Colby Cosh picks up a comment from a recent post of mine, and points out that some Canadians do in fact have the freedom to be rich. Well, actually, just that some Canadians have gotten rich. When they try to expatriate their fortunes (as the Seagram's family successfully did a few years ago; link, anyone?) CCRA gets a bit huffy at them.

But to give Colby his due, I failed to explain the real roots of my problem. You see, although I do live in Edmonton, I am a U.S. citizen (da da da DUM). What's more, to take a page from another blogger:

I write software for a living, and am a capitalist pig small business owner.

When my wife and I moved to Alberta from California, we left a 22% corporate tax bracket and 24% personal tax bracket to come to a place where the tax rates are about 20-24% personal and 51% corporate.

Yes, five-one percent.

WOW THAT'S HIGH. That means that every business expense is half-off, courtesy of money I don't have to send to the government, if I can spend it now.

Mind you, 50% isn't the standard small business tax rate. It should be more like around 17-24% for a company of our size and revenue. What causes problems is that we're not a CCPC (Canadian-Controlled Private Corporation), and as such, we have to follow the rules on Form T-666, Tax Form for Evil Foreign Investors. Our guess is that this part of the Canadian tax system is designed to prevent people from exporting profits from Canadian businesses back to the place where the capital came from. When you get into this area, you discover several wonderful things:

• interest is not deductible if you might be using it to export profits
  
• dividends are deductible (WTF?)
  
• if you want to make payments to related foreign corporations for services, you must withhold 33% and remit it to Ottawa, just in case you were trying to export profits.
  

And the high income tax rate there to encourage you to spend money this tax year in the Canadian economy.

But ultimately, I don't think Canada is a bad place to live. (Was a bit of a shock when we filed the form.) I was talking about any proposed "solution" to the income distribution "problem" when I said I wanted to keep the freedom to be rich.

And the beer here is far too good to dump on Colby's head.

Blogging has failed to develop my political voice beyond the "Yeah, what he said" (link) "plus also..." format. And unfortunately, I have nothing to add to current debates in canon law. And as a final nail in my blog coffin, I am unwilling either to swear or to discuss intimate details of my ... uh ... "inner" health, as they say on the box of All-Bran.

So I guess I'll just be confined to spouting off about minor events in my life, just like everyone else.

No more raspberries. Frost is due anytime in the next week. The birds have started flying south, which means that they fly away from here. I've only ever lived in a place that birds flew to before. It's not very fun to have the birds start bailing out, like they know something we don't.

The cats are starting to shed. For Oscar and Dizzy, our California-born short-hairs, this will be their second attempt to grow a proper Arctic winter coat. Last winter they were afraid to go outside.

Frederick the Attack Cat is now quite well integrated into our household. Yesterday he walked right up to me and sat on my lap. Since this is a cat who hates men and trees guests in the bathroom (a room which has a special place in his idiotic little feline heart), I count this as a big achievement on my part. Or rather, on the part of the ham in my sandwich that Fredrick was trying to cadge.

Here's a picture of Frederick's first sortie downstairs. A few nights ago when I wasn't able to sleep, I was sitting in the living room doing some library work. I noticed a gray cat run up to me, and reached out my hand automatically to pet it. Then I thought, That's funny... what's Fenris [the neighbor's cat] doing in our house?. Of course, it turned out to be Frederick, and he growled the moment I touched him, and then ran off behind a chair to hide. Unfortunately, he picked the chair Dizzy was sleeping on, and since Dizzy is big and heavy and still has his front claws (F. does not), he cleans Frederick's clock whenever they fight. So here's a picture of Frederick skulking and Dizzy trying to figure out what the growling was about:

Steve den Beste is off-base in his condemnation of feminists for failing to speak out against Sharia. The "Choices E-zine" which I subscribe to (helps me monitor the feminist takeover on the Academy) has publicized the Nigerian stoning case of Safiya Hussaini Tungar Dudu.

Back in April, they even promoted a petition aimed at increasing the size of the U.S. peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

The Feminist Majority Foundation (who funds "Choices E-Zine") does make efforts to promote women's rights. They are willing to ignore parts of their own ideology (multiculturalism) when the ideology is wrong and obstructs their fundamental goals. This is a very encouraging sign, and we ought to promote and encourage this sort of behavior instead of sneering at it.

