in Nepal

Internet access is not censored here but I still might not be online frequently given that the connections are either rather dodgy or expensive. I have posted 50 Japan photos to my Facebook profile which is mostly public. One of these days I will do a blogpost about each of the 75+ countries I will have been to by this summer but it won't be today!

bringing sovereign income hedging to Alberta

I have not had much blogging opportunity in recent weeks, not least because it requires a fair bit of set up to worm through the Great Firewall of China to blog.

But this is quick note to ask current and potential Wildrose Alliance members to contact me at bdell555 [at] gmail.com if they are interested in adding their name to a proposal I hope to float at the AGM in 3 months, namely, a proposal calling for hedging of natural resource revenue. The P"C" government essentially made a mockery of its own Fiscal Responsibility legislation in the last decade, such that I think Wildrose should try to be more imaginative in terms of the legislation it proposes on this front. The best way to control spending is to not let politicians get their hands on temporary windfall revenue in the first place.

in China

Within an hour of arriving in Qingdao I encountered all of the classic Chinese staples:
- a meal for less than $2 (would have been $9 in Japan and $7 in Canada)
- cheap internet
- the guy next to me in the internet place both smoking AND spitting
- the Great Firewall of China

Censorship levels seems to be increasing every year... ALL blogspot sites seem to be censored this time although I have managed a workaround that allows me to post this note. We will see how long this works, but I should have the time to post more in the future assuming this continues and the price of getting online is much more reasonable here than in Japan.

Twitter seems to be thoroughly blocked... in my Twitter box to the right, for example, I see nothing and the home page for twitter.com will not load. For Facebook it is also "Oops! This link appears to be broken." in Chinese. Wikipedia, interestingly enough, appears unblocked.

in Okinawa

I have not been blogging lately as I have been on the road, although there have been some interesting developments in Alberta politics, not least being the boundary change proposals. To make the most out of my Japan Rail Pass it was go-go-go this past week.

This Saturday morning (in Okinawa`s capital, Naha) I was woken up by... an earthquake. The noise of the shaking was as much a wakeup call as the movement itself. I happened to be in the capsule of a Japanese capsule hotel, which is evidently a good place to be since nothing would land on me and it is, in fact, extremely rare for buildings to pancake because of earthquakes in developed countries; - most people who are killed are those who tried to run outside and where hit by falling masonry while going out the door, etc. Peeking my head out the capsule it was apparent that the rest of the capsule occupants on my floor were all woken up as well. For all that, no objects seem to have been displaced anywhere such that there was any evidence that there had been as much shaking as I felt.

My first concern was that I was far from the epicenter and there was a disaster in the making, possibly from a tidal wave, for those closer. But as it turned out, I was already in one of the closest communities, and although I thought 80 km constitued close to the epicenter, apparently that is not that close unless it is a truly massive earthquake. Although Haiti was also hit by a magnitude 7, some Haitians were right on top of the epicenter and the effect of an earthquake on a developed and undeveloped country are furthermore, it seems, enormously different.

I searched news.google.com for "earthquake", and nothing recent came up for quite a while, after which it occurred to me to check the US Geological Survey website. The USGS map indicated that I was on the Okinawa coast that was opposite to the epicentre, and so while there is some wraparound effect with tsunamis, for there to be much danger on my side of the island it would have to be an enormous tsunami on the directly exposed east coast.

Although a couple people went to check a television for news, most were back snoring again quite quickly. Interestingly, newsflow to news.google.com seemed to mostly come in a rush as the story briefly topped the headlines. The USGS indicated that it received just a half dozen reports from Naha, population 300 000 plus, but more than 100 from equidistant from the epicentre Chatan, population 25 000, which led me to the (correct) assumption that there is a US military base there. As an aside, the US military presence in Okinawa is reportedly THE issue between Japan and the US right now, since Japan`s new centre-left government is keen on seeing the Americans ship ouｔ。

Alberta at the Olympics

Below is the gift package they were handing out at the Alberta Pavilion.

























Perhaps there is an association between the province and chapped lips?

Media celebrity for Edmonton? CFRN sports host Don Short:


















I watched Lindsay Blackett take the stage to announce some prizes for correct answers to trivia questions (a sample correct answer: a giant easter egg). Cindy Ady was supposed to arrive later in the day but the Premier was reportedly fogged in in Alberta... meanwhile it was glorious sunshine in Vancouver on Wednesday.

