It's official: Ron MacLean (discussed below) is out the door at "Hockey Night in Canada". Hey, maybe they'll hire Dave Hodge to replace him!

Bourque links this morning to a Canadian Press story about the readiness of Canadian soldiers to fight in Iraq.

"There's no doubt in my mind if the second battle in this campaign against terrorism arises -- as I'm sure it will somewhere, sometime -- that we will have troops standing shoulder to shoulder saying goodbye to their families and lining up to do it," Lt.-Col. Pat Stogran, who led Canada's 850-member battalion for six months in Afghanistan, said in an interview.

"The strange irony is if it's really routine, humdrum like Bosnia or an exercise, the troops aren't interested in it," he said. But in the Afghanistan campaign "there was a perceived risk, an element of danger ... and troops were crawling over themselves ... to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida."

I don't wish to mock the colonel, whose troops acquitted themselves well in Afghanistan. But I'm flabbergasted to hear he thinks it strange that soldiers prefer fighting to social engineering. Is the officer hierarchy really so out of touch with its men? Ahhh, the question answers itself.

The welfare state tends, eternally, to turn every public institution into a welfare agency. This is a problem for those who don't want to work for welfare agencies. Young men and women join the army in good faith, expecting to be able to use hard-won fighting skills. What they learn, serving their turn as "peacekeepers", is that they are expected to live up to the part of the contract which says "You will enter into harm's way when we ask you to," and there is no reciprocal obligation upon the state to guarantee that the soldiers will be allowed to defend themselves, or do their jobs, or that they will be used to promote any policy end other than "enhancing Canada's prestige abroad." (Translation: "enhancing the prestige of Liberal Canadian politicians abroad.")

The lives of our soldiers in Yugoslavia did not, in fact, lack for any "element of danger". This is poorly understood by most civilians. I don't know what the colonel's excuse is for perpetuating the idea. He seems to be saying that soldiers like danger for its own sake.

I suppose I should also say something about spending Saturday night at the bar with the Tumbleweed and her better half or significant other or whatever the hell these crazy kids call it. She wrote on Sunday (permalinks don't work, of course):

I've been sporting one hell of a hangover all day. I spent the day alternating between loafing and clutching my stomach. My guts have been muttering, we've got a score to settle. Now the headache has set in. Last night was a good one.

Sure, you had a rough day, lady, but at least you didn't have to oversee the decline of an empire.

It's a relief that I wasn't the only one who ended up in a wretched condition, anyway. I did the sensible thing and barfed when I got home, although I suppose technically "the sensible thing" involves actually hitting the bowl of the toilet.

What I can remember of the evening was terrific. Oh my God, I don't remember settling the bill... holy shitting Jesus, I hope I didn't stick Mr. and Mrs. Tumbleweed with the check. Oh fuck. If we just ran out on it and stiffed the waitress, that's no problem at all. But I drank so much that if the Weeds paid for it, they won't be able to eat for the next week. Oh, this is horrible. My soul is gnawing at me. I'm an idiot!

Anyway, what can I tell you. When journalists get together the result is always reams of shop talk, and if I tried to relate any of it to you, you'd be sickened by our collective self-involvement. The Tumbleweed is as charming as ever, and the boyfriend is an intelligent, genteel guy who's travelled all over hell's half-acre. CANDOUR ALERT: when she told me he was coming along, I got that clammy feeling like, you know, "Jesus... what if he's a dickhead?" There's no telling: excellent women just sometimes end up dating total dickheads, and it fucking ruins everything. "Man, I'd sure like to go to the funny-car races with Sally this weekend, but she'll probably want to bring TOM along. Cuh, what a pain in the ass. Sorry, can't be fucking bothered." You end up just striking these girls out of your social calendar, consigning them to their private hell of witless, filthy offspring and late-night treks to women's shelters. But the Tumbleweed made a good choice; she's still socially viable. I'm pretty relieved. Get well soon, T.

Oh dear. I don't suppose I can avoid discussing the outcome of tonight's Diplomacy game, can I?

It was a five-hander with Report production coordinator Dave Stevens, its webmaster Kevin Steel, CTF Alberta director John Carpay, and a Czech-born postal worker named John Novotny, to whom I have no known way to link but who seems very nice. They drew France, Turkey, England, and Russia respectively.

This left me with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Normally one is perfectly happy to play Austria in a five-hander, with open invasion routes to neutral Germany and Italy. Par-TAY! But on this day everything turned to shit immediately. First of all, the two Johns are chums and were able to weld into an unbreakable alliance instantly. Question: if Russia doesn't have to worry about its backdoor in Scandinavia because it trusts England, whom does it go after?

It goes after Turkey, the sick man of Europe. And here's the second thing that went wrong: Turkey was sicker than usual. Not fully realizing that Russia was a rookie player, the Sublime Porte made an extremely haphazard offer to demilitarize the Black Sea. I believe the text was "Let's do the, you know, the thing, OK?" Russia didn't understand and was shrewd enough not to pretend to. Result: Russia was able to pin down Turkey with a single unopposed Black Sea fleet and send hordes of smelly Tsarist footsoldiers straight down my throat.

England finished off France in about five years--the president of the Republic, Dave, couldn't write an order correctly to save his life on this night--and had grown into a gargantuan sea power, making matters far worse. Russia, animated by a mysterious and abiding hatred of the Hapsburgs, ignored the increasing power imbalance and continued its frenzied campaign to turn Budapest and Vienna into brick dust and kindling. No amount of backpedalling, pleading, or gesticulation could convince the Tsar to lay off and guard his northern frontiers. (Diplomacy my ASS.) When England finally began to undertake daring sea adventures in the region of Norway and Denmark, Russia had no way to respond. Soon British admirals were having high tea in St. Petersburg.

When the proceedings finally closed (after Fall 1910), England was quite close to the game's victory condition, and Turkey, Austria, and Russia had welded into a terribly distasteful sauve-qui-peut coalition. The final rounds suggested that England could have been stopped, with close cooperation and accurate play, and that would have made the game anybody's to win--even mine. We shall never know: the events herein related took ten hours and everyone had had a bellyful of Diplomacy. For most of the game I was caught in a typically frustrating Austrian condition of having to oscillate between four and five units and file long sequences of automatic defensive moves. It was the least fun it is possible to have in a game of Diplomacy, which means that it was still quite a lot of fun.

Through sheer foolishness, I seem to have arranged my weekend such that Saturday night's drinking segues directly into a Sunday afternoon game of Diplomacy.

What is Diplomacy, you ask? Here is one good answer. When Diplomacy is mentioned people who have seen it invariably go "Oh, isn't that like Risk?" Well, it's a board game played on a map, and you do move armies about on it, but Diplomacy is Risk for adults. There are no dice in Diplomacy, and the element of chance is vanishingly small. Unlike other adult board games, though (ALIEN PANZER DUEL FIVE: ROBERT E. LEE'S ZOMBIE ARMADA), it can be learned without recourse to a folio of rules with the mass to disable a moose. Lying, psychological manipulation, intimidation, and blackmail are all permitted; in fact there is nothing in the spirit of the rules, particularly, which would suggest that threats of real violence are not allowed.

The essence of the game, in which each player represents a great European power in the year 1901, is that you can't win solely through your own effort. Meaning that you must, in principle, swindle somebody into helping you to victory. It is a mere marketing convenience that the game is played on a map of Europe, but you do get scenarios which are frightening in their similarity to real history, and others which are amusingly counterfactual--Turkish navies sailing triumphantly up the Thames, that sort of thing.

Unfortunately success today seems improbable, as I am hung over, and as the winner of the previous game I might as well be wearing a "HUMAN TARGET" T-shirt to the festivities. (For the Dip fans out there, I was playing France in a five-hander--which isn't exactly as hard as solving a Rubik's Cube in zero-g, to say the least.) Even though I succeeded with a mere modicum of betrayal and no lying that I can remember, I expect to be treated the way Napoleon was in his latter days: as an Enemy of Mankind.

It's usually pretty funny when a celebrity ups the ante in a contract negotiation by taking his story to the newspapers. But Hockey Night in Canada is serious business. Host Ron MacLean, it seems, has been betrayed by CBC bean-counters and is phoning every number in his Rolodex. You can read the Globe's version or the Star's.

(For foreign readers, here's a USA Today column on the indispensability of HNIC. Imagine a sports show with roughly twice the cultural importance of Monday Night Football.)

MacLean emerged from Albertan obscurity in 1986 and inside of a decade had bagged one of the most important weekly jobs in Canadian television, maybe the most important. This doesn't happen often, and with good reason. Television broadcasting is a craft yoked to a genetic lottery. There are some people with the wit and knowledge to perform well on TV; and there are plenty of people who are, basically, presentable enough to have hosting duties; and there are some people who are calm and organized enough to do it. But on the big Venn diagram, those circles don't have a terribly large intersection, and there are still many pitfalls which can drop you out of the running (a taste for drink, say, or an abiding love of some more meaningful vocation). Television works best when producers relent on one aspect or the other, but the medium seems to have gotten less courageous with time: Howard Cosell wouldn't be allowed near a studio today.

Ron MacLean is very much beloved, I think, of Canadian hockey fans. We think of him in his main duty, which is to provide a foil for Don Cherry on "Coach's Corner". But the really great thing about MacLean is that he has ideas of his own--he's no punching bag. Most of the time, when he's sitting next to Cherry or an interview subject, he looks harmless like a chipmunk. But sometimes you get that MacLean moment where a sudden look of impatience or annoyance or pure suppressed outrage crosses his face, and before you know it, holy shit, the chipmunk is kicking that guy's ass. During the playoffs MacLean did an interview with the president of the league, Gary Bettman... MacLean, who has the unique and crucial job qualification of being an expert amateur hockey referee, had just spent about a week continually savaging the league's confusing, ever-changing instructions to its in-game officials. One wondered beforehand if it was going to come up between the two of them. MacLean got right in Bettman's face with it on the first question, and within seconds these guys were literally yelling at each other on the air. Sports television never gets this compelling. On its own merits it was great TV, and for Canadians, who worry chronically that changes meant to "market the game" to ignorant Americans are going to interfere with the integrity of hockey, it was transcendent.

The people who could possibly replace MacLean are mostly windbags or blow-dried phonies. (I think Kelly Hrudey's terrific, but it's hard to imagine him coping with Cherry.) Yet you can't really blame the CBC for taking a tough line in negotiations; they are managing a tax-funded budget, a public trust. It's a real problem in any commercial hierarchy, trying to hold on to a talented employee who shot directly to the best job on offer. As the Globe notes, the only possible non-monetary bone the network could throw MacLean would be to let him take over the prime-time chair on the Olympics broadcast--but pushing Brian Williams out of that job is as unthinkable as "Coach's Corner" without MacLean. It seems to have become a biennial tradition for Americans living near the border to switch off the U.S. networks in disgust and flip to the Williams-manned CBC coverage.

I don't know if I've mentioned that I live on Auto Accident Alley here in Edmonton. A fairly major four-lane highway runs north-south past my door, and the crossing street gets a great deal of traffic. However, the shoulders of the intersection are crowded with parked cars, and there's no left-turning lane where the big road meets it. So at least once a week I hear the inimitable crump of two cars kissing, just a few yards from where I'm sitting. In fact, that particular noise just awakened me at 4 a.m. Relatively new cars, from the sound--there was very little of the bright iron overtone you get from older ones.

