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ARCHIVES for May 2005

Culture beat

Two important pieces from Arts & Letters Daily: Der Spiegel takes a balanced look at Germany's new-style youth reactionaries, and Alex Ross looks at how recording technology changed classical music.

The Spiegel piece does what any honest, penetrating survey of a social movement must: convince you that if you were alive at that age in that place and time, you too might be tempted to sign up. If the liberal state cannot protect its citizens from violence, it will lose legitimacy (in both perception and fact), and the form of what replaces it cannot be predicted. It is disconcerting to note that neo-Nazis have finally learned to imitate the original article in an important respect:

The neo-Nazis have long since changed their tactics when it comes to young people, no longer relying solely on tired slogans to get their message across. Now they organize camping trips, soccer tournaments, hikes and concerts, as well as running youth clubs.

One also notices the disastrous effects of German music censorship: "kids," the article notes, "are most strongly drawn by anything illegal."

Ross's piece observes something I've noticed about musical artifacts from the earliest period of recorded music: namely, that there is something wild, impassioned, and delightfully heterogenous about them.

Archival reissues give tantalizing glimpses of the world as it was. Philip notes that in a 1912 performance the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe "sways either side of the beat, while the piano maintains an even rhythm." In disks by the Bohemian Quartet, he says, "each player is functioning as an individual," reacting with seeming spontaneity to the personalities of the others. Edward Elgar’s recordings of his Second Symphony and Cello Concerto, from 1927 and 1928, respectively, are practically explosive in impact, destroying all stereotypes of the composer as a staid Victorian gentleman. No modern orchestra would dare to play as the Londoners played for Elgar: phrases precipitously step over one another, tempos constantly change underfoot, rough attacks punch the clean surface. The biographical evidence suggests that this borderline-chaotic style of performance was exactly what Elgar wanted.

"We’ve been listening," says Ross with surprising directness, "to the same record for a century and a half." I've always felt a little bit that way as a purchaser of classical music--and perusers of handbooks like the Penguin Guide will often catch the editors half-confessing that all the extent versions of von Whatever's Heffalump Sonata are more or less clean, polished, and safe. Dare one say that there's a word missing from Ross's piece, and that the word is "punk"?

- 10:14 am, May 31 (link)


In today's National Post: my column on the U.S.A.'s controversy over Medicaid-funded Viagra for registered sex offenders. Subscribers can read it online. (The Sun-Sentinel has a good review of the background.)

- 6:45 am, May 31 (link)


Opus Lucae

I checked out Revenge of the Sith on the weekend... since everyone seems to be developing his favourite reading of the series, can I point out that it takes an unambiguous and unpopular position on the contemporary dichotomy between personalized "spirituality" and organized religion? We live in a period in which churches are regarded as sinister in themselves, but "faith" of all kinds receives exaggerated deference and legal protection. So has anyone noticed that, er, the Jedi are a hierarchical militarist religious order that takes great pains to impose orthodoxy on its members from childhood onward? Or that the rhetoric used by Darth Sidious to befuddle and win over Anakin Skywalker is basically liberal-relativist? "Good is a point of view?" Helloooo?

Obi-Wan Kenobi does make a remark at one point that "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"...but then he proceeds to mutilate the living bejeebers out of his heretical ex-acolyte. Which is a pretty "absolute" sort of thing to do, though nobody asked me. The Jedi, on the whole, seem like a funny sort of bunch for a generation of overeducated slackers with a distaste for "organized religion" to be cheering for. The Jedi virtues all seem to be particularly scarce in the contemporary age--obedience, humility, chastity, patience. And George Lucas, understanding the pervasive collective feeling (present in all human ages) that the world has gone wrong somehow, cannot be said to have chosen them unwisely. But how will he feel if his space opera turns a generation of dorks into crusading conservative Catholics? At least one weblogger has noticed that the movie offers a decisive argument in favour of the celibacy of the priesthood.

- 7:41 am, May 30 (link)


CrosbyWatch

Something like ten weeks ago, I wrote a column for the Western Standard pointing out that nobody knows what the 2005 NHL draft will look like when it's eventually held, assuming it is held. The Globe has now done some reporting on the issue, but didn't get much further than I did from first principles.

The non-playoff clubs of the 2003-04 season want a weighted lottery system to determine the draft order, but the playoff clubs believe that each franchise should get an equal chance at drafting Crosby.

That decision has yet to be made. Most scouts have been told that a draft will be held between a week and two weeks after a settlement is reached between the league and the players' union.

The front-office personnel of my Edmonton Oilers have been griping semi-publicly that the uncertainty about their draft position requires them to rank every player and actually take the best one available, instead of targeting a few dozen that they happen to like. Boo hoo. Not coincidentally, the story linked to there is also another landmark in the club's atrocious recent draft history: the organization appears to be giving up on Finnish prospect Tony Salmaleinen, who was tagged by an optimistic local press as an imminent NHL arrival as little as 16 months ago.

Then again, the 2003 selection of Marc-Antoine Pouliot is looking like it may pay a handsome return. The Edmonton Sun recently ran a what-if piece--entertainingly illustrated with the help of Photoshop--pointing out that the Oilers will likely have some kind of shot at Pouliot's linemate Crosby no matter what form is decided on for the draft. "Granted," writes Robin Brownlee, "contemplating Crosby and Pouliot together in Edmonton is a bit like spending the loot from a Lotto 6-49 jackpot before the draw, but is there anybody who's ever bought a ticket who hasn't done that?"

- 2:56 am, May 29 (link)


While we're talking about music...

...I wasn't all that pleased to see Bo Bice get his American Idol comeuppance on Wednesday night. Perhaps I didn't make my admiration for his excellent gameplay clear enough. He was not only clever: he also must have worked a lot harder than new Idol Carrie Underwood did. She was mostly stiff and uncertain on the stage right until the endgame. Bo began with a stronger performing presence--featuring a repertoire of old-fashioned frontman moves learned through humiliating effort in dozens of ratbag nightclubs--and only got better as a crowd-pleaser. But the one I wanted to win was Vonzell Solomon, who had an enormously appealing personality and interpreted traditional R&B numbers as something other than feats of athleticism. The world doesn't really need another blonde cutie-pie from cow country, and I can't see much point in elevating Bo beyond his natural station as the frontman of a bar band.

Steve Sailer describes American Idol as a "healthy TV fad" for a number of reasons. I would add that it sneaks in a few useful lessons in American musical traditions for young people. The show did a Lieber & Stoller theme night this season, as well as one dedicated to Gamble & Huff.

Currently in high rotation around the house:

The Who, "How Many Friends"/"They Are All In Love"/"In A Hand or a Face": I always think of these awkward confessional numbers from side two of The Who By Numbers as a self-constained trilogy of neurosis and uncertainty, though this is merely an accident of running order ("However Much I Booze", the second cut on side one, sets basically the same tone). This was the album where Pete Townshend stopped using elaborate metaphors to portray his isolation and inadequacy, and started just basically shouting for help. Roger Daltrey's macho voice was arguably not the best vehicle for this sort of exercise, but By Numbers is still a monument to dread and unfocused hostility. I remember being somehow gratified when Eddie Vedder finally acknowledged his incalculable debt to it.

Remember how vinyl LPs had two sides? And how you inevitably regarded each side as an entity unto itself, made a big deal about the differences, and even had arguments about which one was better? I'm just about old enough to remember vinyl singles--I remember, for instance, being invited to the home of a new kid in town who was a year older and who, I guess, was getting a little exasperated with trying to break into the social circle of the guys his own age. We spent an afternoon shooting pool while he played Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" over and over obsessively, at least ten or fifteen times. I had no problem with this--for a 12-year-old in 1983 that song somehow made a whole lot of sense. But that was the last time I was invited over, so maybe I wasn't visibly enthusiastic enough. Neither of us had any idea that the song referred to any other song, or that David Bowie had existed before "Let's Dance". I'm sure there must have been a moment later when I heard "Space Oddity" and the penny dropped.

Booker T. and the M.G.'s, "Something": If you're looking for a summary of the American music scene circa 1970, the all-but-forgotten LP McLemore Avenue just about captures the situation: the finest combo in the annals of R&B was reduced to covering Abbey Road in its (near) entirety. Then again, I suppose you could see it as a counterchallenge from the U.S. to Britain--looking at the Amazon reviews, that appears to be the party line--or even a gesture of triumph: looks like we've outlasted those English pricks, boys. However you regard the creation of McLemore Avenue, it's a fascinating concept; Steve Cropper supposedly didn't even listen to Abbey Road before going into the studio. The results are merely average by M.G. standards, which is still pretty good.

Simon & Garfunkel, "The Only Living Boy In New York": If you're like me, you feel slightly resentful when a movie soundtrack (in this case Garden State) thrusts an underappreciated pop song up your nose and into your frontal lobe. I'm inclined to regard this as the most compelling of S&G songs; by the end of the '60s, Simon had learned to rein in his grad-studenty lyrical tendencies, and the experience of having Sounds of Silence turned into a hit behind his back taught him to surround himself with great session musicians--a lesson that served him well in his solo career. "Only Living Boy" would have floated right off into the vault of the cathedral without the incomparable ballast of Joe Osborn's bass playing. Osborn--who would be notable if he'd done nothing more than discover The Carpenters--is an anonymous yet pivotal presence in the life of pretty much everyone born in the Western world between 1940 and 1975. On "Only Living Boy" he is alternately relaxed and insistent, switching between supporting the main chords and doing his own exquisite thing in the background. For much of the song the bass is really the lead instrument, commenting eloquently underneath the ethereal multi-tracked vocals. I find fairly often that when I dial in to the bass performance of some session legend--an Osborn or a James Jamerson--I become slightly embarrassed for the taste and abilities of the regular bass players in some of my own favourite groups.

Concering Bridge Over Troubled Water as a whole, I wonder if we can maybe lay off Art Garfunkel a little. This guy has been a punching bag for comedians for, what, forty years now? In an era when most of the vocal harmony on the radio is sterile, noxious, and egregiously computer-aided, I don't find the joke so funny anymore. I figure there are millions to be made by some bright character who was, say, willing to reconstruct the Mamas and the Papas on the original model. (And, just for the record, Joe Osborn played on all those records too.)