A protester completed the scene.

Canadian Conservatives underperforming in polls

The Progressive Conservatives' massive landslide in 1984 should be considered together with Reagan's sweep of 49 out of 50 states' electoral college votes in November of that year, and with Maggie Thatcher's landslide in Britain of June 1983. In eastern Europe, seeds were being sown that led to the collapse of several communist regimes by the end of the decade. A lot of people scoff at the idea that conservatives could really be riding high in 2010/2011 when the global economy took a nosedive in late 2008 and early 2009, but one should just look at what happened at the polls in the wake of the recession of 1981/1982.

Those who went through Junior High or High School during the 80s are now appearing in US polling as one of the most conservative demographics. These Alex P Keatons (Reagan reportedly said Family Ties was his favourite TV show) are thought to have gone decisively for Scott P Brown in last month's Massachusetts Senate election. Scott Brown's election underlined a year long decline in popularity for President Obama and the Democrats. A Gallup poll in late August found that 45% of Americans identified with or leaned towards the Democratic Party vs 40% for the Republicans. In January 2009, it was 52% Dem and 35% Republican. European elections in 2009 also showed a distinct move to the right. The dominant question concerning the next British election, which must be held by June of this year, is not whether Gordon Brown's Labour government will be defeated but whether the scale of Labour's defeat will approach the nadir the party registered in the early 80s. Although British MPs voted today to hold a referendum on ditching the first-past-the-post system, the referendum would not be held for many months yet.

To be sure, the 2010s appear unlikely at this stage to represent the conservative renaissance that the 1980s were. But the reality is that Canada's federal Conservative party should be doing better than it is in the polls given international trends of the last 12 months. EKOS' latest poll, for example, shows the Liberals ahead 31.9% to 31.0%. This suggests that the party may be losing support for reasons other than conservativism losing popularity. I cannot see how proroguing Parliament could have helped the party, and strikes me as an example of how the culture of the party is limiting its appeal. The party could use more transparency and more ideology on economic issues. With respect to the latter point, I recommend, as usual, Andrew Coyne.

As one can see from the Cato Institute graph below, the move towards smaller government in the 90s under Clinton south of the border and under the Liberals north of the border stalled out with the election of GWB in November 2000 and the Tories' electoral emergence in 2004, which forced a minority Parliament (Harper then moved into the Prime Minister's residence in 2006).














This graph is now getting dated, as 2009 and 2010 are seeing significant increases in government spending relative to the size of the economy in both countries. Of note here is that there is no clear popular mandate for this government expansion. As the graph below based on President Obama's 2011 Budget indicates (note: this graph just refers to the federal government, unlike the previous one) federal spending set to significantly exceed its long term average relative to the US economy.

As problematic as it is to assert a popular demand for smaller government at this point in time, it is pretty easy to claim that the American public is clearly not happy at the moment, and that alone should be enough to suggest that more political dangers exist on the overspending side than underspending. Will the next Tory budget reflect this, or will the Harper Conservatives continue to obsess over politics at the expense of policy?

There is an interesting side note to the EKOS poll. In Alberta, the Greens are third after the Liberals, with 13%. The share going to "Other" is 6.2% in the province, versus 2.4% nationally. According to EKOS, "This may reflect some disenchantment with the Conservative brand in provincial politics, where the Wildrose Alliance Party is challenging the Progressive Conservatives."

a first attempt with Windows Live Movie Maker

I took the photos and short video clips that I shot a little over two years ago of an odd sight in the former capital of South Vietnam and put them together with the Movie Maker utility that came with the Windows 7 installed on my new Sony laptop. In terms of production it's no Avatar, but when I came across Bobby Vee's 1961 tune "Walkin With My Angel" I decided I must attach my orangutan media to the track. I reckoned the video was a bit short so extended it and added some audio sung by 10 year old Aaron Carter... seemed the macho thing to do!

I should say that I am alive to the contention that orangutans walking upright could potentially be analogous to dancing bears, which in Europe have led to protests against forcing animals to perform unnatural stunts. But given the fact that orangutans will apparently walk upright for extended periods of time on their own volition, and this particular spectacle not being organized for an audience, I thought it fair to conclude that it's just cute, absent the contrary opinion of an orangutan expert.