The Curse That is Politics

Many, many years ago at work I was having a conversation---actually, I was listening to a monologue---with a fellow at work about how ludicrously over-paid and worthless the mayor was. At one point I could listen no more without commenting. "I happen to know that the mayor makes less money that we do." (This was actually true, all the people on Guelph Council used to make very little money.) In the space of a heart-beat, without even the time to draw breath, my co-worker announced "Well, then, that explains it! You get what you pay for." He then left the room "in triumph". This left me alone with another fellow who'd been listening without saying anything. "You do realize that that man's vote is every bit as important as yours, don't you?"

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I've run in elections several times. I've built a riding association from scratch. One of the political parties in Ontario has my fingerprints on various parts of it's constitution. I've also got to know some fairly successful elected officials over the years. And I wouldn't wish their lives on my worst enemies.

Why would I say this? Well if you run for office you have to convince a lot of people to vote for you on very flimsy reasons. It's a blunt fact of life that almost no one outside of your immediate family and close friends really knows much of anything about you. And, moreover, most folks know almost nothing about important public policy issues or your particular party's proposals. This means that you need to totally throw out the window any idea that you can run and win based on your personal character or the issues. Instead, what you generally are doing is engaging in a public relations war based on the shallowest of "memes".  (If you don't know what a "meme" is, stop reading my drivel and follow this link to the Wikipedia article and read it. It's probably the most important thing you can do to make sense of politics.)

And don't expect our news media to help out. Where there still is a print media, there are severe space and time limitations on what reporter can write. This limits them to being able to rush off to an assignment, take a picture, get some quotes, and, then hammer out a quick "he said, she said" story before rushing off to the next assignment.

And on-line publications are generally paid-for by advertising clicks. And to make real money, the story has to "become viral", which means that readers share the story with friends and family on social media, which gets other people to post it, and on, and on. (Come to think of it, this is a lot like those letters crazy aunt Bertha used to send saying: "Send this prayer to at least three other friends. If you break the chain horrible things will happen to you!") And to do that you simply cannot be writing about facts or ideas---you have to be punching emotions. Generally this takes two forms: sappy sentimentality (hence all the cute kitten posts) and ANGER. And if you want to get people angry, the last thing you will want to do is show nuance or grey. Absolutely everything has to be dumbed-down to the blackest of black and whitest of white.

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Since I've just made my usual rant about how awful the mainstream media is, I think I'll make my also usual pitch for support through Patreon or the tip jar. It's a thing that people do if they think that my blog posts serve some useful purpose. I've been sick with the flu for a week so I've foolishly decided to try to write a humorous rant (probably because of the fever.) James Howard Kunstler has been doing these for years under the banner of "Clusterfuck Nation" and they work pretty well for him. I doubt if this post is anywhere near as good. But I'm generally my own worst critic, so I'm tossing this out as an experiment that will probably never be attempted again. Get back to me if you like it. 

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This leaves going door to door, which is essential to an election campaign. But the fact of the matter is that candidates and campaign workers simply do not have the time to be able to spend more than a trivial amount of time talking to voters. This is far less than is necessary for anyone to make an honest appraisal of the candidate's character or the party's platform. So to be a politician you have to master the skill of showing that you are deeply empathetic while cutting the conversation to the shortest time possible. This means that if you have any sense of self-consciousness you end up feeling like a bit of a phony while appearing like one to anyone who is dumb enough to think that you might have the time to actually listen to what they think. Now that's a prescription to make you feel good about yourself!

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If by any wild trick of fate you actually get elected, you then become the last gasp and hope for people that are desperate for help. They will demand and beg for aid with social assistance, parking squabbles, immigration papers, termite spraying, and anything else they can think of. This will run the risk of totally overwhelming your office and grinding your staff into exhaustion and despair.

May the Dark Lord of the North help you if your party wins power. And abandon all hope if you end up in a position of real responsibility---like becoming Mayor or a Cabinet member. That's because if you do, you will end up feeling like an antelope that has been caught by an entire pack of hyenas. One group of people will grab you by one leg and beg you to do one thing. Another will grab another leg and demand you do the exact opposite. Yet another will grab your right arm and demand that you drop everything else and focus on something entirely different. And another will grab your left, and demand that something else be done. No matter what you try, you will never be able to please everyone and these people will generally curse you as a totally vile sell-out.

If you doubt this last point, consider the case of our present Prime Minister. The man has tried to pull the four corners of the universe together to build the case for preventing climate change. And yet, he finds himself facing a revolt from provinces who believe it is better to avoid paying taxes than to prevent a civilization-destroying environmental catastrophe. Foolishly, he attempted to make a Faustian bargain by at the same time supporting a pipeline to help Alberta, and Kinder Morgan kicked him in the groin by deciding to pull out of an "obviously profitable" Trans Mountain pipeline. To appease the Alberta voter, he then went the further step of actually buying the project so that it would still be built. But having done all of that, he is still being vilified to the point where people are selling "merch" suggesting he be lynched.

A brilliant political statement,
by a company that I refuse to promote with a URL
Image used under the fair use provision

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And underlying all of this is the basic fact that far too many ordinary voters have the minds of spoiled children. If you doubt this idea, consider the following graphic.

From the Calgary Herald, art by Dave Elston,
in his book: You Might Be From Alberta If...
Fair use, free advertising, don't complain.

We all know about the bumper sticker. What makes the cartoon funny is the caption that says that it is "reusable". I'm not sure, but I think that Alberta has managed to piss away two oil booms after the first time this bumper sticker entered my consciousness. And yet, they've still managed to avoid saving any money in a heritage fund or diversifying their economy. And they did this at the same time as they lectured the rest of the country about how it needed to "get it's economic house in order" and blamed central Canada (and both Trudeaus) for all their problems short of dandruff and crab grass. In contrast, Norway only had one oil boom and it was able to save more money than God and is now rapidly setting their society up to run on nothing more than sunlight and fresh air. (Can we please trade Alberta for Norway?)

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Frankly, I don't know why anyone would enter politics. I can only speculate, but I think that there are basically two reasons. Some folks enter into it because they are something close to Saints, Bodhisattvas, Sages, Realized Men, or, whatever your religious tradition calls tremendously groovy people who are willing to suffer mightily to help others. The other folks are people with deep, deep holes in their psyche that demand that they amass power no matter how many people they crush in the process. My general experience has been that the former vastly out-number the latter but recent political developments may cause me to rethink that assessment. Ultimately it comes down to the gullibility of the average voter. If things swing back to a more sensible equilibrium my faith in politicians and the system may go back to normal. If not, I may have to start rethinking my understanding of how the universe works. 