This is not to say I wouldn't be familiar with the sound anyway, even if I didn't live at a bad intersection. I grew up out in the country, so I always had to do a lot of driving or riding in cars to socialize or shop; even after we moved to the city, we lived in a remote suburb. Edmonton is fantastically spread out, even by the standards of a city of the plain. The corporate limits cover at least a thousand square miles.

Under these circumstances, car crashes become familiar almost to the point of tedium. Once, when I was 22 or so, my mother was telling me how "unlucky" my aunt was because she'd been in four auto accidents. Nonplussed, I did a quick count. "Well, gee, mom," I said, "I've been in seven myself." The number's gone up by one or two since then. An ambulance has only been necessary for two of these, fortunately, and the worst injury I've suffered was a sharpish blow to the head that made my right ear bleed.

Most of these accidents were not my fault--in fact, I wasn't behind the wheel for the majority of them. But a couple of them were, and I've had enough near-misses to realize that I was once a pretty bad driver, and I'm probably still not terribly good. Few people will admit to such a thing. I'm fairly aggressive behind the wheel, but that's the not the problem; I'm much more dangerous, in fact, when I'm tooling along absent-mindedly with no particular place to be.

It's been a long time since I caused any especial havoc on the road, and just at the moment I am not driving at all; encouraged by insurers, and by a justice system to which I owe various administrative fees, I decided to mothball my wheels in an effort to live more cheaply. I've heard arguments from time to time, even from people otherwise well-disposed to the free market, in favour of "no-fault" auto insurance systems like those existing on either side of Alberta (in B.C. and Saskatchewan). As a worse-than-average driver, however, I am convinced that market pricing of auto insurance is a good thing. At my most haphazard, my insurance rates were over $3,800 (Canadian) a year. This was more than I was paying in rent at the time, but it was more or less fair--just as it's more or less fair now that, as an older and wiser man with a clean recent abstract, I should pay closer to $800/yr. There's no right to insurance at any particular price. However strongly we may all wish to drive, there are some people who just shouldn't be on the road, and we cannot, in principle, do a better job of identifying them and discouraging them than by means of a competitive actuarial market.

Sorry about the site being down earlier. I called my web host and they said there'd been an electrical problem in their building, so they had to shut everything down and reboot. My official review of Tera-Byte, if anyone's interested, is that they're by no means perfect, but they're nearly so, plus they're friendly and they answer support inquiries around the clock. If they screw you, you'll be able to talk to a person about it.

The Two Blowhards compare me to Andrew Sullivan "in terms of sheer volume". Excellent! But remember, ColbyCosh.com is created entirely without artificial steroidal or hormonal assistance. I'm really feeling the locker-room pressure to switch from Wild Turkey to Androgel, though. If you ever see me on a hotel balcony raising my fists to the sky and shouting "I AM A GOLDEN GOD!", you'll know I've crossed over.

See, there you go--I already feel bad about poking fun at Sullivan; it puts you on the side of the creeps who think he's a trivial poseur, or a fascist, plus it's not like he's at the head of an army of party-line followers. What strikes you about his weblog is the touching nakedness of it, and the occasional hissy fit or tortured, self-interested argument goes along with that. As an artist he's creating a valuable portrait of intellectual work and lifestyle. The medium is the message.

A friend points out most helpfully that Florence King, the greatest living American, took on the Pledge of Allegiance issue in late July.

If you danced to the Pledge, "under God" would make you miss a step.

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN TIRESOME BLOGOSPHERE BACKSCRATCHING. I broke 20,000 hits since August 1 sometime today. Thanks and an Ozzy Osbourne "We love you" to everybody. Especially Instapundit, who has to be responsible for about half of those hits. For a graphical, and also comical, view of Instapower's sheer magnitude, take a look at this chart of my daily hits. Can you guess which day I got the thunderbolt? No, it's not a trick question.

Anyway, if you look at the most recent Instantman link to me, you'll see that Glenn actually spotted the entry via Jim Henley's weblog, so I owe Jim a big vote of thanks--he's been pouring on the traffic, himself, like Tabasco on jambalaya, too. I heartily endorse his piss-take of the bafflingly esteemed Greil Marcus.

Don't you think, reading Greil Marcus, that he decided when he was about five that he had a personal mission to exsanguinate the joy out of rock music by means of adjectives? He's been eighty times more destructive, by means of pretension and general bogosity, than any jowly Southron senator who ever drawled a fatwa against the Devil's Music. I personally don't give a rat's pecker for the music of Warren Zevon, but for "ah-wooo!" alone he deserves better than Marcus's half-assed cascade of verbal tinsel.

Anyway, to take the backscratching to its final stopping point, Henley found out about my site from Kelly Torrance, who apparently urged it on him at some Washington social function. (I knew I'd picked the right advance agent.) So, oddly, Instantman's 2,800 or so hits came my way thanks to someone whose own brand-new site probably hasn't had a fifth of that traffic in total. INTERWEB = WEIRD.

In case you were wondering what kind of newsroom we run here: our "production coordinator" (translation: guy who knows his way around a Mac) is, as I write this, in a nearby office assembling a surf-rock version of "King Herod's Song" from Jesus Christ Superstar.

So you are the Christ, you're the great Jesus Christ!
Prove to me that you're divine! Change my water into wine!

He's not doing it for Jesus especially--he did the same vaguely rapelike surf-rock thing to one of the numbers from American Graffiti a while back. I think it would be more accurate to say that his religion is surf rock that it would be to say that his religion is Christianity. Sometimes, when the magazine needs a filler ad, we drop in a one-column pitch for his record company. He is the robo-human relations coordinator for The Capacitors.

If you are not awfully impressed that digital technology allows a Canadian magazine designer to use his spare time to run a record label selling Italian surf rock, then I feel sorry for you.

[UPDATE, 6:38 a.m., September 28: Actually it turns out Dave is adapting "Pilate and Christ", not "King Herod's Song", which kind of ruins my headline, doesn't it? Bastard.]

You remember Steve Martin jumping up and down in The Jerk, shouting "The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!"? I'm like that with post-censal population estimates, man.

You'll notice that Alberta has over 3.1 million people and Saskatchewan about one million. On the eve of the Great Depression, after the wave of immigration that peopled the prairies, Saskatchewan had a much, much larger population than Alberta. Saskatchewan, not Alberta, was the future of Canada. But in the 1930s and '40s, Alberta and Saskatchewan chose diametrically opposite paths. Saskatchewan adopted socialism, taking the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (today's New Democratic Party) as its ugly bride. Alberta elected a weird, millenarian-evangelical, quasi-fascist monetary cult called Social Credit, but the party purged itself in fairly short order and became a model of dry, managerial-state conservatism.

This mysterious divergence changed Canadian history. The origins of both the CCF and Social Credit were Protestant evangelical; Tommy Douglas, the patron saint of Canadian socialism, was a Baptist minister. Social Credit came to power because its first leader, William Aberhart, was the most popular radio speaker in the West: he hosted the "Back to the Bible Hour". The second Socred premier, E.C. Manning, ran the province for more than 25 years--and hosted the "Back to the Bible Hour" on Sundays throughout his whole administration.

So what the hell happened? By the 1960s, Saskatchewan was Confederation's laboratory and spiritual home for socialism; next door, E.C. Manning was easily socialism's loudest critic within Canada. How did two radical movements with similar goals and similar religious origins essentially transmute into opposites?

I don't know. And that's not a casual "I don't know"--it's a baffled, despairing "I don't know". As a historian and researcher, I've studied this stuff, but I've never been able to find a convincing reason for the Great Schism between the provinces. Yet this question is not academic to me: my parents were both born and raised in Saskatchewan, and yet here we all are in Alberta. Saskatchewan, once Alberta's bigger, more vibrant elder brother, systematically self-depopulated: I'm the child of two of the refugees. And moreover, I have "Albertan" attitudes about policy and economics--yet my Saskatchewan grandmother kept a picture of Tommy Douglas on her wall, in the place many homes reserve for Christ or the Queen.

Of course, oil was discovered in Alberta in 1947, and that has hastened the westward exodus. This counts--but the few holdouts in Saskatchewan offer it as a global explanation, and that won't wash. Saskatchewan has potash, and has, or had, uranium; but those industries just never turned into the business incubators that oil and gas did here. More importantly, the policy split happened before any of these resources began to be exploited seriously.

Anyway, I take it as read that Saskatchewan emptied out into Alberta because Alberta chose, or at any rate got, good government, and Saskatchewan didn't. The great mystery, to me, is why. What butterfly wingflap determined the prairies' centre of gravity?

Sam Mikes has answered back on marijuana. What a pleasant, intelligent fellow he seems. I'm basically a professional polemicist, and even so it's a real effort for me to write in a tone 10% as calm and respectful as he does. Not that I usually bother.

The one point I'll address, since we're reaching the limits of anyone else's possible interest in this particular argument, is this:

These are some of the conservative objections. Perhaps they sound shallow, but it's the conservative's job to stand around saying "No! No! No! Don't do that!" to social change, even if the justification turns out to just be "We fear change."

Now, I'm not a conservative, and I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, that more than three or four people in the whole of Canada would both merit and desire the label. But I will point out that one "conservative" view would be that we have had a regime of permanent revolution in Canada since about the First World War. The conservative generally wishes undo as much of this work as possible; it's all a question of what particular year you want to turn the clock back to.

As I pointed out in my original entry on the subject, laws against opiates and cannabis are the work of the progressive-liberal regime. Self-medication was wholly acceptable to 19th-century people, though this is partly because there was often no alternative. Any true, hardcore conservative would be happy to return us to the world of mail-order laudanum. (And, in fact, the return to such a world is happening, and is inevitable.)

I should stop here, but what the hell... the original justifications for these laws were essentially that the proscribed drugs were instruments of what was then called "white slavery." They were objectionable handmaidens of the "lesser races". Portraits of razor-wielding "Negroes" and sinister "Chinamen" were painstakingly painted, and the public was then of a mind to believe them. I know this because I've done loads of primary-source research on that period; nobody that I know of has written in detail about the gobsmacking ignorance which provided the impetus for these changes (or contemporary ones like Social Credit, disarmament conferences, Prohibition, etc., etc.). There is no doubt in my mind that the First World War lowered the mean IQ of the public in Western countries by a good 20 points. Next time you're in a library, compare newspaper stories and advertisements from 1925 to those from 1910. What I've just said should be obvious to you within 15 minutes.

Somehow the pretexts for the laws changed many times in the intervening years--but the laws themselves never changed. How can people not realize how weird that is? There's always something--some shred of research, some pulled-out-of-somebody's-ass argument--that prevents us from just making the stuff legal. 20 years from now, I'm sure, the drug warriors will have rock-solid evidence that marijuana promotes tooth decay and causes vertigo amongst the lunar colonists. At some point, you have to say "Shut up already: your story changes every generation. We're tired of hearing it."

My personal acquaintance with marijuana, in case you're wondering, is extremely slender. The person depicted in the top right corner of this page may appear to be a substance-befuddled roué, but I honestly wouldn't know where to get a baggie of grass if I wanted one.