Television, "See No Evil": Has anyone ever come up with a satisfactory explanation for why this group was huge in Britain and did nothing in the U.S. outside a ten-block radius of CBGB's? Every time I listen to "See No Evil", I think: monster hit. I'm not sure I can name a song with a better guitar hook, with the possible exception of "Venus" (the next track on the Marquee Moon LP). It is baffling to me that music like this was a cult object, the property of a subculture of weirdos and slackers, in the U.S. It's exactly as if ice cream were a secret. "Dude, you have to try this stuff they're making with dairy products and rock salt in the East Village."

- 6:15 pm, May 28 (link)


The musical Antichrist

Recently Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot panned U2 for--to paraphrase lightly--publicly renouncing whatever collective ambitions it might have had to "grow" as a band in any but a commercial sense. Believe it or not, Bono proceeded to accost Kot over the phone, invite him for breakfast, and accuse him of being an enemy of rock music. How many deeply twattish (or twattishly expressed) things can Bono pack into 90 minutes of table talk? Warning: your correspondent may not have the incredible staying power Kot displayed in his set-to with God's gift to Erin.

Some of what is going around as a result of your article is not just unhelpful to our group and our relationship to our audience, but just really problematic for what in the broad sense you might call rock music. [Stop hurting America, Greg! -ed.]

When you suggest we're betraying ourselves by doing TV shows and promotional stuff, to me the Super Bowl was our Ed Sullivan moment. It just came 25 years later. I didn't expect it. But it is one of the moments I'm most proud of in my life.

[The iPod is] the most beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar.

We were offered $23 million for just the music to "Where the Streets Have No Name." We thought we could do a lot of good with that money. Give it away. But if a show is a little off, and there's a hole, that's the one song we can guarantee that God will walk through the room as soon as we play it. [Too bad for the Sudanese orphans and whatnot, but we've got a career to think about.]

That lyric was written in a dusty field in northern Ethiopia... [Oh for fuck's sake. -ed.]

Rap-metal nearly put the white race in jeopardy. It's a travesty. Those people should just take suicide pills and go away. [An intriguing comment, but who else on the planet would be allowed to get away with it? -ed.]

Hey, there are some amazing songs on [the Stones' 1994 album] "Voodoo Lounge."

Bono gets bonus points for commencing his phone call to Kot with the portentous, oh-so-Bono words "You've offended us." No doubt the smarmy gangland phrasing had Kot looking around for shifty-looking Fenians over the next week or so.

I also have a personal beef with Bono's inability to let go of "progressive rock" as the old enemy... Bono comes off here at the ultimate theoretician of rockism, and he denounces Stalinist-schismatic internecine bickering in his interview, but where does it leave young people who liked Kid A or Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots? The music scene was the same when I was a teenager as it is now, and Relayer and Red and Foxtrot were, for me, indispensable boarding passes to a different, more colourful musical climate. This was at a time, I might add, when if you had to put a face to the "enemy", it would certainly have been one of the sour-looking ones staring out from the cover of The Fucking Joshua Tree. (And is it really fair for someone whose whole stage schtick is ripped off from Peter Gabriel circa 1975 to be taking idle pokes at prog?)

Bono is generally praised for his ambitions, and he has Kot eating out of his hand (literally, for all one knows) by the end of their interview. But isn't ambition, aggrandized to some particular degree, objectionable in itself? The man's goal, as I see it, is to unite the entire human race with every song the group writes. He talks unaffectedly of wanting to "change the mood of [the] summer" of 1997 with Pop, and of his shame in failing. This emotional totalitarianism is all the more unnerving because his band is more capable than most--or was, at one time--of bringing it off.

Still, perhaps I'm simply paranoid. There can be no denying the satisfying paneer-like quality of the U2 concert experience, and Bono--as a purveyor of neutered three-chord rock to yuppies who find dotage descending on swift unheard wings--may have done as much to reduce the quantity of human despair as anyone now alive.

- 5:41 am, May 27 (link)


Liberalism and historical amnesia, part n: And you thought Red vs. Blue was just for Halo. (þ: Tabarrok.) -7:07 am, May 25
Swept away by a demographic tsunami in the blue sea of May: "Postmodern Sass" live-blogs a marketing exam for biz-comm majors in two amusing parts. -4:39 am, May 25
Election thermodynamics

Did the Conservatives win by losing last week's non-confidence vote in the House of Commons? The answer is much less important than the damage done by the event to the institution of Parliament. But as a brute matter of electoral calculus, Andrew Coyne's thoughts are running in the same direction as mine.

...the Universal Media Consensus before the event [was] that the Tories would have been better off to wait, rather than push for a spring vote. So, if their defeat is really a victory, why is everyone now declaring the Tories the losers?

If you're interested, it's worth having a peek at the guts of the latest Decima national poll. The poor Liberal support in Quebec has held pretty steady for almost three months, and on these numbers the party would lose another dozen seats there. Ontario is more fickle, but there are still a lot of low-hanging Liberal fruit; modest electoral gains there still translate to impressive seat swings toward the Conservatives. Unusually, though, it's not the voter-intention numbers that are the most interesting material here:

Respondents were asked which of three reasons (a list was read to respondents) was most likely to dissuade them from voting either Liberal or Conservative. The results show:

  • There are two leading reasons cited for not voting Liberal, [the] feeling that it is time for a change (29%) and disagreement with Liberal policy (27%). Discomfort with Paul Martin as PM trails these considerations, at 17%

  • The leading point of resistance to voting Conservative is the desire not to have an election right now (31%), followed by disagreement with Conservative policies (25%), and close behind, discomfort with the idea of Stephen Harper as PM (23%).

  • In other words--I find it hard to interpret this any other way--with the Liberals and Conservatives basically tied in the voter-intention standings, the Liberals' main problem ("time for a change") is only going to get worse, and the Conservatives' main problem ("it's not time for an election yet") is only going to get better. Meanwhile, the accountants continue their work.

    [UPDATE, 8:56 pm: Matt Fenwick has a lucid rebuttal to this last point.]

    - 1:30 am, May 25 (link)


    Old boys

    Inside every lawsuit, there's a movie screaming to get out. But I'd say it's screaming unusually loud in the case of Hardwicke v. American Boychoir School. John Heilemann of New York magazine has the dizzying details of Lawrence Lessig's unexpected battle against the troubled institution where he was once the leading student.

    - 1:08 am, May 25 (link)


    'I'm not buying a Game Boy until they bring out Mere Christianity'

    Evan Kirchhoff visits E3 2K5. Hilarity ensues.

    - 11:35 pm, May 24 (link)


    Even in the Idolest moments

    This Entertainment Weekly interview hints at why Simon Cowell is the most fascinating figure on American TV. American Idol is good TV for the same reason Win Ben Stein's Money was: Cowell, like Stein, takes the competition seriously.

    I learn more from the irregularities of the [American Idol] vote than I do from anything else because it tells me, as someone in the music industry, that this business is not what you think it is. There are a lot of people out there who are not into things we think they should be into. They like safe singers. In the music industry we work in New York and L.A., and we have a slightly tainted view.

    ...I think Carrie [Underwood] is reflective of what's going on in this country. There are a lot of girls who are saying, "I'm bored of girls dressing like sluts. I'm bored of regressive rap lyrics. I actually just like a clean-cut girl because I'm a clean-cut girl." There's a difference between what the record industry thinks and what Wal-Mart customers think.

    Tonight Miss Underwood and Harold "Bo" Bice, long the anointed choices for the final, will be going head-to-head, giving America the showdown it's been smashing other contestants' dreams into kindling to get to.

    You remember how, in the third or fourth season of Survivor, you started to suddenly see contestants who had really studied their predecessors, looked for opportunities in the rules, and put some thought into how to play the game? It was like someone had thrown a switch. Bo, I think, is the first American Idol contestant to fit this archetype. There are ten thousand people in my hometown who are better singers than Bo Bice, but no one who's better at cultivating an image and choosing songs. Everyone but Bo overreached at least once during the competition; Bo just sticks to his strengths, his paisley caftans, and a good-ol'-boy grin that I, for one, long to smack right off his physiognomy.

    Through weeks of theme nights, Bice was always able to find places to fit in the songs he was weaned on. In his hands, everything from "Free Bird" to "Time in a Bottle" ended up sounding like Blood, Sweat, & Tears; he did "Spinning Wheel" as soon as humanly possible--on the first night of the final 12--and if you closed your eyes you could swear you were hearing the original on the radio. I thought he was a dead man the night Ryan Seacrest told the kids they'd be doing "dance music" from the '70s; Bo, utterly unflappable, stretched the definition of "dance" beyond all known limits and trotted out "Vehicle", a 1970 hit by Ides of March (the poor man's BS&T). What were the producers going to do, throw him off the show over a question of semantics? Bo had perceived a truth that had eluded previous Idol contestants thrown by difficult assignments: that the themes are, in fact, mere suggestions disguised as indisputable injunctions. (He had no easy way of finessing "show tune" night, but he got through it by covering "Corner of the Sky" with an opaque layer of Alabama hominy.)

    Last week, Bo performed one of his three songs a cappella. The performance was a snooze, but the dramatic gesture got people talking about Bice's "guts". It also enabled him to roam outside the band's repertoire, break free from its dodgy arranging, and sing a forgotten number (Badlands' "In a Dream") without inviting comparisons to the original. It was the final coup of a master competitor--one pities Carrie Underwood, having to go up against him with nothing but tons of talent. Let's try to absorb what we're seeing here: a cokehead peckerwood whose whole schtick is stolen from David Clayton-Thomas is about to win the world's most closely-watched singing competition. Hats off.

    - 1:41 pm, May 24 (link)


    The tragedy of the commons

    From Newsweek's self-abasing new letter to readers about the myth of the flushed Koran:

    On the basis of what we know now, I've seen nothing to suggest that our people acted unethically or unprofessionally. Veteran reporter Michael Isikoff relied on a well-placed and historically reliable government source. We sought comment from one military spokesman (he declined) and provided the entire story to a senior Defense Department official, who disputed one assertion (which we changed) and said nothing about the charge of abusing the Qur'an. Had he objected to the allegations, I am confident that we would have at the very least revised the item, but we mistakenly took the official's silence for confirmation.

