Well, if I were going to rummage through Angell's oeuvre for goo, I don't think I'd find any shortage. But Matt's got a point: it is pretty cynical, the way the movie makes the Black Sox out to be these ethereal martyred naïfs. And there's no question that this whole mystic Bart Giamatti schtick that baseball's been saddled with is no help to the game at all.

But I can't raise a hand even indirectly to my hero, Bill Kinsella. I think Umberto Eco's thoughts are relevant here:

I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. In the case of a book one can unhinge it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of excerpts. A movie, on the contrary, must be already ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself.

And boy oh boy has this ever happened with Field of Dreams--and, at one remove, Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, against which the semiotic violence is far more to be deplored.

In some distant past, the Agency, then the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was perhaps nearly free of politics; it was thought to be a good thing for the Government to devote a little money towards learning what flight was really all about so that our aeronautical industry could grow and mature, and that was about all the attention it got. With the coming of the missile gap, and with the gigantic push President Kennedy gave to that issue, NASA became a political instrument of world-spanning and unassailable importance. The unfortunate truth, though, is that the moment Neil Armstrong's foot touched the surface of the moon, that all evaporated. We had met the challenge, we had reached the goal, and the question of every day since then has really been "Why waste any more money on space?".

Friedrich wonders why he wasn't exposed to the material in Intellectuals at university. Tcha!--the answer is that you went to the wrong university. Some of us, I am happy to report, got lucky. I caught the tail end of Professor Ronald Hamowy's tenure at the University of Alberta and was actually assigned Intellectuals in one of his history seminars.

This was the most extreme serendipity I ever hope to experience in my lifetime. As late as my fourth year, I didn't know Prof. Hamowy from a canned ham. I signed up for a first-semester seminar on the basis of the course description alone. As a prof, he played his cards quite close to the vest. I sat through the first couple of classes, trying to remain quite invisible; however, I have a problem with excessively mobile eyebrows, and whenever a fellow student would say something particularly bizarre, Hamowy would notice my contemptuous expression and ask for a rejoinder, nodding sagely when he received one. He seemed to delight in ratting me out this way--I didn't know why.

Then one day I was lined up outside his door, probably to discuss the due date of some term paper or other, when a huge gaggle of my libertarian/Objectivist friends descended out of nowhere.

"Uh... what are you guys doing here?"

"Dude, we're here to visit Hamowy!" They looked like groupies waiting to see who'd be allowed backstage at the Aerosmith show. I quickly learned that my tormentor was, in fact, one of Murray Rothbard's closest intellectual intimates and had even, briefly, been a member of the Ayn Rand cénacle. (He'd been cast into outer darkness, naturally, with Rothbard and the other "hippies of the right".) He'd met everybody--he was living history! One of the demigods!

When I made my way into Prof. Hamowy's office with this crew of adulators, he smirked and said "Oh, do you know those people, Mr. Cosh?" It didn't take us long to become friends now that I knew where I stood--I didn't have to hide my copy of Human Action in class or anything. It was my belated chance to experience what the teacher-student relationship really ought to be.

I've neglected my friendship with Hamowy most awfully--I have next to no idea what he's up to now, although I did read a recent paper he wrote on Hayek and the common law, so I know he's keeping his hand in. He was close to retirement when I was his student, and he was not very happy with the way the department was treating him. (If you have tenure, they can't fire you, but they can, say, deny you basic office supplies.) I have good memories of my chats with him, but my fondest memories are of the classes. Eventually he stopped sounding out his students and started interacting with them.

He never advanced a laissez-faire or libertarian or classical liberal agenda, as such, in the history classes. What he stood for was an awareness that history exists. The things we have, whether institutions or items or ideas, did not get here by themselves, and were not always here. In this, I believe he was trying to redress the general "taking for granted" that is the most common intellectual failing in modern education. We're producing people who can own and use an automobile without ever considering the origins of the design, or of the materials that make it up, or of the gas that makes it go, or of the economy that makes it possible. They aren't even aware that such things have an origin. The thing, the car, just plain exists--didn't it always? Well, if you really knew how to look at a car in all its historical and economic dimensions, you would fall to your knees in amazement at the sight of one--but no one is encouraged to think that way. (Economists and economic historians have this sort of imagination.) Prof. Hamowy tried to push people along, a little bit.

And he wouldn't sit still for horseshit. The Hamowy anecdote I never tire of telling people... we were spitballing Dostoevsky or somebody in the second-semester seminar, and for some reason one of the girls piped up "But aren't moral principles relative?" She hadn't spoken all year, poor twitchy thing, but she had seen her chance to say the one thing she knew for sure.

"You think moral principles are 'relative,' Miss P-----s?" he asked her. An ominous silence descended.

"Well, yes..."

"Are you quite sure of that?"

"Er... yes..."

And so Hamowy, with a exquisite cruelty that staggers the imagination, launched upon a ten-minute description of the classic fraternity/army prank known as the "Pig Night" (or, in some versions, the "Dogfight"), in which pledges/soldiers are sent out to woo unsuspecting girls into coming to a party--a party which ends with cash prizes, awarded in the presence of all, for the fellows who have brought the ugliest girls. Before the entranced class, Hamowy spun the details, led us into the mind of the girl who has never had a date in her life, and is sitting somewhere, perhaps contemplating self-murder, and suddenly out of nowhere comes Prince Charming... and she thinks to herself, At last, at last, my luck has changed at last, the expensive pimple creams have paid off and I've been rewarded for turning down the second piece of fried chicken... all to discover at the end of the night that she is nothing but the forlorn, prize-winning Pig.

"Now are you seriously telling me, Miss P------s," he said, turning to the girl in question--who was not what you would call a "looker"--"that there is nothing objectively horrible, disreputable, objectionable, disgusting about the behaviour of young men at a Pig Night?"

She never did answer. Saved by the bell. I went home feeling something very akin to awe.

Colby,

I live in Houston, Texas. My beerhall friends and I feel partly gratified and partly resentful of the Chicks. The Dixie Chicks deserve credit for bringing the rock and blues portions of country back in the face of a pop-country culture. For that we are grateful. However, they've been referred to as innovative and groundbreaking for bringing back the old stuff with a new twist and such. The trouble is that down here Hank Williams and Johnny Cash never died. [Technically, Johnny Cash never died anywhere else either. -ed.] They only took what is very prevalent down here and succeeded with it in Nashville. So we're also kind of resentful because they are certainly not the best we have to offer and are there because of their appearance and Natalie Maines's influential father.

Most of us aren't waiting on the revolution anymore and see the Chicks more or less as the fluke they are. Charlie Robison and Pat Green have made some headway up there, but the songs that make it on the radio are their most mainstream stuff. Their good stuff never quite makes it. In the meantime, down here we've got Jason Boland and Bleu Edmondson. Roger Creager until he makes a break for Nashville and sells out. I recommend any of these guys to you to one extent or another if you can get your hands on them and are interested in hearing some of the good stuff that most people don't know is still around.

I'm not an American, so it's not my business whether America forgives him, but if I were the one being spun, I dare say I'd stand my ground. Here's an excerpt from AP's story:

West [one of Lindh's lawyers] said Lindh did not know that al-Qaida ran or financed the camp, even though Lindh told a television interviewer after his capture late last year that he thought the facility was financed by bin Laden. He was simply relaying what he had heard from other soldiers, the lawyer said.
Harris said Lindh heard about al-Qaida operations from others in his unit only after Sept. 11, and had no way of verifying what he heard.

Okaaay... so Lindh, in asking for forgiveness, is having his lawyers directly contradict what he told the cameras after he'd been captured. We could overlook this, I suppose, but there's one other small problem: Lindh went East after, and because of, the USS Cole bombing. (A BBC profile explains the chronology.)

Basically, he's saying he had no intention of fighting against the United States and never knew anything about no Talibans or Al-Qaedies. Bullshit. Bullshit seven times over. I suggest this: let him be forgiven when he is willing to be candid. No sooner. Defining down treason is a big mistake.

We're talking about two hundred and fifty years here, people. The quotidian intellectual concerns of this time, or the shape of its society, are impossible to guess at. We face a hundred different futures, any of them about equally likely. One hopes for and, to some extent, trusts in continued material progress, and that's been my basic premise. But where will 250 years of material progress bring us? To a state where such basic categories as "childhood" and "family" and "politics" and "literature" may not have any currency whatsoever.

I left Glenn Gould on my list and Lucy Maud Montgomery off of it. This isn't because Gould is necessarily more famous and influential, or "better", than Montgomery even within his own field. This is because Gould was an important pianist and philosopher of music, and I'm fairly confident people will still have music in 250 years. As a supreme Bach interpreter, just for starters, he has hitched his wagon to a very strong horse. Montgomery's work is the product of a certain place and time and stirs certain sentiments in us which may not even be comprehensible 50 years from now, much less 250. If family structures change, or relationships between the sexes change, or children's literature is proscribed by the Astro-Puritans, it's all out the window. I'm afraid this is a plain fact: literature is fragile, music is not. (And even music is a little fragile--Bach himself had to be revived.)

Mark Byron takes quite the opposite tack, and he's certainly entitled. However, I think this statement--

I think [McLuhan] will likely be a footnote in a history of mass media class for the class of 2256.

--is completely insupportable. Since McLuhan was the first serious media theorist, how exactly can he become a "footnote" in media studies? This is like calling William Harvey a "footnote" in cardiology. McLuhan is the whole reason we think in terms of "media." He had big, provocative, influential theories of art and culture and consciousness and history: I believe his place is assured.

Byron's is one strange future world indeed: classical music is so far forgotten as to render Glenn Gould a "footnote", and documentary cinema is so far abandoned as to make Grierson a "footnote", yet people are still watching Leslie Nielsen on TV, hyuk, hyuk. In the real world, as far as actors and sports figures go, you get the names of three or four a century surviving to the next but one. (Assuming that future centuries do take as much care with history as we do, which is by no means assured.) If hockey changes, Gretzky may one day be regarded as a trivial figure--a master of a very primitive and violent form of the game. I'm not saying that will happen, but he's not nearly as safe as Gould and McLuhan. Hockey could be banned outright, or simply forgotten (who were the Gretzkys of bear-baiting?), or the world demographically swamped with people who don't like it. Global warming could make it impossible to play. Plenty of things could happen: sports don't have long historical lifespans, as far as we know.

