"Canada has again legitimized the use of UN resolutions to demonize one nation, while ignoring the truly serious human rights violations of other member states," said Alastair Gordon, president of CCD. "Until resolutions are applied even-handedly to all UN members, Canada must express its condemnation by voting 'no' on all such resolutions."

In its first 42 years, the UN tabled 370 resolutions condemning Israel and zero resolutions critical of the PLO or any Arab state. When Syria slaughtered 20,000 of its own citizens at Hama in 1982, or when it sponsored the destruction and occupation of Lebanon, or even when Iraq massacred its Kurdish citizens with poison gas, there were no UN resolutions criticizing the perpetrators. In recent years, a handful of resolutions have targeted other Middle Eastern states, but the lion's share is still reserved for Israel.

In October 2005, former Prime Minister Paul Martin referred to "the annual ritual of politicized anti-Israel resolutions" at the UN. In November 2004, Canada's then ambassador to the United Nations, Allan Rock, announced to the General Assembly that "resolutions [against Israel] are often divisive and lack balance." Yet even with this recognition, both our past and present governments' anti-Israel voting pattern has barely changed.

The Fourth Committee yesterday tabled nine ritualized resolutions targeting Israel for criticism. Canada voted against Israel on seven, and supported Israel on two. The only change from last year's voting pattern was the change of one abstention to a 'no'.

"The Stephen Harper government has taken a number of principled foreign policy positions that Canadians can be proud of. Yet it is choosing to continue the despicable bullying of one nation, a travesty that was identified by our former Prime Minister and UN ambassador," added Gordon. "Until UN resolutions are an unbiased tool applied equally to all member states, Canada's response to all ritualized anti-Israel resolutions must be NO."

-30-

For more information, please contact:
Alastair Gordon, President, CCD 416-963-8998, or
Naresh Raghubeer, Executive Director 416-452-6957

If you would like to comment on this statement or other topics relating to foreign policy, please visit our public message forum and post your comments:
http://canadiancoalition.com/forum/messages/20285.shtml

For an index of CCD in the Media, please visit:
http://canadiancoalition.com/media.shtml

* with apologies to Borat

Founded in 2003, the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD) is a non-partisan, multi-ethnic, multi-denominational organization of concerned Canadians dedicated to national security and the protection and promotion of democracy at home and abroad. CCD focuses on research, education and media publishing to build a greater understanding of the importance of national security and a pro-democracy foreign policy. http://canadiancoalition.com/

Randall Parker argues that improvements in health and longevity technologies are changing the environment to select (darwinistically) for those humans most interested in reproduction. Simple exponential math tells you that relatively small differences in fertility lead to large differences in population over time.

Right now, the biggest apparent determinant of fertility is religion. So as technology improves, unless the "live long and prosper" folks are really good at converting "be fruitful and multiply folks" to their view, it will be the later who will rapidly come to dominate all aspects of society.

Wikipedia describes Jewish beliefs about the eschaton as follows:

Tumultuous events will overturn the old world order, creating a new order in which God is universally recognized as the ruler over everyone and everything. One of the sages of the Talmud says, "Let the end of days come, but may I not live to see them", because they will be filled with so much conflict and suffering.

Sounds a lot like a technological singularity dominated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. More wikipedia:

Islam teaches the bodily resurrection of the dead, the fulfillment of a divine plan for creation, and the immortality of the human soul; the righteous are rewarded with the pleasures of Jannah (Heaven), while the unrighteous are punished in Jahannam (Hell)

Immortality of the human soul is definitely something promised by the tech folks (backup your brain onto silicon etc.). The difficulty is that it will be very difficult (and perhaps immoral?) to keep the life extension technology out of the hands of the be-fruitful-and-multiply crowd.

All of these religions (and hindu as well) have some model in which evil people will be damned to hell and only the good will persist. In a world where the power to destroy all increases with Moore's law, the need to restrain evil will become a top priority. Only the good will survive and history will come to an end.

If I start bloging again here and no one else does, it will effectively be just my blog and perhaps it makes more sense to do that on alexjacobson.com especially as I give @alexjacobson.com addresses out as my email. That being said, I really like the name spareink and would like to be part of a group blog.