    It now seems clear that we didn't know enough or do enough before publication, and if our traditional procedures did not prevent the mistake, then it is time to clarify and strengthen a number of our policies.

    There follows a number of procedural steps that Newsweek intends to take to prevent a reprise of the incident. This response is fast becoming typical of old-fashioned news organizations that have humiliated themselves; it bespeaks, I think, a weird sort of utilitarianism--a faith that if enough pairs of eyes can be brought to bear on a piece of copy, its correspondence to the world can be established by mere numbers. This naïve epistemological calculus comes complete with a dollop of credentialism: "As they often are now, the name and position of... a[n unnamed] source will be shared upon request with a designated top editor." What does this tell you about Newsweek's diagnosis of its own illness? It believes, apparently, that its reporters have a trust problem--not the Newsweek marque itself, or indeed the industry to which it belongs.

    The original item about the desecrated holy book was a snippet in the magazine's "Periscope" section, and I am inclined to think this a relevant datum. In recent public talks about weblogging, I've been trying clumsily to make the point that with most weblogs, the author-reader relationship of trust is a personal one, even where the author is anonymous. A weblogger has an individuated track record, has ultimate responsibility for the final form of everything that appears in the main body of his site, and is individually answerable for it. Very few people on either side of the civilian-professional divide have expressed the suspicion that the competitive emergence--or perhaps re-emergence--of an individuated species of journalism may be one reason print and broadcast media are haemorrhaging credibility. But it seems obvious to me that, given a choice, people will always place more trust in a personal relationship than an institutional one. And it's a sound instinct.

    If you read CBS's final report on Rathergate, you know that the network was left vulnerable to egregious error because of television's lack of bylines. Mary Mapes prepared the substance of the report, and defended it against all comers by means of sheer bitchiness for days after the initial firestorm. If someone's personal signature had been on the report, and his livelihood depended in a very clear way on its accuracy, he would have perceived the problem almost at once and acted. But the report was merely the product of some entity called "CBS". So Dan Rather, who read the text on the air, chose to hide out while the memoranda were flying: it wasn't his business to test or ultimately stand by the truth of what had been published. Mapes found herself in an adversarial-style system of fact-checking and regarded her place--probably not wrongly--as being similar to that of a defence lawyer. And higher-level executives either didn't understand the nature of the problem or didn't have the power to press for the necessary steps to restore credibility. In the end, agent-principal issues consumed them all in a bonfire of unaccountability.

    What enterprises like the CBS News and Newsweek are trying to do, as I see it, is to survive on an industrial model in a post-industrial world. A network news report reaches the airwaves purely by the Smithian division of labour; you have producers, editors, technical personnel, and the blandly handsome tenured gentleman who reads the thing in a stentorian voice. The modern newsmagazine is assembled in a similar way, and "notebook" sections like Newsweek's "Periscope"--essentially, the collected leavings of staff reporters--are one particular convenience that arises from that.

    What today's news consumer is gradually learning is that the benefits of the division of labour may not apply, or may have reached a point of diminishing returns, when it comes to the distribution of information. And whatever benefits are realized carry serious principal-agent problems with them. (They also tend to make the finished product homogenous and dreary.)

    Television networks will probably have to live or die with the industrial model; the dream of the roving "videographer" has yet to bear much fruit. There is less excuse for the print media, which have pre-industrial roots, not to perceive the problem here. I've always wondered what was gained from the inherited fiction that an unsigned leader or a notebook item is the product of "the staff" of so-and-so. The piece that caused Newsweek's agonies was signed by two people--but do you suppose Michael Isikoff would have been equally incautious about following up a piece that was under his name alone, or that was running on a stand-alone basis outside the Periscope section? Would he have been more careful about material that was going into a Michael Isikoff newsletter or a Michael Isikoff weblog? The answer seems obvious--the Koran tidbit was mere grist for a corporate mill, and received exactly the care you'd expect, with several people devoting about 3% of their attention to it before it exploded upon the world.

    Newsweek proposes to solve the problem by increasing the number of people who happen to smudge up news with their grubby thumbs on the way to the delivery truck. In essence, they are trying to improve their product by adding editorial layers--by acting more like CBS. How well do you figure that's going to work out? (Cf. the endless fun Mickey Kaus is having with the L.A. Times and its "four layers" of editorial oversight.)

    The "corporateness" of corporate journalism seems like a much bigger problem, to me, than self-defeating ethical concerns about "unnamed sources". Such sources can be used well or badly, and Newsweek seems to have, more than anything else, underestimated the amount of double-checking that was called for in this particular case. The authors of the Koran piece are justly open to criticism because they generated an untrue item; in that sense no mitigation or forgiveness of the offence is possible. But it is mysterious to find the U.S. government leading the attack, when it was the government's own press representative who screwed the pooch when given the chance to deny a false and explosive story. Media-relations people basically exist to deny and debunk false statements; if Isikoff showed a certain ineptitude at his job, the Defence Department spokesman he consulted, who owed a more immediate debt to those imperiled or killed in the Afghan riots, didn't do his job at all. Non-journalists who are now arguing that Isikoff should have taken "no comment" to mean "hey, don't print that" are aiding the cause of non-investigable bureaucracy.

    What I'd recommend to Newsweek is the exact converse of what they're doing. Give Michael Isikoff his own page. Put his picture on it. Make it clear--by means of an explicit disclaimer, if necessary--that Isikoff is responsible for everything on that page. I wouldn't let anybody touch it on the way out the door; I wouldn't even correct the spelling mistakes if I could help it. He can have help if he wants it, but let the buck stop with him. Let him develop his own independent reputation instead of forever launching cruise missiles from behind mastheads. We'd see soon enough what that did to his "reporter's intuition." Perhaps it would give him the elbow room to print stuff that didn't necessarily meet someone else's demon-haunted second-hand standards of confidence--which happens to be how he already lost the scoop of a lifetime, on Newsweek's behalf, to Matt Drudge. (Go on, tell me that mess didn't have something to do with this one.)

    There are three big problems with a "columnist model" of ordinary newsgathering that would emphasize the individuality and responsibility of the reporter. One is that many good reporters can't write an English sentence without help. Another is that the financial responsibility for libel is handled collectively at corporate news organs, even when the moral responsibility inheres in one person's byline. (The affordability of defamation insurance may be the most important specific gain from the division of labour in the news business.) And the third is that few owners of newspapers, magazines, or TV networks want to give that kind of bargaining power to reporters; rich men are gravely irritated by the existence of non-modular parts in organizations. In short, expecting anything but corporateness from corporations may be absurd--but there are many ways they can slow down the process of decay and homogenization, instead of encouraging it.

    - 4:12 am, May 23 (link)


    Boom bang-a-bang... kablooie

    Could the Eurovision Song Contest alter the outcome of the European constitution referendum? The Dutch contestant, a Whitney Houston wannabe named Glennis Grace, delivered a show-stopping performance in Thursday's semifinal--but bloc voting amongst the Eastern European countries guaranteed that most of the western competitors were to have the door slammed in their faces. The new European constitution was already facing an uphill fight in the Netherlands, whose "No" vote would doom it. Now many Dutchmen are seeing Glennis's loss as a metaphor for the EU's Eastern-dominated future. The Guardian has a timely piece about the interface between politics and Eurovision, noting that 1974's Portuguese entry was a coded signal to leftist military cadres planning what turned out to be the "Carnation Revolution".

    - 7:49 am, May 21 (link)


    Helsingin Sanomat goes Google-hunting for the world's most famous Finn. "Nokia's Chairman and CEO Jorma Ollila [received] 47,500 hits. The mysterious 'Jorma Olilla' often referred to in foreign papers also scored over 700 times..." -7:29 am, May 21
    The entry on the Cadman moment is getting longer by the hour; make sure you've read the latest version. -10:23 pm, May 19
    You won't hear me say this often...

    ...but Anne McLellan made an excellent point to Peter MacKay during the CBC Newsworld's pre-budget-vote panel-wankery. MacKay and other Conservative spokesmen persist in bitching about the numbers in the "NDP budget" that was just passed and the ad-hoc federal spending that has been flying about in the last few weeks. As McLellan pointed out, the Conservatives have bent over backwards to reassure the public that they intended to carry through with the Liberal spending promises even if the government had collapsed today. Voters shouldn't be content to let the Tories have it both ways. (Especially when it's their chief Atlantic Canadian spokesman who is trying to have the cake and eat it too.)

    - 8:59 pm, May 19 (link)


    A thought to keep Albertans awake at night

    If only Joe Clark had been willing to do in 1979 what that Paul Martin is doing in 2005, there would never have been a National Energy Program.

    - 8:40 pm, May 19 (link)


    Ladies & gentlemen we are floating in space

    There should never have been so much doubt that Chuck Cadman, who held the fate of the outlaw Liberal government in his hands today, was going to vote to support it. It seems unlikely, in retrospect, that the "Prime Minister" would have handed over the largest federal ministry to Belinda Stronach if he hadn't been exceedingly confident that the deal would save his hide. And every indication from Cadman's riding was that his constituents favoured keeping the Liberals in office by a narrow but visible margin. Two important questions now arise from the cancer-fighter's melodramatic House of Commons "yea" vote:

    Is there any cogency or coherency to Cadman's ideological axiom that he must follow the democratic "will" of his constituents no matter what? Stronach's crossing of the floor changed the ethical situation of the government pretty significantly less than 48 hours ago; the same could be said, all the more emphatically, of the Grewal tape. There can be no logical or ethical justification for Cadman to exercise wishes that were expressed before these news items had a chance to filter through to the public. How can Cadman know that these events didn't change minds in his riding? He should not be allowed to evade the moral implications of his vote to support a corrupt and unconstitutional government. And cancer is no excuse. It would be no excuse anyway, but he made a specific point of not staying home.