Finally, someone has a not entirely positive comment about my angel piece. This is almost a relief, to be honest. Lott thinks it's funny that I'd spend time thinking seriously about religion, in its comparative and cultural aspects. Personally, I think the fact that he finds it funny is even funnier.

VANCOUVER (CP) - The Canadian Criminal Code aided and abetted the murders of 11 women who disappeared from the Downtown Eastside, says the member of Parliament for the area. Libby Davies said Wednesday the criminalization of drug addiction and the sex trade marginalized the women and put them at risk.

It's 11 just at the moment, of course: the total number of hookers known missing in Vancouver is 63, and forensics experts are painstakingly combing Robert Pickton's pig farm for ground-up remains.

Libby Davies is a New Democrat Member of Parliament, and you all know how I feel about New Democrats. But in this case, Davies is unarguably right and has something important to say to us. It is not reasonable to think that drugs and sex for pay would come entirely aboveground just because they were legalized; nonetheless, it is true by definition that people lose the protection of the law when they are outlawed for victimless crimes. When hookers go missing from a legal brothel in Nevada, they're missed, if only they're business assets on a balance sheet. Action would be taken long before some hog farmer did away with 63 of them.

Davies cites "discrimination", but the CP story isn't clear on what kind of discrimination she means. If she wants to turn mass murder into a gender issue, well, we'll part company. To say it was about class would be closer to the truth: if you set out to kill 63 woman lawyers, the whole country would be in lockdown before you got ten percent of the way.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here: some women certainly go into the sex trade partly because it is a way for them to live outside the law. We're always going to have people who just don't want to get a diploma or file income tax returns. But the more onerous the reciprocal interaction between the law and society, the greater is the temptation to leap between the binary categories of "within the law" and "outside the law". This is what Western countries learned when they experimented with Prohibition: people do not conform to the law because the law is a holy and terrible God to which their souls are eternally bent. Conformity to the law, like anything else, is a package of incentives: if the perceived benefits outweigh the costs, people will change sides. If enough people change sides, the law's monopoly on violence is threatened, and when that happens, what you have is a state of low-level civil war.

In fact, all societies are continually in a state of low-level civil war. The law competes, capitalist-fashion, with its alternative, anarchy and the rule of open force. To the degree to which law mimics the rule of force--that is, to the degree to which the law becomes oppressive, subjective, and unequal in application--it loses its social advantage and discredits itself.

The demimonde in Vancouver is now large enough to accommodate some rather ravenous appetites. This is a very serious indictment of the other "half" in which most of us, mostly, dwell.

Those engrossed in the continuing travails of the Report will not want to miss Brian Hutchinson's typically excellent view of the chaos from today's National Post. The one inaccuracy, I think, is where Hutch says that "debts began to mount" in the 1990s. In my time, the magazine has been run, day to day, out of its operating revenues: it had no line of credit and no hope of getting one anywhere. It spent some of the cash infusion provided by the investors, John Scrymgeour and Don Graves, but that's not "debt" per se. They were the majority owners of the asset, and while they expected (and, to some extent, got) a return on their investment, this wasn't in any real sense interest-bearing indebtedness to them. The magazine was, until yesterday morning, theirs: it makes no sense to say that the "magazine owed them money" any more than it makes sense for you to say "my car owes me money."

And let it be said that Messrs. Scrymgeour and Graves are getting out of the quagmire with two fairly strong assets: the future revenue from the history book series, and, unless I'm mistaken, the building in which the magazine and the book are produced. There are, no doubt, quirks and quibbles I'm unaware of in this situation. I am speculating when I say this, but the present value of the books and the building, put together, should be greater than any amount S&G ever kicked in. If this is inaccurate, I invite those with a clearer view of the situation to correct me.

(And I don't wish to demean their contributions or their patience by any means--merely to remind readers that S&G are whip-smart businessmen, not saps. If either of them should ever happen to read this, I want them to know I am profoundly grateful for their help to the magazine. Not only did they keep it alive, but they were absolute models of non-interference with the editorial process.)

If you'd rather read something out of the pages of the Report, try Link Byfield's latest column. It's his answer to Ottawa's flirtation with the Kyoto Protocol--"Please, God, send us back Gabriel Dumont". Don't know who Gabriel Dumont is? There's some background here which sells him short: Dumont was not just an "able" commander, but one whose name belongs in our military history alongside Brock and Currie. But you should really read George Woodcock's biography Gabriel Dumont to get the full effect.

(And while I'm on this thread, Woodcock himself is an underappreciated Canadian figure, a close friend of George Orwell whose book Anarchism is probably the finest general historical textbook on that subject.)

A reader from Manitoba writes to complain (mildly) that the new orange colour of the sidebar at left reminds him, unpleasantly, of the New Democratic Party (that's Canada's moribund democratic socialist movement, which has never come close to winning a federal election but has often governed individual provinces, invariably to their chagrin). I had no idea the colour would have such a connotation, because the federal NDP is invisible in Alberta and the provincial ones wisely use different motifs from their national cousins.

If anyone's fooled into thinking this is a Canadian socialist website, they won't be fooled for long. I associate different things with colour orange--it makes me think of Holland, a country I've never visited and have no ethnic ties to, but one I admire to a quite absurd degree. Its polders are a symbol of the triumph of ingenuity over nature; it was Europe's school par excellence of peaceable bourgeois resplendence; it gave to the world Vermeer and Rembrandt and Breughel and van Dyck, among others, which would be an astonishing legacy to civilization for even the largest country. In 1688, when Britain had need of a citizen king to cement a new order of parliamentary democracy and individual liberty, Holland supplied one. Orange is the signifying colour of England's Protestant Settlement, and while I'm no Orangeman, the ultimate value of that event to European civilization cannot possibly be overstated; its ripple effects run through the French Revolution and the Second World War and continue today.

A thorough account of the Dutch genius, historical and contemporary, would keep you and I here all day. I hope one may suggest that nations have personalities without being thought racist. The Dutch personality is, in many respects, overwhelmingly attractive. If I couldn't be me, I'd be very content to be Dutch.

Thanks to Instantman, my recent entry on angels in popular culture has become possibly the most popular thing I've written in my entire life. You guys know I'm an atheist, right? I couldn't believe how many Christians were glad to read my offhand remarks. It's very kind of you all to not simply write in to say, "This stuff's none of your beeswax, you unscrubbed heathen imbecile."

Supreme pride of place goes to Kathy Shaidle, as always: her brief comment is meant to be positive, I think. Maybe. Incidentally, K.S., Christopher Hitchens did testify in the canonization casus of Mother Teresa, and was deeply impressed by the seriousness, nay, deference with which he was treated. Although it would take antipersonnel rockets to stop them from canonizing her, truth be told.

Peter Frank, a fellow editor, had this to say:

You hit the nail on the head.
The problem is that most of us in the Christian subculture are so starved for what we feel are positive portrayals in the broader society we live in that we don't even whimper when someone does something that makes Christianity look nice instead of gay bashing/woman hating/weird.

Working at a publication with a conservative mandate, I could hardly miss that particular nail, Peter. You are much too kind. Faisal Jawdat (gotta be Lutheran, am I right?) adds a datum:

it's worth noting that angels as originally described were not people with a couple feather wings and a halo, they were seriously scary. Multiple faces. Big scary swords.

Which reminds me... this gives me a chance to recommend Patrick Farley's whimsical (but not disrepectful!) take on angels and other celestial beings in the remarkable Japanime-inspired online comic Apocamon. There is lots to enjoy at Farley's site. I particularly recommend his classic The Guy I Almost Was.

David Paglia writes, with considerably more authority than I:

As an ex-Catholic (and therefore having recieved a bigger dose of Christian religious mythology as a kid than most), [Touched by an Angel] has always reminded me of something that a practicing Satanist might produce for the purposes of black propaganda. I never found anything redeeming in that show and only the great love (and greater fear) I bear for my lovely Significant Other could keep the screams of, "But angels don't have free will! She can't do that!" and, "Since when are angels allowed to commit mortal sins?!" bottled up.
The thing that really broke it loose was this one episode... if my scarred memory serves, it was Christmas and this kid was depressed because his dad had committed suicide with a shotgun out in the horse barn or some damn fool thing. Whatsername goes to soothe the kid's grief by bringing his dad's ghost back for a visit.
Man, I broke. Stood up and started yelling, "HI, SON! Don't be depressed! I love you, even though i'm down here in Hell for having committed the mortal sin of suicide! And this nice angel was kind enough to show you my eternal suffering! So cheer up already..."
Of course, the best comment on things angelic came from the movie, "The Prophesy" (Christopher Walken as an angel gone bad: you must see this one!):
"Have you ever noticed that, in the Bible, angels are never shown healing people or getting cats out of trees? Whenever you see an angel, it's always smiting something..."

Well, smiting's damn addictive. Incidentally, David is extremely startled that someone else has read The Five Fingers. I'm telling you, man, there's a whole cult around this book. One of the work buddies who recommended it was a hardcore Maoist; I think the book must have confirmed all his most paranoid suspicions about the Nixon administration, or something. There's one scene, near the end, where Rivers and Master Sergeant Prather accidentally crawl into an ambush (complete with snipers in overhanging tree branches), and have to remain immobile while they figure a way out of it. Prather, the super-stoic Sandhurst-type Englishman, starts shifting his eyes back and forth wildly and sticking his tongue out. Rivers, the narrator, thinks he's gone bananas, but then he realizes Prather is trying to point out enemies with his tongue. For a while there, tongue-pointing became a running gag in the office.

What a strange day. I am sorry I couldn't write until now. I will tell you all about it, but I think I must start with my brief visit to the office at about 3 p.m., when I sat at my desk and noticed that my hit counter here had gone from about 16,500 to over 19,000. Shurely shome mishtake? I clicked on the counter to access the details of my stats, but Sitemeter was down with a 500 error.

Now I have a new standard in visions of Hell. If you are excessively bad in this life, you are sent to a level of black Dis in which your website counter is ticking over like a crooked taxicab meter and you can't access the fucking referrer logs. Naturally, a quick check of Instapundit solved the mystery. (They say a watched pot never boils, and similarly, Instapundit traffic is far more likely to flow your way on a day when you're tied up with deadly serious business matters, and cannot update your site.)

So where was I all day? Well, for those who care, we were working on a radical restructuring of the Report magazine, for which I work. It is Canada's only serious and semi-esteemed conservative publication (or should that be esteemed and semi-serious?). The news was formally announced tonight at a packed reception in a rebuilt airplane hangar. Perhaps a brief explanation is in order: the magazine has existed for 29 years and has been profitable, on its own hook, for about four of those. It hasn't had too much luck expanding outside its home base of Alberta. It has gone bankrupt, and had to raise money from new investors, five or six times over. These investors have generally turned into unwitting contributors in fairly short order. At times the magazine has been propped up by side projects--once it was saved by a postal strike, during which it ran its own (highly lucrative) crosstown Emergency Postal Service out of employees' cars. More recently, we spun off a highly successful Alberta history book series (described briefly on my "about me" page) whose profits have cancelled out the magazine's losses. But the series is ending, and the current majority owners do not want to throw more money after the losing proposition at the company's core.

