A reader writes in response to my Bookshelf post on Kafka's The Trial.

I sadly concur with your thoughts on the decline of literature in your recent blog post on Kafka’s The Trial. There’s another factor, I believe, in the decline of the novel, which is that the nature of the society in which novels are set has fundamentally changed in the last half century. I’m struck when reading Anna Karenina, or Middlemarch, how a character’s actions – a woman’s decision to dance with a certain man at a ball, or to use a certain tone of voice in speaking to another character – can entrain three or four pages detailing the ramifying seismic consequences of the act. Society then mattered, its unity and solidarity and morality had real importance to the vital concerns of its members. There was no safety net of welfare, or of the automation and superabundance of the consumer society. And individual human action in relation to society’s expectations mattered then commensurately.
 
I was born in 1954, and can still remember how, around 1965, a teenage boy who let his hair grow long could be sent home from school by the vice-principal, or ostracized by his peers, despite his being an A student, a star athlete, a regular churchgoer. Choosing to flout society’s expectations had consequences. I wouldn’t think that anyone born after, say, 1960 (A quick check of Wikipedia tells me you were born in 1960 – you just made it!) would have any living memory of a time when the interests of society carried any significant weight in opposition to the interests of the individual. And I think the stuff of novels is largely the contention between individual desires and societal expectations.
 
Thank you for your always stimulating and clear-headed writing. I’m already camped out on the doorstep of NewMajority.com waiting for it to open, and I wish you the greatest success with it.

The CBC has invited Canadians to choose a playlist that will best reflect Canada to the new president. There can be only one serious contender. Here.

OK, OK, maybe this.

Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi speaking on Hamas TV, as reported by Memri.or

"Being killed is nothing new to us. Martyrdom is nothing new to us. You threaten to kill us?! By Allah, you are threatening us with what we desire more than anything. You are threatening us with what our souls yearn for. ...
  
"By Allah, I wish I could carry my gear, carry my gun, and be among you. I wish I could stand among the youth of the Al-Qassam Brigades, passing them one of their missiles, wiping from their faces the dust of a missile that was launched, or crying 'Allah Akbar' along with them. By Allah, I wish I could do that."

From Stuart Koehl, a defense expert well known to all of us at NRO:

I find the Panetta appointment as puzzling as you. In reality, the DCI can't do that much about how the Agency works, but he can have a definite effect on Agency morale. John Deutsch and his minion Nora Slotkin, for instance, had little effect on how the Agency did business, but they totally demoralized the workforce by their attempts at managerial reform, which deluged everyone with massive amounts of chickenshit that made it more difficult to do productive work and had the tendency to penalize the competent to benefit those adept at gaming the system.

The only way the DCI can really change the direction of the Agency is through the budget, as Stan Turner did when he gutted the Directorate of Operations. Adding or eliminating slots has an immediate and noticeable effect. That said, I am not all that impressed with how the Agency over the last eight years has used its budget in hiring personnel. It is, at this point, a hopelessly dysfunctional organization incapable of fulfilling its mission. Up to me, I would abolish it, or at the very least, emasculate it and create a parallel organization to do its job for it.

Your story of Panetta as OMB Director vowing vengeance on Jim Woolsey should give most Agency lovers a sense of relief. The logic of Washington working the way it does, Panetta will be as dogged in defending the prerogatives of his new fiefdom as he was in defending those of his old one. I think, confronted with a plan for massive budget cuts, Panetta would respond in exactly the same way as his nemesis Woolsey.

Mike Ledeen thinks the main purpose of the appointment is to protect Obama from leaky CIA staff that so bedeviled Bush. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. On the other hand, it may be the beginning of a concerted effort to downgrade the status of the DCI and elevate the DNI as the real focal point of intelligence policy. We will see, depending on whether Obama picks a savvy intelligence professional for the latter office, which will then begin to siphon power away from Langley.

Another theory from a Washington friend: Hillary pushed Panetta to place an ally at CIA, to counter the potential rivalry from James Jones at NSC.