    What role did B.C.-specific electoral fatigue play in Cadman's reading of public sentiment--and can that fatigue possibly be a valid basis for such a momentous decision? One of Cadman's constituents, an egregious ass named Robert Hughes, told the Canadian Press this afternoon that "I don't think an election would get the young people here to vote because we just had a provincial election." Not only does this suggest overtly that only the votes of young people are important, it tells the rest of Canada that we aren't entitled to a vote because British Columbia just had one. Surely even a Liberal must be sickened by this sort of self-centered, perverted reasoning? And just how common is it over there in Surrey North?

    [UPDATE, 8:25 pm: I'll add a third question--doesn't the professed fact that Cadman supposedly waited until a half-hour before the vote to decide which way he'd jump suggest that the vote was a purely personal decision? If he were truly acting as the transparent vessel of the volonté générale he so often claims to be, what exactly was left for him to resolve in his mind? Wasn't it just a simple matter of adding up the phone calls, faxes, and e-mails he'd received? Didn't he fly to Ottawa already armed with the data he was supposedly using to make this choice?

    Self-evidently, a man who makes a private decision on a parliamentary division immediately before it takes place is consulting his conscience. Or whatever occupies the space in Chuck's soul that would normally be devoted to one.]

    [UPDATE, 10:10 pm: How about a fourth question: why was it important for Cadman not to disclose his voting intentions to the press gallery on the way into the Commons? The sham drama was thrilling for us all, to be sure, but in the end, what purpose did it serve other than to make Cadman the centre of national attention for an afternoon? Doesn't this suggest--even if nothing else in his career did--a certain repellent narcissism on his part?

    And a fifth question, from reader Mike Dea: is it relevant that Cadman's stated rationale for supporting the government--"[my constituents] didn't feel they were prepared to go into an election"--is creepily similar to the one dangled in Gurmant Grewal's face by Tim Murphy?

    On the tape, Murphy proposes the concept of Grewal abstaining from the vote and using the following excuse, which sounds eerily familiar. "That can be done on the basis, those members can do it on the basis, 'Well look, my riding doesn't want an election, doesn't want one now. Thinks it's the wrong time to do it.'"

    This is the one question of the five that I would instinctively answer in Cadman's favour--I believe that he really has, in earnest, represented the will of his constituents. But it is still worth asking. It is hard to imagine a cancer sufferer succumbing to the allure of the vague and distant patronage blandishments that were implicitly offered to Grewal. And then again, it is very easy to imagine undisclosed benefits that could be supplied very quickly vis-à-vis our healthcare system.]

    - 7:01 pm, May 19 (link)


    Grinding a familiar axe: I have a column in Thursday's National Post about the Newsweek riots and the rapid entry of Koran-flushing into Muslim folklore at the hands of Imran Khan. For me, it's not so much a passing media story as it is one more signal of permanent, deep, incorrigible aspects of Islam.

    We hear -- we have heard again in the wake of the riots -- pious wishes that the Muslims would hurry up and have their "Protestant Reformation" already. Some have hopes for a replay of the 17th-century Enlightenment in the Muslim world. But Islam's essential doctrines leave no wiggle room for a review of scripture in the Muslim universe -- a review that would necessarily emphasize the Koran's status as a created, imperfect human document. To hope for a redemptive separation of church and state within Islam is to overlook that the Koran, unlike other holy books, prescribes a precise political schema for society. And those waiting on the emergence of a Muslim Voltaire -- for the appearance of some witty, piety-smashing philosopher amidst a faith that has uniformly imposed the death penalty for apostasy -- can expect to wait forever.

    I've stated this belief before; it has never yet been challenged except on the question-begging grounds that it is "too pessimistic." Read the whole piece on page A20 of the Post.

    - 9:54 am, May 19 (link)


    Moving the goalposts

    It appears that the single transferable vote is going to end up with about 57% of the vote in British Columbia's referendum on electoral reform. Because BC-STV was such a radical change to the electoral framework, the Campbell government formally required it to obtain 60% of the vote provincewide (and a majority in 60% of the ridings) in order to pass. As the Globe reports, the Yes camp is now demanding that BC-STV be immediately implemented anyway.

    Yes campaign co-chairman Bruce Hallsor said the results signal a clear majority of British Columbians want change...
    "A clear majority passed it," said the Victoria lawyer. "British Columbians want a change and we believe both parties in the legislature should support what the majority of British Columbians have done."
    Mr. Hallsor said the 60 per cent margin required by the electoral reform referendum was an artificial threshold, compared with simple majorities required by other such initiatives.
    "The reason for that is if something passes by a majority and doesn't get implemented, it's profoundly undemocratic," he said.

    Not just undemocratic, mind you--profoundly undemocratic. This implies, of course, the sandbox version of democracy in which a numerical majority may do as it pleases to the minority.

    In fairness, the "double majority" requirement was imposed by fiat on the Citizen's Assembly by the Campbell government--and the formation and conduct of Assembly was so exemplary that it may be widely regarded as having greater legitimacy than the government itself. Still, there remains a strong theoretical justification for refusing to rejig the existing electoral system against the stated wishes of 43% of the public.

    When Citizen's Assembly spokesman Shoni Field says that "If 50 per cent plus one was enough to break up the country [in 1995], it's enough to do all sorts of things", she is unwittingly choosing an argument that blasts her own case straight to hell. How many of us felt comfortable, in 1995, with the prospect of a 50% majority irreversibly determining the fate of the country? Is that ugly, corrupt event really the model of democracy she wants to cite and recommend?

    STV, unlike Quebecois secession, isn't irreversible--it is merely very likely to become entrenched whether its effects are desirable or not, since those who benefit from it will end up in the legislature. That, presumably, was the pretext for making the cutoff 60% rather than two-thirds or 75%. It doesn't seem like an especially outrageous imposition to me, and though I'm comfortable with STV--and especially comfortable with someone else serving as the guinea pig--I don't approve of the Yes side's spin-cycling. The fact that the transferable-ballot alternative didn't get more support, despite the energy that went into crafting its particulars and promoting it, is curious in itself.

    - 9:27 am, May 18 (link)


    The clicking of round heels?

    Belinda Stronach's astonishing seat sale raises an interesting counterfactual question: how would people have reacted if, in similar circumstances but with colours reversed, she had crossed the floor from a Liberal opposition to take a Conservative cabinet seat? Andrew Coyne's comment section allows us to take some snapshots from the demotic Conservative reaction in the existing climate:

  • Really, the only long-term success I see her achieving is that she's been Bill Clinton's holla back girl for a good while now.
  • I knew she was a bimbo flake, but I didn't realize she would ever prostitute herself like this.
  • ...She is a whore of the worst kind.
  • I say good riddance to another Liberal whore who obviously has no morals and no integrity.

  • These examples are merely the most intense ones--the musk of gender, I'm afraid, lingers in the nose across the whole thread. I'm not going to engage in hand-wringing about it; male politicians are quite routinely, not to say incessantly, called "whores". Like anyone else born in 1971 I would have an instinctive fear of calling a female politician a "whore", but in truth we only suffer this fear here precisely because we are talking about a politician whose looks are the substantive, universally professed basis for her status and renown. It seems strange to cut her extra slack precisely because she has no identifiable record of achievement, is a jet-setting serial monogamist who pals around with Bill Clinton, and isn't what you'd call ragingly intelligent.

    And to some degree, the old-time journalistic rule of "two Negroes" applies here. Sports broadcasters used to joke that you could never say that two black athletes looked alike unless they looked so alike that you would look like a complete imbecile for not pointing it out. Similarly, when a Member of Parliament crosses the floor to join the government in an equally-divided House, is photographed canoodling contentedly with the Prime Minister, and is handed the most notoriously leverage-heavy portfolio in the Cabinet... well, let's say that if you're a Conservative, you definitely have to apply a little elbow grease in search of some other suitable concept to use as a metaphor. Even the Liberals must be raising some eyebrows.

    All that said, I still wouldn't go there myself; it is a funny sort of "prostitution", after all, that sees someone return to her family's traditional political allegiance. A better metaphor might be running off with one's childhood sweetheart. The Liberal Party has always been regarded as her natural home, to the degree she was thought to possess anything resembling an ideology. (Or perhaps because she doesn't.) And it would be understandable if she enjoyed an excellent rapport with Paul Martin, who, like her (de facto), is one of the dozen or so wealthiest individuals in the country.

    What's interesting here to me, in a Camille Paglia-ish sort of way, is that in World-Prime, the one in which Belinda crossed over to a Conservative government, you probably wouldn't find the same species of abuse in liberal-dominated comment threads. You'd find, I think, equally venomous language predicated not on sexual metaphors, but on Ms. Stronach's Germanic origins and her staggering wealth. (Though do note the "whore of Babylon" reference in this Rabble.ca thread.) For crossing to the Conservatives, she'd undoubtedly be denounced as a sinister ice-blonde power-tripping neo-fascist corporate puppet--accused tacitly, that is, of the caricatural reactionary vices of the right rather than the caricatural moral vices of the left.

    Either way, the abuse is inevitable, and part of the price one pays for being born clutching a ticket to the inner circle of power. Whatever your attitude toward "sexism", it is probably quite important that there exist such a price, if we are not to have a political class dominated by children of privilege. Even if the form it takes is inexcusable, there is a sense in which the natural hostility towards a Belinda Stronach--or the pretty child of any family that has 600 million dollars lying around--is a valuable thing, when it comes to politics.

    - 12:04 am, May 18 (link)


    Femme fatale

    From the CP wire this morning:

    OTTAWA (CP) - In a stunning political move that could save Paul Martin's government, high-profile Tory MP Belinda Stronach has defected to the Liberals.
    Martin, sitting beside a smiling Stronach at a surprise news conference Tuesday, welcomed his new caucus member and named her human resources minister. He also said she will be in charge of democratic renewal.
    The development boosts the government's chance of surviving a crucial confidence motion scheduled for Thursday. It is also a big blow to the Conservatives.

    The lede here--that this move pushes the constitutional crisis which began last week into full-scale red-alert mode--hasn't just been buried, it's been taken out and shot. It is arguable whether Stronach's defection is a "blow" to the Conservatives in either the short or the long term. What's not arguable is that the delay imposed last week on a formal non-confidence vote in the House of Commons has now--with the balance of power in the House teetering on the razor's edge--visibly become a banana-republic power tactic. Michael Bliss, who has forgotten more Canadian history than most of us know, wrote thus in the National Post on Saturday:

    Canadians ought to realize that this week's breakdown of their Parliament is far more serious than any of the thuggish revelations from the Gomery commission. As of this weekend, we are in the historically unprecedented situation of having a Prime Minister who is clinging to office by recklessly disregarding the fundamental principles of our democracy. It is a shocking act of proto-tyranny, which justifies the extreme resort of intervention by the Governor-General.