We're talking about 250 years here. You people are not stretching your imaginations enough. If the English language isn't spoken in its current form anymore, then there's not much room for a lyric poet whose reputation stands on a single work that's normally recited orally, is there? Our important philosophers and historians will survive in translation, and our important poets will have their oeuvres preserved like Catullus and Horace, but sentimental scraps like "In Flanders Fields"? No. Absolutely not: not in general anthologies of dead-language poetry. I would be shocked to find "In Flanders Fields" in an anthology of English poetry even now, so how is it going to get there 250 years from now?

Your response to all this should not be horror or denial: instead you should sympathize with the historian who must try to recover some of these flavourful elements from the records of past centuries. For many cultures, they are simply gone. I am sure the Incas of Peru had their own "In Flanders Fields"--that is, a popular poem with a symbolic function, expressing the pity of war and the determination to uphold justice at the expense of human lives. But we don't have a text or a memory of it, and if we did, we could at best pretend to understand the nuance of it. Nuances die: and while historians 250 years from now may have some intellectual account of what it was like to bet on a ballgame or go to a drive-in, they won't have the colour, and it will be their loss.

P.S. - Adam Barken e-mails some half-hearted further suggestions: the best are Reginald Fessenden, who is supposed to have beaten Marconi to the invention of wireless radio, and Abraham Gesner, inventor of kerosene. Rightly or wrongly, Fessenden isn't much recognized outside Canada, I fear, and Gesner has the same problem as Frederick Banting (only he has it already: kerosene, once the most ubiquitous petroleum product, has become marginal).

My morning Post tells me the U.S. Transport Security Administration has abandoned the routine check-in questions in air terminals. "Did you pack your own luggage?" Naw, I let my friend do it--my friend Abdul, fresh out of university in Pakistan! He is, like, the goddamn packing master! I think it was his major! Canada is retaining the routine questions, which a ministry spokesman explained by saying "We're all pretty much bonobos with chromosome damage around here." I'm paraphrasing, of course.

Former B.C. premier Glen Clark has been found not guilty of influence-peddling: a judge decided that he honestly didn't notice anything funny when a casino applicant agreed to renovate his house, build him a deck, pave his driveway, impregnate his wife and send the fetus to college, etc., etc. Priceless moment from the Post story:

"I get angry when I think about it," said Mr. Clark when reminded he might still be in office today.

Uh, pardon me, but what monument to brain damage "reminded" Clark that he might still be in office? Yeah, he was forced to step down as New Democrat leader when the police raided his home on TV, but who honestly thinks the NDP was going to win the next B.C. election? Of course, they do have some pretty good drugs out there on the coast.

I recommend bourque.com to all and sundry but Pierre is up to one of his most tiresome tricks this morning--namely, subliminal republicanism. "NO CDN THRONE SPEECH FOR UK-BASED QUEEN" roars a headline on his front page this morning. Hang on a minute! The Queen is based in the U.K.? Whoa, somebody hit the "stop press" button! This changes everything! I'm been sticking up for constitutional monarchy and now I find out the bitch doesn't even live here? Pierre, you have opened this man's eyes. Both of them.

Of course, the monarchy can't win with this kind of spin. Republicans habitually jump back and forth over the fence on this issue. "Ugh! Look at the Queen--she's a dirty foreigner, she is! She doesn't represent Canadian values!" *Hop*. "Ugh! Think how our lily-white queen must offend new immigrants! If you thought bigoted, old-fashioned Canadian values had gone out of style, take a look!" *Hop*. "Ugh, here comes our funny-talking, mostly-German head of state again! Why can't we have a real Canadian in charge?" *Hop*. "How content 'real Canadians' must feel knowing one of their own kind is still in charge. Makes me want to puke." In the old days, we'd know what to do with these infantile Jacobins. But it'll offend my new friends in Australia if I recommend transportation...

And here's a CBC headline: "Bin Laden question resuscitated in British newspaper: Pakistan says he's dead". Why do I have the distressing feeling that the Pakistanis know he's dead because he told them so himself?

The poppy will survive even if Canada doesn't. Since the seeds grow so deeply in the ground, I doubt poppies will be extinct 250 years in the future. Some weary archivist 250 years from now will question those faded pictures of Canadians wearing those red flowers in November and the poem will be resurrected. The poppy and the poem are representative of millions of Canadians who gave their lives in the 20th century. The courage, duty and sacrifice it represents is part of all human history. I will not give up this pick without a fight.

By no means, but are you offering a fair one? I am put in the position of somehow diminishing the "courage, duty, and sacrifice" of Canadians in a century's wars if I point out that even Canadians don't much have a clue as to why the poppy is worn. It would be nice, perhaps, if they shared the rather fantastic idea that "millions" of Canadians had perished fighting Jerry (in fact, Canadian battle deaths from the two World Wars don't quite come to 100,000). If your point is that the practice of wearing poppies on November 11 may make for an amusing footnote in some historical journal 250 years from now, fair enough.

And as for Montgomery, are you suggesting that her role in the economic life of Prince Edward Island is somehow more important than her books, or that it will outlive them? I think not.

I considered Banting (discoverer of insulin) for my list, then rejected him. He has great meaning in the lives of diabetics, but he is not on the level of a Pasteur, an Ehrlich, a Lister. He didn't discover a new class of drugs, or pioneer new methods. We have the problem that, regarded historically, Banting was part of a great transnational flowering of practical medical research, not a solitary figure of genius. We also have the problem that diabetes will certainly be beaten outright in the next hundred years or so. Who remembers anyone who worked on polio before Salk and Sabin?

As for Robert Munsch (a children's book author), no comment.

L.M. Montgomery's a harder case, and not a bad one to bring up. She is known in precincts where the name of Canada itself would elicit bafflement. However, I think people generally are unaware of how fast fashions in literature can change, and how far down the memory hole a once-popular book can go--even a book, that is, which has deep, worldwide, and seemingly permanent popularity. Two favourite cases in point:

· In 1899 the Daily Telegraph printed a list of the "100 Best Novels in the World", chosen collectively by several distinguished men of letters. The books were so far trusted to be recognized by the broad public that they were offered for sale in a special edition ("nine guineas the lot"). Not on the list: Stendhal, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky. On the list: Eugène Sue, Charles Reade, Henry Cockton, and E. Lynn Linton. Some details here.

· When I was a child I had, on loan from my grandmother, a very old edition of a pastoral novel called Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush by Ian MacLaren. I cannot put it more simply than to describe it as an unreadable book; the dialect is in a form of Scots that a Scot himself would have trouble deciphering now, and the plot is insipid, nearly nonexistent. The sole remarkable thing about the book, to me, was a passing reference to a character with the surname of Cosh. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, though you certainly haven't heard of it, was a prominent instance of the "Kailyard school" of Scots writing--an entire literary movement that has been utterly lost to time. ("MacLaren" was actually named Watson and came from Essex, but never mind that--it's another example of the vaguely perverted Victorian fascination with things Scotch, whether authentic or not.)

How popular was Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush in its time? It was only the best-selling fiction book in the entire world in 1896. It sold half a million copies in the United States (then a country of 76 million people, many illiterate) and another quarter-million in the U.K. It was still well-known enough in 1921 to have a feature-length silent film made of it (the intertitles were designed by a young A. Hitchcock). Today, MacLaren might as well never have lived at all, even as far as scholars are concerned.

So am I willing to bet that anyone will know of Anne of Green Gables 250 years from now, when our English itself may grind against the ear like Chaucer? Not on your damn life.

(Note: Mark Byron is playing with a similar theme, though with American names, here.)

· Northrop Frye

Eehhh. Can't go along with you here, Adam; pure literary critics do not age well, as a rule. Not any more than music critics, come to think of it. The artistic criticism that survives from past ages is by men who were either philosophers of significance or outstanding artists themselves. I don't mean to underrate Frye, but who knows how he will be thought of in 50 years, let alone 250.

· Yousuf Karsh

Not a great photographer, in my opinion; just a photographer who shot great men. Vastly, vastly overrated.

· Robertson Davies

And speaking of overrated--the very mention of this mincing grotesque blinds me with patriotic rage. Couldn't you have at least thrown Mordecai Richler out there? Davies is someone who makes Canadians swoon because he actually attained the rank of "second-rate novelist", which so few of us have. We have yet to produce a first-rate one. (I am fond of pointing out, although it doesn't bear directly on the question, that Iceland and Guatemala each have more Nobel Prizes for literature than Canada. And we have just as many as Mauritius and the Faroe Islands--which is to say, none.)

· John Grierson

Now this one I can give you. As the substantive father of documentary cinema, Grierson may be unbudgeable from the historical record. I'll add him to my own list unless anyone cares to quarrel. That gives us four. Feel free to send more.

The ratification plan is being pushed forward by Environment Canada and has the support of the Privy Council, the chief advisory group to the Prime Minister.
The plan has five core elements, including a proposal for a $500-million annual federal-provincial fund to offset the costs to business of implementing the accord and the continuation of Canada's demand that it receive credit for exports of clean-burning natural gas and of hydroelectricity.

Emphasis mine. Chretien has personally insisted that since the United States is not a signatory, Canada should receive credit for exporting clean energy south--energy that the U.S. would otherwise get credit for importing. Such a credit would dramatically reduce the greenhouse-reduction requirements of the treaty, as they apply to Canada.

The European signatories to the Kyoto Protocol have shown absolutely no interest in amending the document to accommodate this demand. They are tired of everyone's cute little ideas for tweaking the Protocol to their own advantage. Canada has had the door slammed in its face, very vigorously, on this issue. If Chretien is going to continue insisting on clean energy credits, and Europe isn't going to give him clean energy credits, then how can the National Post, or anyone else, be so sure the Protocol is ever going to be ratified?