Why does Guelph have a Community Energy Initiative?

I've been working away at researching my next series of articles on the Guelph Community Energy Initiative. Here's the first one. It answers the question "Why should Guelph---or any city for that matter---have a Community Energy Initiative?"

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The first thing to realize is that a local energy plan isn't about how the energy is created. So don't fixate on things like wind turbines and solar panels. Instead, it's focused on how efficiently the energy is used. This is an absolutely key point to remember because efficiency is directly linked to productivity, which is an economic concept that is key to a prosperous community. 

What is "Productivity"?

If two workers are producing a specific product---like a blender---we generally think of the worker who is producing two an hour as being more productive than the one who is only creating one. And, if each blender sells for the same price and is equally profitable, then the factory owner can make more profit and (at least potentially) pay his workers more money than the owner who's workers only make one. Or at least that's how the theory of productivity works.

The first thing to remember is that productivity is not a measure of how hard a person works, but rather how much she produces. That's because we live in a results economy, not an effort economy. People sometimes forget this distinction and talk as if productivity is a measurement of laziness versus work ethic. Instead, productivity usually comes down to capital investment decisions by management. The factories that produce more than one blender an hour do so by installing robots rather than having managers yell at their employees to work harder.

This gets to the second thing that people need to remember. Productivity is not just a question of how many things get done per person, it's more generally a question of how much comes out after putting how much into it. That's where the robots come into play. Up until now, the cost of labour has always been so much higher than the cost of replacing it with machines that our society has gotten into the habit of always assuming that machines are always more productive than people, and, that the only way to become more productive is to get rid of workers. This process is called "automation" and it is why wages rose sharply in the decades after the Second World War and also why in the last few years fewer and fewer people get to have steady, full-time employment.

Some folks use short-cuts when they think about problems (ie: they are mentally lazy) instead of learning the complete facts of the matter. And in the case of productivity there are a great many ways one can think about productivity depending on how deeply you dive into the issue. For example, the people who think of productivity in terms of the laziness or work ethic of employees have reduced the issue to a simple equation:

(Gross Income) - (Cost of Labour) = Productivity

Other folks do understand the importance of capital investment in productivity, but forget about the cost of energy. For them, productivity boils down to this equation:  

(Gross Income) - [(Cost of machines) + (Cost of Labour)] = Productivity

But machines aren't free to buy or run. They also use energy, and for some of them the energy used is a major fraction of the cost of producing something like a blender. These people think of productivity using this formula:

(income) - [(energy) + (machines) + (labour)] = productivity

There is yet another important element to consider. Businesses also exist in a social and environmental context. They have neighbours, their workers have lives outside of work, and, so on. The government has to consider the impact of the business's activities on the greater society and calculate the costs to society-as-a-whole in order to understand how useful it is. For example, if a company making blenders dumps poisonous sludge into a river and this destroys a very profitable fishing industry, the increased wages and profits created by the factory may be completely negated by the lost wages and profits from the fishery that is destroyed. This is what economists call an "externality". If a business is forced by the government to deal with potential externalities (eg: cleaning the toxic sludge up instead of just dumping it in the river), this again adds costs, which lowers productivity.

The latest example of an attempt to deal with externalities is the decision by the Liberals to put a price on carbon in order to get the market to consider the consequences of climate change in its investment decisions. In the short run, the importance of externalities can be hidden if the government simply refuses to think about them. (This appears to be the brilliant economic development strategy supported by the Conservatives.) But over the long haul society either suffers real consequences (fishermen lose their jobs, the cost of fish increases), and/or regulations are eventually introduced.

This leads to the following formula. (It might be that there are yet other elements to add, but that would be another article.)

(income) - [(externalities) + (energy) + (machines) + (labour)] = productivity

Readers need to understand the tremendous opportunity implied by the last equation. If Guelph can find a way to increase productivity by cutting the non-labour productivity costs (ie: machines, energy, and, externalities), this will give businesses the freedom to raise wages for Guelph workers without cutting the number of people it employs. And if Guelph citizens are making more money, they will spend it locally and increase the "spin off" benefits for everyone else who lives here. Moreover, if Guelph has a coordinated plan to encourage increased efficiency throughout the city, businesses that can see the advantages to such a strategy will want to build new facilities here.

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Locally Sourced is Better

A second point that needs to be understood is that spending money on energy tends to be a way that wealth leaks out of Guelph. To understand this point, consider what happens when you buy vegetables from a large corporation---say Walmart---versus what happens when shop directly from a local farmer. A certain amount of the money you spend at Walmart will stay in your community in the form of local wages, but if you buy Californian lettuce, most of the money goes back to the farm there and the truck that shipped it to Ontario. Moreover, all the profit ends up going to Arkansas (ie: the Walmart headquarters.) In contrast, if you buy cabbage at the market from the farmer who grew it, a lot more of the money goes into the local economy. Even inputs that come from out of town (eg: the fertilizer and gasoline) came through a local distributor, who gets to pocket some money before it disappears. This means that when you buy anything locally it tends to have a bigger impact on the well-being of the community than if it is purchased out-of-town.

I couldn't find any analysis or data that specifically dealt with energy, but economists have done some work on the macro-economic effect of buying local on the economy. Consider the following two sets of pie-charts that compare the relative economic benefits of locally-owned retail stores and restaurants that come from a report prepared by the American Independent Business Alliance.

Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.
Click on image for a bigger version

Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.
Click on image for a bigger version.

As you can see, where you shop has a big impact on the economic well-being of your community. Exactly the same processes are at work whether you are buying potatoes, a hamburger, or, energy for your home or business. If you buy electricity from a local guy with solar panels, the money he makes might very well be spent at the business you own. Similarly, if a local business saves so much money on making itself more efficient that it can give its employees a dollar/hour raise---that money may also end up in your pocket. 

At this point the obvious question is "Where does our energy currently come from?" Ontario uses almost no coal. And our electricity is mostly created in-province using nuclear and hydro-electric plants. So when we are talking about money-leakage based on energy, we are mostly referring to natural gas and petroleum. As you can see from the chart below, a significant fraction of our natural gas comes from Western Canada (WCSB means "Western Canada Sedimentary Basin".) ("Bcfd" means "Billion cubic feet/day", which should give you some idea of the amount of energy---and money---we are talking about.) 