    I am not writing this lightly or with any knowledge of or involvement in any party's strategy. Nor do I think that most Canadians understand or perhaps even care about the complexities of the constitutional imbroglio that has unfolded since the opposition began defeating the government in the Commons last Wednesday. Canada this weekend has a government clinging to office against the repeatedly expressed wishes of a majority of the democratically elected members of the House of Commons.

    ...The defeat of the Martin government on Tuesday came on a procedural, not a confidence motion, but it was such a clear sign that a majority of the House of Commons do not support the government that virtually all constitutional experts are agreed that an immediate test of the House's confidence was required.

    Instead of doing this, the government proposed a nine-day delay, offering reasons for the delay so transparently bogus as to affront the intelligence of a 10-year-old. The British Columbia election has nothing whatever to do with the affairs of the Parliament of Canada. The visit of the Queen, a constitutional monarch whose activities are absolutely ceremonial and apolitical, cannot possibly in the 21st century take precedence over the need to resolve an impasse in our elected Parliament.

    Paul Martin had a constitutional and moral responsibility to ascertain the confidence of the House of Commons on Wednesday. When he failed in this responsibility he was thumbing his nose at the conventions of responsible government and modern democracy. His government continued to disregard their constitutional responsibilities on Thursday and yesterday, leaving a frustrated opposition to demonstrate its lack of confidence repeatedly by taking control of parliamentary affairs in one vote after another.

    The whole point of the tradition that the confidence of the House will be tested at once, upon the government's defeat in a supply-related division, is to prevent exactly the sort of shenanigan just perpetrated. Martin has used the delay he imposed unilaterally to purchase the services of a disaffected Conservative leadership candidate--one, it bears noting, elected by her constituents as a Conservative. (She'll be in charge of "democratic renewal", says Martin--never let it be said the man lacks a taste for irony.) "I am not sure," Bliss concluded, "that Canada has ever had such a serious parliamentary crisis." There can be no doubt about it now. If the Liberals win Thursday's confidence vote by virtue of Stronach's presence on the government benches, we will continue to have a government openly acknowledged to be illegal by most if not all of the major constitutional authorities in the country.

    Meanwhile, the royal visit to Alberta and Saskatchewan has been used as the pretext for the whole manoeuvre--but it would not be terribly surprising, given the horrified reaction we are likely to see over the next few hours, if the plane were turned around or the visit cut short. And then again, perhaps Her Majesty will swoop down and save us somehow from this crazed, lawless régime.

    - 10:37 am, May 17 (link)


    Shorter Anthony Lane on Revenge of the Sith: "Break me a fucking give." (Thank God someone finally said it.) -10:03 pm, May 16
    I never thought about it that way before

    "Having grown up a bit, I try to get out of first-person singular when giving advice. It can be dangerous to listen to authors about how to write or establish communication; they can only say what has worked for them or how they work. With an n of 1, a sample size of 1, the variance is infinite. You never get more variance reduction than when you go to n=2." -Edward Tufte

    - 9:55 pm, May 16 (link)


    Hee hee, he said 'overlap'

    British Columbia may end up having two elections in the space of about sixty days, and so far the two electoral news stories that are getting the most traction internationally are the antics of The Sex Party and the imminent referendum on the single transferable vote. (Click here to view photos from the Sex Party's May 12, er, sex party.) Has it occurred to anybody that there is actually some overlap here? The SP's calls for "sexual gradualism" in schools and "sex-positive holidays" may not win much of the vote--but in B.C.'s bright future, they may not have to in order to bag a couple of downtown seats in the provincial assembly. Isn't the Sex Party exactly the sort of long-suffering minority interest that STV is intended to encourage? Proportional representation showed the word that Cicciolina was more than just an actress, after all.

    - 8:17 pm, May 16 (link)


    Another humorous quotation

    Quiz time--who said it?

    I think [The Passion of the Christ] was a pretty fine movie, and darned if it didn’t get people talking about religion again, a subject that some are trying to close off from the public square, a pet peeve of mine. Though the Judeo-Christian worldview has served us well for more than two hundred years and underpins the finest society in the history of the world, there are those fighting hard to throw it all on the scrap heap and replace it with radical secularism, a worldview that has brought us Nazism, Communism and some of the greatest horrors of all time.

    a) George H.W. Bush;
    b) Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX);
    c) Mike Nelson, the lovable human face of cult comedy series Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

    - 7:45 pm, May 13 (link)


    A humorous quotation

    I got goose bumps hearing [Mikhail Gorbachev] talk of the Pope -- they were both lead players resulting in huge changes in the world, and here he was speaking to our group of computer people.

    What's the punchline, you ask? The starry-eyed luncheon attendee typing these words on his personal weblog is Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet. (He tells the story here.) If you asked me who had altered human history more in the long run--Gorbachev or Bricklin--I'm not sure I'd know what to say. If you asked me who I'd be more intimidated to meet, or whose thoughts on the future of the human species I'd rather listen to for an hour, it would be a dead-easy decision in Bricklin's favour.

    - 6:34 pm, May 13 (link)


    Friday afternoon link roundup

    Deceptive headline of the day: "Escort gets degree at U of C". If you're thinking "Does this mean she'll charge more?", you have the wrong idea.

    Fingered: the authorities have finally found out where Anna Ayala gets her chili ingredients.

    You can have my site when you pry it from my cold dead hands: Elections B.C. is mulling over coming after blogs to force them to register as third-party communicators under the Election Act. Individuals are supposed to be left alone unless they expect to spend the equivalent of $500 over the course of the campaign. There is probably no individual weblogger in the whole province who could be construed as doing so, even if the nugatory advertising-market value of weblog space were included. But it's not the spending that really bothers election officials; it's the untidiness of free speech. How long before the federal government's wider limits are invoked against weblogs during an election campaign? It could be as soon as the coming vote, I'd say.

    And while we're on the subject: Paul Wells' question is the main reason I've been staying away from Canadian politics as much as possible on this site. I fear the answer to "Is there anyone planning to vote differently this time?" is almost certainly "No."

    Home team: Readers who saw the National Post's original experiment with in-house weblogging will recall that all members of the Post's editorial board were originally supposed to participate, but that Across the Board didn't live up to expectations. The project ran aground for a number of reasons--no individual was really charged with keeping it alive, the subsite was started at a moment when editorial resources were being stretched, some members left for new jobs, and weblogging simply failed to capture the imagination of others. The one guy who really got into it--rather surprisingly, given his other responsibilities and his longtime private skepticism about the weblog form--was my old friend and fellow Edmonton-based columnist Lorne Gunter. It's a touching story, really: one day he was sneering at the pyjama people, the next he was in the jungle with the rest of us swilling Kool-Aid like a marathoner.

    The Post has now wisely given Lorne a one-man site, usurping the sacred "As I Please" title from George Orwell's column in the Tribune. (But surely the URL should receive some sort of Redundancy Prize Award?) All of my readers will want to bookmark it immediately, and visit often. Lorne and I are pretty well indistinguishable on politics, only he is mature, organized, presentable, calm, and backed by the resources of a great newspaper. Wait a minute... is this good news?

    - 4:53 pm, May 13 (link)


    Getting real

    I've been trying to find a way to say this without sounding like some sort of Indymedia refugee, but can someone tell me the difference between the United States' new REAL-ID program and the internal passports used in the Soviet Union after 1932? I'm not dramatizing for effect: I'd like an answer. I'm not suggesting that anyone intends to create immediate harm with the new system, but in what regard is REAL-ID not a potential framework for an internal-passport scheme? And doesn't anybody in Congress or the executive realize what a terrible weapon this places in the hands of the central government? Besides Ron Paul, I mean.

    Bruce Schneier writes:

    One of my fears is that this new uniform driver's license will bring a new level of "show me your papers" checks by the government. Already you can't fly without an ID, even though no one has ever explained how that ID check makes airplane terrorism any harder. I have previously written about Secure Flight, another lousy security system that tries to match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists. I've already heard rumblings about requiring states to check identities against "government databases" before issuing driver's licenses. I'm sure Secure Flight will be used for cruise ships, trains, and possibly even subways. Combine REAL ID with Secure Flight and you have an unprecedented system for broad surveillance of the population.

    Is there anyone who would feel safer under this kind of police state?

    REAL-ID is being pursued, in part, as a measure against illegal immigration--which makes it a depressingly familiar example of how state power grows out of control. Having failed to police the borders of the republic, the U.S. government has decided that it must police the airport, the train station, and ultimately the neighbourhood. It's as reliable as the Ideal Gas Law: the worse governments are at meeting their basic obligations, the more oppressive they must become to maintain order (and therefore their own legitimacy).

    In practice, the United States already seems much closer to a "papers please, citizen" system than Canada; I have lived for many years now without a valid driver's license, and so far it has never stopped me from engaging in any particular sort of trade or travel. Believe it or not, it didn't even prevent me from boarding domestic airline flights after 9/11.

    American sentiment is clearly against a national I.D. card, as it is against all forms of vexatious bureaucracy. Superstitious evangelical fears of the Mark of the Beast would probably be enough, on their own, to wipe out the plan if it were put to a proper debate. But Congress acquiesced in the passage of the act by means of a cowardly stunt that has shamed that body in the eyes of the world. And however irritated contemporary Americans are by bureaucratic bullying, they are clearly not equipped by the study of history to regard the introduction and increasing use of standardized identity papers as a practical tool to control them and a moral means of habituating them to control. (Certainly few realize that internal passports were used as an instrument of genocide within living memory; pop culture has yet to commemorate the tribulations of the Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Chechens, et al.) They will complain; and for all their complaining, their children will grow up in a world where leaving the house without one's papers is literally unthinkable.