The certification of Al Franken as senator-elect from Minnesota is as good a reason as any to reproduce a review I wrote five years ago of Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

INSIDE JOKE
Review of "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" by Al Franken
November 1, 2003, Commentary

"Telling the truth is something I take seriously, and I try to hold myself to an impossibly high standard." - Al Franken
 
This time, however, Al Franken may have set the bar too high. By his own account, the self-appointed scourge of right-wing lies and liars has something of a truth problem himself. But let him tell the story:
 

April 21, 2003
 
Dear Attorney General Ashcroft,
 
I am currently a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where I am working on a book about abstinence programs in our public schools entitled, Savin' It:
 ... The book's fourth chapter, "Role Modelin' It!," will feature the personal stories of abstinence heroes for our nation's young people to emulate.. I would very much appreciate it if you could share your abstinence story. So far, I have received wonderful testimonies from HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, William J. Bennett, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, Cardinal Egan, Senator Rick Santorum, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. (I'm still hoping to hear back from the President!)
 

And so on. The letter was a pretty obvious con, and none of the 28 people to whom Franken sent it was fooled. Somebody even tipped off the Kennedy School that Franken was misusing its stationery. He apologized to Harvard--but not to any of his intended victims.
 
Anybody can type out a deceitful letter. (Well, almost anybody.) To lie to people's faces--and to do it over and over again--requires a more hardened character. Franken, though, is up to the challenge. He devotes a lengthy chapter of this book to an "elaborate ruse" (his words) intended to extract embarrassing material about Bob Jones University. (Just why he thought this material--or, for that matter, his abstinence-education material--might be relevant to a book about right-wing lying is something of a mystery.) First he asked his son to submit a bogus application to Bob Jones; then, when the boy begged to be released, Franken had one of his research assistants apply, this time traveling with the assistant to South Carolina to pursue the joke in person.
 
They got caught. "Look," Franken reports the man from the public-liaison office saying, "We've had enough of being made fun of... If you're legit, I'd be happy to show you anything you want to see. But we're not going to put our heads on the chopping block again." Franken acknowledges that "even while being hostile, [the man] was extremely nice about it."
 
Franken might well excuse these excursions into deception as comedy--pure entertainment. But that only raises another mystery: how does a man who values truth so highly as Franken says he does, and is so plainly eager to have his readers think him a nice guy, convince himself that it is OK to deceive people in order to lure them into doing foolish things that will cause others to laugh at them? Is that not compounding deceit with cruelty?
 
But Franken has an excuse for that, too: "I never lie. That is, unless it is absolutely necessary." And this time, one gathers, it has been absolutely necessary. For the latest book from America's most famous left-wing comic needs all the help it can get.
 
That may sound like a strange thing to say about a number-one bestseller. Franken is surely entitled to feel that his book has succeeded beyond all expectations. And, just as advertised, he and the fourteen research assistants provided him by Harvard University have caught some important conservative journalists and politicians in a number of embarrassing errors. Anne Coulter, for example, has identified Newsweek's Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas as the son of Norman Thomas, the famous socialist politician of the 1920's and 30's. Evan Thomas is not Norman Thomas's son. He is his grandson. Gotcha.
 
And yet, even Al Franken's keenest fans may sense that, in most of the "lies" he detects, there is (shall we say) a lack of oomph. Who would lay out $ 24.95 to be told that George W. Bush's claim to have eliminated income taxes for millions of low-income taxpayers is a lie because it says nothing about payroll and excise taxes? If that kind of thing gets you excited, there are ten Democratic presidential candidates who will say it to you for free--and, if yon live in Iowa or New Hampshire, even throw in a steak dinner or fish fry to thank you for listening.
 
No, the appeal of Franken's book cannot rest in its repetition of familiar Democratic talking points. It must rest, instead, on Franken's purported ability, to transform familiar Democratic talking points into knee-slapping hilarity. But it is just there that Lies repeatedly fails.
 
Not that Franken is unamusing: there are bits of Lies that might elicit chuckles even from those who do not share his politics:

God chose me to write this book... The reason I know God chose me is because God spoke to me personally. God began our conversation by clearing something up. Some of George W. Bush's friends say that Bush believes God called him to be President during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore the popular vote and, God thought, the electoral college. "THAT WORKED FOR EVERYONE ELSE!," God said."What about Tilden?," I asked, referring to the 1876 debacle. "QUIET!" God snapped.