Sources of natural gas in Ontario.
Navigant 2015 report commissioned by province of Ontario.
Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.

As you can also see, the percentage of natural gas we are purchasing from Western Canada is in significant decline because of competition with the USA. Why this is happening is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say the money that goes out of Ontario is certainly not bouncing around in Guelph helping you pay off your mortgage. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a similar groovy graphic for oil in Ontario, but here's a quote from an article from the National Observer:

Ontario sources the majority of its oil domestically, and all its imported oil comes from the United States. Ontario brought in an average of 50,000 cubic metres of oil per day of domestic oil between January 2012 and July 2017, compared to an average of 5,000 cubic metres per day of imported crude, mostly from North Dakota, Indiana and Texas.    (from "Guess Where Quebec Gets Its Oil", by Carl Meyer, Nov 13, 2018)

Obviously Western Canada is a better source than Texas, but still the money is leaking from our city. 

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What About Carbon Taxes?

Money will also increasingly "leak" out of Guelph as a result of externalities too. The federal government has doubled-down on its commitment to put a price on carbon, even as the Conservatives have decided to make sabotaging the future health of the planet their core economic development plank. Even if we only take climate change seriously once the ice caps have melted and climate change denier's bodies are swinging from lamp posts, we will eventually have to switch to a no-carbon economy. And no matter what happens, any city that has built it's economy around using energy more efficiently is going to do better than one who built their "game plan" around "Après moi, le déluge!" (or "after me, the flood").

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Why Get the City Involved?

If you look at a municipality---like Guelph---and try to think about it like a business the first question to ask is "what does it produce?" I'd suggest that the primary product of a municipality is "coordination". City staff and Council decide a myriad of different issues for both businesses and citizens: which roads to fix this year, how many bus routes we need, when and how often garbage gets picked up, whether we build recreation centres or libraries, how many police, etc. If ordinary people or even large businesses tried to figure these things out for themselves, the city would be an exercise in complete chaos.

To understand this point, look at the following photo. This shows two parts of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The upper half with the high-rises and the trees is the part that has gone through the same sort of zoning process that Guelph routinely uses to build housing. (Although unlike Guelph, there seems to not be as much pressure from NIMBYs to prevent high density housing.) In the bottom half there is a "favela", or "shanty-town".  The difference is that a favela is "self-organizing" without any municipal government planning. The difference is stark reminder of how important the role of organizing can be in human life. People routinely complain about "government bureaucracy", but the fact of the matter is that life with clearly defined rules and chains of command is much better than the total free-for-all that exists in a favela. (I know that I have grossly over-simplified a complex subject, but that isn't what this article is about.)

See the difference between planned and unplanned parts of a city?
Image by Alicia Nijdam, c/o Wikicommons

A community energy plan is nothing more than an attempt to expand the mandate of the city to go beyond the current limits of coordination, and move into another sphere---energy. And the reason it would do so is for exactly the same reason it currently plans things like road construction, zoning, public transit, garbage pick-up, etc:  because by doing so it can create new efficiencies that will benefit everyone.

This is also a way that a Community Energy Plan can help the people of Guelph. If coordination is the product that cities sell, then by adding in energy efficiency to the mix they are making the city more attractive to businesses that are looking for a place to expand. To understand this point, consider the case of the Toyota plant that was built in Woodstock Ontario (where I spent some of my teenage years.) Toyota was offered significant financial incentives to locate in the Southern USA but instead it chose to move to Ontario. The reason why is because Ontario offered a greater level of coordination than places like Alabama and Mississippi.

And by "coordination", I mean two things:  a good public education system, and, single-payer

Paul Krugman writing
about Woodstock Ontario???
Prolineserver, c/o Wikicommons 

healthcare. In the Southern US the public education system is in free-fall and anyone who can puts their children into a private school. Similarly, there is no single-payer healthcare system, and health coverage costs a lot more for everything---plus the employer is supposed to foot the bill, not the government. Toyota wasn't interested in putting functionally illiterate workers in charge of machines that cost millions of dollars. Nor were they willing to pay the highest hospital bills in the world when those workers got sick. (Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed about this for the New York Times.) If Toyota was willing to come to Woodstock because of the good schools and public healthcare, the argument is that companies would similarly come to Guelph if it can help them save money on energy costs.

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Well, time to put out the begging bowl. As you might imagine, writing articles about things like the Community Energy Initiative take a lot of work. I'm not an expert, but I have to dig deep and try to make myself into one every time I foolishly decide to take on a new subject. I don't just "jump into" this stuff, I have to start out by finding local experts, interviewing them, working my recordings into notes, and then using those notes to find information in other sources to quote in my final blog. (Did I mention that I do all this while also working at the full-time job?)

This is fundamentally different from what a professional reporter does. Their job is to entertain instead of inform, which means that their editors choose stories based on their shock or "cutesy" value. They are also under extreme financial constraints, so they usually have to run around and get quick sound bites and hammer out several short stories a day. What's the result? An  ill-informed electorate, many of whom seem to live in a state of permanent outrage against people that have never done them any harm at all. How much would you pay for a news outlet that actually informs people about the world around them? How about one that isn't behind a pay wall, so you can not only pay a modest fee to keep it up and running, but which is also delivered free to anyone who wants to read it?

Well, that's what "The Guelph Back-Grounder" is, and you can be part of the solution by either making a regular contribution through Patreon or by tossing something in the Tip Jar once in a while. Other people have already done it (thanks Patricia for being so Awesome!), why haven't you? 

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So How Much Money are We Talking About?

And what exactly are the projected energy savings that come from an Community Energy Plan? If you go back to the original Community Energy 2007 report written for the city by Garforth International, IIc , you will see the following figures for Guelph (note, they do not count inter-city transportation---just what happens here):

• homes and buildings use 30% of all energy, and 50% of all electricity
• in 2004 6,030 gigawatts of energy were used, or, 52.45 megawatts per person
• transport fuels in the city represent 30% of total energy and 45% of greenhouse gas emissions
• in 2005 total water use was 19.2 billion liters, or 52.579 million liters per day
• water use per household/day averages at 230-250 liters---the rest is used by industry

Let's get an "order of magnitude" number here. The cost of energy fluctuates wildly on the spot market, and large consumers get different prices than individual home owners. Moreover, there is a huge difference between the cost of a kilowatt hour of natural gas, gasoline, electricity. ("Kilowatt hour" is a measure of all types of energy, even though people generally only use it to describe electricity.)  Just to give you an idea of the comparisons, one cubic metre of natural gas has 8.8 kilowatt hours (kwh) of energy. I looked up the current price for natural gas in Guelph, which is about $0.21/cubic meter.  If we divide that by 8.8, we should get the price for natural gas per kwh of something like 2 cents. The amount of energy in a liter of gasoline is 9.1 kilowatt hours. A quick check on line says that the price of gasoline in Guelph is something like $1.02 per liter. Divide them out and the price per kilowatt hour of gasoline is 11 cents. Looking at my latest hydro bill, I'm paying 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour.