Women's rights is an excellent unifying issue, particularly when you get to the far-out left -- the militant breastfeeding homebirth wackos. But more about that another day.

From a Catholic blog, here's a picture of a common sexual position around here.

A favorite pastime for people the world over is talking past each other. This is what happened between Max Sawicky and Steven Den Beste in their Transnational Progressivism non-debate. Most of us have two modes: agreement mode and disagreement mode. In agreement mode, we agree with the comments of our interlocutor (co-conversationalist?). In disagreement mode, I let the other person speak and then there's a pause while I recall all of the things that I disagreed with in his comment, and then I say them all. And then he does the same to me.

Anyway, here's an excellent example of talking past, in an article about left support for war in Iraq, why it's hard to find, and what to do to make it materialize. A throwaway line from that article is: "The psychological hurdles to [coming to terms with the use of force] were higher [for Baby Boomers] because of the innate, and largely justified, suspicion of Cold War military adventurism in Suez [and other places]..."

That's a lovely thesis, and someday maybe I could debate it on the merits with you. But there's a bigger problem, because there never was any "military adventurism" in the Suez. I assume that this article refers to the 1956 response by Israel to Nasser's closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and the support given the Israelis by the British and French, who were peeved by Nasser's nationalizing of the Suez canal and cuddling up to the Soviets.

See, when you violate international covenants about the free movement of shipping, that's called an act of war. And when you commit acts of war, you become a rogue nation. And then other nations with opposing interests to yours, or nations whose interests you have damaged -- say, by stealing the property of their resident corporations -- why, they come and smack you down.

And if your response to this article is, "What if random other nation decided that the U.S. was a 'rogue nation' because of any of 15,000 unpleasant things the U.S. has done in the last 200 years? What then? Would they be justified in attacking the U.S.?" Yeah, probably they would be. Bring it on, and we'll see who finishes.

Funny how much of what I post is a three-line addendum to a long post by Steven den Beste. Anyway, here Steven discusses utopian redistributionism both in the context of capitalism v. communism, and the First World v. the Third World.

In this article, he asks: "Is it better for some people to be poor and some to be rich? Or for everyone to be poor?". Clearly a hardcore Transnational Progressive would claim that it's best for everyone to be rich -- as long as they were sustainably rich. Solving that problem is left as an exercise for the reader, or more commonly, to the immense bureaucracies TP'ers feel are needed to ensure equity.

Speaking as a victim of Canadian redistributionism (Colby Cosh provides the Canadian Content, I just link to it), I have to come out in support of the system where there exists the freedom to be rich. Every political or economic system guarantees the right to be poor, of course. Communism and Europoean socialism try to guarantee freedom from poverty -- the "right" to a job, housing, etc. -- but all they seem to deliver in practice is freedom from wealth.

Colby Cosh, a columnist for The Report magazine, points out that Canada is receiving more of your petroleum dollars than Saudi.

But that's no reason to drop your concern. Look what Alberta's doing with that money: funding honky-tonk bars, giving teachers a 14% raise which was grudgingly accepted, and subsidizing a system of SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

Fear us.

Steve Den Beste had an interesting throwaway comment today. He said: "If you want a bigger pie you have to accept that it will be divided unevenly, because that is the incentive for making the pie bigger." This reminded me of something I've wanted to write about for some time: David Chandler's L-Curve site.

(For those who care, this appears to be neither David Chandler the liquid theorist nor David Chandler the physical chemist, nor David Chandler the management consultant.)

The implication of the "L-Curve" is that in the U.S., income is highly unequally distributed, and wealth even more so. Mr. Chandler uses a stark depiction of these facts to ask questions such as: "Can democracy meaningfully exist where the distribution of wealth, and thus the distribution of power, is this concentrated?"

But several questions are begged here. First is the obvious assumption that wealth and power are equivalent. I don't deny that there's some correlation between wealth and power, but I doubt it's linear. Even minimally wealthy people have basic civil rights, and extremely wealthy people are occasionally convicted of crimes and sent to prison (ask Michael Milken). Certainly there is value in being wealthy if you are going to be a criminal defendant (ask O.J. Simpson or John Walker Lindh), but even Mr. Chandler doesn't seem to argue that we've become a lawless society where the wealthy trample the poor.