Either the clean energy credits are a deal-breaker for us or they aren't. The government has waffled on this--I've tried questioning them myself on it, and got no clear answer (surprise surprise). Reporters need to keep the pressure on. It's a big key to the story and the Post basically dropped the ball.

Speaking as a victim of Canadian redistributionism, I have to come out in support of the system where there exists the freedom to be rich.

By world standards, Canada is in fact good at facilitating the creation and survival of enormous private fortunes. It is not so good at encouraging people to make that step from a $40,000 income to a $60,000 one, or from $60,000 to $80,000. The experience of the typical Canadian working person is a slide backward that never seems to end. Work for a raise, or put in overtime, and you'll see about half of every extra dollar you've earned disappear. Assuming you can hold a job and go up the salary ladder in the first place, that is.

As the Fraser Institute has pointed out, the average Canadian's tax bill increased $761 in the past year. Income taxes went down, but the gain was promptly swallowed by Canada Pension Plan contribution hikes. If you fly, there's a new "security" tax. If you drink or smoke, you're paying more tax than you did before: I'm paying $3 a pack more for cigarettes than I did at the start of 2002, but then, smoking makes me evil so I deserve to be broke. Medicare premiums are going up in the provinces that have them; but those that don't will have them soon, don't worry.

These are the good times, mind. The pattern is that taxes more or less stagnate when there's no crisis, and go up when there is. They don't ever go down. I speak solely from the standpoint of one who works for a living. This, of course, is unforgivable selfishness in a Canadian.

For everything our rulers say about creating the conditions for middle-class people to get ahead (and to become "rich" in the sense in which it is possible for a reasonable number of us), they say twenty about protecting the "most vulnerable." The Liberals' moral priorities are democratic-socialist in every essential, with the difference that old-time democratic socialists believed in freedom of thought and expression (and probably would have been fucking revolted at confiscatory taxes on a nickel miner's cigarettes).

The Radwanski argument is that Canadians, if asked "Shall we continue to have socialism or not?", would answer "yes" as one. I should like for the question to be put to the electorate in that form before we decide that there is no use arguing about it. Nearly every other issue--foreign policy, immigration, medicare--is identity politics in disguise. The Canadian Alliance shouldn't get bogged down in fighting on the enemy's ground. (Neither should the Republicans down south, for that matter, but that's a matter for another day.)

Who are the Canadians whose names will still be part of the history of civilization 250 years from now? They are, I think, disconcertingly few. Counting Alexander Graham Bell as a "Canadian", as we sometimes do, is definitely cheating. The two I'm quite certain of are Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan. If basketball is still played by the post-apocalyptic mutants, James Naismith will of course have a place of esteem. Sir Sandford Fleming was the first to make a practical proposal for time zones, but the natural demarcation lines are so much meddled with and shifted around by Daylight Saving that we are hardly any further ahead than we were in his day.

I don't think there are any other good candidates. As things stand, the sum of our striving will be represented in the long-term record by two or three people... and that's if we're lucky.

(Update: more possibilities are discussed here, here.)

There's a certain spark of divine fire in some women, and if they don't have it then the camera can't supply it. If it's not there, you can distract the viewer by doing any number of things. Wearing outrageous outfits or highlighting very obvious assets would be one way of doing this. If you can somehow convey that you have endless reserves of lusty joy, or indeed any sort of energy, that's good too. If have an intelligent, active face, then you don't need to worry about anything; you'll be compelling to men on the worst day of your life. But if you're a glassy-eyed, thin-lipped, absurd-boobed, slack-mouthed Barbie doll, don't suppose that merely lounging around is going to work. Go grab a hamburger, Shania. I've often suspected it's red meat that contains that divine secret: you'll need plenty.

Although the Alliance's numbers have stabilized under Mr. Harper's leadership, his party suffers from a natural limit. To win a federal election in Canada, a party must be able to appeal to moderate voters. Of the four national parties, the Alliance and the NDP are too wedded to a specific ideology to do so. That's increasingly a problem for Mr. Harper's party, because there is simply not enough room to the right of the Liberals for hard-line conservatives to win many votes. Tax cuts are no longer a priority for most Canadians, the budget is balanced and the economy is relatively strong.

Hear that, "most Canadians"? Your taxes are just fine. There, there, don't grind your teeth: the general will has spoken through its anointed avatar.

Perhaps "most Canadians" do agree with Mr. Radwanski. Certainly "most Canadians" should be made aware that the Conservatives, as he implies, aren't going to do a damn thing about your taxes, no matter what insalubrious Muppet they choose as their next leader. However, I find his claim that the economy is "relatively" strong to be most intriguing. Relative to whom, exactly? Cyprus? North Korea?

It is generally agreed that the most instructive comparisons in such matters are made with the United States: even if we didn't share a three-thousand-mile border with it, it would still be the world's standard of economic health. And what do you see when you compare Canada's economic health to that of the U.S.?

Gaps. Gaps galore. As individuals, we face a huge "tax gap" with the U.S., or at least our middle and upper classes do. A similar "gap" applies to the profits of the company you work for and to any capital gains you might have, you lucky devil. Our personal disposable income is, on average, two-thirds that in the U.S.: there's a lovely graph here illustrating the growing "disposable income gap". In real dollars, their DI is increasing, ours has flatlined. (Only in the mind of a Tory supporter could flatlining equal health.)

And why shouldn't American incomes increase? Say hello to the "productivity gap", which you may inform yourself upon here. Canadian labour was 85-88% as productive as American labour in 1976, depending on what measure you choose. Today we're around 80%, and dropping very fast. And don't forget the "unemployment gap", which hovers around 3-4% and has since I was a wee tyke. Oh, and while the federal deficit is gone, there's still a huge "public debt gap", too, which means more of our tax dollars get hoovered up by lenders.

Look, here's my point: by any measure of economic health you could possibly devise, there is a large gap--one which is ever growing, in the vital respects--between Canada and the United States. No credible economist disagrees with this. If there are, by chance, some Canadians who haven't noticed their paycheques shrinking, then perhaps they can be convinced to give a crap about the declining productivity of labour, or the pervasive Sovietness of the businesses and government services around them, or the brain drain to the United States.

This is all about tax policy. We're not dumber than the Americans, or naturally shiftless; we just pay a much larger state apparatus to tax and regulate us. In some ways, Canadians clearly do want that: by and large, we do favour publicly funded health insurance, for example. That's fine--but how does medicare depress labour productivity? How does medicare create unemployment? Medicare is a government service for which we pay a great deal of tax money--far too much--but it's not government services that are the real big problem here. It's marginal tax rates, economic mismanagement, the regulatory burden, the debt burden, and government programs that don't contribute to quality of life that are the problem.

Our economy isn't strong, it's pathetic. Huge, underlying problems are not being fixed. I don't really think Canadians want to live like the hopeless muzhiks we now are. But perhaps I'm mistaken, and Radwanski is right.

McDonald's has been accused of extreme insensitivity after releasing a new sandwich called the "McAfrika" in Norway, one of the world's richest countries, at a time when 12 million people are facing starvation in southern Africa.
The launch of the new hamburger has infuriated the Norwegian equivalent of Christian Aid and the Norwegian Red Cross and generated a storm of bad publicity for the American fast-food giant.

The solution, it seems to me, is obvious. Why don't the aid agencies start up a rival to McDonald's? Lord knows they have the know-how when it comes to distributing food. Here's how it will work: when you enter McNGO's, you are immediately herded into a corner of the restaurant with your fellow patrons. Your server will count heads, go to the counter with your cash, and order enough food for treble the number. When the food is ready, he'll take 90% of it for himself, selling what little he can't eat (it takes a lot of calories to keep a fast-food restaurant running!). The remainder is distributed to patrons more or less on a first-come first-serve basis, although it will help if you know somebody, hint hint, or you're a member of the right ethnic group, hint hint. Each McNGO's franchise will be required to obtain massive lines of credit to build atomic pizza ovens and grease-powered helicopters; when they go broke, U2 vocalist Bono will personally lobby banks and governments to forgive the debt on humanitarian grounds. That's a solemn promise to you, the customer.

We listen to the radio to hear what's cookin'
But the music ain't got no soul
Now they sound tired but they don't sound Haggard
They got money but they don't have Cash
They got Junior but they don't have Hank...

It's hard to know how much to credit this dissent from the radio-driven homogenization of country music, given that the Dixie Chicks are among the prime beneficiaries. Certainly they represent old-fashioned performance values (and unlike Merle Haggard, they probably show up for most of their concert bookings) but would their records sell ten million copies if they didn't look like figure-skating bronze medallists?

I'm probably like a lot of you: I didn't start feeling nostalgic for Merle Haggard or his contemporaries until country music got Garthified and then, in turn, flooded with supermodels manqué. It takes age and distance to recognize real talent, at least in a stance-afflicted genre where personality is so much to the forefront. Back in the '70s, everything that came out of country radio seemed to be coming from the same swampy place. Some of it has aged well, better than could be expected.

My objection to the Dixie Chicks is that Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr., and Merle Haggard don't really need the help. That's real bold of you ladies to climb aboard the bus and point out recognized American geniuses to us. Hey, Don Williams is still alive and playing casinos, how about throwing him a bone? And perhaps Marty Robbins isn't nearly po-faced enough to sit alongside Hank Sr., but he had few equals as a storyteller.

Well, my American friends, the truth is far far worse. In actual fact, the money you spend at the pump funds this website.

Don't believe me? Have a look at the numbers. Pop quiz: what country is the largest single supplier of crude oil and petroleum products to the United States? Saudi Arabia? Iraq? Nay: the correct answer is "Canada." We may be the retarded giant on your doorstep, in the words of National Lampoon, but we shit pure Texas tea.

Most of the crude oil we supply to the United States comes from here, in Alberta, a fact that is an endless source of grief and envy to the other nine provinces. The US consumes, if I recall right, about 50% of our output. It would probably not be overstating matters for me to say that the livelihood of nearly every member of my extended family depends, directly or indirectly, upon the petroleum business. My father fixes cranes, for example, at the Syncrude bitumen mine near Fort McMurray, in the far north. And without a broad base of loyal Alberta readers with large disposable incomes, the magazine I work for would be up the creek. In fact, its majority owners are two Calgary oilmen who bailed it out the last time it went broke (something that's happened from time to time over its checkered 28-year history). I draw a paycheque for two reasons: oil and gas. (OK, three if you count my abundant talent.)