Let's put this on a bullet chart:

• natural gas: 8.8 kwh per cubic meter, 21 cents/cubic meter, or, 2 cents per kwh
• gasoline: 9.1 kwh per liter, $1.02 per liter, or, 11 cents per kwh
• electricity: 6.5 cents per kwh 

I think that the above makes sense. Resistance electric heating (baseboard heaters) is more expensive than natural gas and electric vehicles run cheaper than gasoline powered.

I'm not about to try to calculate how much Guelph spends on energy a year because that would require more research than I'm prepared to do on a story, and also because I'd lose most of my readers anyway. But let's just break down how much 6,030 gigawatts of energy would cost using each of those numbers above. I can calculate that by multiplying the cost by 6.03 billion ("kilo" means "thousand" and "giga" means "billion"---so the "kilo" in "kwh" cancels out three decimal points):

• natural gas:  at $.02 kwh equals $0.121 billion or $121 million
• gasoline: at $0.11 kwh equals $0.66 billion or $663 million
• electricity: at $0.065 kwh equal $0.39 billion or $392 million

At this point I need to remind readers again that the prices I am using above are not what are actually paid. There are volume discounts and wild fluctuations in the spot market. But having said that, it's important to have some sort of number in front of us so we can understand if the amount of money is bigger than a toaster or smaller than a moose. Having said that, there's a considerable range of cost here, from a minimum of $121 million/year for natural gas versus $663 million/year for gasoline. 

The Garforth International report goes on to say cities that actively pursue city-wide energy efficiency programs often achieve 50% savings (from page 14 of the executive summary.) That means that the potential for freed-up money in Guelph could fit into a range of $60.5 million/year to $332 million/year. How does that compare to the Guelph economy-as-a-whole? Well, I couldn't easily find a Gross Domestic Product number for Guelph, but Statistics Canada does have a Gross Domestic Product per capita number for Guelph:  $48,410. (Only because Guelph has the 10th highest number in Canada---which is really amazing. We appear to be doing something right.) In 2006 the city's population was 115,000, so presumably the GDP was $5.57 billion.

So how does a saving of between $60.5 and $332 million fit into an city economy of $5.57 billion?  Just dividing out for a percentage, we get a range of 1% to 6%.  That might not seem like a lot, but it is a significant increase in economic activity. (Just consider how much freaking-out would happen if the mortgage rate went up that amount!) And, it is important to realize that this is in addition to the other effects that I mentioned above:  the decreased leakage of wealth out of the city (both to buying energy and carbon pricing) and the increased attraction for outside investors to move facilities to Guelph so they could take advantage of city-wide energy saving programs. 

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That's enough for now. (I originally wanted to do a short introduction to the subject.  But as you can see, like every other "deep dig" I write, it has ballooned.) As always, comments are welcome and please share on social media. 

We Can No Longer Afford Ideology

Yesterday I was interviewing a respected local politician and I asked her a totally idiotic---and yet, I think profound---question:  "Are the Conservatives  evil? Or are they stupid? It seems that they are either one or the other."

It's an idiotic question because it's hopelessly simplistic and forced her to quickly come up with a reasonable-sounding response. She managed to come back with something that not only kept her from offering me a too-honest "gotcha" quote, but also kept her from sounding disingenuous. The fact that she did so without also making me look like an idiot just showed her profound mastery as a politician.

Why I asked the question in the first place was not because I wanted to score points, but because it was a way of getting to something that journalists usually are afraid of asking about when dealing with important people. That is, "Why exactly do people do the things that they do?" And that is the import of my question, because it is a way of introducing more subtle and serious issues. I was thinking in particular about the decision of both the provincial and federal Tories to build their brand around sabotaging any attempt to prevent runaway climate change. And in that context, the question "are they evil?" really boils down to "are they aware of the existential threat to human civilization and yet consciously choose to oppose legislation to prevent runaway climate change simply because they think it will help them win the next election?" Similarly, the question "are they stupid?" is a shorthand for "are they so blinded by their ideology that they simply cannot comprehend how dangerous climate change is to humanity?"

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It's usually considered "rude" or "unfair" to question the motives of anyone when they say or do something. Indeed, I've been accused of being a "troll" in on-line discussions because I sometimes do this. The idea is that you have to simply accept that someone is saying something with the best of intentions and only deal with what they say instead of why you think that they may be saying it. The problem is that many people suffer from a profound lack of understanding about what the implications of their actions will be. To an outside observer what might seem like a profoundly cynical power play might simply be a case of someone being oblivious to the effects that the course of action they support will have on other people.

I first considered this idea when I heard a fellow at work talking about being in a developing nation and seeing a man with no legs rolling around on a creeper and begging for money. My co-worker said he was with a couple other tourists and he was amazed to see that they were actually afraid of this guy, even though he offered zero physical threat because of his disability. I opined that perhaps they were terrified by the implications that this man raised about the nature of life. This is the idea that "there but for the grace of God goeth I", and this can be a scary thing to contemplate. My co-worker looked at me with amazement, thought for a while, and said "I think you may have something there. I'd never thought of that." The point is that what had seemed obvious to me was something that had never occurred to this other guy.

Too stupid to know he's stupid?
Public Domain, US gov photo
c/o Wikicommons

Since the rise of Donald Trump people have become more aware of something called the "Dunning-Kruger effect". That is a syndrome where people are so ignorant of a subject that they don't know that they know nothing about it, but instead believe that they are experts. It's sort of the corollary of Aristotle's observation that "the more I know, the less I think I know". The implication is that if you know nothing at all, maybe you think that you know everything. There's also a related effect where someone knows a subject so well that they expect that everyone else does too. If it is blindingly obvious to her that a certain thing is going to result from following a specific action, she will believe that anyone advocating for it is really seeking that (to her) inevitable result. And if the other person says "no, not at all", he is actively hiding his true intentions. Well, no. Lots of time people are just oblivious to the consequences of what they are advocating.