As I say: chuckles. Humor is notoriously subjective, but I suspect that even the most die-hard Democrat will go many, many pages between belly laughs--pages that are instead filled with more characteristic charmers like this one:

In contrast to [John Walker] Lindh's depraved [California] childhood environment, [conservative talk-show host Sean] Hannity trumpets his Long Island childhood in the protective embrace of the Catholic Church. Gee, nothing weird happened to cute little boys in the Catholic Church, eh, Sean? Nothing that would explain your bizarre fixation with our nation's homosexuals.

Not to be invidious, but the best right-wing funny men--P.J. O'Rourke, Rob Long, Mark Steyn--truly are laugh-out-loud funny. I have been on airplanes on days when Steyn's column is running in the local paper and heard the laughs exploding from the seat in front of me like artillery shells out of a howitzer. There is nothing howitzer-like about Franken. If he resembles anyone, it is Russell Baker, the New York Times humorist who churned out almost four decades' worth of columns that his admirers praised as "wry" and his non-admirers skipped for their intolerable smugness.
 
So WHY, then, if it is not for the content, and not for the humor, are liberal-minded Americans buying up this book by the boxcar-load? (An Al Franken wannabe might reply, "What else are they going to read? Hillary?" But that would be mean-spirited.) Obviously, a book so successful is filling some vast, unmet need. What is it?
 
Let me attempt an answer. Today's liberal-Left confronts a baffling predicament. For the first time since the early 1950's, Republicans hold the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. For the first two years of the Bush presidency, liberals could dismiss this amazing breakthrough as the product of a freak presidential election. But then the Republicans went on to enlarge their majorities in the 2002 off-year elections--something that had not occurred under a Republican president since at least Teddy Roosevelt's time.
 
How to explain this crushing turn of events? In the 1980's, many Democrats had responded to a prior wave of Republican success, the one that gave the country first Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan, with similar bafflement and rage. But, back then, Democratic governors based in the practical world of state politics were able to exert some restraint upon their party's tendency, when cut off from power, to veer into bitterness, paranoia, and extremism. The governors created the Democratic Leadership Council, from which Bill Clinton rose to win the presidency.
 
Today's Democrats are looking not for answers but for villains and scapegoats. This is the need that Al Franken's book satisfies--like Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?, and Joe Conason's Big Lies before it and like many more that are sure to follow. All of them propound a single message: "We Democrats did not lose power because of our own mistakes. We lost because we were cheated. We lost because the other side lied--and because it controls the media that allow it to lie and get away with lying."
 
Of course, conservatives and Republicans also devour books that bash the other side and the media, like Bernard Goldberg's Bias and Anne Coulter's Slander. But there is a noticeable difference between, for example, Goldberg's take on CBS and Franken's assessment of Fox News. Goldberg attacks media bias as an evil in itself. Franken blames right-wing media deceit for depriving liberals of the political power that is rightly theirs. "The members of the right-wing media are not interested in conveying the truth. That's not what they are for," writes Franken in a pair of sentences that (substituting "left-wing" for "right-wing") could easily have appeared in Goldberg's book. But the sentence that follows it could not: "They"--the media--"are an indispensable component of the right-wing machine that has taken over our country." In short, where Goldberg's is a book about the media, Franken's is a book about political power, about how those who should rightfully hold it have lost it, and about how to get it back.
 
"What went wrong?" is the question with which the eminent scholar Bernard Lewis titles his book about the intellectual history of the Muslim Middle East. How had the once-wealthy and all-conquering Muslim world been overtaken by the despised Christian West? Al Franken's Lies can be read as one Democrat's attempt to grapple with an analogous problem. Unfortunately, like the enraged Muslims whom we meet in Lewis's book, Franken repudiates both self-examination and self criticism. It is all somebody else's fault. The faithful have nothing to learn from anybody. The solution to their problems is not reform, and it is certainly not self-criticism. It is a return to the fundamentals of the faith--and war against the unbelievers.


 

 ... is (surprise, surprise) being stolen by Hamas.

Hamas has set up an independent hospital in the Gaza Strip to treat its operatives wounded in fighting with the IDF - and, according to Israeli estimates, it is pilfering a significant portion of the medicine allowed into the Strip, senior defense officials told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

The creation of the new post of Director of National Intelligence atop the old post of Director of Central Intelligence opened one of those intense bureaucratic problems that can paralyze a government: Who does what?