No magazine with 43,000 subscribers paying $80 or so a year should be a losing proposition, you may say, but net ad sales have dwindled from nearly a million dollars per annum ten years ago to a figure scraping uncomfortably close to $100,000 now. For the magazine, that is the difference between happiness and tragedy, and the men at the top are convinced that we're never going to get back to a million a year, mainly because of anti-conservative prejudice by national advertisers (although things suck right now for ad sellers generally, it must be said).

The proposed answer, enacted officially this morning, is to place the magazine under the control of a non-profit foundation. Since most if not all American conservative magazines have backing from trusts and foundations, this seems like a reasonable move. The move to a foundation may mean substantial changes in the style, look, and mandate of the magazine. It may go from a fortnightly to a monthly, but our publisher has promised to move heaven and earth to avoid layoffs. (I believe he is in earnest, because he is well known to hate laying people off the way the Taliban hate Barbie dolls.) For the editorial working stiff, there is a possible upside, as other activities are being mooted for the foundation: a radio show is one idea, a legal defence fund for the fundamental Charter freedoms is another. If we can find donors, the magazine may transform into a multi-theatre conservative fighting machine, a bit less strident and a bit more influential than its current incarnation.

If we can't find donors, of course, your beloved correspondent will have to go on the dole. But I'm versatile and educated, and I work pretty cheap, so right now I am what is called "guardedly optimistic". Many conservatives and libertarians in the U.S. seem to live adequately recompensed lives of writing and study with the help of non-profit foundations. I have no objection to doing this myself. In fact, if you'd like a fellowship named after you and you have the cash to back it up, get in touch with me. "Colby J. Cosh is the Hermert Buglebuster Fellow in Invective at the So-and-So Foundation in Edmonton, Alberta." This, I think, could be arranged!

I am often told by people that they don't agree with everything in the magazine, but they are glad it exists and that its ornery, saurian Western viewpoint is represented in Canada. (I don't agree with everything in the magazine either.) This is the sentiment, expressed in the form of large cheques, upon which we are counting.

Quite a lot of journos and conservative quasi-celebs were on hand tonight: Ezra Levant, Sean McKinsley, Jason Kenney, Ric Dolphin, Danielle Smith. I got to meet some of the magazine's staunch letter-writers, people who would have weblogs, probably, if they were twenty years younger. I met some guys who went to school with my dad back in Saskatchewan. And I received some very nice compliments--one gentleman, a veteran journalist in his own right, came up to me and said "I wanted to say hello to the funniest man alive!" Sadly, I missed my cue to say "Holy shinola, is Don Rickles here??"

[Warning: I typed the following without my contact lenses in. Orthography may at times diverge from standard English. Apologies.]

I can't promise anything will appear in this space Tuesday: the magazine's annual face-to-face meeting of its far-flung staff is tomorrow morning, and a fundraising dinner is taking place in the evening. All your Report favourites will be there. I'll be the drunk angry one.

And so, before bed, we turn to the nagging issue of Sam Mikes' ever-multiplying rebuttals. The first one is about healthcare. What I originally said was that user fees are worth trying in Canada's single-payer medicare system. Sam disagrees.

First of all, Sam cites the additional costs involved with accepting user fees. I do not believe these costs need to be great. Why? Because I don't actually care about the money. They can set fire to it on a damn hibachi if that will be cheaper than collecting it, securing it, and accounting for it. The fee is not a fee for revenue: the function of the fee is to associate some price with usage of the system.

Secondly, Sam says this:

[A]ny user fee will have the effect of discouraging use of the system--which is all to the good when the system is being abused by hypochondriacs, idiots, or the incompetent. But if we're aiming to control costs by providing cheap preventive services to avoid expensive emergency services, user fees are not the way to go.

That's great, but who, in what fantasy universe, is offering "cheap preventive services to avoid expensive emergency services"? This is a strange idea indeed of how Canadian medicare works. And of course, "prevention" is the most overhyped concept in the known universe anyway: ask the middle-aged women who were told that hormone replacement does a body good, or the smokers who've been popping Zyban (actually, this one isn't in the papers yet, but I've been given a heads-up on some stuff that's crawling through peer review). The amount of legitimate demand for emergency services that can be eliminated by means of specifically medical interventions is small. Unless someone's hiding a pill for head trauma up their sleeve.

Sam's third point:

[A]lthough we can use the market, and the prices it assigns, to estimate the value of most services, the market is distorted by the infinite demand for life-saving health services. We can't price emergency health care like we price avocados: "You're going to die if I don't do this -- how much is it worth to you?"

This is (a) frequently heard, (b) wrong, and (b) irrelevant to this discussion. It's wrong, because we do price food and drinking water and clothing, all of which you will, in fact, die soon enough without. In a free market, different qualities of emergency care would be available at different prices, as different qualities of food and other essentials are available. And there'd be a free level of care, as food and shelter are available for free in every known industrial society. It is an ignorant fantasy to think that anyone would be left without basic care, though it might be very basic indeed, in a society without subsidized healthcare. (Are people really so silly that they never stop to think why so many hospitals have names of Roman Catholic significance?)

But that doesn't really matter and you may freely ignore it. It is a political fact that fluid market pricing for emergency healthcare won't be tolerated in Canada, and it's not what I suggested, so why even bring it up? The knee is mysteriously jerking here in response to a tap on the elbow.

Finally, Sam leaves off on this strange note:

[T]he value that government health care provides to the public is the privilege of not stepping over dying indigents as we walk the public sidewalks. In this regard, the public health systems of the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. all succeed.

Which is true; I don't know of any public health system that doesn't "succeed", by this measure. Some of them, as it happens, have user fees. The worker's paradise, Sweden, has them: are the dead stacked like cordwood on the streets of Stockholm? Not that I'm aware of.

If you've read this far, bravo. We will dispense with Sam's second rebuttal more quickly. I wrote in favour of the immediate legalization of marijuana, and Sam replied, agreeing with some things and disputing others.

I can hardly believe he wrote this, but here it is:

Unlike alcohol, though, marijuana cannot be made in every house or shed from locally available materials (sugar, water, yeast). It's pretty easy to make beer -- I do it every couple of weeks. (With work eating my brain the last two weeks, I let myself run out of beer. Probably brewing later today.) It's pretty easy to set up a still and make the hard stuff -- I've done it in chem lab. Alcohol prohibition failed for these pragmatic reasons, in addition to failing the "it's my body" ideological test.

Do I need to reply? Sam, you need three things to grow pot: (1) seeds, (2) dirt, (3) water. Dirt and water, I daresay, are locally available materials. The seeds can be ordered legally through the mail, even now. It embarrasses me to declare this fact, but a lot of people are growing weed in their homes. A LOT. A REALLY HUGE NUMBER. FUCKING SIZEABLE, SIR. Yeah, there's some lore involved in turning the houseplant into product, but it doesn't explode if you get the chemistry wrong.

Sam then tumbles into weirder territory: he makes the claim that second-hand pot smoke is dangerous ("serious health hazards") and that a casual "contact high" from "walking past a couple of stoners on Whyte [Avenue]" can render you utterly unable to drive. Why am I starting to suspect that, like all known pot opponents, Sam is trying to make policy about something with which he is entirely unfamiliar?

Sam is, in fact, right that residual controls on pot use would be socially desirable. (We've been scaring people shitless about cannabis for 80 years; you don't undo that kind of work in a day.) I see no necessity to restrict it entirely to "private enclosed spaces among consenting adults", because I'm a strong believer in the bush-party tradition of my native northern Alberta. But in cities, a "private enclosed yadda yadda" policy is fine by me. It would work; in compassion clubs and Amsterdam pot bars, it does work.

It's not enough to say "you're worried about slippery slopes", because that is a universal argument against any conceivable public policy change whatsoever. I'm afraid that statement has the cognitive status of a fart, but most of the rest was very good and thoughtful. On that note, goodnight to all.

Here's a riveting true story of blogosphere cooperation. Except my "help" amounted to little more than telling Janis that a band as kooky as the one she described to me was probably from Quebec. Score one for ColbyCosh.com, though, most definitely.

I'm re-reading The Five Fingers, a curious cult classic amongst trashy war books. Back when the magazine had a sizable number of editorial employees all in the same place, I had an informal rule that I had to read any book which was recommended by two of my colleagues. Sometimes I'd be disappointed (as with Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion), sometimes I'd be astonished (William Burroughs' Junky). The weirdest book to emerge from the general discussion was certainly The Five Fingers, which is not especially hard to find.

The book was written by "Gayle Rivers", the pseudonym of a soldier/writer whose name has some currency in counterterrorist circles, and a journalist named James Hudson. Nowhere does it say that the events in the book actually happened: however, Rivers' "about the author" section says curtly that he was "the youngest on the team, but second in command." And the front cover of my edition, with a frisson of ambiguity, says that "If it's fiction it's harrowing, if it's fact it's terrifying."

Well, that's another way of saying it's fiction. But the premise is clever. In the book, which begins in April 1969, seven elite special-forces soldiers--a Korean, two Kiwis, a Brit, three Americans--are assembled at a base in Vietnam. They begin training for a top-secret mission that's not explained to them; for some weeks, they size each other up, speculate on why the hell they've been brought together. One day they're led under guard to a briefing room, where they're addressed by--kerbango! None other than Gen. William Westmoreland! It turns out that Communist Asia is getting its act together, trying to coordinate a dual southward push in Korea and Vietnam, to be conducted under an "umbrella of Chinese nuclear missiles." The plan is to be finalized at a secret conference, and our heroes are being ordered to assassinate the attendees--including Lin Biao (!) and Gen. Nguyen van Giap (!).

But to do it, they have to walk all the way from Thailand to the conference site.

Which is in China.

From there on out, the book is a brusque but joyous Benzedrine-fuelled roller-coaster of ambushes and flesh wounds. The seven members of the Five Fingers team stomp through Laos, leaving armies of dead in their wake. Male bonding occurs. There is a betrayal. The ending is ambiguous, startlingly so for a cheapo battle paperback. And one is by no means cheated of that sine qua non of war books: lurid microscopic detail.

He wore a flak jacket which he used to support a wooden rocket platform that fit across his back. The rockets were Jackson's handiwork. He had loaded them himself with shale wrapped in a light chain; every fourth link in the chain had been weakened with a saw. I had watched Jackson test his rockets on the range. They were devastating. When they went off, the chains whirred like razor blades.

Hey, the Hemingway plod got popular because it fucking works. The Five Fingers--weird, compelling, and perhaps overdue for recognition.

I was talking about religion with Mike Byfield last week and he noted, in passing, that in the Bible, when angels appear to human beings, the first thing they say is "Be not afraid." Angels, we may surmise, are beings of such power that when they announce themselves to humans the mind instinctively reels in terror.

I was thinking about this just now... these TV shows about angels, where a kindly Michael Landon or Della Reese helps families and small businessmen with their problems, must be extremely antagonizing to orthodox Christians, no? If angels are amongst us, presumably they are here to serve God's purposes. As you may have noticed, God's supposed "purposes" strongly resemble the operation of blind chance; at any rate, they are not always benign, within the context of human life. If God wants your child to die of SIDS, he'll make it happen. If he wants you to be a quadriplegic, don't think you can dodge it. If he wants a monsoon to kill a million people in Bangladesh, this will be arranged--perhaps by Della Reese or Michael Landon?