This is where the "too stupid to understand" idea arises. I'm not talking about people suffering from some sort of brain damage. Instead, I'm talking about people who have had their heads so stuffed with nonsense that there isn't any room left for evidence or logic to alter their opinions. 

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Time for the begging bowl. If you like these articles---and I suppose you do if you are reading this---consider subscribing to them through Patreon or toss something in the Tip Jar. Maybe, you could buy a book. All these options exist on the upper right hand of the screen. (Switch to the desktop option if you read these on your cell phone.)  Writing these things take a lot of time and energy and I have bills to pay and family obligations just like anyone else. Part of the problem that I'm identifying in this article is that if people expect to get their news for free, people write wild, sensationalist articles in order to get clicks and shares to increase ad revenue. If you want to "damp this down" and get more logical, fact-based stuff (ie:  less ideological), people are going to have to get back into the habit of paying for it. Lots of folks used to pay for newspapers---why not blogs?

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A few years back I was at a dinner party and one of the guests was a fellow I'd never met before. He was a profoundly odd person. Among other things, he said that "everyone in the USA has healthcare". (My wife, Misha, is an American---one who has never had health insurance except when she was in the Armed Forces.) I was taken aback. I tried to get an idea of what he meant, and said that I knew for a fact that this was simply not true. But he just blustered and got angry if anyone disagreed with him. Eventually, I just left rather than spend any time in the room with this disagreeable person. (I wasn't the only one. An elderly woman who remembered England before the National Health Service similarly couldn't stand this "nonsense" either, so she left too.)

While it was hard to figure out exactly what this guy was thinking (simply because he refused to engage in the "back-and-forth" of conversation that allows one to tease out this sort of information), I did learn that he owned a local company and he was profoundly pissed off about the amount of money he had to pay in taxes. In fact, it seemed like he had worked himself into an almost permanent frenzy over the subject.

Moreover, my hosts told me afterwards that they had made a mistake inviting the three of us to dinner at the same time. They'd forgotten that they had invited this person earlier. The fact of the matter was that my two friends were also self-described "right wing", but they tended to keep quiet around me and the elderly relative, because they knew that we didn't share their opinions.

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I might be odd (in fact I've been told I am by several people), but I tend to think that we should subject our cherished ideas to some sort of "fact checking" once in a while. The idea that someone would tell me to my face that I was wrong, and that my wife does have health insurance when I know that this isn't true---and that in some sense this is a question of "opinion" instead of "facts"---just seems weird. 

Of course, there are nuances to most conflicts. It might be the case that the fellow I met at the dinner had conflated the idea that no one can get turned away from an emergency department in an American hospital with the existence of "medical insurance". But if you do end up at a hospital, you will end up with a bill afterwards and people can and often do lose their entire life's savings over this sort of thing. And as a result, people often think long and hard about whether they want to go in for a "check up" after a minor accident. Indeed, Misha had a friend who got into a "fender bender" on his motor scooter, got a significant bump on the head, but avoided going to Emergency because of this concern. He died of an aneurysm the next day. People who have no health insurance never go for check-ups either. Which means that if I lived in the USA I would never have had my high blood pressure identified and would probably be well on the way to kidney failure right now.

The important point, however, was that we never had this discussion because this guy was so angry and belligerent that he would not allow me to find some sort of "common ground" that we could build a conversation on. He just made angry, universal statements. Indeed, if my friends had been better organized, I would never have even met him because the two of us would have been kept carefully separated into our own, independent "filter bubbles". 

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This isn't a new thing. In fact pretty much since the revolutions (British, American, and, French) that changed European politics from being about intrigue between courtiers to being about the worldviews of an entire nation, people have been creating grotesquely over-simplified ways of looking at the world. Political scientists and revolutionaries alike call these "ideologies".

The thing about ideologies is that they aren't fully-formed, well thought out, and, evidence-based. Instead, they are a type of tribal identity that one declares allegiance to. Before I figured this out, I would often be surprised by people who complained about things like "the liberal bias" of universities and who expressed a desire to see space created there to allow "a conservative point of view". Why---I would ask---can't we just judge each issue on its own merits and see where the facts lead us? The problem I couldn't see was that in the hierarchy of understanding that these people hold, "conservatism" is more important than facts or logic. At the dinner party, the anti-tax business guy simply ignored my statement that my wife didn't have health insurance because it didn't agree with something more important, namely his ideological opinion that all taxes are a form of theft.

Ideological conflict has been around since the 17th century's battles over the divine right of kings. But until now the "stakes of the game" haven't been all that large. It just involved whether or not thousands and hundreds of thousands of people would suffer horribly because of minor irritants like slavery and horrific poverty. Now, the fate of human civilization is on the chopping block. What is more important, whether a company in Guelph has to pay more taxes or the ice caps melt and Bangladesh gets drowned? It seems clear to both the federal and provincial conservatives that taxes are much more important. But that's absurd. Our world is too complex and our technology far too powerful to continue this childish game of ideological thinking. 

A Democratic Primer: Direct Election of Party Leaders

Yesterday I had a long chat with my dear, sweet, lovely Misha and the recent elections naturally came up. My significant other is an American. (I hope she will soon be immigrating to live with me in Guelph.) As such, she was puzzled about why such a progressive place like Ontario could elect a Trump clone as premier. This, of course, got me thinking about a core issue in democratic governance: how parties pick their leaders.

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Alcibiades, the politician that
destroyed Athenian democracy.
Public Domain c/o Wiki Commons

People talk about "Athenian democracy" and often put it forward as some sort of idyllic society. In actual fact, in the more than 2,000 years since it went under, most philosophers have used it as an example of why democracies are not a good thing. The problem is "demagoguery", or, "mob rule". Historically, the figure they focus on is Alcibiades, who convinced Athenian voters into sending out a disastrous invasion of Sicily. After the cream of the Athenian fleet was massacred, the downward spiral and eventual defeat by Sparta and it's allies was inevitable. (To a great degree, Socrates was executed by Athens because he was a teacher of Alcibiades.)

