I WAS HAPPIER WHEN THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE WAS BASICALLY OVER

It looks very much like the USA and Russia will both withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which is… very bad? Extremely bad? “These weapons could still end all life on Earth and in fact nearly did so on more than one occasion” bad? Yes, that last one.

“Intermediate nuclear forces” is one of those phrases that sounds ridiculous because they’re nukes. They’re literally all nukes. Every one of them can melt a city into slag in the space of a second. But “intermediate” in this case refers more to operational range rather than striking power: we’re talking about intermediate range, which means in between 2,500 and 5,000 kilometers - which means not intercontinental ballistic missiles, the type which can fire off from the USA and hit Russia (or vice versa). Intermediate nukes represented the possibility of nuclear missiles that could be fired within Europe (where practically all of them were), which both sides had in order to ensure a nuclear standoff there. The Russians were deterred from attacking Western Europe because the USA had installed intermediate nukes in Western Europe which would be used to blow up the Warsaw Pact nations in event of attack, and NATO was deterred from attacking Russia for basically the same reason in reverse. It was quite a sensible compromise, except for the part where all life on earth could have ended.

Anyway, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in the 1980s, wherein both sides agreed to give up their intermediate nukes (and whatever other shitty things can be said about Reagan - and there’s a lot of awful things to say about Reagan - he was a firm believer in nuclear disarmament and went over the heads of a lot of Republican nitwits who thought the more nukes the better, including many of the merry twits who went on to wreak havoc in George W. Bush’s administration). And the world breathed a deep sigh of relief, and we all started to think “well, maybe the world won’t end in a nuclear war” and that was honestly pretty good! I, personally, liked that a whole lot.

Anyway, the USA and Russia had an arms summit where each of them accused the other of violating the treaty, and given that Donald Trump is visibly in Putin’s back pocket, one could be forgiven for thinking it was all a bit of theatre in order to provide a rationale for what both of them want to do, which is “have more nukes.” Putin wants more nukes because Russia can’t hope to win a conventional war any more - they’re broke and most of the world doesn’t like them - so pulling what is essentially a much larger and more skilled version of North Korea’s “do what we want or nukes!” playbook is, from a tactical standpoint, understandable if nothing else. And Trump wants more nukes because there is a lengthy track record of Donald Trump being absolutely fascinated with the idea of shooting a nuclear weapon off and killing millions of people, which somehow manages to make Vladimir Putin look like the sensible one. After all, as Tom Nichols pointed out on Twitter, the USA doesn’t need intermediate nukes any more, because all the former Warsaw Pact nations are part of NATO now; intermediate nukes can only hit Russia, and the USA already has strategic nukes that do that.

It’s stupid and dangerous, so, yeah, it’s on brand for 2019.

CRYPTOCURRENCY: STILL A VERY GOOD IDEA!

You probably heard about this already because it’s a fun story (well, fun for onlookers, anyway), but the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange site QuadrigaCX announced that it had effectively lost $137 million in cryptocurrency because Gerry Cotten, the CEO of QuadrigaCX, died and nobody seems to be able to find his passwords for the digital wallets, solely controlled by him, that holds all $137 million in cryptocurrency. So the people who gave him that $137 million to hold onto, for security reasons, are shit out of luck.

There is of course the very real possibility that Cotten faked his death in order to disappear with a hundred and thirty seven million dollars - and before you dismiss this as some ludicrous Hollywood script pitch, please understand that this exact scenario has already happened, specifically in 2015 when the administrators of Evolution Marketplace, another crypto exchange, disappeared with $12 million in Bitcoin… and then it happened again in 2016 when Oasis, yet another crypto exchange, went permanently offline with at least $800,000 of users’ crypto in its virtual pockets. And deaths of crypto owners causing problems isn’t new either: two longtime Bitcoin miners who were business partners ended up in a massive legal battle when one of them died and his heirs claimed the other had, by virtue of his partner’s death, stolen billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoins.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you try to speculate in crypto, and it is why you should never, ever speculate in crypto. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s fun to watch crypto enthusiasts demonstrate in real time why banking laws exist, but real people are getting scammed out of real money, and some of them aren’t even assholes, just plain folks who saw that ad for Coinsquare (a Canadian crypto exchange) on TV and thought “man, I don’t want to lose money to a scary teenage hacker, I had better give my money to a faceless corporation unaffiliated with any major bank instead” because they didn’t want to “miss out on the crypto boom” because there are fewer and fewer workable paths to a comfortable retirement, or even a managing-to-avoid-eating-dog-food-in-a-motel retirement.

(FUN ASIDE: Coinsquare laid off forty people last week! Including their CFO and COO! Don’t worry, though, I’m sure Everything Is Just Fine.)