As time goes by, the oil sands in Alberta's north are only going to become more important to the American petro-economy, not less. The price of extracting oil from those sands gets cheaper every year. Soon enough, it won't even occur to your politicians to suck up to the Saudis: they'll be priced right out of the market. "Thank you for financing global terror" says the phunnee Situationist prefab graffito. Thank you for financing my next meal, say I, entirely in earnest.

Although aware of the possibility of complications, including death from sepsis, the woman adamantly refused amputation. Her answers to questions were brief, but she had no obvious delusional thoughts. She had recently been active in caring for herself, maintaining her own home and helping neighbours with lawn care. She no longer took neuroleptics but had severe tardive dyskinesias from her past use. She was considered to have adequate decision-making capacity, and no amputation was undertaken.

Having made this decision, the doctors had little choice but to admit the lady, put her on painkillers, and watch the leg. The reader begins to squirm rather seriously around this point:

Dry gangrene developed in her left lower limb over the ensuing weeks, and the area of interface between the healthy tissue and the dry gangrene developed putrefaction, which required debridement several times...

While making strangled noises, you think to yourself "Jesus, thank god there are no photos with this article."

And then you scroll down... and find out... that there are photos with this article.

I cannot be responsible for the consequences if you click on this link to "A woman with a mummified leg" (Gallagher, CMAJ 167(4): 380).

· Conventional wisdom in the libertarian blogosphere: Ann Coulter is a Very Bad Person, but Norah Vincent is a Genius. I suppose I ought to agree. But I like cruel, funny commentators; if someone really is funny I'll cut them a world of slack for outré comments. And I'm sorry, but Ann's joke about Tim McVeigh and the New York Times was pretty funny: I read it as a joke at her own expense, and it made me warm considerably to the toothsome berserker. I try to extend the same courtesy to the left--I liked Michael Moore well enough when he was still a satirist, for example, but there was no evidence he was trying to be funny when he wondered why the 9/11 hijackers had the tactical naiveté to crash the jets into the Blue States.

As for Norah, I'm trying to go along with the hype, I really am. But when a person takes 400 words to say "my blog doesn't have an editor, so please forgive the occasional error of usage or spelling," my guard goes up. And when an emerging libertarian icon defends the banning of smoking in private establishments on the grounds that she doesn't like smoke--well, not only does my guard go up, but I start saying the words that make baby Jesus cry.

· Government surveillance of private citizens is such a hot topic these days... I've been apprised by someone apparently in a position to know that the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service has a file on me. I don't really know what to make of this, to be honest with you. It makes sense that they'd keep a clip file on a radical journalist with ties to the right and sentiments in favour of Western separatism. I'd expect a government intelligence agency to do the same basic research on an analogous figure from the left. Assuming, charitably, that they're only doing basic research. There's the rub, I suppose. I should really get around to filing an Access to Information request one of these days, but I can't imagine they'd find anything bad about me that I wouldn't own up to if asked. I don't frequent brothels and I'm not in the pay of the dreaded Slovaks. I make no secret of my dodgy credit history or my tax arrears (which are probably below average for an ex-freelancer). My personal history isn't quite anodyne enough for me to run for high public office, but the bar is set pretty damn low for a mere journalist. Would that there were more entertainingly misshapen skeletons in my closet...

That's it for now. Back later.

· (Link from The Null Device) Remember how, in Whit Stillman's Barcelona, that Spanish journalist was holding court and he kept going on and on about the pernicious transnational influence of the "AFL-CIA"? It seems more than ever, doesn't it, that when you scratch a seemingly rational European you'll often find a cluster of bizarre, uninformed, and frankly retarded beliefs about the United States of America? A paranormal skeptic recently investigated an urban legend about a time traveller in Times Square which had no currency in the U.S. but had been widely heard in Europe. Here are, for me, the money grafs:

...It took another six months of research before Aubeck found the story in a 1975 French book.

The French book had cited a 1974 Italian magazine.

The Italian magazine referred to a 1973 Norwegian article.

The Norwegians had lifted it from a Swedish periodical.

My question: does the multi-lingual nature of Europe accommodate the viral transmission of bullshit?

· This one's from the weblog of a Texas physician named Chris Rangel. It will tell you how out-of-control trial lawyers are endangering your health by making it less likely that you will get timely medical assistance if you fall ill on an airplane. And lots of people fall ill on airplanes. I had a sudden consciousness-raising on this issue when a elderly gentleman had the misfortune to die in his seat, three rows ahead of me, on a Toronto-Edmonton flight three years ago. (It ended up being a Toronto-Thunder Bay-Edmonton flight punctuated by a Stuka-esque dive through the clouds.) Since then I always notice the clippings...

· On a lighter note we have ProSoundWeb.com's interesting interview with recording engineer Bob Olhsson, who cut the vinyl on those classic Motown records, which some of you young sprats may know as "Ally McBeal records". I don't understand 90% of the techie stuff but I enjoy being immersed in it anyway. Bob has some trenchant observations on music, record production, performance, and the future of the industry. Myths are punctured. If you didn't know that Stevie Wonder played all the parts on his records because "he basically was putting together combinations of dead musicians," then go read.

(Link from Bourque) The Winnipeg Sun's Charles Adler is an OK columnist but he has a propensity for saying bizarre things. He pens a homage to his father today in which he strays into discussing baseball, a subject upon which he is supposedly expert:

One of the hungriest parts of the planet is the Dominican Republic, and it's not surprising the Sandy and Roberto Alomars and so many others filling major-league rosters come from places where people poorer than church mice grow up with the hearts of lions, fed by the hunger that creates the desire to play hard and win big.

This is the kind of casual observation you see a lot, so much so that the facts start to slip around like a chimp on rollerblades. (1) If "hunger" creates "desire", how come the somewhat poor Dominican Republic has produced a hundred times as many big leaguers as its far poorer neighbour Haiti? Tough to match the Haitians in the "hunger" department, I should think. (2) Adler doesn't come right out and say that the Alomars are from the D.R., but he suggests it, and if you didn't know better you wouldn't suspect that they're actually Puerto Rican. (3) If Sandy and Robbie grew up "poor as church mice", then their famous father Sandy Sr., who played major league baseball well into the free agent era and was a coach for the San Diego Padres, must be pretty horrible at handling money. Indeed, if an impoverished childhood is some sort of key to success, it is damned odd that any child of a post-1970 major leaguer should do well at the game. As well as, say, Barry Bonds. Or Ken Griffey Jr.

But Adler isn't finished:

I covered the Red Sox in Boston, where I ran into an oldtimer who, at one time, knew Mickey Mantle's heart. I had grown up watching the New York Yankees outfielder on TV and I asked the old scout about the Mick. What made Mick tick? He told me Mickey was the son of an Oklahoma coal miner. And he never forgot it. He said if Mick had been the son of a doctor or a wealthy businessman, he still would have had an abundance of talent. But he would have been missing the greatest gift a champion can have: hunger.

What can he possibly mean?--hunger for booze? I will be the last person to denigrate the glory and grace of Mickey Mantle, but "hunger" does not strike me as the dominant note in the career of a man who routinely turned up for games hung over. Pete Rose, he had hunger. Ty Cobb--now he had hunger. What Mantle had was genius, which can afford not to be hungry.

Floridian Andrea Harris, who daubs a bit herself, says she likes the Impressionists but would rather have the academicians' talent. I feel guilty hoovering up links from what is really the Blowhards' find, so I will urge you again to visit them.

I have been neglecting to keep up with chess news lately so I am tardy in reporting an amusing disaster at the British Championships in Torquay. By an old Imperial tradition, Commonwealth players from outside the UK are normally given seats, but the last foreigner to take the title had been Canadian chess great Abe Yanofsky in 1953. At this year's tournament, however, a handful of Indians showed up and stomped the British field senseless, taking away three of the four top placings, the women's title, and the junior prize. The overall winner was unheralded IM (!) R.B. Ramesh. Chess journalist Malcolm Pein speculates that the invasion will lead to the adoption of a closed Brits-only tournament and a separate Commonwealth championship.

[Added 11:15 pm:] Elsewhere, Mark Byron's thoughts about a Second Players' League predate mine and are worth reading.

The fashion in art history courses, I can confirm, is still to praise theory-bound Impressionism and post-Impressionism to the skies, and to heap nightsoil on artists like Bouguereau, Leighton, and Alma-Tadema. Well, the debates which animated that time, and made Waterhouse and Courbet "opponents" or "opposites", have really lost their immediacy. I don't see why we can't leave the infighting behind and have the best of both worlds. At artrenewal.org, Fred Ross makes a very strident case in favour of a strongly idealized, dramatic, technically fantastic art of pure beauty--an art that was, in the 19th century, "academic" in status and method. Ross is speaking for painterly values which have been destroyed. I'm not speaking in metaphors here. They've literally been destroyed: we no longer have the kind of society that can produce those ripe, compelling Bouguereau nymphs, which is unspeakably sad. When I think of it, I long for some mullah with a dirty nuke to do his worst to us, a hundred times over.

But, you know, I'm not going to turn around and say that pure craft and pure beauty are the only aims of art. Can't go quite that far, though I believe Ross has hit on something important. Munch speaks to me; Courbet speaks to me; van Gogh speaks to me, in his finer, bleaker moments. (But Monet I have no use for, and I wouldn't have a Cezanne in my home as a rug.)

What's funny is that, although the intellectual prejudice against 19th-century academicians has endured, these same painters are enormously popular with the mass public. I know literally dozens of people, mostly people who know little about art history, who have these paintings on their walls and computer desktops. If you and I got together and entered the apartment of a randomly selected female undergraduate, I'd be happy to bet, straight up, on the presence of at least one 19th-century academic painting, probably from England or France. People go mad for this stuff, but they'll be told--if they enter an art history class--that they're perpetuating something that's really kind of patriarchal, and stale, and lacking in irony, and blah blah blah.