With his nominations of Dennis Blair and Leon Panetta, President-elect Obama has drawn a clear line. Blair (a former commander in chief of the Navy's Pacific Command, a former associate director of central intelligence, and a former president of the Institute for Defense Analysis) will run the US intelligence establishment.

Leon Panetta, a former budget director and White House Chief of Staff whose main connection to the world of intelligence was to write a letter denouncing the Bush administration's detainee policies, is there to appease the Democratic left.

It does not get any neater than that.

Anne Applebaum argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be ended by outsiders. It will end only when the Palestinians accept that they cannot get a better deal through violence. The so-called peace process is an elaborate and wearisome attempt to deny this reality.

 Hamas and its followers believe that the continuing firing of rockets into southern Israel will, sooner or later, result in the dissolution of the Jewish state. The Israelis -- both on the "peacenik" left and the more bellicose right -- believe that the only way to prevent Hamas from firing rockets is to fight back. Intervention -- whether by well-meaning Europeans, U.N. delegations, Russian envoys (or even Condoleezza Rice, who has wisely stayed home, so far) -- can postpone the conflict but cannot halt the violence, at least not until one side or the other surrenders.

That brief, halcyon period of the Oslo peace process was possible because this is precisely what happened: a combination of Russian emigration into Israel, the end of Soviet support and general weariness led at least a part of the Palestinian leadership to conclude, after 30 years, that it would never push Israel into the sea. At least some of the equally weary Israeli leaders came to believe that their occupation policies were doing Israel more harm than good and that they would gain more from negotiating than from fighting. Further negotiations will make sense only when Hamas's leaders -- currently emboldened by a combination of popular indignation and Iranian support -- finally arrive at the same conclusion as their secular counterparts, and a new generation of Israelis is persuaded to believe them.

Tyler Cowen makes a point that needs to be more widely heard:

The biggest problem with a fiscal stimulus is this: our economic problems stem from having spent too much in the first place. Now that our homes are no longer rising in value every year and America is aging, more saving is in order, not more spending. Recovery will come only when we discover which new and valuable things the economy should produce as it shifts out of real estate and finance. Simply borrowing and doling out more cash doesn't solve that problem.

From the CIA's own on-line institutional history:

[Former CIA Director James] Woolsey was determined to work closely with the new leaders of DOD .... In particular, Woolsey pressed for progress in developing unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance in close cooperation with DOD. ...

Woolsey also used DOD as an ally in preparing and defending the Intelligence Community’s program and budget. Leon Panetta, the Clinton administration’s first director of OMB, had indicated to Woolsey early in 1993 that OMB was considering providing the DCI with top-line guidance, perhaps with a publicly disclosed figure, and seeking sizable out-year cuts in intelligence spending. Woolsey also faced skeptical audiences in Congress anxious to find an additional “peace dividend” in intelligence spending as well as in the larger defense budget. From Woolsey’s perspective, he had the unenviable task of managing declining intelligence budgets in an era of multiplying intelligence targets (the “poisonous snakes”), and he did not wish to see each intelligence agency develop its own downsizing plan in isolation. Downsizing in fact offered the DCI an opportunity if he could use it as an incentive to advance community integration.

Woolsey was willing to accommodate such pressures to some degree (among his first major decisions as DCI were cancellations of major collection programs no longer viewed as affordable), but he fought tenaciously to limit the cuts and to justify what he considered a responsible level of NFIP spending. This stance earned him in March 1993 press attention that unfairly portrayed him as not on board with overall administration policy. In April he wrote to the president, giving him a carefully framed explanation of how his planned program—despite a near-term increase—would achieve the five-year savings goals Clinton had set for intelligence. The spending issue at times preoccupied Woolsey, and it reinforced his inclination to cleave closely to DOD. ...

Woolsey’s aggressive defense ... came at some cost in his relationships with OMB and the White House. From OMB’s perspective, he came across as confrontational in his efforts to keep OMB from examining, and possibly cutting, his budget. ... DCI and DOD leaders, in a personal meeting with President Clinton, gained the president’s agreement—over OMB objections—to a program and budget Woolsey had worked out in concert with DOD. The DCI was almost euphoric about his success as he returned to CIA headquarters, but he soon received a message from Panetta that Woolsey would “pay” for his budget victory.

A stirring speech by Kashmir's elected new chief minister, Omar Abdullah.

