Moving day

This miscellany has moved to WordPress.com (at iangarrickmason.wordpress.com) in order to save its author from dealing with HTML more than he deserves to. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Posted at 11.36pm

Young man, not at war

Go read Dennis Perrin's fascinating essay on his youth in the post-Vietnam U.S. Army. Dennis is a fine and honest writer, and his blog is a must-visit.

Posted at 2.30pm

Bright light, bright light!

Like a sunbeam descending unexpectedly from a cloud-filled sky, a bit of environmental good news from the Wall Street Journal. Worried that US states will confront them with a blizzard of differing energy efficiency standards for light bulbs (Nevada's new standards take effect in 2012, California – the silverback gorilla of the environmental standards world – is considering its own), manufacturers like GE and Philips have been meeting with conservation groups to finalize a national plan to remove low-efficiency incandescent light bulbs (which turn only 5% of their electricity input into light) from the market. Lighting accounts for 17.5% of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency, and the U.S. represents one-third of the world market for incandescent bulbs, so a wholesale shift in that country from low-efficiency to high-efficiency bulbs will mark a significant step – though not an immense one – in lowering energy use and carbon emissions. Of course, it’s early days yet. The agreement must be finalized, and then must survive inclusion into (and avoid excision from) a broad energy bill next month; further, the implementation timeframes being talked about are on the order of 10 to 15 years.

But what this highlights is the essential role that governments have to play in mitigating climate change. The voluntarism promoted by Al Gore is laudable and necessary, but insufficient. For its part, the free market has produced energy-efficient fluorescents alright, but they make up only 10% of bulb sales, despite the money consumers can save by using them, and despite all of the public-awareness campaigns promoting them. Generalized consumer preferences toward “green” products have not been able to trump specific consumer preferences for goods with low up-front cash costs and with attributes that they are familiar with. There is not a single fluorescent bulb in my entire house, though I’ve been aware of and favorably disposed toward the option for years. Consumer habits can be tremendously hard to break.

What standards do is enable the achievement of publicly-supported policy objectives, while avoiding the dangers of “picking winners” (i.e. mandating the use of specific technologies). If producers can meet the new standards by improving old incandescent technology -- as some are hoping to do -- then fair enough. If they meet the standards by using fluorescents or LEDs, that’s fine too. The market will move on as vigorously as before, offering consumer choices and producing technical innovations, just as it’s supposed to. Only its boundaries will have changed.

The red sea

The New York Times has worked up a striking interactive graphic showing the expanding proportion of Afghanistan that is rated by the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (which handles staff security training and issues travel advisories) as either "high risk, volatile" (pink areas) or "extreme risk, hostile" (red areas). Moving the slider from the year 2003 (in which only a spattering of zones are labelled "volatile") to the year 2007 (in which virtually the entire southern half of the country is marked either "volatile" or "hostile") is depressing viewing.

If there's a light at the end of this tunnel, it doesn't seem to be the colour we were hoping for.

Posted at 9.00pm

Unknown unknowns

For what will undoubtably be a limited time given its normally forbidding paywall, National Journal has made available a thought-provoking cover story on "game changers": that class of unforeseen geopolitical events that knocks the carefully laid plans of national leaders into the rough. You may find the scenarios a little bit overwrought, but that's part of the fun of speculation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose blog (no, no, a "notebook", a "scratchpad", not a blog) Opacity is very much worth a look when you're in the mood to have your mind expanded (or, once in a while, befuddled), has written a book on a similar topic. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable discusses the unsung role of high-impact but random events in the progress of mankind. I haven't read the book yet, but conveniently for all of us he summarizes his main arguments in a Forbes article from last spring.

It still disturbs me to no end that Donald Rumsfeld was actually being accurate and, ulp, wise when he said, "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." The British Plain English Campaign gave him a "Foot in Mouth" award for that one, and the media laughed. But dammit, he was right.

Posted at 10.00pm

Beginnings

"Recent figures put the number of ghost detainees in secret American detention centres around the world at 13,600."*

That's where I began.

What starts as shock eventually subsides and moves to the back of the mind. A couple of years ago, the press was riddled with stories about Guantánamo Bay, renditions, Gulfstream Vs, and the Bush administration's definition of torture. But time passes. Today, weeks and even months can go by in the life of an educated citizen -- in my life, I mean -- without that citizen once remembering that his government is complicit in the arbitrary and indefinite detention of thousands of human beings. I'm a Canadian, by the way, and those aren't our secret prisons; but complicity has many shades.

Rudely re-awakened and now filled with guilt, I thought of constructing a blog/resource centre, which would bear witness in some small way to what has happened to the ideals of Western civilization. I didn't think I could change the situation, but the least I could do is to be aware of it, to track it, and to understand its reach and direction.

But then I retreated. The more I thought about what it would entail, the more I realized I couldn't carry the burden. I'm not a lawyer, and cannot navigate the thickets of constitutional and international law. And I don't have the single-minded purpose of a committed activist. The idea of reading and writing about torture, kidnapping, detention, and surveillance day after day, year after year, filled me with anxiety, then pessimism. I could start such a project, perhaps, but I wouldn't be able to keep it up. There are others better suited to the work, educated for it, dedicated. They're employed at organizations like the ACLU and PEN and Amnesty International. I can't add much value to their remarkable efforts.

Where I can add value is in doing what I already do, naturally and happily. I'm a generalist writer (well, minus sports and technology and business and cooking -- so not that generalist), so I'll do what I can to supply perspective and hopefully some thought-provoking observations on the compelling issues of the day (or week, more realistically -- see sidebar), and to point out important articles, essays, or commentary written by others. I'll discuss the dark topics that brought me here, certainly, but I'll discuss plenty of other things too. Hopefully as a reader you'll find it a more stimulating mix.

Yes, I know this meets the definition of a blog. But let's stick with "miscellany" for now, shall we? I have my reasons.

On a more prosaic level, I'm also launching the site to test my theory that it will fill a perceived (or at least, sensed) gap in my writings. I'm working on one long-term project, a book on war and the epic mind; I've usually got one or two medium-term efforts underway (right now, a review essay on Andrew Bacevich's The Long War); but I produce nothing that covers the short-term: all of those ideas, in other words, that crop up in response to events and that need to be expressed in a more timely manner than the publishing cycles of magazines will allow.

That, and multi-coloured thought bubbles, which must be transcribed before they pop.

*From Colin Dayan's review of Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, by Clive Stafford Smith (London Review of Books, August 2, 2007): "There are roughly 380 prisoners left in Guantánamo, but recent figures put the number of ghost detainees in secret American detention centres around the world at 13,600." Emphasis added.

Posted at 8.00pm

Archipelagoes is a regular series of thoughts and observations about politics and culture -- in case you didn't deduce that from the site's subtitle. I don't plan to post with daily regularity, so you may wish to add this as a "weekly" bookmark to save you from disappointment.

And even then, I'm not promising.

I'm Ian Garrick Mason, a Toronto-based writer and reviewer.

Contact
iangmason at canada dot com

Articles
www3.sympatico.ca/ian.g.mason

Islands worth visiting
Dennis Perrin
Opacity