No, Della and Michael aren't that kind of angel: they're the kind who help retarded kids raise money at bake sales. And presumably it's some other angel's job to shatter the kid's chromosomes in the first place. I dimly recall that Touched by an Angel has flirted with this theme, actually--but a truly Christian presentation would try to actively convince the viewer that the "bad" angel's purposes, which are the Lord's will, are every bit as much to be applauded and cheered for as the "good" angel's. How about a whole spinoff devoted to the bad guys? Mutilated by an Angel. Decapitated by an Angel.

Not going to happen, I guess. We are often told that America is the most Christian society left in the world, but for how many people is it a trivial Christianity--a thinly disguised cult of whimpering zombie niceness? A lot, I suspect, or the Christian clergy wouldn't stand for televised Manichaean nonsense trafficking under its brand name.

Some months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine, an Alberta expatriate now living in Toronto, and he told me something along these lines: "People here in T.O. support the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol because they are massively ignorant. They actually think it's got something to do with the abominable air pollution here. So they figure 'Kyoto? Great idea, clean things up a little. It's about time those bastards did something.'"

I fear I did not entirely believe him, even after I saw the infamous CROP poll. Because if you were stupid enough to believe that Kyoto had anything to do with air pollution, could you simultaneously be cynical enough to believe that the answer was to crush the economy of Alberta--a place where there is no air pollution issue?

Alas. In today's Globe and Mail (link will be good for seven days) Hugh Winsor endorses the theory without even blinking.

Like it or not, the global warming issue is linked in the minds of most Canadians to clean air and pollution. Technically, they may not be the same phenomenon, but it is all pollution.

Incredibly, this isn't even the most cynical theory on offer. Lawrence Garvin at Fresh Hell has found at least one public figure who openly supports Kyoto because what hurts Alberta has to be good, by definition, for Ontario cities. The speaker is John Barber [of the Globe, not the Federation of Canadian Municipalities--thanks to my colleague Rick Hiebert for the correction]:

Once again the hewers of wheat and drawers of oil are coming to town to tell us what's good for us.
Previously, they've come during elections, urging us to support political parties founded on the promise to repress our interests in favour of theirs.
This time they want us to rise up against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that couldn't be more attractive if it were written specifically to boost the competitive advantage of Southern Ontario.
Do they think we're stupid?

We should have gone a long time ago. The Constitution allows for it, and Albertans in fact favour it. If our chickenshit domestic political leaders didn't think it would limit their career opportunities, they'd be doing the right thing and saying "Screw you forever" to a country that tolerates us because it needs somebody to steal from.

You read a lot about "last-minute heroics" in accounts of football games. In Edmonton, the phrase now has a slightly different meaning. Top that, Adam Vinatieri.

Here's an afternoon's worth of new business.

First of all, Peter Bagge rules and you should follow every single stinking link on this page. Some of you will remember Bagge from the last days of the late great Suck; some of you will have seen his new work in Reason; some of you will remember all the way back to his alternative comic Hate. It's been a wondrous journey from snot jokes (good ones!) to sophisticated cultural commentary.

Incidentally, it was former Reason intern Jeremy Lott who reminded me of Bagge's current gig. What's the meaning of this cryptic utterance about "hoseheads" on his blog? I have my theories, but qualified informants have sworn me to secrecy.

When you write about marijuana, the mail's guaranteed to roll in. Steven Jens offers one possible "conservative argument" against marijuana legalization:

I asked an anti-decriminalisation conservative once whether he supported alcohol prohibition, and if not, what the distinction was. His answer was that alcohol is (and was, immediately before the US prohibited it) a part of the general culture, whereas marijuana is not. I don't really buy that, but it's certainly a conservative argument.

Granted--it's a thin conservative argument, but a conservative argument for all that. (When time travel is invented, these "conservatives" will be pretty appalled by their first visit to Mount Vernon. Or perhaps they'll come prepared, with flamethrowers.) The learned Thomas Fleming made this point to me once, in a non-political context. He was making the case for a double social standard, not a double political one. In the social context, the case is excellent. Fleming despises libertarianism, so I shouldn't speculate, but it wouldn't surprise me if he took the view that legal marijuana would serve as a useful "opiate" for social groups otherwise prone to violence.

Speaking of admirable, hyperintelligent conservatives who are largely sui generis, Steve Sailer writes a brief note on the same subject:

The final word on marijuana, from Jackie Brown.

Samuel L. Jackson comes home to find Bridget Fonda smoking dope while watching TV:

Ordell Robbie: That shit'll rob you of your ambitions.
Melanie: Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV.

When among Canadians, such lines are normally my cue to chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!" in mocking fashion. Although I've kind of been softpedalling the whole "mocking chant" thing since you-know-what-date.

Finally, American-living-in-Edmonton Sam Mikes has a rebuttal to my thoughts on pot. And, er, also a rebuttal to my thoughts on Canadian healthcare. Jesus, Sam, isn't there another goddamn pinata you can go whack? Hit me all you like, I don't shit candy. Most likely I'll deal with Sam's (serious and well-crafted) arguments tomorrow, after a few more people are caught up with the weekend activity.

Oh, and many thanks to Matt Welch for providing some traffic today. Important technical note: I never called anybody no damn jackass! All I meant by that comment was, nobody's buying a brand new Benz on cheques from NewsForChange. If my mental picture of genteel bohemian poverty is all wrong, I don't know how I'll bear it.

ColbyCosh.com amusing search engine referral of the day:

iranian penis enlargers

Surrender or die, Kazakh porn barons! You cannot compete with the Iranian penis enlarger magnate!

I actually found the article on dialect mentioned below when I was looking for an online copy of Lorne Gunter's Sunday column in the Journal. Well, it's not online, but if you take the Journal, or can find it, his excellent defence of Eric Fischl's infamous sculpture is on page A10.

Tumbling Woman is such a powerful piece it should be displayed in a gallery, where patrons may choose to enter and view it, or not.
However, those who have said the piece is "sick," "shameful," and "bad art," are wrong. Tumbling Woman is staggering and impressive, which is a surprise, since its creator, Eric Fischl, has so often in the past produced puerile and adolescent shock-art...
This sculpture is the last moment of Tumbling Woman's wholeness, the final second of her humanity. At this point she still has life, a millisecond later -- brutally and barbarously -- she will not. Yes, there is something repulsive about being there in that moment. Yet, there is also something heart-wrenching, just as there is something enraging about recalling who and what made her jump in the first place.

In fact, there are plenty of Christians in my sidebar (which just changed colours for fall, thank all of you for NOT NOTICING). I didn't plan it this way, but that's what happens when your day job involves working with Christians like Kathy Shaidle and Jeremy Lott; they learn about your website first. And because they are Christians, their better instincts can be manipulated to get site traffic! AHAHAHA!

Seriously, though... there is such a cause as Western Civilization, and the sense in which I'm a "conservative" is the sense in which I'm united with the defenders of that project. Historically, the West is a Christian cause, a Christian entity. The geographic and theological West (one might almost say "Europe and the Faith", after Belloc) were decoupled at the Enlightenment, and most Christians, whether they'll admit it or not, followed the liberal track most of the way; so we've arrived at the same place, they and I. And it doesn't much matter, for the purposes of politics, whether your orientation is toward Jerusalem or Athens. As a practical matter, my Christian employers and colleagues have been able to agree with me on our priorities in the fight for the West at least as much as they agree with one another. So why shouldn't I return the favour?

It does not make good sense for an atheist to regard all religions as being equal. As pure sets of propositions, they are all equal, more or less, but Christianity has the virtue of holding in check certain impulses which threaten the West when they are given free rein. (Honest Christians should recognize themselves in the funhouse mirror, certainly, when they study classical Communism and Islam.) As a historical matter, Christianity did provide the cultural bedrock for the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. It was Christendom, not anyplace else, from whence emerged Darwin and Voltaire and Mencken... this isn't a coincidence, even if Christians did and do despise Darwin, Voltaire, and Mencken.

Want to hear what I sound like? Too bad; I don't have a working microphone attached to this computer. But you could get the effect, according to a dialect coach interviewed in the Edmonton Journal, by locating a typical baritone and having him do an hour or so of yardwork.

To do an Edmontonian--to get the sound of the land--he pretends to shovel dirt. What comes out is a bigger voice and slower-developing speech. The stereotypical speech of the farm.
"One of the things you always heard in farming communities was a particular kind of terseness: 'Gonna rain. Sure is. Yep. How's the tractor? OK.'"

But we do, sort of. The vowel isn't actually an "oo" sound--if anything, it may be closer to "aboat". I know there's something there, though, because I've caught myself saying it. And to attentive non-Canadians, it's blatant. A friend from Pakistan once told me, "You know who else 'sounds like' you? That guy on CNN, Jonathan Mann." She didn't know beforehand, and neither did I, that Mann was a Montrealer who attended York University. To her the Canadianness is obvious like a clown nose.

If I'm careful, I can pick out a Canadian accent, but I can't do it by listening for the Raising; I have to go by rhythm, basically listening to see if the person sounds "familiar" and stresses the same words I would. Norm MacDonald was probably my best-ever catch.

I'm sure other conservative magazines are as schizoid as ours is about marijuana. At least, I assume that's the case. Well, heck, you've got your conservative argument that it is not the state's place to tell people what they may or may not ingest; and on the other hand, you've got your conservative argument that... er... I don't know, pot is bad or something. Was it invented by Satan, is that the idea? Little help here?

In fact, conservatives who support drug laws are unwittingly prolonging the aftereffects of a racist moral panic fostered in the 1920s by feminist, eugenist progressives. Funny old world. National Review took a pro-legalization position very early on in its history, and I understand this to also be the formal position of The Report, which has run cover stories in favour of legalization. I believe the sole holdout on the staff is Terry O'Neill, whose most recent response to legalization advocates is now online.

Terry, whom of course I like and respect, gets his panties in a bunch very entertainingly on this issue. He seems to enjoy pretending that those who disagree with him about pot are all hysterical, howling hippies munching roots in the wilderness; meanwhile, his co-workers are sitting at their desks reading his column and going "Jeez Louise, is he on about this again?" It's a very personal crusade against personal responsibility. Look closely at the core of his argument against medical marijuana:

I, for one, am against medical use of the drug, on the grounds its benefits are unproved, its dangers considerable and its use represents an incremental victory for those wanting the drug decriminalized and eventually legalized...

Did you catch that? Those who want medical marijuana legalized are just using the issue as an "incremental" way to get the drug for themselves, the selfish jerks*. But those who oppose it--why they're acting solely on rational, scientific grounds; they couldn't possibly be actuated by personal, visceral hatred of the stuff. Of course, even if we didn't know that Terry was crusading against marijuana long before the "medical" issue arose, this stance of sweet reason might just be slightly undercut by the last sentence of his column, where he allows an interviewee to compare legalization advocates to the Nazis. First they legalized weed, and then they came for the Jews...we were all too stoned to do anything but giggle, man...