    - 3:33 am, May 13 (link)


    "I'm not sure, but I think Nelson Mandela smoked my drugs!": Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Dave Chappelle has checked himself into a "psychiatric facility in South Africa". Hey, I'm just telling you what I heard--I don't understand it either. -5:34 pm, May 12
    Don't call it an obituary: Thursday's National Post has an 1,100-word Colby Cosh pressjammer about the future of the Star Trek franchise. With "Enterprise" scheduled to end Friday, is Viacom putting a tired brand in mothballs, or merely abandoning a medium that is itself on the cusp of terminal illness? You can read my answer online--it's on the friendly side of the subscriber wall.

    The piece deliberately does not mention the bizarre assertions of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, by the way; that kind of thing has no place in a purely artistic and technical assessment. Trekkies come in for a kicking, anyhow, on the strictly defensible grounds that their show is more of a religious fantasy than a work of speculative fiction--"future history written by Marxist amnesiacs." In other words, I more or less agree with Orson Scott Card--except I'd say he's an optimist.

    Though it shares some of the weaknesses of the original show, I'm still a big fan of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". It's space opera, but it is probably the finest space opera we've seen on TV to date. Later attempts to make Trek "harder" as science fiction were merely embarrassing. TNG took the antiseptic, stateless, moneyless world of the original series largely for granted, but found ways to raise questions of justice, ethics, and law within that framework. I'm a complete sucker for courtroom dramas, and "The Drumhead" (featuring the inimitable Jean Simmons) and "The Measure of a Man" are two exemplary ones that just happen to take place on a starship. The "Chain of Command" two-parter hinted in its first half that Starfleet might not be a perfectly-ordered meritocracy; the second half, with its Darkness at Noon overtones, is now recognized as just plain classic TV. Similarly, the "Best of Both Worlds" cliffhanger was a mind-blowing moment--for one summer, even the toughest-hided Trek detractor had to become a total mark for the show, as it painted itself into a apocalyptic corner that seemed to require the destruction of either Captain Picard, the Enterprise D, or the planet Earth. The Borg were subsequently done to death as a villain, of course, so the whole thing has presumably aged about as well as the "Who Shot J.R.?" episodes of Dallas. The franchise certainly won't be able to recapture that feeling if it insists on mucking about with prequels: you could call it George Lucas's last, best storytelling lesson.

    - 5:08 am, May 12 (link)


    Confidence men

    You know what those Liberals are like--they stand on the Constitution so often that they're always scuffing it up. A controversy has now emerged over their refusal to resign in the wake of a loss in the Commons on a procedural motion. Simon Fraser University constitution expert Andrew Heard is monitoring the situation and isn't impressed with the Liberal position:

    The wording of the motion passed on May 10, 2005 indicates that it should be considered a clear vote of confidence. What is important in this motion is that the House had to collectively is express its view on whether the government should resign. One could not vote for the motion without agreeing that the government should resign, which is the essence of a non-confidence vote. While the wording of the motion is convoluted, the essential content is a clear expression of non-confidence.

    Andrew Coyne suggests that the Liberals may be hoping that cancer will tip the balance of the House. They are entitled to introduce their own confidence motion, but precedent obliges them to do so before any of the other business of the House is conducted, and the nine-day delay proposed by the Prime Minister is definitely stretching things. They are most definitely not allowed to sneak through a budget, or to wait for an act of God to rescue them from the sentiments of the assembly. But Martin is very much counting on the public not to care about constitutional form, and he is probably not far wrong in doing so.

    - 3:33 pm, May 11 (link)


    Born on the bayou? Some daft bugger has been introducing crayfish to the icy North Saskatchewan River--and it appears they like it. Anybody got any good recipes? -3:20 pm, May 11
    When I'm listening to "Subterranean Homesick Blues", I'm grooving along just like you. But when I'm listening to "Blood on the Tracks", that's about my parents. The NYT finds out what it's like to be Bob Dylan's son. (þ: Robot Wisdom) -5:49 pm, May 10
    The prodigy

    I thought the New York Times headline about the suspended production of Chappelle's Show was almost as funny as... well, a sketch from Chappelle's Show.

    Why Is Chappelle's Show at a Halt? Not Because of Drugs, an Aide Says

    I guess that's one way of saying what everyone was thinking. "We're pretty sure he's not in rehab." Newsweek moves the ball further a little bit in this week's issue, offering an enlightening quote from an unnamed "celebrity friend":

    I saw him start trippin' when the buzz started to get real loud. I think he was in shock after the first season, and then [during] the second, it hit him that he was the man. That freaked him.

    There's no better way to sum up Chappelle's status than this--he's the man. Chappelle started doing open-mike nights when his age was almost still in single digits, and was skipping school to headline nightclubs by 14. But before he got the Comedy Central gig, he had watched a whole generation of black comedians (and plenty of white ones) vault past him into the stratosphere, wondering if he was ever going to catch the same break. Within a year and a half he had established himself as perhaps the first true successor to Richard Pryor--the first post-Pryor black comic to have a mass success with Pryor's daredevil tactics. Chappelle didn't have to close the coffin lid of situation comedy over his work, like Redd Foxx, or pass through the groves of SNL's institutional-revolutionary academy, like Chris Rock.

    Chappelle's Show is that rare sketch-comedy series that doesn't ultimately spring from the great white he-womb of Del Close, who was father to SNL and SCTV and Mr. Show and Upright Citizens Brigade and every other show that has ever had Second City or Groundlings alumni swarming around it. Before Chappelle, it seems like the history of black American sketch comedy consists of one breakthrough show--In Living Color--which was rapidly commandeered by its all-purpose white dude (a guy named Jim Carrey). The first day of shooting on Chappelle's Show was, remarkably, Chappelle's first time doing sketch in any medium. All by himself, he has created an independent alternative to "alternative comedy."

    Carrying a sketch show by oneself isn't easy: Ben Stiller flopped at it, and he only turned out to be pretty much the world's most successful comic entrepreneur. The Season 1 DVD of Chappelle, by contrast, quickly became history's best-selling TV series on video. Combine that with a two-year contract for $50 million, and you'd have to be surprised if it turns out that he hasn't had a nervous breakdown.

    - 10:17 am, May 10 (link)


    Great Canadians dept.

    For your Sabbath reading pleasure: Andrew Coyne anticipates Svend Robinson's next crusade brilliantly; Steyn says a slightly puzzled farewell to Sir John Mills; and Evan Kirchhoff meets la France inconnue in a taxicab.

    - 12:56 am, May 8 (link)


    Should have bought Energizers

    Bruce Rolston says the batteries in this site's bullshit detector need changing. He could be right! And then again, maybe we're both overdue for a battery change. Rolston thinks Tim "Deltoid" Lambert has knocked Benny Peiser's paper out of the box; I think he's shown that there is a wide gray area of interpretation involved, but the fact remains that the Oreskes paper--equally interpretive, and afflicted with oddities of counting to boot--was published while Peiser's wasn't. If neither paper meets a publishable standard, surely it's still telling that only one actually got into the literature (and that the second one was rejected on the explicit grounds that its content was already hashed out on the Net)? I can't find the "simple error" of which Peiser is supposedly guilty; though he is unimpressed by the work, Lambert does not seem to accuse him of one.

    As for the Star Trek pedo-puzzler, Bruce offers a curious form of comfort food:

    Some people, when they're faced with a statistic that seems spectacularly hard to credit and against all reason, spend a lot of time trying to confirm/disconfirm it, analyse it, try and figure out if there was some misquotation/misunderstanding involved, and generally beat it to a pancake... You can spend your day figuring out what bizarre statistical confluence of events could possibly lead to such a remarkable correlation. Or you could just assume, as I automatically did, that the police sergeant in question was blowing smoke out his ass.

    Nothing to see here! As a globally applicable method of accounting for surprising facts, this has much to recommend it--above all, ease of use. But is a bullshit detector that's flashing continually any better than one which sometimes doesn't work? The police lie all the time to create work for themselves, but this wasn't the familiar case where a cop tugs some inflated statistic out of his rectum for a showstopping press conference; this was a case (weirdly described as an "allegation" by Rolston) where a cop was asked to explain a running joke in the office. The information was volunteered only after the Times reporter spotted a Star Trek poster and other Trekiana in the unit's headquarters. The supposed fact, having been uttered and published (and defended, and confirmed by two other personnel), is of interest whether it's right or wrong; it would seem all the more imperative to get to the bottom of matters if the Toronto police are unjustly biased against Star Trek fans. (Perhaps the police should be asked, as later commenters in Ernest Miller's thread do, how trophies from the private homes of convicted criminals are ending up on their walls.) Just to be clear, when I state that Det. Sgt. Gillespie's statement demands "investigation", what I have in mind is a proper follow-up from some Canadian newspaper--not some kind of Royal Commission on the Trek Menace. But I could be convinced!...

    - 10:49 pm, May 6 (link)


    Looking beyond the numbers: three stories behind the UK General Election

    'Ang on, surely he's on the wrong side of the floor? It is now difficult for a diaspora Briton to understand the congenital hatred of the Conservatives that exists among the educated and working classes in the UK. But it becomes just a little easier on election night: as the BBC control room ping-pongs from counting-station to counting-station, the endless parade of Conservative candidates with ruddy cheeks, saucy breeze-blown coifs and smug expressions begins to seem positively like a joke. Tonight Euroskeptic small-businessman Adam Afriyie became the first black Conservative MP in the history of Westminster, winning an exceedingly safe Tory seat in the constituency of Windsor. If the Canadian Parliament (or the history of African-Americans in the upper branches of the U.S. government) provides any sort of precedent, Afriyie--as a Conservative of visible-minority origin--can expect to be sneered at as a token and, in general, treated worse by the liberal opposition than he would be if he were white.