A more interesting point is that Mr. Chandler doesn't provide the statistics on income distribution in any other nation. I doubt you'd see anything different anywhere in the world: in the capitalist "West" (say Germany, Japan, the U.K.), in South America or Africa, or in the few remaining allegedly Communist nations -- notably China. Perhaps in China you'd have to account for non-monetary perks specially, but I expect that you'd still find that there's a wealthy/privileged class and a mass class, which is the fundamental point ofthe article.

Even more interesting -- and much more disturbing -- is that Mr. Chandler seems to be seekinga a cure for the L-curve. "A truly democratic society needs to find ways to manage the economy to benefit the population as a whole. This is not being done." A truly democratic society can decide to take your popsicle away and split it into equal shares. This is not being done because we have property rights, a concept from English common law which Mr. Chandler may not be familiar with. I wonder how the inequity he describes could be cured without undermining one of the fundamental freedoms -- the right to property -- described in our founding documents. (In particular, the 5th Amendment states "No person .. shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law....")

Even if the government were to seriously attempt to remedy this inequity, and the Constitutional problems could somehow be overcome, I am convinced that it would be a bad idea to try. This is for the reason den Beste gives in the quote above: the only reason that there's a lot of wealth distributed unequally is that it's not possible to have a lot of wealth distributed equally. It's possible to have a little wealth distributed equally, but once you get past the point of bare survival, extra production will only happen with appropriate incentives. And the only incentive that appears to work is private property, i.e, "allowing" the producer to keep most of the fruits of his labor.

What is it? A convenient name for the union of current academic thought on a variety of subjects. John Fonte puts forward the name and gives the general summary. Steven Den Beste comments on Fonte's article: he finds it a good summary of a philosophy he disagrees with. Max Sawicky strikes back with something like a point-by-point commentary on the main points of the ascribed Transnational Progressivist philosophy.

Let's look at one such point/expansion/response set:

Fonte writes:

The Key Concepts of Transnational Progressivism

(1) The ascribed group over the individual citizen

The key political unit is not the individual citizen who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born. This emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender leads to group consciousness and a de-emphasis of the individual’s capacity for choice and for transcendence of ascriptive categories, joining with others beyond the confines of social class, tribe, and gender to create a cohesive nation.

Den Beste expands on this:

Groups are what matter, not people. You are "Black" or "Christian" or "Mexican" or "Afghan" or "Sunni", you are not yourself. You also don't get to choose your group; it's inherent in what you were when you were born. Someone else will categorize you into your group, and you will become a number, a body to count to decide how important that group is. And your group won't change during your lifetime.

Sawicky responds:

"Groups are what matter, not people." Politics and public policy necessarily refers to groups. Governments don't construct a package of rights, responsibilities, benefits, and taxes for each individual separately. The interest in the sort of group that SDB names -- nationalities, ethnic groups, or religions -- stems from historic discrimination against them. Inveighing against groups is just another way of saying government ought not to do much. This would be a perfectly respectable position if it was presented forthrightly.

I believe that Sawicky is genuinely attempting to rebut Fonte and Steven Den Beste (see his whole post for full context), so I will take his words at face value.

Sawicky states without justification that "politics and public policy necessarily refer[] to groups". This is not, in fact, the case in the U.S. U.S. law governs individual behavior and provides for the punishment of individual lawbreakers; Group punishment is not allowed. Our governments (state and federal) may not "construct" "packages of rights" for any individual; but neither do they construct them for groups, because they guarantee the same rights to all.

The only time that I can think of that our laws refer to groups are in the cases of class actions and discrimination law, which I will take up separately.

A class action (defined here) allows the law to deal with a group of plaintiffs as a single plaintiff. However, in order to be a member of the class, you must be able to document that you suffered from the allegedly tortious behavior of the respondent. This is hardly a general use of group identity in our law or public policy, because group identity (in the sense that we're discussing, especially as described in the TP article) is external, ascribed, and fixed at birth (e.g., being Catholic), while membership in a lawsuit class depends on individual circumstances (e.g., working with asbestos insulation).

Sawicky claims that "The interest in the sort of group that SDB names -- nationalities, ethnic groups, or religions -- stems from historic discrimination against them". But in discrimination cases, the interpretation of the law usually used is the reverse of what Sawicky seems to claim. The "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment means precisely that you may not use group membership to discriminate. This is the classic case against Affirmative Action, and it's been the law of the land since the Bakke decision in 1978. Sawicky claims that group membership is important because of discrimination, but in our law, group membership is important only because it must explicitly be disregarded.