The fundamental problem that these classic thinkers identified was allowing people to choose only makes sense if they are capable of making an informed choice. Consider the following hypothetical situation. A person is presented with a room with three unlabeled doors. He is told that one of the doors will open soon and a hungry polar bear will come out of it to kill him. Behind another door his family is trapped and he will be able set them free. If he doesn't free them they are the next meal for the bear. Another door has a large amount of money and if he goes through that door, he can keep it and go free (good for him, not so good for the wife and kids.) And, of course, the polar bear is behind the last door---very bad things will happen to both him and his family if he chooses it.

The key issue in this scenario is that the doors aren't labeled. It's true that the hypothetical person I mentioned above gets to choose which door to open, but it's not really much of a choice at all until she learns what is behind each door. The implication for democratic governance is that the ability to vote is worthless unless it is coupled with the information necessary to make an informed choice. 

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Now let's make things a little more confusing. Suppose that the fellow who has to choose the door has three people talking to him through a computer monitor. One of them says "choose the door on the right"---that's where your family is. Another says "don't listen to him, you need to choose the door in the middle----that's where your family is". The third guy says "they're both wrong, you want the door on the left because that's really where they are". This changes the situation from one of random chance to one of having to make a psychological assessment:  "who do you trust?" They can't all be right. In fact, you know that two of them are at worst lying or at best too arrogant to admit that they don't really know what is behind any of the doors.

The problem with having to make a psychological assessment is that contrary to what you might think, it is impossible to tell if someone is or is not lying to you simply by looking at them. The only real way to make an informed prediction is by knowing something of the history of the person who is talking to you. And that can be really hard to know if you don't live in a small town where everyone carries their own personal history on their shoulders for all to see. If you do really know the history of all of the three people talking to you, you might be able to do a quick assessment like this. "Fred is a slime bag who's always wanted my farm, if my family and I get eaten by a polar bear he will be able to buy it cheap. I don't trust him." "Jack confabulates and really can't tell the difference between fact and fantasy. He wouldn't set out to hurt anyone, but his advice is worthless. I can't trust him." "Loraine, on the other hand, is very honest, really cares about other people, and, has very good judgement. If I have to choose who to believe, it has to be her. I will choose the door she suggests."

But what if you really don't know anything at all about either Fred, Jack, or, Loraine? Moreover, what if they each hire public relations firms and advertising to constantly "bang the drum" about how honest, trustworthy, and, decent each of them is---and also hire lawyers to sue into the dirt anyone who tries to inform the public about anything bad in their past? 

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In my little story the voter is the person who has to choose the door and the future of the country is what lies behind the doors. (Think of the polar bear as climate change.) And the guys trying to get her to choose one door over the other are the political parties and their leaders. This is a very important problem in democratic practice.

Democratic systems have devised ways to get around this problem by recreating the "small town feel" inside political parties. They traditionally do this by limiting the number of people who can nominate candidates or elect leaders. The old model was that the sitting MPs and MPPs for a particular party would be the only people who got to vote for the leader. (This still happens in Australia, which is why they have recently seemed to have gone through an inordinate number of Prime Ministers.) The key advantage for selecting the party leader, Prime Minister, and, Premier this way is that the people with the best knowledge of a person's ability are the only ones involved. This means that all the votes cast are informed votes.

There are some problems with this system however. For example, it means that the only party members who are allowed to run for the leadership are people who've already been elected to Parliament. While it's true that a leader needs to be sitting to be effective, it also means that new parties or ones with few seats can't elect a leader. Mike Schreiner---Guelph's MMP---could never have been chosen leader of the party until he was elected.

As a result, another system was created where local Riding Associations would elect delegates to a convention and they would choose the party leader. The value of this system was that the sorts of people who would get elected as delegates would be people that were "known quantities" to the other members of the local riding association: they "carried their personal histories on their shoulders". And as part of being experienced members, they would also have a good understanding of the party outside of the local association. This meant that when it was time to go to a convention and choose a leader, these individuals have a good chance of telling the difference between Fred "the slime bag", Jack "the confabulator", and, Loraine "the good egg", and vote accordingly. This was the system that all the political parties---both in Canada and the US---used until only a few decades ago. 

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Doug Ford, the modern Alcibiades?
Public Domain c/o Wiki Commons

Unfortunately, this system has been declared "old-fashioned" and "undemocratic" by many people (who I suspect have never really considered the issues I've raised above.) As a result, it has been replaced with a system whereby each member of the party gets to vote in an internal election. Moreover, it isn't just the old, established members of the party who get to vote. Candidates are encouraged to go out and sell as many memberships as possible to new people. The benefit that comes from this is to increase the membership base, but the huge problem is that none of these people have any understanding at all about the internal culture of the party. Indeed, the only real connection that they have is to the individual candidate who sold them their membership. This puts these new members in the position of the person in the room facing three doors and having three different people that they know very little about trying to convince them to choose one unlabeled door over another.

This makes a political party prone to the "mob rule" or "demagoguery" that classical philosophers were so worried about. And, to be totally frank, people like Donald Trump and Doug Ford would never, ever get elected to lead the Republican and Conservative parties if the only people allowed to choose were folks who had had a long history in the party and really had a feel for the merits of the individual candidates.

Personally, I'd like to go back to the old way of doing things. How about you?

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I'm busy grinding away at future stories beyond these "op eds", so if you are champing at the bit for some more investigative journalism, you just need to be patient---it is coming. Having said that, I am surprised by the positive feedback that I've gotten over these opinion pieces. They are less work, but they still are time consuming none-the-less. 

One of the things that used to infuriate me about the opinion pages of mainstream newspapers was that a lot of the pieces were "freebies" that had been sent to the paper by subsidized "think tanks" like the Fraser Institute. In effect, people like the Koch brothers were able to transform a newspaper opinion page into paid advertising against doing anything about climate change simply by giving some suit an honourarium to write some nonsense and then send it out to any paper that had a hole next to the cartoon and didn't want to pay someone like me to fill it.

That's one of the reasons why it's important for people to support indie media. Thanks to Matt and Stephanie for doing so since my last post. Thanks for being so awesome! If you want to be like Matt and Stephanie, you can do so by clicking on this Patreon link and subscribing; or clicking on this PayPal link and putting something in the "tip jar". Either way, you'll helping build a new institution for the 21st century:  independent journalism free from corporate skullduggery. 

What a concept!    

Is Canada an Empire?

For a very long time I've wrestled with an idea that is probably so "out there" for most folks that I suspect that they will have a hard time understanding what I am talking about. Recent disturbing tendencies in politics seem to support my central thesis, and I think it's time I shared it with my readers. Is Canada a nation? Or is it an empire?