But in reality, their instincts are much truer than the received wisdom. Because this painting, for its mild defects, represents the highest pitch to which mankind has ever been able to raise its sense of beauty, and awe, and love of the visual. The 19th century is talking to us through these paintings. Like any time's art, it is asking two questions: "Do you have anything to match these? And are you still capable of responding to them the way we did?" I'm afraid we don't come off very well next to 19th-century man. Perpetual shame is the truly educated person's lot, anno 2002.

The idea is simple: the players should take steps to destroy the major leagues.

I won't give you the full-blown version of my scenario, which is like a demented cross between speculative fiction and Marxism. Basically, my question is this: what if two wealthy, fairly senior, respected ballplayers got together, convinced many of the top players to defect from the MLB, and formed two barnstorming clubs to play 150-200 games around the U.S. and the world, sharing the gate receipts plus TV income between them according to their winning percentage?

If you could attract a large enough fraction of the top tier of MLB talent, there is little question in my mind that people would pay attention and take it seriously. How would you convince the players to defect? Give them shares in the income generated by the club. For all but two or three guys, I think this would mean a significant raise. There's no question in my mind that two de facto all-star teams playing ten nights in Mexico would sell out the biggest stadium you could find all ten nights. There's no question they'd sell out ten or more nights in the Tokyo Dome, although it would help if Ichiro were on one of the teams.

The players, having shares in the club income, would be motivated to play colourful, winning baseball, and lots of it. Would players play 180 games a year, with double-headers and four-man pitching rotations, if each additional game meant $50M in revenue split 25 (or 40, or 50) ways? I think so.

Could you find ways to improve the game and its marketing if you took the best players out from under the confining rubric of MLB? Absolutely.

A mobile barnstorming unit of this type could easily serve as the nucleus of a new, streamlined league. Initially it would be the Higher League, the Better-Than-MLB league, people have sometimes spoken of. (If it isn't, it can't get off the ground: it's just another USFL.) After a while, the money men in MLB would start to close up shop, having been reduced to a sophisticated sort of Triple-A status. The collapse in the market value of franchises would bankrupt many. You'd see a regrouping, a reforming, and eventually, some kind of peace deal between the barnstormers and the surviving MLB clubs.

The reason I suggest all this is that, thinking about it, I don't know how there is any sense in having George Steinbrenner "own" the New York Yankees. What value does he add to the organization that the players wouldn't basically retain if they went across town and reformed as the Wankees? What, do the players need his towering marketing genius? Do we think that ballplayers, some of whom are worth nine figures, can't run a sophisticated business enterprise? Like they can't hire a comptroller or a GM or scouts? Why are this man and his class still in the game? He's the holder of a franchise that only has value because it's a monopoly: if there's no monopoly he's got nothing. If you're wondering why the strikes are so frequent, that's why.

I do think some kind of Second Players' League will come about, one day, through one process or another. Either MLBPA will make it happen by force, or the players will gradually grow in economic power until they elbow out the owners altogether. The Rangers would, frankly, probably have been smarter just to give Alex Rodriguez 49% of the shares in the club. Hollywood offers its stars a percentage of the gross--why doesn't baseball? Only because the books are closed. If the players want to pry them open, they'll have to become "producers" themselves, just like Tom Cruise and Robert Redford.

Player stakeholdership is the long-term future of baseball and other pro sports, and these labour troubles are just the growing pains. The sooner we get the growing pains over with and get where we're going, the better.

In order to make our presentation of Henry V more relevant to a modern audience, and to de-emphasize the play as a History, we chose to set the play in the context of the Canadian Alliance party under the leadership of Stockwell Day.

Stockwell Day as Henry V? I hope this guy got a 9. [That's 9 out of 9 for those not familiar with the bizarre University of Alberta grading system, which no other school uses or understands.]

Even with three children in their 30s, Gloria Gutman sometimes wonders if she'll ever be a grandmother.
"There's some wishfulness," the Vancouver resident said when asked if she hopes one day to bounce grandchildren on her knee.
Gutman, director of the gerontology centre at Simon Fraser University, says career issues are among the reasons none of her adult kids has started a family.
"I keep hearing how nice it is to be a grandparent, but whether I become a grandparent remains to be seen," she says.
With the aging population -- emphasized by Statistics Canada census data released in July -- and the fact that baby boomers and their kids are having fewer offspring, many older Canadians share Gutman's uncertainty.

Here's a hint for those of you awaiting grandkids. We younger folk were born into a world of confiscatory tax rates. We were never asked to vote on Canada's generous welfare programs, nationalized healthcare, interprovincial equalization, pension plan, or phony unemployment "insurance". These things were already in place when we were born, and thanks to your own rather inhibited fertility, we're outvoted until you die.

In short, you already busted our balls--don't expect them to suddenly start working now.

(Digression: if anything rivals it, it's maybe that '91 Oilers-Flames playoff series where the Oilers went up 3-0, then lost three straight, then went down three-zip in game seven, then pulled even, and then Esa Tikkanen beat that sieve Mike Vernon top-shelf-glove-side from forty feet out seven minutes into overtime. I had already seen the Oilers go to six Cup finals and bring home five, and they didn't finish the job in '91, but that goal was pretty much the best.)

(Further digression: although if you held a gun to my head I might pick the 1981 Grey Cup game. At halftime: Ottawa Roughriders 20, Edmonton Eskimos 0. Final score: Edmonton Eskimos 26, Ottawa Roughriders 23. The opposing quarterbacks: Warren Moon for the good guys, future Congressman Julius Caesar "J.C." Watts for the forces of evil.)

Where was I... right! Martinez. I got home from university early that day and the game was still in the third inning, El Presidente going head-to-head with already-ageless Mike Morgan. No score on the board, but I had a funny feeling, and I popped in a VHS tape, which I've never done for a sporting event before or since. And I have to admit to you that when I watch that tape, which I still do occasionally, what I notice is that Martinez sure went to his mouth an awful lot. I just have no idea why the umpires never told him to cut it out. I'm not gonna come right out and tell you Martinez was loading up the ball, but the way his curve was breaking, the Dodgers could have stayed in there for 54 outs. They weren't going anyplace.

Most of the time, from the center field camera, the motion of a pitched ball is suppositional at best to the ordinary viewer, but Martinez's stuff was breaking downward, what?--eighteen inches? Two feet? Plus his fastball was still a good 92, maybe 93 miles an hour at that point in his career. Really it's no wonder I started the tape.

By the most generous possible count, there have been 19 perfect games thrown in 120-plus years of major league ball. About one every six years if you count oddities like Ernie Shore and Harvey Haddix. If you're around 30, like I am, you've got, let's say, fifty years left to catch one of those games. About eight chances, maybe 10 or 12 if you account for expansion. Do you feel like that's going to happen for you? You'd wear yourself out chasing after the perfect game: it's got to come to where you are. If it happens to your favourite pitcher, on your favourite team, in a season in which the team licks the big one in all other respects, well, I can assure you that you are a man very much to be envied.

I was re-reading Bill James's New Historical Baseball Abstract the other day. He has little capsule comments or biographies for the top 100 players, all-time, at each position. For the much-reviled Albert Belle he asks the counterintuitive question "What are ten good things we can say about Albert Belle?" And damned if he doesn't come up with ten.

I can list 100 bad things about Chretien, but I thought that, as an exercise, I'd sit down and see if I could find ten good things to say for the man. Here's my best effort.

1. As Prime Minister, Chretien passed the Clarity Act (2000) on provincial secession, acknowledging its possibility and imposing rules on how it can be voted on and carried out. The rules are fairly reasonable. They are not as clear, themselves, as they could be, but the statute is only quasi-constitutional. Incidentally, the magazine I work for helped push this idea to the forefront in a 1998 cover story conceived by Paul Bunner and written by him and Brian Mulawka.

2. Chretien is the nominal author of the 1969 White Paper advocating the annihilation of the department of Indian Affairs and freeing Canada's Indians from their status as enfeebled wards of the state. Chretien had little to do with the inception and composition of the White Paper, as I understand it, and it was murdered in its cradle by Indian activists who preferred, and prefer, to think of themselves as "Citizens Plus." It is still the best blueprint we have for extricating ourselves from our ghastly gavotte with the downtrodden Canadian treaty Indian. Chretien's name is on it, Chretien took the heat for it: Chretien deserves part of the credit for it.

3. Chretien returned the Liberal Party to its natural, historical, and sane position on free trade with the United States.

4. Chretien backed down on renaming Mount Logan after Pierre Trudeau.

5. I don't exactly agree with making a former television presenter the Governor-General, as Chretien did, but I understand what he was getting at with that appointment, and with similar ones made to the Senate (he installed semi-distinguished jazz pianist Tommy Banks in the Red Chamber, to take one example). Chretien was trying, in his farcical way, to find people of achievement outside of politics for those jobs. Adrienne Clarkson obviously has Liberal sympathies, but she's not some drooling hack who got beaten in an election, as previous viceregents had been. Her husband is, to me, an unspeakable leftist jackanapes: but he's a public intellectual. He's written books, and people buy them and read them. Chretien has been made fun of for putting nuns and hockey players in the Senate, but he's trying to make it a house of accomplished citizens from the private sector. I don't like the choices he's made, but I like that principle.

6. He dumped Hedy Fry from the Cabinet for demented racial fear-mongering, and he dumped Maria Minna for violating voting rules in a municipal election. He has been too slow, generally, to hold cabinet ministers accountable for their words and actions, but he acted in good faith in these cases and faced up to a first minister's responsibility.

7. That guy he tried to strangle pretty much had it coming.

Sorry, that's it. I can only get to seven. I tried, I really did. This is two hours' work you're looking at here. If there's a number eight... well, let me put it this way. When I'm not wishing simultaneous brain and penis cancer on the man, I'm like anybody else: I want to like him. I think it is a wholly good thing that he is sometimes flippant and cruel when asked about Important Issues. We may remember him, one day, as the last Canadian politician who was capable of black humour. ("Pepper? Dat is someting I put on my steak.") As the touchy-feely apocalypse descends, we may value him more, in retrospect, for that. I guess what I'm saying is:

8. Chretien was, at least, an authentic autocrat.

(Nota bene: it's not a double standard insofar as male and female reporters are treated differently; under the league rule, both genders are shown the door after 20 minutes of interviewing the players, who remain in their togs. It's only a double standard insofar as we expect male football and baseball players to deal with unlimited access by both sexes, but we don't expect it of the women.)