    I don't suppose a Straw/camel joke would be appropriate: Jack Straw, probably the fourth most powerful figure in the Labour administration, was returned safely in Blackburn with his majority shaved down only a little. Straw has been the government's most powerful aggressor in the Labour push to a utopia of harmonious race relations--which makes it at least a little ironic that he was harassed constantly throughout the campaign by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. In the one-quarter-Muslim riding, MPAC hoped it could mobilize antiwar (and anti-"Zionist") sentiment against Straw, waging an explicit "jihad" against his "Uncle Tom" Muslim supporters. It didn't work very well; Straw, a consummate street-level politician who makes weekly public appearances on the pavement outside Blackburn's Marks & Spencer shop, has always taken special care with his Muslim constituents. But the toll on the candidate was visible on election night, as Straw thanked his electoral opponents for not sinking to the level of the radical MPAC flying-squad sent against him. Could this be the future of politics in Western countries that have allowed for the growth of groups of young, disaffected, unassimilated Muslims? It's certainly the present of politics in places like Holland already.

    We're not gonna take it: Political correctness suffered a crippling blow Thursday night in the Welsh riding of Blaenau Gwent. In the last election the constituency served up the largest Labour majority in all Wales. When the local Labour office was presented with an ostentatiously all-female shortlist of non-local candidates for this round, popular Welsh Labour assemblyman Peter Law quit the party and announced an independent candidacy for the seat, pressing ahead despite late news of a brain tumour (later safely extracted). After excoriating his old comrades for weeks over using the hinterland for "social experiments", Law ended up annihilating parachutist Maggie Jones by a margin of nearly two to one. "This is what you get," Law told supporters in his acceptance speech, "when you don't listen to people." Labour may simply be lucky that it is learning the lesson at a time when it had Commons representation to spare.

    Bonus stories: Worldwide conservative partisans who believe that "hard-line" immigration policies only drive voters out of the tent may wish to study this election: immigration was the chosen wedge issue of Michael Howard's advisors, and it seems to have bought him some time and attracted widespread Old Labour support. (Not to mention already forcing New Labour to look seriously at adopting a Canadian-style "points" system for economic-class immigrants, and getting serious about language requirements.)

    The American media should also note that British exit pollsters nailed the final result almost exactly, despite being faced with an unusually complex three-sided electoral environment full of open calls for tactical voting. The pollster's call early Thursday was for a 66-seat Labour majority, and at this hour the true figure looks like about 68. What are they doing right that the Americans aren't?

    - 3:41 am, May 6 (link)


    Burden of dreams: Matt Welch--who hails from Long Beach, California, the putative baseball capital of the universe--has a fascinating piece for BaseballAnalysts.com about Dave Hansen, longtime major-league utilityman and former bandmate. -6:23 pm, May 5
    Chomos on the edge of forever? Mickey Kaus is right--this stunning bit of anecdotage about Star Trek and pedophilia demands investigation. Sure, maybe the Toronto cops are exaggerating to the L.A. Times; sure, maybe the methods they use are inherently more likely to catch Captain Kirk wannabes. Still, holy crap. -6:00 am, May 5
    Control freak

    Alex Tabarrok--an American economist whose acquaintance overlaps slightly with mine--recently watched a fascinating exchange between overexposed freakonomist Steven Levitt and overexposed fakejournalist Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

    ...Levitt said that in estimating the effect of abortion on crime he controlled for other variables like police and prisons. Jon Stewart pressed Steve for an explanation of how someone could "control" for other variables--amazingly, Stewart seemed genuinely interested in an answer but, wisely, Steve demurred.

    In the (perhaps imaginary) Golden Age of talk shows, when Carl Sagan and Edward Teller would drop by to visit Carson and expound on the great scientific questions, one might have had the freedom to tackle such a topic. As Tabarrok points out, the Daily Show's half-hour format and its gag-driven ethos won't allow for it nowadays. The subject practically needs its own documentary. Which is too bad. Stewart's question reveals both a gap in his education and a laudable ability to spot legerdemain (which is a pretty good cement for such educational gaps).

    It might be helpful, in fact, if the public at large knew that the phenomenon of "experimental control" covers many orders of rigor. Tabarrok gives the example of a study in which you wish to figure out the effect of weight on life expectancy, and in which you wish to control for height (which has, ex hypothesi, its own independent effects on life expectancy). There are many possible kinds of "control" you could impose on such an experiment.

  • You could pair the experimental subjects with lighter (or heavier) individual control subjects of the precise same height, thus guaranteeing that the confounding factor of height is exercising no influence on the experiment at all;

  • you could organize your study without individual pairing, but try to ensure that the experimental and control groups did not vary much in average height, hoping that the effect of height would thereby "wash out" overall;

  • or you could find out, as Tabarrok recommends, how weight correlates with height in the general population, transform your "weight" variable into a "weight corrected for height" variable, and do the second-order calculation--hoping all the while that your ever-lengthening chain of implied correlations is fairly sturdy.

    This third method of experimental control is popular in the social sciences, for obvious reasons. But its weakness when compared to the methods of "control" used in the hard sciences is obvious, and it is probably responsible for a fair amount of overenthusiastic induction. Moreover, scientists are constantly tripping over chicken-and-egg questions; maybe we shouldn't be controlling for height in this study, because the known effects of height of life expectancy might actually be a consequence of weight's effects on life expectancy--which is precisely what we are trying to measure. (Who necessarily cares, in other words, about "weight corrected for height"?)

    Controlling for A in trying to locate B's overall effect on C is a mistake if B also has some causal influence on A--and numerical correlations alone won't tell you how to sort out causation amongst A, B, and C. To top it all off, just because you controlled for A doesn't mean you took care of D, E, and F--offstage variables the human mind might not even have considered as potential confounders. You might find in the end, based on your numbers, that being heavier was correlated with a greater life expectancy. Alas! Twenty years from now some sharp lad at Johns Hopkins comes along and wins a Nobel Prize for discovering that egg yolks contain the chemical secret of immortality, and that people who ate a lot of eggs, who tended to be heavier, lived longer. (Did we ever doubt it?) But leaving eggs aside--controlling suitably for the hitherto unsuspected D--the remaining effect of weight on life expectancy might actually turn out to be negative. And your best strategy might, all along, have been remaining thin on an omelet-only diet. (In this case it might be argued that the conclusion was not wrong--that, in fact, it was right as a statement about the population--but was nonetheless otiose with respect to the question of genuine interest.)

    This matter of experimental control is a pretty deep pool. I would be the last person to advise us to dispense with inferential "controls" in the squishier sciences. But Jon Stewart is probably quite wise to dig in when someone tries to skate with him across that pool, arm-in-arm.

    - 3:41 am, May 5 (link)


    The day the CBC actually aired something interesting: WFMU's endlessly astonishing radio-blog has posted excerpts from a legendary Canadian broadcast that was hitherto confined to the shadow world of underground audio curiosities. -9:13 pm, May 4
    A case against the commentless weblog

    Megan McArdle has a good question about Hollywood portrayals of the developmentally disabled:

    Why are they trying to teach us to love people who don't exist, instead of the many helpless people, often treated shamefully, who deserve to be accepted by the society around them?

    But the question, being a familiar one, isn't the most depressing thing in this particular thread. The most depressing thing would be the quite serious and credible suggestion by a commenter that Honey, I Blew Up The Kid might be Hollywood's best stab ever at the subject.

    - 8:36 pm, May 4 (link)


    FM follies

    There's a fascinating spectrum story going on right now in Edmonton, a story which, I think, goes to show how the little guy ends up getting stepped on when businessmen and politicians clash in a regulatory environment. In 2002, the OK Radio Group, which owns Edmonton's ethnic station CKER, applied for permission to build a 425-metre radio mast in Strathcona County south of the city. The mast would have been the second-tallest structure in Canada, and although he had no firm commitments from other stations, OK president Roger Charest felt confident that the new tower's height and advantageous elevation would have eventually attracted other radio broadcasters to the site. But local residents and student pilots at the nearby Cooking Lake airport expressed vague concerns about safety and aesthetics--even though the tower could have replaced a dozen or more similar structures now scattered around the environs of the city. The council of Strathcona County voted unanimously to reject OK Radio's rezoning application.

    In the meantime, OK has been awarded a second CRTC license to run an alt-rock station on Edmonton's FM dial--which brings us to today's Edmonton Journal story by Sandra Sperounes:

    Two [new] frequencies -- Sonic and The Bounce -- are inadvertently interfering with the signals of two Corus Radio outlets, preventing listeners from hearing country powerhouse CISN and Joe, a classic hits station.
    In the case of CISN 103.9 FM, station manager Doug Rutherford says its signal is being cancelled at times by its nearest neighbours on the dial -- Sonic 102.9 and CKER 101.9, both owned by OK Radio Group.
    Rutherford says he's received 500 e-mails from frustrated CISN listeners since Sonic, a modern rock station, launched on April 5. The reception troubles are worst in St. Albert, Spruce Grove and Stony Plain...
    Part of the problem is the fact that Sonic and CISN transmit from separate broadcasting towers, and interference arises due to the location of the transmitters. Sonic's [new] transmitter is in Spruce Grove and CISN's is east of Edmonton, so their signals tend to overpower each other in the areas closest to their transmitters.
    "The OK Radio Group has done nothing wrong," Rutherford says. "They put up their tower; it met all the specifications. They're bending over backwards to help us solve it."

    I'd like to know whether OK's engineers, while staying within the letter of the regulation, might have snickeringly anticipated a situation of this sort. I wouldn't blame them if they did. (And assuming they're good engineers, they could hardly fail to.) Elsewhere on the dial, CHUM's new Bounce station (described as having a "rhythmic" format--???) is interfering with Corus's classic-rawk outlet, 92.5 Joe FM, over large parts of the city. Clearly it is high time Edmonton got a supertall multi-user broadcasting tower somewhere in the area--but Strathcona County is the only logical place for such a facility, and as long as the county council regards itself as being the sacred defender of the troposphere, it's apparently not going to happen.

    Fortunately, there's a solution being proposed by The Bounce's program director: radio listeners can just run out and spend their own money addressing the technical problem.

    [James] Stuart says listeners could solve some of their reception troubles by replacing their old clock radios with digital FM tuners. Dial tuners were built at a time when there were far fewer radio stations. "So their ability to get an absolute specific frequency is nowhere near as good as a digital tuner," Stuart says. "Essentially, that's our view of it all -- it's not a transmitter issue, it's a receiver issue."