Ultimately -- and I know that this is a harsh judgment -- Sawicky appears in the quoted paragraph to be arguing not about what is, but rather about what he wishes were the case. He has accepted the ideas of the "left" (as he describes it) which den Beste calls Transnational Progressivism, and uses these ideas to claim that our politics and public policy refer to groups, even though our laws are neither written nor interpreted in this way.

We've recenty integrated two new cats into our household: Frederick the attack cat and Winston the rarely-seen black cat. This brings our total household cat population to six, which is the Edmonton by-law limit.

Thank God.

Tonight, Dizzy is sitting on one of the chairs in the living room and Frederick came downstairs to explore. He's even letting me touch and pet him, which is amazingly positive. I took a picture of Frederick hiding behind Dizzy's chair while Dizzy looks suspiciously over his shoulder, but unfortunately the camera battery went dead immediately thereafter, so I can't upload it now. Maybe tomorrow.

Right now they're having a staring match across the living room floor.

It has been very easy to introduce these two (both males) to our other two males -- especially when compared to the endless nightmare we have with the two females and the original two males. (Actually, with the one troublesome female -- Kess, who hates Dizzy and whom Dizzy hates.)

My working theory is that if you have a male pet cat, its development is arrested such that it thinks of itself as a kitten and you as its mother; while if you have a female pet cat, it thinks of you as a kitten and itself as your mother. Many males coexist because many kittens can coexist; but a sufficiently proprietary female cat drives out all others. Or tries to: you don't have much traction in driving out an animal three times your weight.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder proposes an increase in corporate taxes to raise money for the government to pay to repair flood damage.

I don't really see what the logic is, here. Create a flood tax so that the corporations won't cause more flooding in the future? This is like the conservative joke argument in favor of estate taxes: since taxing an activity discourages it, by raising the death tax rate we can extend our lifespan.

There are many good things about the Edmonton Fringe festival. For one: a violent, Barney-beheading clown.

A long, rambling, speculative article on the history of cafes in England. Couldn't be bothered to read the whole thing as I haven't had any coffee yet today:
Crisis at the Coffee Counter.

Apparently the end of the coffee fad in the UK is "sinister". Huh? Is it being orchestrated by evil copyright holders (today's villain of last resort)?

Honduran coffee workers demand the Honduran government grant 20 million dollars in loans. Violence ensues ( Coffee Workers Clash With Police ) after a week of protest.

Nothing clever to say about this.

Another bad idea: a luxury tax on that which fuels the wheels of industry around here.

Proposal brewing for Seattle "espresso tax"

SEATTLE (Reuters) - A campaign is underway to slap a tax on espresso in the city that launched America's love affair with dark, strong coffee.

But so far few caffeine addicts living in the hometown of the Starbucks Corp. and Tully's Coffee Corp. are complaining.

That's because polls say that more than two-thirds of them favor a tax that would add 10 cents to the price of each cup of espresso or espresso-based coffee to help provide better child day care for low-income families.

Guarana-based drink (high caffeine content, low tannin content) for gamers:

Drink gives gamers jolt of energy

Most energy drinks target club kids or gym rats looking for that extra burst of power so they can dance all night or pump more iron.

But BAWLS focuses on a unique market niche: computer gamers.

The high-caffeine beverage doesn't have the vitamins and minerals typically found in energy drinks and instead markets itself as a soft drink spiked with guarana, a berry grown in the Amazon rain forest. The formula has developed an almost cult-like following among computer addicts looking for a source of energy to keep them awake for gaming binges lasting 15 to 24 hours straight.

Well, we went out last weekend to do some couch-shopping. But we wound up buying a video game instead -- Baldur's Gate II. So all non-work time has been sucked up by that.

Rasperries are ripe by the pint, and the orange berries (cloudberries?) that grow through our fence are ripe as well.

A year ago today marks the first morning we woke up in our new house. Cash-strapped, makeshift bed on the floor, furniture still shipping, and both cats freaking out. And the raspberries were ripe: I definitely remember that.

Funny how much has changed, really.

Oh, there's objective value in this blog, at least for me. I couldn't remember when I bottled the Arrogant Bastard. This is important to know because I should wait at least two weeks to allow full carbonation before trying it. I forgot to make a note in the beer lab notebook, but since I made a blog entry about it I was able to pinpoint date and time.