Anyway, the point of all of this is the point of every story about crypto: yes, maybe at some point in the future there will be real utility in getting massively powerful computers to solve sudokus that you can then trade for drugs. (That phrase is a total lift, for the record, and I don’t remember from where, but it is perfect in that it is both asshole snark and also completely accurate.) But that day is not today. Comparing crypto speculation to a casino game is an insult to blackjack: at least casinos are legally required to give you the money when you win, even if they tell you afterwards to stop playing. The problems that were the cause of QuadrigaCX’s failure have been around in crypto practically since the beginning, and nobody has ever really bothered to fix them, because fixing them is something The Man would do or something like that, so every year or so there’s another crypto scandal; the only thing that changes is the scale.

Finally, apparently somebody is stealing cryptocurrency from the “locked” QuadrigaCX digital wallets now, so either those passwords weren’t as lost as everybody thought or Cotten really did fake his own death.

IT IS NOT (QUITE) YET TIME TO PANIC ABOUT ONTARIO’S HEALTHCARE BEING PRIVATIZED

Andrea Horwath, who has lost three provincial elections but stil has a job because the Ontario NDP doesn’t actually expect to win elections and is - less often than the other parties but more often than one would like - just a pipeline for certain sympathetic activists who know the right people to have gainful employment, held a press conference this week to attack the Tories for an as-yet-unwritten bill that she claimed would “privatize” Ontario’s health care system.

Having read the draft of the bill - and bear in mind that the draft that was leaked to the press is in such early stages that there are comments and notes scattered throughout from the collaborators writing it which say things like “I’m not sure what this phrase means” and “can we do this? is this even legal?” and “what if we just gave everybody their own set of sirens for their own car so nobody would ever need an ambulance ever again” - okay, no, not so much, but the point is: it’s a draft bill. And any fair reading of it doesn’t explicitly speak to privatization.

Now, on the other hand, it’s eminently fair to say that Doug Ford’s Tories want the system to have more private-care options, because the Tories have campaigned on this for more than a decade as a partial solution to care waitlisting, and because pro-privatization doctors’ groups endorsed Ford and they want to get their reward. And certainly, as written, the draft bill does appear to give the Minister of Health a lot more discretionary power about how the healthcare system is organized, and certainly that power and others in the bill could be used to, say, create entry points for private-care companies into the system.

But it’s not a privatization bill per se. I’m in wait-and-see mode in this one; there’s very little point in commenting before the actual bill is introduced, unless you’re a political leader trying to drum up fundraising.

PEACE IN THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC? WE CAN BUT HOPE (NO, REALLY, THAT’S IT)

A new peace deal in the Central African Republic this week, brokered by the UN, and… okay, background time.

In 2012 the Seleka (“coalition”), an alliance of Muslim militias and rebel groups, rose up against the government because they believed the government under President François Bozizé was not abiding by the terms of the peace agreement that was struck in 2007 which ended the Central African Republic Bush War (which itself started in 2004 when Bozizé took the Presidency in a coup). The Seleka captured Bangui (the capital), Bozizé fled to Cameroon, and Michel Djotodia, the leader of the Seleka political wing, took power and dissolved the Seleka - except that a lot of the Seleka didn’t listen to him and kept fighting, in part because there were now opposing militias, primarily Christian by number, who call themselves the “anti-balaka.” (It’s a Sango word formation which more or less means “we have voodoo which stops bullets,” which is certainly more poetic than “coalition.”) Djotodia didn’t have any legitimate power since the Seleka were largely ignoring him, so he left office, and the CAR is currently on its third president since him.

The fighting has been really bad, the country has basically been divided in two (with the Seleka controlling the northeast half and the anti-balaka controlling the southwest half), and there’s pretty solid evidence that the anti-balaka have been ethnically cleansing Muslim villages and neighborhoods and coordinating Muslim massacres - which is why there’s over half a million refugees from the CAR around the world now, and estimated to be another million dislocated from their homes within the country.

This is the fifth peace deal in the last four years, and the last four all failed within weeks or even days. But you have to keep hoping that this one is the one that sticks, because what else is there?

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Io (2019, Jonathan Helpert, Netflix) - 0.5/5

The Favourite (2018, Yorgos Lanthimos, theatre) - 4/5

On a nostalgia kick, my wife and I watched the original BBC miniseries of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has aged much less well than I had hoped, mostly because the performances of the cast are not exactly timeless - although it ends sweetly, and Peter Jones as the voice of the Guide is still near-perfect, and a lot of Douglas Adams’ original jokes still work well. We’re now watching the original miniseries of State of Play, which has Every Medium-Tier British Actor in it to an extent that is often kind of ridiculous. Oh, and this year’s Royal Rumble was a middling affair - neither actual Royal Rumble match was as good as last year’s matches, and the entire show took five hours and that is just too freaking long.

Next week: the stuff that starts happening tomorrow, except delayed and in text form!