Terry offers brief abstracts of three studies that "show" the negative effects of marijuana. The first one, which shows that early adolescent pot use is "associated" with all kinds of bad things, is quite laughable. Hey, kids whose parents can't keep them from using drugs at age 12 are more likely to be violent and have multiple sex partners? Whoa, stop press! The second study was stepped all over in an editorial that ran alongside it in JAMA; since Terry wants you to "learn the facts" he won't mind if you go have a read.

The third one I haven't seen--it sounds like they're trying to revive the old idea of "cannabis psychosis", which can't be rejected out of hand. There are some rare, but persuasive, case reports of psychotic reactions to extremely heavy marijuana use. There are also thousands of instances, every damn year, of psychotic behaviour directly attributable to alcohol; indeed, I'm sure you've seen some yourself, down at the pub.

And herein lies the fundamental dishonesty of a column like Terry's: no mention of the A word. If you accepted everything that was ever said half-credibly about the "dangers" of marijuana, what you'd still have is a drug that is fantastically benign compared to the one we all have in our homes, the one we freely use socially, the one we've devoted buildings to on every corner. How can the double standard be justified? It appears the answer is "By ignoring it completely."

Unfortunately, throwing thousands of people in jail has negative--"not positive or neutral"--effects on their lives, on their families, on policing, on the corrections system, and on civil liberties. But if it prevents just one bad trip, it's worth it, right?

*The selfish jerks include Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of National Review. For him, the "incremental victory" was against testicular cancer.

Steve Schroer writes to say "Maybe Richard Ames meant to suggest that you LOOK LIKE Garrison Keillor. That would be even harder to take, wouldn't it?" Aw, nobody can touch me tonight, my man, because I put on a hat too soon after I got out of the shower and now I have a perfect Dave Murray From Iron Maiden hairdo (circa Killers). I was looking at myself with the Dave Murray hair and I thought "There's only been four or five times in my life where I could have just set foot out of the house and started a trend, and this is one of them. I have the fashion fate of Western Civilization in my hands this very minute." Then I let the moment slip away because I didn't feel up to shaving, and what has Western Civilization done for me lately?

In fact, isn't it time those black New Wave of British Heavy Metal concert shirts with the white sleeves came back into style? You're goddamn right it is.

Speaking of style, check out The White Stripes at the MTV Video Awards. I'm not even bisexual but I can't decide which of them is more adorable. What are they even doing at the MTV Awards? These guys are so cool, the Nobel Foundation dinner would be slumming for them. The King of Sweden would be all, "I bought De Stijl on vinyl, ya know" and Meg would be all, like, "WhatEVer." Yeah.

David Janes wants Canadians to lobby the National Post to hire James Lileks. What's that you say? What do Canadian journalists think of David's Worthwhile Canadian Initiative to hand lucrative column acreage over to foreigners? Unprintable, my good man, unprintable.

Of course, the Post picks up stuff from Matt Welch, but that's different: freelancing knows no borders, and Matt is someone you can imagine missing meals if he doesn't get cheques on the side. Lileks, on the other hand, has a day job and a sideline in books. Lord knows we all want the Gnat to go to a good college, but can't we get Norway or Switzerland or somebody to give this subsidy?

Yikes! Kelly Torrance has a weblog devoted to "literature, music, film, and the visual arts." Too bad I hate all that stuff! Literature's for creeps and nerds, man! And I only like two kinds of music: AC and DC. [At this juncture, the writer did himself an injury trying to mimic Brian Johnson's singing voice, and was forced to retire from the keyboard temporarily.]

Even though her weblog has all of two entries at the moment, Kelly is already attending Washington-area blogmeetings, and so thanks to her promotional activity on my behalf I have great new readers like Jim Henley. Jim gives me a very nice review but inadvertently says something quite cruel:

Colby Cosh is funny, Canadian and about as libertarian as can be expected up there.

Yes, you know, I'd love to push my political philosophy that last mile, but--I'm Canadian! There are some things they won't let me think. In truth, Jim knows perfectly well, or should know, that I'm not really "Canadian", but Albertan. Which is a very different thing.

I figured the promise I made of "new content" yesterday was absolutely certain not to be violated. What could happen? I had no plans at all. I turns out that when I have no plans at all, and I've put in about forty straight hours of work with no sleep, what I do is fall into a coma for most of the day. I was awake there for a while, but I ended up spending the time chatting with people and feeling guilty about my site visitors. Not guilty enough to keep me from nodding out like a smackhead, though.

Let me clear up a little more correspondence. Richard Ames, whose letter about ATMs I reprinted yesterday, turns out to have his own weblog. An excellent one! And I say this even though he compares me to Garrison Keillor, which I'd consider a capital offence coming from most people. My old buddy Jefferson N. Glapski, perhaps the last living human being who doesn't have his own weblog, argues that "automated teller machine" is in fact more descriptive than "bank machine";

since said ATM replicates a much greater portion of what the teller does (minus the blowjobs, of course) as opposed to what a bank does.

He's failed to see that my objection was to the acronym, which disguises its information content. John Costello notes that New Englanders, like Canadians, use the term "bank machines". Fun fact: in alphabetical lists of surnames, "Cosgrave" and "Costello" are the most common neighbours of "Cosh".

Greg at The Daily Stone, which may or may not have changed its name to "Mr. Helpful", says my line about "the terrorists have already won" was a cheap shot. Correct! He also says:

Because I am just a poor, uneducated, drunken bastard, your reference to Eugene Delacroix went roaring right past me. Thanks to the almighty Internet, I was able to quench my curiosity...in doing so I found this description of Delacroix's work to be quite interesting:
"Maurice Sérullaz expands on this: "Delacroix perceived that, under the impetus of Rubens, a new epoch of art had opened up, an era of synthesis and equilibrium. On the one hand, there was the power, abundance, fiery dynamism, realism - and a certain penchant for Baroque eloquence and even effect. On the other, there was a nobility of conception and style. the paradigmatic harmony, sobriety and austerity of the Classical masters. Thus Delacroix discovered himself through Rubens. In Rubens, his own errors found their vindication. They had been severely criticised by his contemporaries, especially in his large decorative compositions; but, as in Rubens, they are the work of a genius at once rational and impulsive, inventive and objective, visionary and realist."
Or maybe, just maybe, the poor son of a bitch was a sadist who loved to portray countless scenes of horror and despair....eh?

Time to get some "bloggish" transactions out of the way. Sorry posting's been so light, by the way, but I had a work week where everything possible went wrong. I'm not going to bore you with the details. Yes, I realize sites like this are predicated on boring you with details, but since we're rummaging through the mailbag anyway, there is no sense overegging the pudding.

Richard Ames of Pittburgh writes in with this rebuttal to my praise of ATMs. By the way, why can't you Americans just call them "bank machines"--do you have to use the most cryptic and undescriptive term possible, or what?

Colby: You sound like a GE spokesman (yes, they were all men then) pitching the latest gadget--the ATM. But every cloud has its lightning. How about folks who never seem to have any money on them because they know an ATM is always around that corner? ("Lunch? Sure. But can we stop at the ATM machine first?") In the old days, that person would have actually had to plan something for a change ("I must remember to stop at the bank today before it closes"), or else suffer the embarrassing consequences. This type of everyday personal organization and attention to detail bred discipline and instilled character.

You ask: "I wonder what the pure economic impact [of the ATM] is in dollar terms." Well, for starters, the banks have done very well (thank you) with these monsters. It used to be that the teller, a real flesh and blood person who was always concerned about the depositor's financial well-being, would check your account balance before dolling out the greenbacks (U.S. of course). The ATM, in contrast, will give most folks an advance if they've got nothin' going in the account and then proceed to deduct an additional NSF fee from an already negative balance. And the worst part is that no one knows these debits are going on, including the customer until he get's his statement at months end (will he even look at it?). The ATM's primary drawback is the absolute lack of immediate negative consequences that directly correspond to negative monetary behaviors, like withdrawing $50 three separate times in three different locations on the same day because you were "a bit short" that day. There's no feedback until later, at the end of the month, and then it's too late and it doesn't hurt as much. The "pure economic impact" is alarmingly negative in this respect. Young folks are particularly vulnerable to this quick cash scheme, and as an attorney in western Pennsylvania who has represented numerous bankruptcy clients, I can personally attest to these cards' evil ways in fostering too much reliance and too many withdrawals. Betty Lou, the teller at your local bank, would never have condoned it! She would have shamed you into reality. "Back again, huh?"; or "You must have got a promotion!"; or "Looks like all the little lines in this account book are full already and it's not even the 15th." So, Colby, perhaps a more balanced approach to the ATM's alleged wonderfulness is due.

As for my ATM card? I never leave home without it.

Some good points here, but I'm all for replacing snotty, prying humans with impersonal, efficient robots. As for the "old days" when one's lunch partner would have had to plan ahead and carry adequate cash, Richard's view is of course a pleasant fiction: what really would have happened was that the organized types ended up buying a lot more lunches for disorganized comrades. And isn't "instills character" just a synonym for "wastes a lot of fucking time"? Still, let's by all means limit our huzzahs: two cheers for bank machines!

A new reader has some further thoughts:

I was just reading your weblog & I got a huge kick out of your comments about the ATM because the damn thing ate my card twice in the last couple of months. The first time was back a couple of months ago ON A FRIDAY after bank hours. The machine ate my card. Just as I stuck my card in the machine, the screen went black & then the message popped "Out of service." I was stuck for the weekend without one until I could go to the bank on Monday & get a new one. Thank god your father had his little stash of money in [location of stash deleted].

Yes, you guessed it, it's my mother. Dammit, which one of you gave her the URL? I guess my dad's rampant technophobia came in handy on that particular occasion. He's still a bit suspicious of things like bank machines and microwave ovens. If there's ever a nuclear war and all the computers and electronics are destroyed, he's going to be the king of the Wasteland Formerly Known As North America inside of about a month.

Sasha Castel has a new URL and a new site design: update your bookmarks. And I've been terribly remiss in not mentioning Ilana Mercer's site earlier (warning: ferocious paleo-libertarian at work). Greg over at The Daily Stone has a rebuttal to my comments on the "Tumbling Woman" sculpture, sort of: the whole controversy seems to have stripped his gears a little bit, and I have no rejoinder to something that's essentially indecipherable. He seems to think the sculptor, Fischl, was trying to deliberately antagonize the public. Apparently if artists try to commingle horror with beauty, the terrorists have already won--which, I suppose, means we were screwed as soon as Eugene Delacroix put the finishing touches on The Death of Sardanapalus.

More actual content here tomorrow, I promise. I need to get some sleep.

Insanity is more common than you think, you know. You probably see fifty people every day, without even knowing it, who are just completely batshit. If you eat in restaurants alone a lot, you start to notice this stuff, and you dread the possibility that you might end up as one of those people. My local diner has a whole host of loopy characters. But today (Thursday) I was in line at Subway behind a guy--ordinary-looking fellow, dressed rather well--who was chatting away to his frowsy girlfriend and getting ready to order a sandwich. He was regaling her with details about how he was going to order the sweet onion sauce or something, which seemed kind of banal but scarcely out of the ordinary.