    I think it's a great idea. So great, in fact, that many customers going down to the local stereo shop may take it to its logical conclusion, and leave the Earth behind completely. Edmonton lies within the footprint of both the Sirius and XM satellite radio networks. The receivers are cheap and digital, you're unlikely to lose signal on even the longest Canadian road trip, and your radio dealer will be happy to set you up with an American mailing address so you can subscribe to vastly more innovative and broad music programming--all without those persnickety Canadian content regulations. At this point, the subscriber fee might seem like a small price to pay for rising above the broadcast engineers' frequency warfare.

    I leave the reader to reflect on the fact that the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission is expanding into the exciting and unconstitutional world of content regulation even as it fails to live up to its original core mandate--namely, the orderly homesteading of wireless spectrum. The libertarian, non-public model of the airwaves is often described as a "chaos" of warring frequencies and squabbling broadcasters. Permit me to conclude here with a bitter "Ha bloody ha" and sign off.

    - 7:34 pm, May 4 (link)


    How to skin a Cat

    You all know that Rachel Corrie, the pro-intifada airhead who mistakenly thought her white skin was bulldozer-proof, has been given hagiographic treatment in a new play co-created by Alan Rickman. Rickman's involvement has guaranteed that the play is big international culture news. (It really strikes home, I guess, when someone with a familiar name like Rachel dies a needless death in the midst of sectarian violence.)

    But very few Western newspapers have reported on the crowning gag in this slapstick comedy of reverse orientalism. Corrie's parents--believe me, I couldn't make up something this perfect--are suing Caterpillar Inc. over the death of their daughter. Is it really necessary for those D-9s to be so goddamn heavy?

    - 5:01 pm, May 3 (link)


    Here's a slightly expanded version of my National Post column from last Tuesday about Sativex, the newly-approved treatment for idiopathic pain in multiple sclerosis sufferers. It contains a minor factual mistake spotted by two sharp-eyed Post readers--see if you can pick it out on your first pass.

    There are few diseases as baffling and scary as multiple sclerosis. You know this if you have it, or know someone who does--and, since this is Canada, you probably do. Our place on the globe is an MS hot zone. Around the world there is a noticeable "latitudinal gradient" in the incidence of MS; it is most common in Scandinavia, Iceland, Scotland, and here, and even within countries like Italy, Australia, and the U.S., it becomes more common as you move north. A recent study confirmed the existence of an equally weird "calendar gradient" among Brits, Canadians, Danes, and Swedes; if you were born in November, your MS risk is almost 20% lower than if you were born in May.

    But despite such powerful clues, theories about the disease's cause remain manifold and tenuous. Is it environmental? Dietary? Genetic? Viral? There is no conclusive answer. Acting with a keen consciousness of medicine's helplessness, Health Canada announced on April 13 that it is extending conditional approval to a new drug for the treatment of chronic pain in MS patients. But the new drug has a familiar face. The active ingredients in GW Pharmaceuticals' Sativex are THC and cannibidiol--which also happen to be the main active ingredients in marijuana.

    One can only admire the lightning speed with which this UK-based firm has moved to capitalize on our national schizophrenia about cannabis. Canada is the first jurisdiction to approve the product, an oral spray said to taste a little like Guinness. (The price has not yet been set, but Sativex is expected to go on sale in June.) We were targeted first, it seems, because of our high MS incidence and our relative openness to marijuana. But if marijuana were actually legal here, there might not be such a sizable market for a new form of the stuff. Thousands of Canadian MS sufferers are already smoking pot on the sly, and will attest to the pain-relieving powers of THC.

    Yet the biological mechanism might account for this anecdotal power is unknown, and the reproducible evidence for its existence is slender. Health Canada's approval of Sativex is based on one paltry four-week study, and is contingent on further research by GW. The drug was approved only because there are no other MS-specific pain drugs on the market. And it was passed despite a high incidence--nearly 90%--of "adverse events" in the GW study. The punchline is that most of these adverse events fell into two categories: mild pain or irritation in the mouth, which is attributable to the delivery method, and "intoxication", which is attributable to, uh, the fact that it's weed.

    Sativex is billed by its maker as pot for squares: GW spokesman Mark Rogerson told the Edmonton Journal that "With Sativex you don't need to get high to manage your symptoms." It's being left to MS patients to set their own dosage, on the premise that they will gradually find an amount that relieves pain without getting them high. But if they want to get high, there certainly won't be anything stopping them. And what kind of sadist would begrudge them the relaxation?

    The genius of Sativex is that it takes moral pressure off the physician. Ever since the Liberals began to contemplate medical licensing of smokeable marijuana, the Canadian Medical Association and individual M.D.s have occasionally complained about being asked to prescribe a "poorly understood" substance in a non-titrated form. The complaint is partly valid, since black-market marijuana varies widely in strength. And partly, it has a valid unstated basis: doctors don't want to become society's sole conduit for a loathed and feared recreational drug.

    But there are thousands of studies of marijuana in the medical literature, and it has millions of habitual users. Drugs are prescribed every day which are understood one percent as well as THC and other cannabinoids. If physicians are really as jumpy about THC as their spokesmen sometime claim, they certainly won't want to prescribe Sativex on a take-it-when-you-feel-like-it basis.

    The truth is that most doctors understand marijuana to be fairly harmless (which is why the CMA's journal of record officially supports decriminalization). Its availability in sanitized, pre-packaged form is likely to put a further strain on our hypocrisy about pot. Sativex, chemically and physiologically, is just marijuana without the smoke. So, arguably, is Marinol, a synthetic THC already available to treat nausea in AIDS, glaucoma and cancer patients.

    It's good to give patients choices like these, if choice really ends up being the result. Licensed, patented pseudopot alternatives should not open the door for renewed crackdowns on "compassion clubs"--which would mean taking traditional marijuana away from patients, and replacing a naturally-occuring substance with expensive simulacra that might be therapeutically inferior.

    As readers Ted Scott and George Grosman were kind enough to point out, the latitudinal gradient for MS is reversed in the southern hemisphere--it appears (based on data from Australia and New Zealand) to be defined by distance from the equator, not northernliness. So the statement that MS becomes more common in Australia as one moves north is 180° wrong; it's the south that is the MS danger zone there. My apologies to anyone who was confused or misled. Jacob Sullum has a brief comment on Sativex from an American perspective over at Hit & Run.

    - 4:31 pm, May 3 (link)


    Climate of mistrust

    It's widely known, I hope, that Scientific American discredited itself forever three years ago with its hysterical response to Bjorn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist--a response that was later used in a grotesque attempt to derail Lomborg's career. Still, SA is a journal of science popularization, and has never really been as apolitical as all that anyhow. The spirit of objective inquiry can afford to lose one totem, however prominent. But this story in today's Telegraph credibly accuses more serious and pivotal journals of failing to hold up their end of the scientific bargain.

    The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.
    The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.
    Dr Oreskes's study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser.
    However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.
    They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.
    Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been "widely dispersed on the internet".

    Even in those circles where global-warming skepticism is familiar, it should be a cause for horror that bad research is being left uncorrected because of rebuttals already "widely dispersed." Of course, on its own terms, this gives the game away. Are the editorial boards of journals like Science and Nature now openly confessing that their content cannot be trusted without the use of the Net as a scholars' crib? Isn't this like a sporting umpire defending a bad call on the grounds that the fans weren't denied the opportunity to boo?

    - 9:37 am, May 2 (link)


    Slave to the rhythm: Monday morning's National Post has a faintly silly new column from me about the dynamics of that strange and addictive "reality TV" phenomenon American Idol, which is becoming more ubiquitous than ever in its fourth season. Post subscribers can read it online.

    - 8:51 am, May 2 (link)


    So what the hell am I looking at?

    After Saturday's panel discussion in Calgary about weblogs, I spent much of the weekend discussing this weird new medium with people who have been hearing plenty of excited muttering about "blogs" but haven't yet looked at one. So some of you will be looking at a weblog for the very first time. This is what all the fuss is about, more or less. But keep in mind that this is a singularly ugly--and, under the hood, crudely designed--example of the form.

    There is nothing very challenging about the weblog format for someone who is accustomed to the Web. Perhaps the only novel convention you need to get used to is that the most recent entries on a weblog are usually at the top; as you scroll down, you're working backwards in time. That coloured column on the left-hand side is what's known as a "blogroll"; it has links to other interesting weblogs. In my case I've sorted them into arbitrary categories that lend themselves to random exploration. If you're a fan of Jorge Luis Borges you may be reminded of the famous Chinese encyclopedia that classified the animals so confusingly.

    My site, as you'll see, is personal and pretty eclectic. Some people go about it much the same way, and others stick closely to particular themes. Some weblogs are news-obsessed, some aren't. You will want to check out some of the better-known sites belonging to Canadians. Over at Maclean's Paul Wells mixes music criticism with political skeet-shooting. Andrew Coyne stays on top of the political scene day-by-day, writing great little items that aren't quite capable of being inflated into columns. The Globe's Mathew Ingram does much the same thing, focusing on technology and culture items. The Western Standard's Shotgun is a right-wing group weblog that is gaining in influence. Paleocons will enjoy Kevin Grace's implacably hostile Ambler, which comes to or at you from Vancouver Island. On the other end of the spectrum there's the This magazine weblog, which is considerably more entertaining than the actual This magazine. And of course, having heard Norman Spector and Adam Daifallah talk about weblogs, you'll want to visit their sites.

    For all the strife between the "MSM" and the new media, you'll notice that many of the best-known sites are by journalists, who are habituated to fast writing (and smitten with the sound of their own voices). But the best "civilian" sites are as good or better. CF Sgt. Bruce Rolston's Flit contains indispensible comment on military issues. (For our purposes he qualifies as a "civilian".) I don't even know what the heck Torontonian Chris Selley does for a living, but he's great. Grant McCracken does cultural anthropology both professionally and on his site. Darren Barefoot in B.C. and Toronto's Accordion Guy run breezy, popular personal sites.

    For international comment, I leave you to the ambivalent mercies of the blogroll. If you click around long enough, you are bound to find something that captivates you. Particular attention to the "USA STARTING XI" category is advised; these sites are all amongst the earliest and most popular American weblogs. And Reason magazine's Hit & Run is an outstanding exemplar of a political group weblog.

    - 8:33 am, May 2 (link)