I am a Muslim, and I am an Indian, and I see no distinction between the two. I see no reason why I as a Muslim have to fear a deal between India and the United States of America. This is a deal between two countries - it is a deal between, we hope, two countries that will be two equals. The enemies of Indian Muslims are not the Americans. The enemies of Indian Muslims are not deals like this. The enemies of Indian Muslims are the same enemies that all the poor people of India face: poverty, hunger, unemployment, lack of development, and the absence of a voice.

Another despoliation of the landscape by Ontario's allegedly green government:

Here in our small town of Niagara on the Lake,  we are faced with a huge behemoth or a project conceived by the National Arts Centre and the Toronto Symphony Orchestras, and commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Recreatiion,  Falls Management Corporation, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, and the Niagara Economic Development Corporation and in progress since 2004.  Of course NOTL residents had to hear of it from the Toronto newspapers sometime last year.  The idea is for a national summer festival like Tanglewood.
 
This outdoor amphitheatre with fixed seating and lawn seating to accommodate up to 12,000 people, a parking lot for over 2,000 vehicles, 50 outdoor concerts over a 17 week period in the summer months, a time when our little town is crowded with tourists already, some of whom come for the Shaw Festival, but mostly for a day trip will change the whole character of the town, which people have said  they like to visit because it is quiet and pretty and quaint.
 
These outside interests have chosen Parks Canada lands, which are on Lakeshore Road right across from a really nice major subdivision of long standing, Garrison Village, and next to another subdivision called Chatacquea.  It will be within the Ontario Government's greenbelt area, but of course the feds  can do what they want.  It is within a five minute drive from our busy town centre, close to all residential areas and although they promise great accoustical things, we all know that these concerts will be heard all over town, to say nothing of the rehearsals themselves.
 
I don't know if you have ever been in NOTL in tourist season, but if you have experienced the drive here on the Queen Elizabeth Hwy. or have used the bridges from the U.S. you will know how difficult it is to get to, how very little parking there is in town, metres are expensive, and the four or five blocks of sidewalks on Queen Street make walking difficult.
 
Of course this will cost a lot of money, thirty percent from the feds, thirty percent from the province, and thirty percent from fundraising.  The Sewage lagoons presently on the site have to be removed, roads will have to have major upgrades.  In the feasibility study which can be seen on www.projectniagara.ca on page 8 they even say that "it has the potential for break even (sustainable) operation."  Nothing guaranteed of course!  As we are well aware, from the experience of our Shaw Festival Theatre, our local Museum, the Fort George, these things always need more money.  They are never, ever self-supporting, and taxpayers will be left on the hook.  With only so many tourist dollars to go around, there is the fear that the Shaw will suffer, they already are only playing to seventy percent of their capacity.
 
It has been very difficult to obtain information from our town, the region, the province, the feds, in fact we expect to wake up one day and find that it is a GO.
 
Why do people think that by crowding more people into a tiny little area this will bring more people and money to town?  What is even more infuriating is the it is the TSO and the National Arts Centre Orchestras that have imposed this thing on the people of Niagara on the Lake.  With only three two lane roads in and out of town, it will be a logistical to say nothing of a financial nightmare.

Tom Gross notes:

Several papers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have reported that among the “civilian dead” in Gaza in recent days are Fatah supporters executed by Hamas in hospitals, schools and other locations. (Unsurprisingly anti-Israel media in Britain, France and elsewhere have misled readers and viewers to believe they are part of a death toll Israel is responsible for.)

For example, here buried in one Washington Post report from Gaza is the following: “On Sunday, doctors said, men believed to be Hamas fighters grabbed a patient, accusing him of being an Israeli collaborator. The gunmen shot him dead. ‘They took revenge,’ Khalaf said.”

And this New York Times report, for instance, mentions Hamas killed six people in one Gaza hospital alone in a 24-hour period:

“Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way. In the fourth-floor orthopaedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head. Mr. Hajoj, like five others killed at the hospital this way in 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel.” (This is catch-all excuse Hamas uses to justify the murder of all those who dare voice public criticism of it.)

Khaled Abu Toameh, chief Palestinian correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, who is himself a Palestinian ... and who has excellent sources in Gaza, reports that on Saturday and Sunday alone, Hamas executed 35 Fatah activists and shot around another 75 in the legs. Others had their hands broken or were placed under house arrest.