Then this guy started to build his sandwich and things got a little weird. The "sandwich artist" asks him what kind of cheese he wants, right? At the better-stocked Subways around here, you've got three choices: white "cheddar", an orange "cheddar" which tastes more or less the same, and Swiss. But when this guy, who's been talking like some kind of Subway frequent flyer, is asked for his cheese choice, he goes:

"White parmesan."

Now, parmesan is of course not normally served in slices, because the fumes would probably make you faint. The server bravely recoups from the unexpected request and says "Sorry, sir, all we have is white cheddar, orange cheddar, and Swiss."

"White... parmesan," he says, with a sudden hint of suppressed anger. Uh oh. The server repeats the options, and the guy, suddenly on the defensive because his cognitive deficit's been revealed, just asks for "white."

Somehow, through gesticulations and strangled noises, he ended up getting the ordinary white cheddar, I think. From then on in the sandwich manufacture process, he concluded every answer with an exaggerated "Sir", which seemed odd, seeing as the server was female. After securing his sandwich, the guy walked directly out of the Subway and left his "girlfriend" standing there with a confused expression--at which point I realized they'd been total strangers: he'd simply decided to engage her in some funky crazy-person chat. To see him, you'd never have thought he was anything but a thoroughly well-organized computer programmer or bike courier. What a struggle he must go through, just leaving the house to get a damn sandwich, knowing his damaged social mechanism is likely to let him down in some telling way. I wasn't very hungry anymore after I thought about it some.

The Tumbleweed thinks I should invest in a Cat Mantis. Shockingly, this is actually an appealing idea. My cat's pretty affectionate, so things usually get to the point where I just sort of hang my arm off the couch or the bed and scratch feebly while he runs back and forth under it. "Zzzz... yes, yes, good kitty, whatever... zzzz...." Where are these aloof, snotty, emotionally self-sufficient cats I keep hearing about, anyway? I suspect some of these cats are owned by people who don't actually like cats, and who cluelessly interact with them as if they were dogs. "Oh, well, Frisky doesn't do the dishes or retrieve sticks, he must not love us."

Bourque points us to the Dallas Stars' new crack squad of ten handpicked "Ice Girls", who will helpfully remove slush from the surface of play during commercials. IMPORTANT NOTE: The Dallas Stars "Ice Girls" have important duties and are not to be considered mere melon-chested fantasy objects. They will NOT be incorporating Zamboni slush in 9½ Weeks-type displays of half-naked lesbian pleasuring.

This is me at about 10 p.m. this evening: "Oh, look, there's apparently one sculptor in the world who is prepared to pick up where Rodin left off and do meaningful representational art. [pause] Oh, look, they had to cover it up because of an unspecified number of complaints." Nice to see some things haven't changed since September 11. The literalism expressed by the opponents of the statue speaks volumes: there appears to be some confusion as to why the falling woman is nude, along with a wholly unjustified (judging from online photos) assumption that she is meant to be depicted at the point of impact. I can only say "Sheesh."

For those, outside or inside Canada, looking for primers on Canada's political system, Bill Stanbury's series now getting underway in the Hill Times will make terrific, enlightening reading. I've interviewed Prof. Stanbury and found him to be just a real sharp guy. Some academics make for dreadful interviews because they'll let their deep-grooved thought patterns take over the conversation: Stanbury isn't one of those. He listens to your question and gives a relevant, informed answer. Oh God, send us twenty more like him. Anyway, here's a brief illustrative quote, thought-provoking in itself:

When he or she is at the head of a majority government, the PM is effectively an elected king for up to five years. The Prime Minister in Britain, who has less power than his Canadian counterpart, has been described as a "constitutional dictator."
Indeed, the PM in Canada wields far more power than any king under a constitutional monarchy and as much as many kings could wield when the divine right of kings prevailed. Recall the trouble that divine right monarchs had in raising money to engage in wars, civil and international. The PM can lay on the whips and get Parliament to impose whatever level of taxes he or she wants. The PM can have the war financed by the time-honoured methods of increasing the public debt or debauching the currency. Richard III, Henry VIII, or even William the Conqueror would probably have been highly jealous.

Having praised Stanbury, there's a big "but" coming. (I'm famous for my big but, hyuk hyuk.) We in Canada have just learned that the dictatorial power of a prime minister is, in part, a very convincing illusion, one which can be stripped away by the exercise of the democratic will. Jean Chretien's power as prime minister rested on one thing: his ability to command a majority in the House of Commons. He exercised his power heedlessly, so much so that many of his caucus members felt that their seats were threatened and that remaining under his command was suicide. Under these conditions, a sitting PM can and will be replaced. It is purely a question of whether his members have the courage and the cat-herding ability to act in their own interests.

(I pause to observe that a PM is much easier to unseat than an American president, who need not relinquish executive power until he is tried and impeached by Congress. We are told that the American system is uniquely one of "checks and balances"--yet our system, though it unites the legislative and the de facto executive in one man, makes it much easier to get rid of the real person in charge. No one has to prove misconduct to a courtroom-type evidentiary standard: a PM can be ousted, quite simply, anytime his caucus is feeling a tad dyspeptic.)

So Stanbury's dire warning is a bit ill-timed (I feel bad that events obviously got ahead of him), yet not false in any essential. The problem we have is not a problem with our institutions: it is basically a problem with the men we've sent to them, who have, over the years, allowed the Prime Minister to amass so much power that they can't keep him in check without becoming veritable Brutuses. But the check still exists: they will, as we've just seen, become Brutuses when there is no other choice.

The next Prime Minister would be wise to voluntarily return some power to caucus, cabinet, and committees. It is in his own interest that his underlings be able to resist him without killing him politically. The next PM is very likely to be Paul Martin, who has in fact talked of a "democratic deficit" and a need for restoring the authority of parliamentarians. Is this what he has in mind? Perhaps.

Over on MeFi, RobbieFal asks this rhetorical question:

In our P.C. society, could America accept a show with such a weird almost-offensive story like Hogan's Heroes, or would it be run off the air in weeks?

I think the answer's obvious, isn't it? We can't even contemplate a "reality" remake of The Beverly Hillbillies without somebody getting upset.

Even in its time, Hogan's Heroes was deemed in questionable taste. I direct your attention to the 1967 Mad magazine parody, "Hokum's Heroes". The post-Elder, post-Kurtzman years of Mad are not much appreciated when they receive any attention at all, but this Larry Siegel piece is superb, devastating satire.

"So are you gonna go to sleep?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"I gotta update the website one more time before I turn in, I've hardly touched it all day."

"You should write something about how Mike is a jerk."

"What?"

"Yeah, definitely."

"Jeez, be careful what you wish for. You don't really want me to do that."

"Why not?"

"Because what if he sees it?"

"He's not gonna see it. He's NDP, remember? Besides, how's he gonna know you're talking about him?"

"Well, if I include the thing about the beads, he might figure it out."

"Are you kidding? Even if you used his name, he couldn't possibly be sure it was him."

Well, OK. This site is designed as a conduit for news and interesting facts, so here it is: this guy named Mike is a real big jerk. He is, I am told, a ghastly, lisping, leftist hippie from British Columbia who's practicing law in Toronto. It must disturb British Columbians, I think, to know there are living caricatures of them roaming the country. The guy burns through about a cubic metre of pot a week and actually wears mules (!) and love beads with his business suit. Like many lefties, he is, paradoxically, a total shit when it comes to parting with money, shafting his fellow citizens on cab fare. He also makes clumsy, unwelcome passes at other girls right before the eyes of his gorgeous, intelligent Eurasian fiancée.

If you are acquainted with Mike, avoid him. If you are friends with Mike, correct the situation. If you are dating him, dump him. You may think "How do I know he's talking about that Mike?", but it doesn't really matter--if your Mike fits the above description, you need to get rid. In fact, this is true even if your Mike is named Steve, Carlos, Mujibur, or anything else. This has been a public service announcement from ColbyCosh.com.

I don't really think there's much chance Fidel Castro is responsible for the West Nile outbreaks in North America. Would this make sense--to propagate a disease that is fatal mostly to the infirm and elderly, as a way of lashing out at the Great Satan? It could be some sort of experiment on the part of Cuban biotechnicians, of course, but if so, it's a great deal dumber than those old CIA attempts to make Fidel's beard fall out. Facts: diseases don't stop at borders. West Nile is starting to kill Canadians. Does Castro want to alienate Canada, the best friend he has left in the world? I should think not.

If the Cubans are ever implicated in the spread of West Nile, of course, we'll look awfully stupid for propping up Castro's regime, even to those who don't already consider us monumentally stupid for doing so.

Virgin Atlantic is reporting that it will have to refit recently-installed diaper-changing tables because couples have been using them for... uh... well, let's say they've been trying to make babies, not change babies. (It's easy to see how customers might get confused!)

This whole Mile High Club thing... have you noticed it's not an actual club? There are no meetings, there's no club executive or membership card. There isn't even a secret handshake. Or... wait, I guess if there was, it'd be a secret, wouldn't it?

Obviously if the Mile High Club could get its shit together, it could do some proper lobbying, just like other interest groups. Spokesmen for the Mile High Club reacted strongly today to Virgin Atlantic Airways' claim that skyborne lovers had destroyed diaper-changing tables on board the airline's Airbus A340-600 jumbo jets. "Respect for property has always been the number one policy of the Club," said the society's international vice-president of business relations, Mal Delair. The fall congress of the Mile High Club will vote on whether to retain Virgin on the official list of five-star "preferred airlines for getting your freak on".

I've hit some of you with this before, but have you considered how amazing bank machines (American viewers: read "ATMs") are? Maybe other people have had different experiences from my own, but I figured I've used bank machines somewhere between three thousand and five thousand times. Often I've found machines labelled out of order; occasionally I've had machines run out of money, and send me on my way with my bank account untouched; but never have I had one debit the wrong sum to my account or give me an amount other than what I had asked for. I've never had one mangle my card, or refuse to give it back, or fail to recognize the customer information on my card. Obviously they conk out, but I've never had one conk out while I was using it. Yet they were a novelty 15 years ago and unknown 20 years ago. And do you remember what it was like trying to organize your life around the infamous "bankers' hours"? Bank machines are a piece of consumer technology we take totally and entirely for granted, but in a short time they've changed all our lives for the better. I wonder what the pure economic impact is in dollar terms. Would it be too much to say that bank machines save us 5-10 hours a year of standing in line apiece? What's the value of that time at minimum wage...? Gotta be an eleven-digit amount in the United States, every year.

The clock radio this morning tried to urge me awake with a local talk-show discussion on medicare reform. Some doctor, a supporter of the Cuban-style status quo, was on the air talking about the obvious solution to shortages, overcrowding, and assembly-line care. His solution, basically, starts with "M" and rhymes with "funny". It's an interesting idea of "reform", don't you think? His answer to unlimited annual cost increases is to keep paying the bills with a smile, I guess.

The problem isn't really that that's a bad idea (although it is), the problem is that that's not reform. Buying more MRI machines and hiring more doctors isn't "reform". Unlimited demand for limited healthcare resources is, itself, the problem. You don't make the limited resources any more limited buy going out and buying more of them. Eight is not any closer to infinity than six, get it?