Being a philosopher of sorts, I need to follow standard operating procedure and offer some definitions first. Wikipedia currently defines it as follows:  "An empire is a sovereign state functioning as an aggregate of nations or people that are ruled over by an emperor or another kind of monarch. The territory and population of an empire is commonly of greater extent than the one of a kingdom." In contrast, it says:  "A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."

The first thing that should jump out and bite the reader on the nose is the fact that Canada clearly isn't a "nation" based on the above definition. That's because our population doesn't all speak the same language, the country is too big, and, arguably we don't all have a similar culture and economic reality.

To start with, not only is there the French/English divide, but to be fair there are lots and lots of First Nations' and immigrant languages commonly used in Canada.

Would a nation based on linguistic unity have signs like this?
Public Domain image by Taprobanus, c/o WikiCommons

When we get beyond language, we start talking about other issues. The fracture lines in our society would suggest a conflict in terms of territory and economic life. Consider the divide between Alberta's oil-based economy and central Canada's commitment to the emerging high-tech, sustainable world. Is it any wonder that the part of the country that makes most of its money selling especially dirty oil is at odds with the part that sells solar panels and wind turbines?  I could go on and cite other examples, but I hope I've made my point.

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It's easier to show that Canada's not really a nation in the same sense as European states like Germany and France, than it is to argue that that Canada is an empire. But bear with me and look at the definition I provided above.

It's trivially true that Canada has a sovereign:  Elizabeth Regina. But I think it's more useful to think of Canada as being ruled by an aristocracy which alienated Westerners like Stephen Harper call "the Laurentian Elite".  This is a very small group of families that act like a Canadian aristocracy that has ruled the nation for most of my life and long before. Think about the various party leaders we've had:  Pierre and Justin Trudeau, Paul Martin (son of Paul Joseph James Martin---an important cabinet member under four different Liberal Prime Ministers), Bob Ray (son of Saul Ray---career diplomat, brother of John A. Ray---assistant to Jean Chretien and a Director of Power Corp.) In Quebec we have the Johnson Family:  Daniel Johnson Sr. was premier with the Union National party, his son Pierre-Marc Johnson was premier with the Parti Quebecois, and, his other son Daniel Johnson Jr. was premier with the Liberals.   Without going into detail, suffice it to say that there are a small number of families that control politics in Canada and have done so for a long time.

The Laurentian Elite are not the only aristocratic group that has emerged in Canada. Preston Manning's---founder of the Reform Party---father was Ernest Manning, Premier of Alberta for 25 years. Rob and Doug Ford also grew out of a political dynasty. Their father Doug Ford Sr. was a wealthy businessman who sat as a Conservative MPP and groomed his children for a career in politics. The important point to consider is not that there are elites that dominate politics in Canada, but to admit that they exist and pay attention as they engage in conflicts to control the city, province, or, nation.

It's important not to get hung-up on the elite thing. I'd suggest that it's a necessary component to the creation of an empire, but not sufficient. The United States has elites too:  the Kennedys, the Bushes, and, the Clintons come to mind. But the continental USA doesn't function like an empire, but rather a nation. Consider, if you will, how zealously it protects the linguistic of monopoly of English---it would never mandate that all government services must be available in Spanish, for example. (The relationship of the US to other nations that it dominates is another issue, which is why even though people causally call America an "empire", what they are really talking about is another phenomenon: "neo-colonialism".)

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If the readers will indulge me a bit more, I'd like to suggest that why it is important to think about Canada as an empire instead of a nation. Among other things, I'd suggest that it explains why we have managed to avoid some of the worst tendencies of populism that have damaged electoral politics in the rest of the world.

Flag of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

The two classic examples of stable empires are the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. In both of these societies a wide variety of different nationalities were able to live together more-or-less peaceably for a long period of time. I say "more or less" because there were periodic conflicts between ethnic groups that needed to be forcibly squelched by the central authority in order to preserve the peace. While there were horrible ethnic conflicts within these empires, their collapse did nothing but accelerate and make these conflicts worse. For example, the former Yugoslavian states were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and, the entire middle-East was controlled by the Ottomans.

If you know a little bit about Canadian history you can see similar forces at play. Lower Canada was created as a distinct society after the invasion and conquest of the French colony by General Wolf. The central point was that the British were willing to give Quebec the religious and cultural

Flag of the Ottoman Empire

independence that they wanted, so they refused to join in the American revolution. Similarly, key elements of the First Nations agreed to stick with the British in order to protect themselves from what they considered a much worse relationship with the hated Yankees. This initial three-way alliance was cemented further by the addition of American loyalist refugees who created Upper Canada. The War of 1812 cemented this four-way alliance between Imperial overlord, British settlers, Canadiens, and First Nations. When Canada moved on to achieving Dominion status the Laurentian Elite substituted for the agents of the British Crown, but the basic system continues to this day. Ottawa balances the different constituencies of immigrant, First Nations, settlers, and, Quebecois to prevent the emergence of the sort of angry nationalism that is plaguing Europe and the USA. This system is called "the mosaic" in Canada, but in actual fact in every other context in human history it is instead called "imperial". If you look back on human history it was never independent countries that were tolerant of cultural diversity, it was always empires. (Think back to ancient Rome and it's tolerance of religious diversity.)

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Okay, here comes the begging bowl. I suppose if you thought the "Back-Grounder" was crap you wouldn't be reading this. So I have to assume that you are getting some value out of it. (On-line writing doesn't even provide paper for lining a bird cage.) If you do see some value in independent media, I'd suggest that if you can, you really should consider ponying up some money to support it. The great thing is that it doesn't have to cost much. All you have to do is click on the "Patreon" button on the upper right hand side. (If you are using a smart phone to read this, just click on one of the times I've written "Patreon" in this paragraph.) Once you get on the Patreon page, look at the right and choose a tier. They start at $1/month, so unless you are really poor, you should be able to afford to support the blog. If you really, really hate using the Web to pay bills, you can write me a cheque care of "Bill Hulet" and mail it to "124-A Surrey Street East, Guelph, N1H 3P9".    