How do you find out if a window is visible? Do you use the IsWindowVisible API? Or do you call ShowWindow with a special flag that says, "Don't show the window, just tell me if it is showing."

Today was Heritage Day, the Canadian name for the August Bank Holiday. Now, we don't have August Bank Holiday or any sort of Bank Holidays in the States, so I'm not really clear on this concept in the first place. But apparently the bankers feel that there ought to be a holiday every month, so they invented Bank Holidays. The government picked up on it and used it as an excuse to celebrate diversity (since when do they need an excuse to celebrate diversity?!).

In practice, Heritage Day is a wonderful thing. I say that because the Heritage Days festival, which runs from Saturday through to the Monday holiday, is a great place to get high-quality ethnic food. Although there are no excellent Thai restaurants in Edmonton (none to compare with Sanamluang, for example), for Heritage days a crowd of Thai grandmas gets together and cooks the baddest green curry in town. Somebody makes real Karjalan piirakoita, although I never see any Finns around the Scandinavian pavillion. There are five different kinds of baklava to try: the Arabian baklava is the best, but the Greek was pretty good too (avoid Bosnia-Hercegovina).

There's some culture and dancing, too, although the focus is definitely on the food. Bringing culture into it is a bit rough... since when you start talking about places with a truly different culture, even mainstream tolerant Canadians get a little edgy. For example: although Canada's metaphor is 'cultural mosaic', not 'melting pot', the various tents all fly the Canadian flag. They used to fly national flags (which makes sense: easier to get your bearings from a distance) but apparently this discomfited enough people that they all now fly the Canadian flag. Cultural mosiac -- riiight.

Today is probably the day: it's long past time to bottle the Arrogant Bastard I laid down over a week ago. I will go start on that now.

Nobody minds because it means I clean and sterilize the kitchen.

Mail is up on trillian now, but not yet for me. I need to sync my files over, and then we're almost done. I guess just the FTP and WWW servers need to be moved: so I need to d/l and install the patched publicfile. Bummer.

Both of trillian's IP addresses are currently set up by DHCP, which is fine, except that DHCP tries to clobbers lots of useful information including:

the name server (I want trillian to use marvin's cache)

the default route (I want trillian's default route to be out via DSL)

The DSL provider tries to give me name servers, and marvin tries to give trillian a default route to itself -- which is appropriate for PC DHCP clients, but not for trillian.

The painful result of this is that it takes forever to boot trillian, as she is trying to find the IP addresses of internal machines dugong, jeltz, and piranha by querying the outside name server (!) via marvin (!). Yuck.

So: reconfigure trillian to get internal IP not by DHCP is a first good step. Name server and cache on trillian is a good next step.

Trillian gets a Sig11 crash in a repeatable place when I try to compile the XEmacs packages. I am hoping it's just a bug in XEmacs. It would suck to have to ditch this box too. Happens when compiling cc-align.el with r21-4-8.

Set up the samba mounts on trillian today. Also installing necessary software, such as CVS, cdrecord, etc. DJBDNS tools are now installed. Next step is making trillian be the gateway for talking to foreign cvs servers.

Fox news gives a decent summary of several recent cases where parents sued teachers and schools over their children's grades.

How long before this comes to universities, or is it already there? And not just grading -- I'm thinking of room draw, where people did wave laws (such as ADA) around. How long before Mudd's first ADA-related room draw lawsuit?

An expert is someone from out of town with a briefcase. No, really, an expert is someone with domain-specific knowledge. Who probably has spent years studying and practicing something. When I want to benefit from expertise, I find a book written by an expert, and I read it and try to understand it. And I try to follow the instructions from the expert.

I don't read four books written by four different experts, think I know better than any of them (or them all put together) and then put together my own set of instructions, which I then don't even follow, and then give unrelated people unsolicited advice about it. Because I'm not, then, an expect.

[everybody's a critic]

A half hour of morning picking yields 1.5 pints of fresh ripe raspberries. Even factoring in the cost of driving to the store, I'm sure I could have bought them cheaper. So why am I so happy?

Warming my hands on a cup of hot coffee inside, picking bugs out of my berries, I think it must be this: bringing a bowl full of fresh-picked raspberries up to bed is the best way in the world to wake up my wife.