It's a precarious modus vivendi, probably an unfair one, but male pro athletes are recompensed more than amply. I'm sure the shy or religious ones find a way to deal with it. But what happens when a woman working the beat for the first time goes ballistic in print and her editors are too drunk or stupid to stop her?

Last week, I was assigned to cover a story at Dodger Stadium. Two of my co-workers passed on the assignment, so I went. Easy enough. Get paid to watch a Dodger game? What was there to think about? Never in my wildest dreams could I have dreamed of the adventure that I lived... I'm told that, with my credential, I can go on the field, in the press box, or even more dangerous, in the clubhouse. Yes, the clubhouse... with baseball players... male baseball players... professional male baseball players... I'm sure you get the point.[...]
As I'm trying to mentally "put it together," I'm leaning against this blue table in the center of the room waiting for Shawn Green, No. 15, to appear from the showers that are just a few mad dashes away. While I'm waiting, I listen to Jesse Orosco, Chad Kreuter, Dave Roberts and Brian Jordan give interviews. Nice guys. Then I discover that I'm in the way because Eric Karros - who is 15 times better looking in person - asked me to move so he could get by. Gulp!
Just then, Shawn Green emerges from the showers, rubbing a towel on his head and wearing only a towel. Three millimeters thick of terry cloth is separating Green's goodies from my life's most embarrassing moment. I really didn't have that much time to think about it before Green whipped off the towel and began to get dressed.
Holy ?$@!!! I'm going to need to see a chiropractor for the whiplash I gave myself. I turned away to not see most of the goods, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I saw Greenie's buns, le toosh, el booty. Catch my drift?

Indubitably, madam (these are just the highlights of the column, you understand). According to SportsByBrooks.com, Patti Shea is a reporter for the Signal of Santa Clarita, CA, which yanked the glassy-eyed column off their website as soon as they realized they had a crate of dynamite on their hands. Romenesko's MediaNews has Shea's apology to the Association for Women in Sports Media, which is presumably living its worst nightmare, times ten, as a result of her behaviour.

Of course, Ms. Shea's true offence was not ogling Shawn Green's "goodies", but in raising the question whether other female reporters are really such human popsicles. I know this much: the last thing baseball needs right now is another goddamn labour-relations issue.

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has shut down a Web site that equates gays with pedophilia and bestiality, saying it contravenes the country's hate laws. "If the telephone is ideally suited to spread prejudicial ideas, the Internet is even better positioned," wrote Tribunal chairman Grant Sinclair in the ruling.

Free speech in Canada? Ha ha ha! What are we, Americans or something? The Globe apparently believes that your brain will melt if they mention the URL of the proscribed website (maybe they're worried they're next in line). Go visit it at your own risk (it's still online as of 3:30 pm Mountain time Monday). ColbyCosh.com does not endorse any of the content at that link, but the management supposes it's only a matter of time before its own opinions are banned.

The humiliating climbdown is mighty delicious. But the round of lame-duck "legacy" legislation isn't going to taste very good. Chretien's got nothing to lose now: prepare to see the true face of Liberal government.

Without evidence from positive randomized trials (and, better still, systematic reviews of randomized trials) we cannot justify soliciting the well to accept any personal health intervention. There are simply too many examples of the disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence as a basis for individual interventions among the well: supplemental oxygen for healthy premies (causing retrolental fibroplasia), healthy babies sleeping face down (causing SIDS), thymic irradiation in healthy children, and the list goes on. To this sad list we must now add estrogen plus progestin when given to healthy postmenopausal women under the presumption that they will be protected against cardiovascular disease.

Preventing disease, argues Dr. David Sackett, is an essentially arrogant enterprise in a way that curing disease is not. It requires a higher standard of scientific evidence, one that isn't being applied. And the mass screwups that result are not because of "greedy" drug companies or "demanding patients": they're because of the culture of the "expert." Take a look at what Sackett has to say, it's not long.

Since the site was started in February 2000, it has grown in popularity (and functionality), and Sean's costs have grown to more than $7,000 a year. What started as a labour of love has become a significant pain in the ass in the life of an underpaid academic. Last year Sean added PayPal and Amazon.com buttons to the site, begging the thousands of freeloaders to pay for all that sweet, sweet data. Some ponied up, but not enough for Sean to turn a profit.

Now, practically overnight, he's discovered a revenue model that seems to work: paid sponsorships for text ads on individual team and player pages. In the past 24 hours Sean's been deluged with money as ball fans race to snap up their favourites. Few if any of the buyers are interested in commerce: most are just buying bragging rights to their favourite teams or players, either for themselves or, in many cases, their fathers. If you want to sign up, you'd better damn well hurry.

I don't know if Sean's reached the break-even point, or if he will, but the excitement that this simple idea has created is insane. It will certainly put a large dent in his costs. I think everybody who has followed his ups and downs is ashamed of himself for not thinking of this sooner. Eventually he intends to implement a system whereby pages can be bought and sold, so consider this message your chance to get in on the ground floor of the next tulipomania. When you read about it in Wired News, remember where you heard it first.

· Henry Jenkins, a researcher who is skeptical of claims that video games cause youth violence, went on Donahue and got bushwhacked, bullied, and browbeaten. Salon.com deserves credit for giving him space in a deliberative medium to fight back. Drawing-room leftism sì, moral panics no!

· A ZDNet article suggests that the invention shown to bigwigs during the hype over Dean Kamen's "Ginger" may not actually have been the Segway. Which is odd, since the rumours which got out before the unveiling all pointed to something very much like the Segway, and so did almost all the hints that were dropped by the aforementioned bigwigs. Apparently 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe told the New York Times:

Some months ago when speculation was running high, I said that Kamen's IT was more important than the Internet, but not as important as cold fusion, had cold fusion worked out. The IT I was talking about, which I did not disclose, was NOT Segway. That's all I can say.

This actually isn't hard to parse. Metcalfe doesn't say he wasn't shown the Segway. He only says that when he talked about something "more important than the Internet," he wasn't talking about the Segway itself.

What could he have been talking about? How about the engine inside the Segway? Reader John Hall points out [by way of correcting the original paragraph here--thanks, John] that the current-generation machine runs on batteries, but Kamen is said to be working on a practical Stirling engine: if so, that would represent a pretty significant advance in basic engineering. (With many Segways now in the hands of users, albeit public-sector ones, I'm waiting for someone to crack one open on the sly and report back on their tinkering.) Could Metcalfe have seen such an engine, or a Segway prototype powered by one?

Incidentally, Ben, my surname isn't "Cash", although you are hardly the first to make the mistake. Look, the banner on my page is already the size of a infant's head, plus you got "Cosh" right in the URL. What more can I do here? Don't make me demonstrate the verb "cosh" on you people. [UPDATE: The offender has now restored the dignity of the Cosh name, which is in its third millennium of verifiable historical existence and expects no less.]

I'm Ontarian, and I've voted Alliance/Reform for the last two elections. What I can comment on is the attitude of other Ontarians towards the Alliance. I've never once heard any mention of antipathy to the West as being a reason for disliking the Alliance. What seems to jar people, especially women, is the image that the Alliance has been saddled with of being the party of the Religious right and a bunch of racist, homophobic bigots. (The moment of truth for me in dating has more than once been telling a girl that yes, I support the Alliance. This has not always worked out well. one girl from Queens told me never to speak to her again after I had the temerity to ask for proof that Stockwell Day was a racist as she'd claimed.)

Silly monkey! Do you think the image of the Alliance as the party of bigotry would be credible for one minute if the party wasn't dominated by Albertans and British Columbians? Of course people don't mention regional antipathy as a factor, because they're ashamed of it or (more likely) they don't even consider it. It just is a factor.

Look, the Alliance is the overwhelmingly dominant party here--nobody who's from here doesn't vote for them. So when someone tells you that the CA is a party of Holocaust-denying gay-bashers, he (or she) is ipso facto admitting to regional hatred. What else would you call it when an entire region of the country is arraigned for voting, pretty much unanimously, for a neo-fascist conspiracy? This ugly regional prejudice may not be a sufficient cause for the "stigma" you speak of, but it's certainly a necessary one. The stigma is the antipathy. If you think this through you'll see they're logically equivalent.

To put it another way, how does one maintain that Stockwell Day is a bigot, and yet not think that Albertans, who overwhelmingly supported a government in which he was a senior minister, are themselves a bunch of bigots? The two beliefs go hand in hand, and I'm inclined to think (in the absence of evidence that poor Stock Day has a racist bone in his body) that the implicit one is actually the prior one. As an exercise, you may wish to find an Ontario resident who comes from Alberta originally and is willing to admit to it: they'll tell you quick enough whether the never-mentioned regional bias exists, and is common, and figures large in people's minds. Hell, try telling some new acquaintances you're from Alberta yourself, and check the reaction.

I really admire your courage, BCM, in sticking up for your political beliefs (and mine). It's a shame you have to feel jumpy about voting your self-evident self-interest. But there are nearly a million of you out there, as I have to remind myself every day. So you're obviously not alone. Several dozen of that million may even be chicks! Woo-hoo!

"Some nights I lay in my bedroom and I listen to 'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,' and I cry," he tells me. "I cry and cry and cry. I cry like a little bitch, man."

We've all been there, dude. I could keep you here all day with baffling quotes from this article.

It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrissey?" question will haunt us forever.

"People have actually said to me, 'You like Morrissey? That's weird for a white guy.'"

See, I gotta stop or I'll ruin it for you. I want to just hug these kids--they're giving poor Moz's life a second act. It's a beautiful, mind-bending thing.

