the plane is for non-combat.  Harper makes this clear in his statement:

"Today our Government received a specific request from the French Government for heavy-lift aircraft to assist in the transport of equipment into the Malian capital of Bamako, a location that is not part of any active combat zone."
"The Government of Canada will support our allies in this request and will be providing one RCAF C-17 transport aircraft in a non-combat role to support operations for a period of one week.  The RCAF aircraft will not operate in any combat zone.
"At no time will Canadian Armed Forces members be participating in direct action against insurgent forces in Mali."

I am pretty sure the instructions the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Commander of Canadian Joint Operations Command (used to be CEFCOM, now CJOC) will limit what the C-17 can do.  Even if it could do combat stuff, which it cannot. 

Of course, this could be confusing as Harper had sworn off the Canadians intevening in Mali.  But that was before the French jumped on in.  So, this raises a few questions, and I will answer them here with a modicum of arrogance (since I have not done any footwork to figure this all out):

1. Is this the first step to a larger escalation of Canadian intervention in Mali?  Almost certainly not, as that would be costly and budget cutting is job one these days.  Plus Harper has a sore taste in his mouth from the Afghanistan mission--heaps of challenges, relatively little control, and endless questions.
2. If folks in Parliament are unhappy, what does this say about trying to insist on the PM subjecting combat deployments to Parliamentary votes?  Not much unless the PM does not have a majority in Parliament.  No PM is going to agree to a deployment that is so objectionable to his/her party that he/she cannot get a vote through.  Only in case of a minority government is this problematic.  And it would be problematic with or without any formalization of a Parliamentary vote since the opposition parties could cause a minority government to collapse whether nor not they have a formal excuse to do so.
3. Does the noise suggest that "Smart Defence"* is in trouble, as Phil tweeted?  No and yes.  No, in that this case shows that the PM can support an ally by providing a resource (long distance transport) that the ally lacks without any real problems.  Yes, in the sense that some folks are squeamish about the government doing the absolute minimum.  Sending one C-17 or even a dozen (as if Canada had a dozen) is far from getting Canada embroiled in combat.  If people get upset by this, then one can only imagine a Smart Defence kind of assist that has some real risk.

This post may be premature as the leader of the NDP has already muted the noise somewhat. Still, Phil is asking good questions.

For more significant reasons to be skeptical about Smart Defence, see this.