Matt isn't blogging here anymore because he has a consistent singular narrative to explore. My planned blog entries are less linear and make more sense in a group context like this. Perhaps I should blog at alexjacobson.com and we convert spareink into an aggregblog using haloscan to maintain a consistent commenter community accross all sites?

Thoughts?

1) drink plenty of water. go on a new diet or exercise program or
earlier) sleep routine.

2) begin daily private meditation (stretch your body, observe each
of your senses and their imaginative powers, initiate deep abdominal
breathing and quiet observation of your thoughts, have a pen and
paper handy to record your insights about previously unseen issues
and unseen solutions afterwards) and/or individual and/or group
prayer (emphasizing gratitude & desires),

(Note: avoid religious fanaticism or dangerous cults.)

3) listen to the music you like until you can hear it in your head
even when it's not playing. Ideally sing a song each day. And
dance wildly to it.

4) write 1-year goals for various areas of life. Write which is
your chief goal among them.

(Process Caveat: Note that some people reasonably argue that we can
often have too many goals or take them too seriously and that our time is better spent enjoying the process of our life.)

5) prepare a statement of what you will have manifested, and read it
aloud with full visualization and emotional faith of having
successfully manifested such, to yourself in the mirror, while
listening and watching yourself as if you were second or third person, for 10 minutes in the morning. For more power, repeat in the evening before bed (but you don't need the mirror then), and perhaps even mid-day too.

(Process Caveat applies.)

6) compose a set of daily routines, such as drinking plenty of
water upon rising, morning exercises, daily goal setting, meditations
to manifest particular spiritual energies, time for cleaning, a time
limit for news reading, blog entries, a required but time-limited
frivolous procrastination or new adventure time, a required but
time-limited new-skill-learning time, etc.

(Process Caveat applies.)

7) maybe you're not challenging yourself enough! find a new hobby or
skill to pursue excellence in: art, a martial art, a book group or
other class or study group or support group or mastermind alliance, or regular random adventures, such as bike rides to other cities, or some charitable or entrepreneurial endeavor.

8) take a document or book that's meaningful to you (or write it
yourself, even a statement of identity) and read it aloud with full
visualization and emotion, to yourself in the mirror, while listening
and watching yourself as if you were second or third person, for 10
minutes in the morning.

9) a workshop such as Landmark Forum, a Franklin-Covey seminar, a
communication, motivation, or sales seminar, a coach or therapist.

(Stay clear on and stick to your agenda, and same caveats about religious fanaticism, dangerous cults, etc. apply; resist dependency, fanaticism, or excessive loyalty to the person or program.)

10) new drugs, such as caffeine pills or herbal or prescription
stimulants, or an antidepressant.

(Note: Obviously, only under proper medical supervision, and be
careful about contraindications, addiction, side-effects, developing
tolerances, etc.)

What do you think?

If we assume that is the case, then we have to ask why the ISPs would object to laws requiring net neutrality and why people like David worry that telco's might choose to implement QoS rather than simply provision more capacity. David and Russ Nelson in the comments to my prior post argue that the ISPs are only doing QoS because it allows tem to take maximal advantage of limited competition to extract money from content providers that they can't get from their users.

So they must believe:

• end-users are willing to purchase only a finite amount of bandwidth at a given price to reach content providers.


• content providers are willing to supplement end-user payments for additional bandwidth.
  

In other words, the total amount of bandwidth on the system is the sum of the capacity for which end users are willing to pay and the capacity for which content providers are willing to pay. That means that the only way to achieve maximum Internet bandwidth is if content providers pay for some of it. Since the content providers are only willing to pay for QoS bandwidth and Net Neutrality laws would ban the sale of that sort of bandwidth, Net Neutrality laws will result in less Internet bandwidth. Since more bandwidth is good, net neutrality must be bad. Q.E.D

Note 1: I am not taking a position on whether the ISPs are extracting monopoly rents. They may very well be doing so. I am only observing that regardless of whether they are doing so, it is clearly the case that net neutrality laws will result in a slower internet.