Chuck Strahl simply won't give up. The British Columbia MP, part of the Flight Club that crossed to the Progressive Conservatives when the Canadian Alliance ushered Preston Manning out the door, is now back in the CA fold under new leader Stephen Harper. But he still wants to "unite the right", because if the Tory and CA benches were all in the same place, he'd save a bundle on shoe leather. Here's Chuck in the Monday Vancouver Province:

"It takes maturity and a recognition that none of our ideas will get carried forward if the Liberals win another majority.
"Do you want a chance to implement a plan, or are you more satisfied with a war of attrition in the trenches?"
It is all such a muddle. While he talks of unification, Strahl must also support the Alliance.
It has to find its way again with a "positive, compelling" new vision, he says, the old one tattered after too much internal turmoil.
"We have to decide it's not all just about lower taxes. If we get stuck on our '93 rhetoric, we won't get the next generation of voters."

How much is wrong with all this? Let's see:

· First of all, "maturity" is the war cry of the L-O-S-E-R. It's the word you trot out when your ideas are not only bankrupt, but actually wearing a barrel around them like a cartoon from the 1930's. There is no "immaturity" bloc in any political dispute, OK? Can we agree to drop this word? It's an even worse synonym for "bipartisanship", which we are mercifully free of here in the Northern Heptarchy.

· Another Liberal majority would be bad, says Chuck. Well, no shit, Sherlock. We'd all like it if there were an obvious means of reducing the Liberals to sooty rubble, but as it happens, there is a very good argument, supported by pretty much all the psephological evidence and common sense, that the Tories are siphoning votes from the Liberals.

I don't, myself, know why people still vote Tory. But no one has ever given me any reason to suspect that the answer is anything but this: Tory voters would rather choke to death on their own shit than vote for anything which comes from the West, is led by the West, or favours the political agenda of Westerners. How is a Western party supposed to accommodate that slight difficulty? Or am I perhaps missing some policy difference between the PCs and the CA? Because I thought the whole point of the "unite-the-right" argument was that there is no policy difference. If there's no policy difference, why are people still voting Tory, if not out of anti-Western fear, suspicion, and hatred? And if there is a policy difference, then why are we talking about a merger?

· Finally we have Chuck admitting that "It's not about lower taxes". Well, I can go along with that, if what he means is that "It's about smaller government and closing the standard-of-living gap with the U.S.". But lower taxes would seem to be a perfectly reasonable third leg in that tripod. What else do you fellows want to run on? Banning abortion? Good luck with that. Stopping gay marriage? News flash: no one gives a crap. Building a giant ice lens in Nunavut to focus the sun's rays on our enemies? Sure, go for it.

This addled man is really worried, it appears, that the "younger generation" is going to bolt from the CA because it intends to focus on economic issues. This is the same younger generation that knows, and dreads, that it's going to be carrying the Baby Boomers on its back until Doomsday under various intergenerational Ponzi schemes devised by the Liberals. It's grown up knowing nothing but Cuban standards of healthcare. It's grown up soaked in public and private debt, watching payroll taxes increase every year. In the "have-not" provinces, this "younger generation" has watched its own most talented members--and several entire economies--pack up and move on to Alberta and Ontario. In Alberta and Ontario, it has watched those same talents pack up and move south to the U.S.

It's the economy, STUPID. The reason the Canadian Alliance isn't occupying 24 Sussex right now is that the economic message has never been given a fair chance. The party began as a mechanism for desirable, but improbable, constitutional reforms favourable to the West. Even as it's tried to shake its original raison d'être, which won it the West and understandably hindered growth in Ontario, it's been saddled with sideshows at every turn. From bogus accusations of racism to disputes over Quebec to this unite-the-right fiddle-faddle, the party's economic platform has never been more than a background issue. The various leaders have all, most of the time, allowed the media to shine the light elsewhere.

The successful strategy is simple. Get taxes and the economy at the top of the agenda. Don't let reporters distract you with bullshit wastes of time.

"Mr. Harper, what if Mike Harris runs for the Tory leadership?"

"Can't say that I give a damn, Jim: here's our plan for cleaner, smaller government and economic growth. Mike Harris is welcome to steal it if he likes. In fact, I've sent him ten copies."

"Mr. Harper, there are signs that the Quebec separatist movement is reviving. Your thoughts?"

"Well, Jane, maybe you haven't heard about our economic plan to give Canada, including Quebec, cleaner, smaller government and economic growth. If we're given the chance to implement it, I don't think you'll be hearing much about separatism five years down the road."

"Mr. Harper, where do you stand on gay marriage?"

"Well, I married a woman myself, and that seems to work out OK for me. But as a party, we have no formal position on gay marriage. Our plan to give Canada cleaner, smaller government and economic growth will enrich working people--gay, straight, celibate, or transsexual."

"Mr. Harper, will you call for a free vote in the Commons on abortion?"

"Not in my first term as Prime Minister. That's a promise. We'll have our hands full in the first four years introducing cleaner, smaller government and economic growth."

"Mr. Harper, what about those who say your economic proposals victimize society's most vulnerable?"

"I feel sorry for anyone who feels victimized by cleaner, smaller government and economic growth. If you want dirty, huge government and economic stagnation, I invite you to vote Liberal."

The economy's not everything, of course. There are some other issues too popular to resist including in a short-term Alliance platform: you could win trainloads of votes promising to shut down Indian Affairs and to give treaty Indians the same economic rights as the rest of us. If the Liberals resist, point out that you're merely advocating the principles in the 1969 Liberal white paper written by a certain J. Chretien. You could include the text in your campaign literature. The Indians won't like it, you say? Oh, many will like it very much, I suspect, but either way, Indians (for complex cultural reasons) don't vote in very great numbers. There will be violent protests fomented by the corrupt band councils who grow fat under the current system, of course. They should be worth about 100,000 Alliance votes apiece.

· To return to my original point, why is Chuck so sure that no Canadian Alliance ideas will be implemented even if the Liberals do win again? "None of our ideas"? None? Are you quite sure about that, Chuck? It seems to me that the classic Liberal method of survival has been to steal ideas wholesale from whomever poses the greatest threat electorally. This is, in fact, a frequent complaint of the satellite parties clustered around the Liberal sun.

Of course, in a situation of the sort we have now, no one poses any threat, and the Liberals can let their imaginations run wild with new foreign aid programs for African dictators. A strong Opposition forces them to do good things they don't really want to do (e.g., they've had to stop giving untendered advertising contracts to storefront sleazebags in Quebec). The stronger the Opposition, the better the country will be run by the Liberals. Ideally we won't have Liberals in power, but if we end up with Liberals in power using the Canadian Alliance playbook, I'll be fairly happy with that. It's not so important to me that "my guy" get into 24 Sussex. I know it's important to Chuck, though: perhaps he has his eye on one of those cushy Senate seats.

I am to do a revision of the piece for the archives... Face very red. Thanks for writing.

The reputation of LewRockwell.com for accountability is restored! And I owe Tom a big apology, myself, for my system's throwing his actually very prompt e-mail into a locker for two days. Tom was, in truth, on top of things immediately, and the piece isn't going to be made to disappear forever, just fixed up. Bravo to Mr. White.

I am in enough trouble with the SA government as it is, by daring to get a foreign temporary work visa. I've had deposits into my accounts frozen for "money laundering" once already. Plenty of SA politicians would have no problem calling me a "traitor", and have done so in general terms when talking about "the brain drain" (which they are creating).

A "brain drain" is what we have here in Canada: in South Africa it's more like a brain flush, with an inept president working the lever. The government can't, or won't, do anything about the ongoing national rape and murder spree, and there does seem to be a feeling abroad in the country that the whites are just getting their own back. It's a slow-motion version of the process now being completed in Zimbabwe, and in the long term it's bound to reach the same terminus. I'm not complaining, myself--Canada is a net beneficiary from the flight of South African professionals, black and white. In particular, medical doctors seem to be hightailing it in large numbers, providing understaffed rural areas of Canada with plenty of De Wets, De Boers, and Cronjes who just want to be able go outside unarmed.

The ground was seeded when a large number of doctors left the RSA in the '70s to avoid the military draft and because they were heartsick at the "business" apartheid was sending their way. But when apartheid ended, the influx didn't stop. The Canadian Medical Association Journal observed last year that 1,500 Canadian doctors are South African-trained. In the province of Saskatchewan, 17% of the physicians are from SA.

This is not, needless to say, good for South Africa, but what's South Africa doing about it? Asking the Canadian government to stop "recruiting" South African physicians? That's a laugh and a half: it's not Canada's brilliant marketing that's bringing South African doctors over, it's emigré classmates, friends, and relatives who are already here, and who have found that they like it.

Martin Vogel explained to the CMAJ why he was "recruited" away from South Africa:

"To know your kids are safe while you're at work. To know that if you're going to be back late, somebody will pick them up and take them to hockey or to dance class. To know if you're going to be out of town they can have a sleepover. I can't speak highly enough about that."

Some people would call Dr. Vogel a "traitor" to South Africa, but did South Africa fulfill its obligations to Dr. Vogel? Loyalty is, or ought to be, a two-way street.

· The Canadian Press reports that Bartolo Colon's two-hit shutout of the Padres may be the Expos' "last game in Montreal." The Spos are on the road now until the strike date, August 30. How many "possible Montreal finales" have been played over the years? As I've said, it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the former minority owners of the team would not ask the judge in their RICO suit to order an injunction if MLB tried to move the club. And it's almost as unlikely that he wouldn't grant it. On what legal grounds could he not grant it? They're just not moving, CP, get your head screwed on straight.

· The 8-0 Montreal Alouettes, who are playing awfully well for a team whose name is French for larks, are staring into the abyss. NFL pariah Lawrence Phillips, a woman-assaulting drunk driver who won't take orders from a coach, won the starting fullback job from probable Hall of Famer Mike Pringle in camp. But now Pringle's out for the year with a buggered knee. And then this happens:

Lawrence Phillips is missing in action again.
The Montreal Alouettes suspended the CFL's leading rusher Monday after he left the team Sunday morning and skipped practice without explanation.
Phillips' only contact with the club came Monday morning, when he complained of knee pain in a brief phone call to an Alouettes trainer.
General manager Jim Popp suspended Phillips when he missed the team's 5 p.m. EDT flight Monday to B.C., where they play the Lions on Wednesday.