One example is that of Wisam Abu Jalhoum, a Fatah activist from the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, who was shot in the legs by Hamas militiamen for allegedly expressing joy over Israeli air strikes on Hamas targets.

Fahmi Za’arir, a Fatah spokesman, named two of the Fatah leaders in Gaza “executed” by Hamas on Saturday as Nasser Muhana and Saher al-Silawi.

Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah forces in a bloody coup in June 2007 in which 400 Palestinians were brutally killed by Hamas, including people who were handcuffed and then thrown off Gaza high rises.

Toronto United Jewish Appeal will hold a Rally for Israel at Congregation Beth Tzedec. Details here.

Tom Ricks has a new blog at Foreign Policy magazine. Few American reporters have better and deeper military sources than Ricks, so I look forward to adding this to my daily read.

Any videographer worth his or her salt knows how to make a gathering of 11 people look like a huge crowd: just keep the shot super tight. For all the heavy breathing about the wave of international protests against Israel, I keep noticing that the crowd shots at the Gaza protests have been cropped very, very tight indeed. A friend in Paris confirms:

It seems that the French anti-Israel crowd is not what it used to be. Last week, they managed to organise a demonstration with about a thousand people in the North of Paris, that is, where most North African immigrants live. They didn't even manage to make the traditional Bastille-République march or to gather near the Foreign ministry.

My column in the National Post about Ontario's irrational windpower policy has elicited an electric surge of very interesting responses.

The general conclusion: However costly, however uneconomic, however outright irrational you might have imagined windpower to be - the reality is even worse. Some samples:

From Doug Gallagher in Toronto:

I worked for 10 years in the nuclear power industry in Ontario. I also understand how wind mills work, and how inefficient they really are.

Power levels for wind mills reported in the media are invariably peak power levels, and not average power levels. Typically, the average power out of a windmill is about 20% of peak power. The wind mill on the CNE grounds is rated at 750 kwh, so average power would be around 150 kwh, or about 108,000,000 kw per month assuming enough wind to power it 24 hours a day. The average house in Toronto uses about 1,000 kwh per month, or 12,000 kwh per year. That works out to enough power for about 108,000 households from the windmill at the CNE - theoretically. Many times while walking at the water's edge in south Etobicoke I have seen the CNE windmill stalk-still. 0 watts output.

The larger issue with power generation in Ontario is that it is government owned with the ensuing inefficiencies. I saw this first-hand will working with the former Ontario Hydro. Undoubtedly power generation costs are subsidized and the price of hydro is held artificially low. This as you point out is for political reasons. Technical decisions made by non-technical people for political reasons guarantees a bad outcome.

In California, when they were facing rotating blackouts, and brownouts, Gov. Arnie solved the problem overnight by increasing the cost of hydro to 17 cents per kwh, as opposed to the 5.6 cents per kwh Ontario now charges. Demand plummeted, and supply became ample enough to allow time to build more capacity.

Supply and demand works every time.

Windmills are a legacy of the Middle Ages. Going that route means we will have power when the wind blows, and not when we need it. Clean coal and natural gas fired generators will provide power when we need it, cost effectively.

Raising the cost of hydro to the true cost of generation would also ensure we waste much less of it.

Update and correction from reader Alasdair Robinson:

The lone windmill at CNE produces 1800 MW-hr's of energy per year, or enough to power 250 homes, not the 108,000 homes claimed by Doug.  His problem is mixing kW-hours with kW's.  The turbine has a power rating of 750 kW so it could theoretically produce 0.75 MW x 24 hrs/day x 365 days/year = 6570MW-hrs/yr.  But since wind turbines produce only about 25-30% of their theoretical capacity, the output of the windmill is ~1800MW-hrs/yr.  The average house uses 0.6MW-hrs/month or 7.2MW-hrs/yr.  So this turbine can supply power for ~250 homes.

From a member of the Ontario provincial parliament:

At the present time OPG [Ontario Power Generation, the provincially owned power monopoly] is compelled to pay $0.42 per kilowatt hour for wind & solar energy which they then resell at $0.05 for a loss of $0.37. In addition there are significant capital grants available for wind farms through various government renewable energy programs.