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Of course, this raises the next question. Will "the Empire of the Two Canadas" (eg:  "upper and lower Canada"---Ontario and Quebec) continue? Or will it fall apart like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires? This isn't a trivial question, because recent populist parties have emerged and been elected in both Ontario and Quebec. These threaten the position of the "natural governing party" (the Liberals, who are the political front for the Laurentian elite.) This will make it harder for Ottawa to

Flag of the Empire of the Two Canadas?

balance the competing interests of the empire's constituent elements. For my part, I think that this would be a very  bad thing. Our world needs larger and larger structures to deal with the environmental, economic, and, social problems we face. If Canada breaks into different emerging cultures that fracture on ethnic, provincial, and, economic lines, we will be creating new conflicts at a time when we need to be forging a greater ability to act collectively.

Guelph is no longer a town---

Downtown Guelph at night. Photo by Andrew Goodwin

I'm researching a series of articles about energy and Guelph, and one of the things that I'm taking away from this is the clash between people who understand that Guelph has to start seeing itself as a city, and others who are nostalgic for the "good old days" of being a small town. In this specific case this has manifested itself in so-called "conservatives" who don't want the city to  concern itself with "big city" ideas like developing a strategic vision for future economic growth and how to position ourselves for the 21rst century. Instead, they just want to get back to small town worries like fixing potholes and keeping taxes under control.

I noticed the same thing about the general citizenry in my housing articles. The vast majority of people I know (at least in my age group---I'm a baby boomer) seem to be deeply offended by and bitterly opposed to any housing that is more than four stories high. They wax nostalgic about life in the countryside and the necessity of every child being able to directly experience nature. To their way of thinking, any child who has to grow up in an urban environment has been subjected to child abuse.

This attitude is already causing big problems, and will only get worse in the immediate future. Cities are not towns or villages. The great benefit of city life is that it brings together a great mass of different folks who energize each other with their different ideas. This has been what attracted people to live in cities from the time of ancient Athens. But there are trade offs. Towns and villages can provide access to the countryside for everyone because they are so low density that land remains cheap enough to squander. But a city cannot be so wasteful, simply because there are too many people competing for the scarce resource called "space". Instead, cities offer something else to their citizens: social interaction.

What do I mean? Well, look at the photo on the top of this missive. It was taken by a fellow named Andrew Goodwin, who is the very gifted artist behind Beautiful Guelph.  He found the Back-Grounder on-line and became a supporter. As part of my promotion, I sent him a copy of my first book Walking the Talk, which he liked so much that he decided to write a story about me for his own upcoming indie media project. He also offered to help me with the design of the blog---some of which he's already done. He also offered me free advice, including a suggestion that I make use of this Patreon feature designed to keep subscribers interested between posts.

Another example is Adam Donaldson's indie media work through Guelph Politico. He has helped me through giving me a couple interviews where he introduced me to his listeners. In exchange, I try to promote the work he does to my readership.

Yet another example is Jeremy Luke Hill who runs the Vocamus Press and the Vocamus Writer's Community. Jeremy is someone I met through the Guelph Time Bank. I had the original manuscript of Walking the Talk, but I didn't have a clue about how to publish it. He turned me onto the Lulu self-publishing system and gave me the background necessary to find Smashwords which both directly publishes my Ebooks and other distributors all over the world. I could also go on about the various sources in the community that help me research my articles, but by now I'm sure most readers will get my point. Writing may be a "lonely pursuit", but publishing requires an entire community.

And that's the good thing about Guelph. We are big enough that we have a very vibrant and exciting cultural scene---which includes an emerging indie media subculture. I love this about Guelph. I grew up in the countryside and in real towns instead of cities. And there was nothing at all like the synergy that happens in the Royal City. That's a wonderful thing not just for adults, but also for children too. I just wish that more baby boomers would understand this point and stop trying to hold up the future by pining for "the good old days" of small town Guelph. I was here for the tail end of that time, and to be totally honest, it really wasn't all that good.

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I've sent out the above "teaser" op-ed ("opinion-editorial") piece because I'm trying to build an audience for the "Back-Grounder", and the professional advice I find all says that to build an audience a blogger has to put out regular posts on a frequent basis. So, I'm going to try to hammer out something like this once a week. (I've written regular columns in newspapers and magazines in the past, so it shouldn't be much of a problem.)

I also want to build a subscription base of paid readers too, which means that I'm going to be working on drawing them to my Patreon page too. The idea is that if you pay a monthly subscription (as low as one dollar a month) you will get these op-eds sent to you through email as they are written. Eventually, the idea is that you will have to buy a subscription in order to receive them.

I had hoped that I wouldn't have to do all this stuff to build a subscription base, but it just doesn't seem that most of my readers want to give me any money to support indie media in Guelph. (I know that I have a lot of readers, because I can track them after I post an article.) What this means is that I'm going to have to laboriously grind away at teasing, cajoling, and, wheedling people into signing up through Patreon. I wish I didn't have to do it, because the time I spend marketing this blog will be time I cannot spend researching and writing my articles.

The problem is, however, that I'm doing all of this with one hand tied behind my back. The vast majority of stuff you read on the Web is designed to get you to support it financially. The editorial decisions are made specifically on the basis of how many "clicks" associated advertisements will come from an article, and, how often you will share a story with friends of social media.

Just to illustrate this point, I recently heard an interview with several journalists on the "cannabis beat" talk about why there was such an avalanche of stories about legalization. They all admitted that it was simply because their editors thought that the stories produced would be shared and generate "clicks". In contrast, Jesse Brown at "Canada Land" just started producing a series of important podcasts about the rash of murders of young First Nation's people in Thunder Bay . Brown has been on the air for months cajoling his listeners to pony up some money in order to pay a reporter to work on this file (yup, I put some money into it myself---a lot of the money I get from subscribers gets recycled this way.) Not a lot of "clicks" in stories about children being murdered and tossed in the river I suppose, so Jesse has to really fight for the resources he needs to cover the news.

Anyway, I loathe having to be so damned pushy about subscribing to this thing. But I know that I'm producing something that is a real service to the community because I get so much verbal support from people who are real experts on the subjects I am covering. I also know that a lot of "progressive" people complained bitterly about the demise of "the Mercury"---but I have yet to see much support from these folks in terms of cold hard cash. How come? Don't they really care about the existence of an independent, object source of information?

Again, I have to acknowledge the support that I am getting from the people who've already subscribed. You are AWESOME! Your money is also moral support for what I do, and it's why I am inspired to continue with the work. I wish I didn't have to constantly whine about finances, but I understand that that is the only way that we can wean readers off the idea that news is, and always should be "free". :-(