The CFL gets a lot of these NFL "reclamation projects". In the case of your Doug Flutie type, where the guy's failure to stick is a pure question of prejudice and cowardice among NFL coaches, they usually work. In the cases where the guy has burned his own bridges and comes with a rap sheet as long as your arm... well, you can't argue with an 8-0 start, but the Als are sure in a fix now.

In sports generally, an important difference between good organizations and bad ones is that good organizations seem able to get guys with "bad attitude" raps onto the same page as the club. My Eskimos seem to do a good job of this--it's been a long time now since the last Cup win, mind you, but I will point out that they're 6-2 with guys like Ron Williams and Elfrid Payton who were basically discarded by martinets in other cities. Of course, those are acknowledged all-league players and there's some suspicion that the Esks just blew off the salary cap in an effort to get to the Cup game, which is here this November. At least the Calgary papers are suspicious, anyway.

· Are Canadian soldiers nervous wrecks? CP reports:

Canada's soldiers, sailors and air crews booked off about 27,000 more days of sick leave last year than in 1999, raising troubling questions about the health of the military.
The amount of sick leave jumped 25 per cent over two years -- from 106,151 days in 1999-00 to 132,890 sick days in 2001-02, figures released under the Access to Information Act show.
And last week, a health survey of half of the Canadian Force's 52,000 active members suggested personnel are less healthy than the average Canadian and are more likely to be mentally distressed.
Only 22 per cent reported being in excellent health, compared with 29 per cent of the wider population, which is surprising given that physical fitness is emphasized in the military, the report said.

There's no hint in the story that soldiers may gauge their own fitness differently than the general population, because they work in a field where "physical fitness" is emphasized. There's a lot of sucking and blowing in the story about how Canadian soldiers are "burned out", and Lord knows it's not an easy life. But near the back end, a colonel points out that the increase in sick time may be a simple question of more units signing onto the database that keeps track of this stuff! What's more, a retired Forces doctor points out that the military is outsourcing more of its medical work, and civilian doctors may be more likely to put a guy on sick leave than military ones are. (I'd consider this a near certainty, myself.)

The real explanation is probably some combination of all of these, plus the factor no one dares mention: the disgust of the ordinary soldier with our bureaucratized, social-engineered, "soft-power" armed forces, which will court-martial a guy for hanging a "Fuck Terrorism" sign on a dead Taliban shitbag. If you hate your bosses, you're going to take more sick leave: simple as that.

· Martha meltdown? Drudge says yes!

Embattled media mogul Martha Stewart is said to see a political conspiracy behind the deepening investigation into her questionable stock trades, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
"Martha really believes it is the Republicans who are behind this -- and they are chasing her for purely political reasons," a Stewart intimate said this weekend.
"Martha told me that she believes they are doing the very same thing to her, they did to President Clinton...."

Go on, Martha, I dare you to tell your customers with your own mouth that you're the victim of a Republican conspiracy. As things stand, most of them aren't aware of your feverish fundraising for the party of Clinton and Gore. By all means, go out of your way to call the attention of white yuppies to your political predicament. It'll play absolutely brilliantly in Peoria.

I'm sympathetic to anyone who attracts the unwelcome attention of--well, any government agency with an acronym, really: IRS, DEA, ATF, SEC, they're all Satan. But come now, Martha, are you really so shocked that an insider-trading investigation has them looking at your e-mails and checking into whom you've dated? I wasn't a Bill Clinton defender in any way, but this isn't anything like what Clinton faced. Is the ultimate legacy of the Starr investigation going to be that people suspected of fraud invariably play the Clinton card? "Now I understand Bill's pain!" No you don't: not until the whole world has a detailed record of you licking a 22-year-old's ass and having a wank into a bathroom fixture, you don't.

I'm pleased to be able to actively recommend all these sites, but I should highlight a couple I've rather neglected to talk up... if you agree with my "Let's get informed about Australia, fellow Canadians" initiative you should make Gareth Parker part of your diet. Sasha Castel is charming and erudite enough to rise far above the common run of "Come back with your shield or on it" female bloggers. The boss of Fumbling, which I linked purely as a matter of reflex, turns out to be an emergency-room medical resident with some frightfully interesting observations. And I'm just about to add the Greeblie Blog to the sidebar. Again, it's just reflexive backscratching--guy linked to me, didn't say a word about it. And yes, the name of his site sounds like an invisible forest creature who performs anilingus on unsuspecting wayfarers. But if you like rampaging, sweary middle American blogs, then rock on.

I'm personally rather sick of the view that you need to express an opinion on the morality of the practices you're describing, especially in news reporting. The Washington Post is supposed to state that targeting innocent civilians is immoral? In a news article?

(The Volokhs' permalinks are busted at the moment, which is becoming typical for Blogspot sites. You'll have to search for the particular posting yourself.)

I'm afraid, although I respect the warbloggers Volokh is chiding, that I feel the same way he does. If your goal is analysis, outrage will only interfere. "We are much beholden to Machiavel and others," wrote Francis Bacon, "that write what men do, and not what they ought to do." Indignation, however appropriate it may be to the circumstances, is not a tool of cognition.

Sasha then asks for input on the question of why "suicide bombers targeting civilians" are wrong--that is, for a logical elucidation of why, apart from the justice or injustice of the Palestinian cause, we feel or assume that "suicide bombers targeting civilians" are wrong. Is it the "suicide" part that bothers us? Or the targeting of civilians? Or is there some mutual interaction of the elements there that makes the whole objectionable?

I believe the answer is that we are right to be bothered by both, independently, with qualifications.

A suicidal attack which is made to further a larger war aim is one thing; any war would offer examples, some of which have justly entered the annals of human heroism. And why is that? Because the men who made them were giving their lives for their brothers in arms, for their families, or for their country--for things which they valued more than their lives. In these cases, the common consent of mankind ratifies the action: we can all--Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian, atheist--respect these men for acting on their values in the face of human fears.

But I think we are correct to object to a suicide attack where the suicide is part of the essential nature of the attack--where the suicide is itself the goal, or part of the goal. A suicide states by his action that he values nothing, or nothing worldly at any rate. The Palestinian suicide bombers horrify us because they are not men and women who can reasonably think "There will be a Palestinian state in 90 days because I blew up this cafe, and my children will live at peace in that state." They are men and women who think "Allah is going to love this. Virgins, here I cum!" Operationally, from a secular standpoint, a religious fetish for suicide is tantamount to nihilism: you can't reason with, or placate, a person who is ab initio committed to self-annihilation. We rightly feel aggrieved in the face of a nihilistic enemy, because he has raised the stakes on us, on no pretext we share. We feel that he is cheating at the rules of war, which is supposed to be the furtherance of political ends by means of reluctant coercion and destruction. We are, ourselves, reluctant to abandon our humanity by taking him at his implicit word that he does not care if he lives or dies.

(And I will digress in this connection to say that it is too fucking rich that the Palestinian sympathizers, who ask us to understand the "freedom fighters" on one hand, are the same people who demand that the United States, in its relations with Iraq et al., be placed in a straitjacket of wholly novel and fantastic conventions of international "law". Make up your mind, Lefty.)

As to the targeting of civilians... Sasha asks:

What's the problem with targeting civilians? Is the claim that you should never target civilians, or that targeting civilians is a strike against your side which you need to make up for with (a) an exceptionally worthy cause or (b) an inability to go after military targets? If we're against Palestinian terror on those grounds, do we have to be against having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima too?

In fact, what Sasha's suggesting in the bit with the (a) and the (b) sounds quite a lot like what Grotius, who is The Man on this issue, told us in Book Three of De Jure Belli ac Pacis. I expect he's read it:

Though there may be circumstances, in which absolute justice will not condemn the sacrifice of lives in war, yet humanity will require that the greatest precaution should be used against involving the innocent in danger, except in cases of extreme urgency and utility.

(Text provided by Wei Wilson Chen.)

This doctrine leaves a fair amount of room for Hiroshima, or both the atom bomb attacks, because they (a) ended the war immediately and (b) were arguably not a "sacrifice of lives" at all, but rather the means of saving them, on both sides. There was also an element of "taking the enemy at his word" in the bombing too: after the mass suicide on Saipan and the kamikaze attacks, there could have been no remaining doubt about the frightfulness necessary to bring the conflict to a conclusion.

Whether the Palestinians' random bombings of discos and cafes satisfy the requirement of "extreme urgency or utility" that Grotius proposed, I cannot rightly say here, because Sasha wishes to leave aside questions about the nature of the Palestinian cause. These questions are intimately connected with the problem of what level of violence against innocent citizens is permissible.

But three case-specific things are crying out to be noted in this connection:

(1) The Palestinians are not fighting against enslavement or destruction: they are fighting against disenfranchisement, dispossession of property, and the sovereign authority of people they don't like because of ethnic and religious differences. They are not fighting for "freedom": they're fighting against a liberal democracy, and for substantive enslavement by people who read from the same hymnal they do (not even that, in the case of the Palestinian Christians). I think we are required to impose very different moral criteria on Yasser Arafat's actions and, say, Nat Turner's.

(2) Are the Israelis always as careful as Grotius would wish about killing civilians? Perhaps not, although I've always been impressed to the point of dumbfoundedness by the actual care the IDF takes when I've read trustworthy accounts of its behaviour. But ignore that. The point is this: the Israelis do believe their actions are bound by a moral law and will be judged by it. When they kill civilians, they defend their actions and assert that they do not want to kill civilians haphazardly. Hypocrisy? Perhaps: but hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. It is a sign of moral judgment, of moral consciousness. What self-imposed moral limits do the suicide bombers accept? "We'll stop killing babies when you give us what we want"? That's not a moral limit, that's a ransom demand.

(3) Killing innocents because they are innocents is very different, morally, from killing innocents because they are in the way. However depraved the latter, the former is on a whole other level, no matter how you slice it.

I've promoted Lew Rockwell's site here before, and with good reason: it's extremely useful and I think it's an important locus of paleoconservative dissent. So I feel obliged to report a disc