From another reader:

During the 1950's I worked for Ontario Hydro in Mechanical Maintenance of generating stations. Even then we found that we could not afford to keep small stations manned, because of the labour costs. All wind turbines are tiny power contributors, even when running, and no one seems to have taken into account that they will need to be maintained. When you look at the huge costs involved in putting them up, and then think about replacing a bearing, the original capital cost is insignificant. I predict that in a few years many of these will be abandoned, as the maintenance costs are unaffordable.

Israel is acting defensively, says the EU presidency, currently held by the Czechs.

Windpower seems merely irrational and expensive - until it threatens to despoil a landscape you care about. My column for the National Post is up early:

When people in places such as Prince Edward County hear about “the environment,” they think of their environment. They think responsible stewardship means protecting what is lovely and natural. To them, it seems perverse to ruin the landscape in the name of preserving the environment. So they resist.

To deal with this resistance, the Green Energy Act proposes to strip local governments of their zoning powers. (In the draft’s own words, the province will propose: “Streamlined regulatory and approvals processes that enable the rapid but prudent development of green energy projects across the province, reducing uncertainty and transaction costs to all involved.”)

It is important to realize that local scrutiny is often the only scrutiny a wind project gets. Unless a project uses federal money or land, there is no federal environmental assessment. Smaller projects are exempt from provincial assessment as well, and bigger projects can count on a very friendly hearing.
Not all localities will be ignored. There will be special consultation with First Nations/Métis communities (and a special piece of the action for them as well). But for everybody else, Ontario’s message is: Shut up and eat your peas.

Three things Bush did right is the theme of my contribution to Newsweek's "New World" issue. You can read the essay here.

Bob Rosenkranz offers a simple but powerful reform in the Wall Street Journal

The problem was not the erroneous ratings per se; everyone misgauges risk and ratings agencies are no different. The problem is that these erroneous ratings were incorporated into law. Regulators should not have relied on ratings agencies to asses the risk of bond holdings. Instead, they should have relied on markets.

When they come to design new regulations to govern capital requirements and investment parameters for financial institutions, Barack Obama and Congress should write ratings agencies out of the regulation of financial institutions. The market is a far better judge of risk and value than any individual analyst, team or firm.

The amount of capital required to hold a fixed-income security should be determined not by a rating but by its yield, expressed as a spread over Treasurys. The higher the spread, the riskier the market has determined the asset to be, and more capital should be required to hold it.

Similarly, financial institutions should be required to set aside a percentage of their interest income every year as reserves for credit losses; the higher the spread, the higher the reserve percentage. Should spreads widen, the share of the return set aside for reserves should increase, thus gradually increasing reserves commensurate with the market's perception of increased risk.

Great tech news!

I used to rely on a program called Foldershare to sync my data across computers. For a time, it worked beautifully. Then alas Foldershare was bought by Microsoft, folded into one of their dreaded consumer so-called service programs, and stopped working altogether, at least for Mac users. I experimented with Mac's iDisk, never very happily. But now there is a fantastic new program, that works brilliantly to sync Mac files, DropBox, www.getdropbox.com.

It works as well as the old Foldershare at its best - and its interface is far better designed, more intuitive and requiring much less keystroking. They give away 2 gigs of storage space for free, and you can sign up for more for $10 a month. It's worth the money, if only to prevent Microsoft from buying and ruining this program too.

But I'm not a total Mac acolyte. My New Year's resolution is to submit to reason, and replace my iPhone with a Blackberry. The iPhone itself is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It's a wonderful device for listening to audiobooks, or enjoying photos, or carrying datebooks and addressbooks. But as a communications device, you'd do better to rely on carrier pigeons.

I recognize that the problem originates in AT&T's appalling network. My iPhone works splendidly in Canada, where it picks up the Rogers network. For that matter, I suffered  no dropped calls when I used my iPhone in Kabul. The last time I went to New York City, however, it dropped 6 in a row. Service in Washington is not quite so bad as that, but it's plenty bad enough. Email is nearly as slow and irritating as voice.

Until AT&T can equal the service standards of Afghanistan's cellphone carriers, I'm sadly crossing the street to Verizon.

Here's an important eyewitness account of the big decisions by one of the people closest to the action, Jay Lefkowitz, in the current Commentary.