So these people can, and ought to be, ignored: they have no answers for us, nothing to contribute. Oh, but Dr. Smarts had other ideas, too. They represent the flip side of the "more money" approach: for example, he wants to get primary-care doctors out of the front lines of care, and turn the whole country into one of those student health clinics where you fill out a questionnaire (does your problem involve massive vomiting of blood? Y/N), a nurse sees you first, and she decides whether you need an appointment with a physician or whether you just need to be sent away with some happy pills.

This, or something like it, wouldn't be so intolerable either, but it's the same kind of futility: it amounts to slightly worse, cheaper care, and that's not "reform" either. Perhaps we're prepared to accept it, but it ain't reform. All the "plans" put forward by the Roy Romanows and Don Mazankowskis are essentially clever combinations of "more money" and "worse care". Mazankowski had a long list of ideas for "reforming" Alberta medicare, and precisely two have been adopted--higher cigarette taxes and higher healthcare premiums. How is that reform?

The problem with medicare is stupefyingly simple: unlimited demand, limited resources. Let's chant it together. Unlimited demand, limited resources. Anyone with a drunken hobo's understanding of economics can tell you that when you make a good free, it will be used to the limit of its availability, and eventually it will have to be rationed. Any analysis of "medicare's problems" that doesn't mention this in bold letters in the first paragraph is somebody's flatulent fantasy. (Incidentally, this is also the magical formula underlying such brain-twisters as food-bank shortages and crowded homeless shelters.)

What is needed for true medicare reform is a way to circumscribe demand--to limit the compass of socialism within the system. We're trying to ration healthcare right now without the price signals that help us allocate resources when it comes to other, no less vital industries like groceries and shoe manufacture. That's not going to work--but people won't stand for outright market pricing of (non-pharmaceutical) healthcare goods, either. The best we can do is move in that direction somehow, and try to stop the growth of the behemoth.

I know of only two ideas that would help and that might be halfway politically acceptable. One, and a very good place to start, would be to start moving user fees back into the system. I don't mean a user fee that actually covers any costs: I just mean one that adds some kind of incentive not to use the system. If we introduced a nationwide $20 flat fee to see a doctor, would that represent some sort of incredible, unreasonable hardship? Would the Dominion fall to its knees? You want to see a doctor, you can see one--but go to the bank machine, or panhandle for 40 minutes, and bring a $20. Simple as that. Maybe it wouldn't help anything: we don't have very good hard data on the degree of stress placed on the system by hypochondriacs, lonely seniors, and confused drunks. But that's precisely the point--we don't have any good way of ascertaining that, or of reading people's minds to see if they're using the system "appropriately". Prices are how we find out. In the rest of the economy, prices are the means of allocating resources efficiently. Let's put a simple, fair, artificially low price on seeing a doctor, and at least see what we learn. And no, we're not exempting anybody from the fee: sorry, this isn't about the redistribution of wealth.

The other idea that might help us move toward sanity would be to declare what I think of as a historical halt on publicly-funded medicare. This involves a premier calling a press conference and saying something like this: "When medicare was introduced in Canada, medicine was, by our current standards, a fairly crude art. We didn't have magnetic resonance imaging or mammograms or titanium joint replacement; doctors weren't asked to be the gatekeepers for a dizzying array of lifestyle drugs like Propecia or Viagra. The level of care that people expected for their tax money was modest. It's now much more comprehensive, and it's only going to get more so, with gene therapies and stem cells and the like coming onstream.

"As you all must suspect in your hearts, we can't afford it. We can't afford to give unlimited access to everything that is invented, somewhere, by somebody. So we're stopping. We don't wish to turn back the clock: you've come to expect a certain level of free care, and we're going to continue providing that level. Forever. Any specific medical service or technology which exists on this date will continue to be publicly-funded in perpetuity, or until you decide it's not important for us to pay for it anymore.

"But anything which doesn't yet exist, you will have to arrange to pay for yourself. We invite doctors to create private centres of excellence to introduce new medical technologies and therapies to the public; we're not going to provide those technologies at the taxpayers' expense in public hospitals, but patients occupying space in public hospitals are welcome to arrange for adjunct advanced care."

The armies of the private insurers would not be far behind such an announcement, I trust. Emergency care could easily be exempted from this halt, if the practical problems of demanding payment for this-heart-injection-but-not-that one seem too great (as indeed they do). And the same kind of halt could be applied to drug plans for welfare recipients. You would have to decide what the meaning of "exist" is, of course: do we want to go on funding therapies which now exist only in embryonic, experimental form? Possibly: it doesn't really matter where you draw the line, as long as you draw one. And we'd have to define what "new" means, too: if you find some modest, simple way to improve an X-ray machine, is that a "new" technology? Will we fund new models of existing equipment, or not? Again, it doesn't really matter where (or even how) you draw the line, as long as you draw one.

It seems to me a "halt" would have great advantages, even if it was difficult to implement. It introduces private insurance into the system, but it introduces it at the point where it is the most tolerable, even for the hardest-core socialist. It guarantees to everyone, forever, the precise quality of care we all expect now. It puts the system on a clear basis that the public can understand: though the ministerial and bureaucratic decision-making will always be cloaked in mystery, the basic principle will be known to all. And the halt protects the system from the shock of monumental new medical discoveries--say, a way to let people live to the age of 150. It would make the accounting of public healthcare costs easier, too: it would instantly filter out the rising costs of new technology and allow us to make decisions with one fewer variable in the models.

I'll try to keep this short, but I think this photo--on display at Glenn Cornick's website--is always good for a laugh. It's the "what might have been" lineup of Jethro Tull, with Ian and the original rhythm section playing alongside a rented guitarist, brought in to help the band mime convincingly for the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus movie (suppressed for quality reasons until the late '90s). Recognize the stoop, the black clothing, the mustache, the missing digits? Yes, it's our old friend Tony Iommi, later to become the spiral architect of Black Sabbath's thunderous sound. Most amusingly disorienting.

Alex Whitlock has been talking to inanimate objects again. Please don't tell his mother.

In July, I was spitballing with Steve Sailer about the things I'd learned from playing the Hollywood Stock Exchange. I can't find the e-mail, but I remember telling him something to the effect that movies made for a black audience are easy to handicap, box-office wise, because they are far more likely to break out and become big hits when they present black people in a positive light as ordinary human beings--enterprising, hopeful, diverse, wanting the same things we all want. Sounds kind of obvious, doesn't it? Yet everyone seems surprised at the jet-fuelled opening weekend of Barbershop. Hell, even I'm surprised. 21 million bucks? WOW. I guess Ice Cube should smile more often.

The small-market, contraction-worthy Twins snapped up the AL Central title tonight. Holy cow, that's sweet. I have a confession to make. I saw Kyle Lohse pitch here last year (the Edmonton Trappers are the Twins' Triple-A affiliate) and I swear to god I thought he'd never make it as a big-league pitcher. He was throwing strikes, but they were batting-practice strikes, and the Cannons were having their way with him like he was a mail-order bride. He got the W tonight against the Indians: I was never more happy to be mistaken.

Possibly one of the single happiest events this year is what's happened to Tony Shalhoub, the great character actor. As many of you know, a few years back ABC bought a series called "Monk", about a genius detective who suffers from a debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder. They couldn't find the right guy to play Adrian Monk, so they let the series go to the USA Cable Network... which hired Shalhoub and soon had basic cable's biggest hit. ABC has since taken the unprecedented step of buying the already-aired episodes of "Monk" and rerunning them on the main network. I guess that makes "Monk" the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot of TV. (I guess it also means that "suspicious" and "hateful" Americans don't seem to mind embracing a quite obvious Arab-American in a big starring role.)

The emerging structure of TV commerce is really fascinating. I don't know if you know this, but here in Canada a weird thing has happened with The Sopranos. It's a huge hit here, of course. But the first-run episodes--season four's just getting underway, if I've figured this right--are available only on digital cable, which you have to buy a box and pay through the nose for. The season three episodes are available to basic cable subscribers, and CTV recently started airing season two on its broadcast network. Follow that? We've jury-rigged a system whereby you can see real old episodes for free, stale ones for next to nothing, and scorchingly new ones for an arm and a leg. I'm told a surprising number of people are opting for the "arm and leg" option. On top of all this, of course, you can buy seasons one, two, and three on DVD.

Canadian networks have always operated like this, letting U.S. networks do the R&D, so to speak, and cherry-picking the shows that are big hits (like South Park or The Osbournes). I think, long-term, this is the role the U.S. networks may find themselves in too--let the cable networks find the great shows and then swoop in with the big money and the big audiences. I suspect that "Monk" will be only the first of its kind.

Disheartening news emerges from the camp of Mr. Show's David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, who have wrapped filming on a Ronnie Dobbs movie that's apparently never going to see the light of day. (For those who haven't made the wise investment in the Mr. Show season one and two DVDs, the Ronnie Dobbs character [played by Cross] is a good ol' boy who finds unexpected fame when a TV producer notices his repeated appearances on reality cop shows.)

Cross and Odenkirk took the studio cut of the movie around to some film festivals and got good notices. But New Line decided to leave it in the can--at which point the director, under Cross and Odenkirk's guidance, prepared a second cut which, in their opinion, was superior. This "supercut" was greeted with such annihilating indifference that David and Bob have addressed a personal message to fans.

If any situation called for an act of euthanasia, this is it. Both Bob and I agree that all in all, the movie is not that great. While it definitely has some very funny moments, the current cut of the movie that is out there being screened and traded on the internet, just isn't that good. There are very specific notes for a different cut (that Troy Miller, the director is enthusiastic about) ready to be input, which we all feel would make the movie, tighter, funnier, and generally more enjoyable all around. And I truly believe that the drama around New Line's decision to not release it (which Bob and I have unfortunately contributed far to much too) has only served to heighten expectations to a level that the current cut of movie cannot live up to.

So, please everybody, let's put our petty differences behind us for once, and let us all band together for a common good. Please stop wanting to see the movie, asking about it, or online chatting about it. Perhaps the sooner we put this national nightmare behind us, the sooner Bob and I can get working on our next project[...] Let's kill Run Ronnie Run once and for all.

I guess I'm not really helping, huh. Sorry guys.

If you didn't have enough reasons to be contemptuous of the Barenaked Ladies, here's a huge one. CBC's unnamed reporter didn't ask the wealthy crooning kneedip fucks if they pay taxes in Canada (of course). But then, the question answers itself, doesn't it? Hecklers, start your engines.

If I had a million dollars
I'd buy yer luuuuv...

Where's anyone going to get a million dollars if it's taxed at 90%+ after the first $80K? I bet their fucking accountant doesn't vote NDP, that's for sure.

If you have a moment to spare this fine Sunday and you're of a curious disposition, there's some good stuff on the Report Web site. This, as you may have heard, is the Canadian conservative magazine I work for. Or should I just say that it's the Canadian conservative magazine? Its basic mandate is to promote Christianity, the traditional family, and liberty: in the old days, the fourth pillar, promoting the role of the West in Confederation, was more important than any of these, and it's still important, but the magazine is notionally national now. In fact, the magazine's Western mandate was what grew it in the first place, and it's what keeps people--a quarter million of 'em or so--reading now.

Anyway, my site is slightly more popular than the magazine's now--but I wouldn't dream