Sambal

Sunday we went to the Earth Day festival at Edmonton’s Hawrelak Park. We decided not to drive, it being Earth Day and all, so we chose to walk along the river valley, up Keillor Road, and along the bike trail to Hawrelak.

But we didn’t quite get there. Apparently there has been some settling on Keillor Road. The first we saw of it was a big sign that said “Steep Dropoff Ahead,” but we figured that was probably aimed at bicyclists more than pedestrians like us. A bicyclist passed us as we went up Keillor Road, and then he came back down past us. We asked him why he’d turned around, and he said, “There’s a steep dropoff.”

He wasn’t kidding:

Here’s a view from the broken road edge. The tiny white tent in the distance is the auditorium at Hawrelak.

We took the detour.

I often use this space to complain about Alberta’s treatment in Canada. Perhaps this seems excessive to some of y’all. Please check out this graph:

This is a graphical representation of the current “equalization” regime whereby Alberta (and to a much lesser extent Ontario) is taxed to fund social services in the other provinces.

Note that the diagram excludes “floor provisions” — this a rule that a province’s equalization payment cannot decline by more than 1.6% in any given year, even if large fluctuations in that province’s “fiscal capacity” would justify such a decrease. For example, if there is a sudden sharp increase in the price of natural gas, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan do not suffer a compensating drop in their equalization transfer payment. It is an accounting identity, therefore, that Alberta does not see a compensating drop in its outgoing transfer payments.

There are additional provisions. For example, two special agreements with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on the handling of offshore petroleum exploitation (15-year phaseout of equalization payments to “protect” the province from sudden drops). There is a “generic solution” to the concentration of a specific asset in a specific province (thus creating an incentive for a province receiving equalization to eliminate tax on that asset, knowing that equalization would make up the difference). The “generic solution” actually seems designed to protect Alberta…. I mean, the “have” provinces.

But my very favorite part in the whole site comes on this page:

The standard measures the average fiscal capacity of the five

Dalton McGuinty is continuing to lead Ontario down the path California followed ten years ago — first ignoring the warning rumbles following the first failed energy deregulation, now reducing K-3 class sizes to a limit of 20 pupils per teacher. From a distance it looks like a slow-motion reenactment of California’s crash; the crucial difference is that Ontario may not have the high growth necessary to truly suffer from these decisions. Low growth is good, see? Low growth makes it possible for the consequences to be dragged out over ten years — long enough for Dalton McGuinty to have moved on.

The other crucial difference is that California suffered its worst under a Democratic governor with a Republican president. There was no federal bailout: why should a Republican government reward a consistently Democratic state? And California is objectively rich, anyway — who would the federal government steal from to bail out? Happily, both Ontario and the Canadian federal government are run by Liberals, and there is already a tradition of soaking Alberta for the greater benefit of greater Canada.

I was thinking the other day about political philosophies and I came up with another way of describing them — by the relative ranking of rights.

Notably, in Libertarianism, my property rights are just as important as your right to life. Or more to the point, if you are starving and try to steal a loaf of bread from me and wind up dead — well, that’s justice.

Headline and lead paragraph:

Vanunu, Israeli Nuclear Whistleblower, Is Released

April 21 (Bloomberg) — Mordechai Vanunu, who was convicted of treason for shedding light on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program, walked out of prison after 18 years, saying he was treated brutally behind bars and remains proud of his actions.

I don’t know how they came up with “whistleblower” (”one who exposes unethical conduct or wrongdoing”). Israel’s still-not-acknowledged weapons program does not constitute a breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, since Israel is not a party to that treaty. (To Bloomberg’s credit, the article does note this fact.)

I’m left to wonder — does the headline writer think that developing nuclear weapons is wrong-in-itself, or is it only wrong when it’s the Jews who are doing it?

I brewed again yesterday, for the first time since last August. Unfortunately I couldn’t find my notebook so I am going to type in my notes here so I have a good record of the brew. I’ll put the details in the “More…” section of this post, so only serious homebrewing nuts need to continue.

This was a new recipe for me, from Carl’s friend Calin. I tried it about a year ago when we spent the night at Carl’s on our drive up from the ABL party. It’s a pretty standard American IPA, exactly the kind of beer I like — heavy on the hops and decently strong.

One last note of possibly general interest - I bought the supplies at the Southside Brew Crew here in Edmonton, which is open on Sundays. Usually I shop at Harvest Brewing Company, which isn’t open on Sundays. I noticed that every Brew Crew item I bought was 50 cents to a dollar more expensive than Harvest. But they were open.

My stove is a 1960’s GE Americana electric (there’s a picture in this entry). It has only one large burner, and that burner has a feature called “Sensi-Temp” which is supposed to keep the pot at a particular temperature. There is a thermocouple built into the middle of the burner, and I assume there’s some sort of PID control in the stove. It’s a wonderful concept, but unfortunately the thermocouple has a thick layer of burned matter caked onto it which acts as insulation. So you have to set the Sensi-Temp to about 325 to boil a small pot of water; and to 475 or so to keep 3 gallons of wort boiling. I record the temperature setting as “325 ST” to indicate the setpoint on the Sensi-Temp dial.

(more…)

This has been weighing on my mind for a while, but I haven’t seen it seriously addressed anywhere (this does not count). This is one of the sidebars of war that we’re not supposed to talk about: those at home don’t ask, those in the field don’t tell, and thirty years later we make movies about it. But I think it’s important, so I’ll talk about it anyway.

I can only assume that there are brothels in Iraq which cater to the occupation forces. I believe their mere presence (whether they’re staffed with Iraqi women or non-Muslim foreigners) will help radicalize susceptible young Iraqi men, leading them to join the insurgency.

On the other hand I can’t really think of a better way to solve the problem of several hundred thousand coalition troops, mostly men, with lots of money and nothing to do. It would be impossible to achieve our stated goal — to establish a free society in Iraq — if in addition to fighting the insurgents, coalition forces had to spend their time raiding whorehouses like small town vice cops.

And one rape committed by a coalition soldier will do an enormous amount of damage, probably more than the brothels could.

I just hope that the coalition authority has some cultural experts who pay attention to this issue.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. There are a variety of reasons, most deeply general laziness, but my one legitimate excuse is that the baby is now big enough to want to play when I have her in the mornings (like now). And in her concept of “play” I’ll include “banging on the keyboard”. Also “whacking the optical mouse”. Whoever came up with the idea of making a light come on when the mouse is moved is obviously childless.