James Thurber begins one of his essays with the remark, "Probably nobody should have had as many dogs in his life as I have had."

I know what he meant. Right now, for example, we have two dogs in the house: a big yellow Lab and an insinuating King Charles spaniel. Most people would think, "That's enough dogs." So actually did my wife and I. That is, until we met Chester.

Our New Year's Day project is to go pick him up and bring him home. And when I worry that perhaps we've overdone it, I am inspired by another remark, this from a friend who lives in a small town on the Atlantic shore. "When people around here see you walking only one big dog, they think, 'What? You don't like dogs?'"

A very happy new year to all readers and friends of NRO and the Frum Diary, human and canine.

... is the theme of my latest column in THE WEEK

The key to Barack Obama’s success to date has been the deft deployment of verbal formulas to reconcile contradictions. It will be interesting to see whether that trick works quite so well in real life..

... launches on January 20: Inauguration Day. I'll be in this space till January 16. I look forward to continuing the conversation through the challenging days ahead.

From a reader with a Hibernian surname:

Your readers will enjoy his last words, a joke at the expense of his executioners: "Take a step or two forward, lads. It will be easier that way."

Michael Tomasky has an interesting column warning that the Burris senate nomination has already begun to explode into a racial conflagration that Barack Obama may not be able to escape.

The Blagojevich-Burris press conference was just a typical circus for a little while. Blago was his defiant self, sticking it to everybody and loving it. Roland Burris, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, played it cool and straight, ducking the questions about Harry Reid refusing to seat him or the Illinois secretary of state's announcement about not certifying him as the senator.

It was crazy, but normal-crazy. Then Bobby Rush showed up. The south side congressman -- the only man ever to defeat Barack Obama in an election -- introduced the racial angle and dramatically raised the stakes.

It must be said that Rush made an entirely fair point. In 2004, when they elected Obama, the voters of Illinois chose an African American senator. And so, in determining who should fill out his term, it's reasonable that race count as a factor. He pointed to Illinois' recent history as the only state that's elected two black senators (Obama and Carol Moseley Braun), arguing that the state has a history on this score that's unique. That's all fair.

But Rush wasn't pleading. He was warning. He was daring Reid and the other senators to deny this black man the seat. I couldn't quite believe my ears when he used the word "lynch," but sure enough he did: he urged the members of the media "not to hang or lynch the appointee as you castigate the appointor." He went on to say that he and his congressional allies would push Reid to reverse his position and said of the prospect of a bunch of white senators denying Burris the seat: "I don't think they wanna go on record doing that."

I covered lots of racial-politics conflagrations in New York in the very racially heated 1980s and 1990s, and I've heard rhetoric like Rush's before, and I've seen its effects. When a black figure issues a public challenge like this, including one of the most heavily freighted dog-whistle words in American political history, to a white politician, sides start to line up. Tempers start to inflame. Whether the white pol stands firm or assents, somebody is going to be really, really unhappy.

Did Obama imagine that he could leave Chicago behind him? Think again - his state's ways are following him to Washington.

... but who better would you like to stand beside you on debate platform. Watch this jaw-droppingly audacious performance on the Bill Maher show, where he explains to "a booing and mooing audience" that whatever they may believe about George Bush, "none of you is smarter than the president."

A fascinating four-day diary by Jonathan Foreman.

I get to Mumbai (almost all residents still call it Bombay even though they have long called themselves Mumbaikars) in the evening, about 24 hours after the terrorists attacked. After walking through the gleaming but half-empty airport terminal, I find it all but impossible to get a cab down to my hotel in Colaba. The drivers are convinced either that the south of the Mumbai peninsula is too dangerous or that a police curfew has cut off all road access to the area. As my hotel has reassured me, it turns out that no such cordon or curfew exists.

The one brave driver willing to take a German businessman and me makes it down to the bottom of the peninsula in a quarter of the usual time. Despite the fact that the emergency is at its height, there are no roadblocks except in the immediate vicinity of the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels. Indeed, when I drop the German at his seaside apartment, we go straight through a police checkpoint that has apparently been abandoned. "Oh, the police always leave the checkpoints at midnight to go to sleep," the businessman tells me. "Security was supposed to have been boosted because they were expecting attacks here after the bombs in Jaipur and Bangalore, especially during Diwali [in early November], but nothing really changed."