Note 2: If ISPs really are monopoly then there may be legitimate concern that they will extact monopoly profit from content providers and that the absence of net neutrality will mean that we are trading a faster internet for a lower quality one (as profits to content providers decline). I don't buy this argument because at the head of the power curve, I think Google, Disney, Microsoft, et al or more than able to defend themselves. In the long tail, distribution costs are too small a fraction of total cost and profits are rarely financial. There is perhaps an argument here about the middle, but the regulatory hassle from Net Neutrality would be equally bothersome so it seems like a wash.

This assumption of plenty was especially valid in the late 1990's when last mile bandwidth was very limited, people used the internet primarily for web surfing and email, and the Internet bubble was paying for companies to provision what seemed like huge amounts of bandwidth at the backbone.

Today however, the last mile has improved enough for people to download HD quality video to their home.... as long as not that many other people are doing so simultaneously! In other words, the era of bandwidth plenty is over. There simply is not a enough bandwidth for everyone to download their own HD quality video feed over the Internet simultaneously.

The standard answer provided by economics for dealing with the problem of demand exceeding supply is called pricing. Consumers who pay more are favored over those who pay less. So the question on the table is how do people or companies pay more for their traffic to arrive in preference to that of others.

There are four basic choices:

• Overprovisioning: You pay $1000 to ensure that you always have enough bandwidth for whatever you need. Even if most of the time, your bandwidth is idle, you still pay.


• Different classes of Internet end-users: If you pay more per month, your traffic will block someone else's. Even if you don't actually need that particular file ASAP, you still pay more.


• Recipient pays for different classes of content: You transact with a web site to download a video you want and then you transact with your ISP to decide what quality of service you want for that particular download. You suffer from having to do two transactions for every thing you want to download, you have to understand at great technical level the bandwidth requirements of the particular action you want to perform, and you have to suffer through whatever poor UI your ISP offers for this activity.


• Server pays for different classes of content: You transact with the web site to obtain the video. The web site pays your ISP for the quality of service you expect. Advertisers can subsidize your Internet use. You save money and time.
  

Net Neutrality is basically a prohibition on option 4. Option 4 is obviously most preferable to end users. Therefore Net Neutrality is bad.

[Update: David Isenberg responded to this post in Welcome to the Stupid Internet. I replied to his response in "Paying for Quality".

It's worth pointing out that FoxClocks time zone updates are generally not corrections, but reflect very recent changes in time zone legislation; Iran ('Asia/Tehran' time zone), for example, announced on 19th March 2006 that it would no longer use daylight saving time;

Huh? Iran just went off of daylight savings time? This seems like a symbolic gesture--I don't see any practical value for eliminating DS--and this leaves me wondering: how come countries that fight tooth and nail against modernity and capitalism also fight against daylight savings? (See last year's craziness in Mexico City and its suburbs, too.) I have no strong feelings either way for or against DS; but, based on who is fighting to get rid of daylight savings, this makes me want to support it! The related question is: what is so fundamentally modern and capitalist about daylight savings? And also, why do so many people fight wars on the symbolic level, too?

It's also interesting how we learn about where countries are going via this small data points that we find in unexpected contexts.

A few weeks ago, a member of the Park Slope Parents e-mail forum who’d encountered a stray piece of winterwear in the neighborhood posted a notice to the group titled “Found: boy’s hat.” … [S]ubscriber “Lisa” went public with her problems regarding the gender-specifying description of the hat. Wondering how such a categorization would feel to a spiky-hat-wearing girl, Lisa wrote, “It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful.” A third member responded soon after, saying such political correctness drove her “up the wall,” and a heated discussion ensued. Lisa’s supporters questioned their opponents’ commitment to “the free interchange of ideas and questions” … while an opposing faction expressed facetious dismay that the original poster, who had described the hat as likely belonging to “an older child,” was not more considerate toward “younger children who happen to have large heads.” … [O]ne poster questioned the use of “hat,” asking if the object might be more sensitively labeled a “soft, porous bowl."

This description doesn't do justice to the intensity and comedy of the full list-serv exchange, however, which is on-line at Gawker here. The funniest post is the last one.