Don’t worry, my Norwegian friends, it’s just small-minded Canadian jealousy that you tend to beat us in all the “Smug Country” polls and your national monopoly is even more constricting and incompetent than our equivalent national monopoly:
Everyone knows the Norwegians are the most revoltingly perfect people in the world.
They consistently top all lists of Things Good Countries Do.
They give more to foreign aid than just about any other country in the world. Countries are supposed to give 70¢ for every $100 of national production, but hardly any do. Norway gives about 40% more than the benchmark. They’re sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in oil profits, and instead of blowing it on short-term expediencies (like a certain western province we could mention) they squirrel a lot of it away in an investment fund to help maintain their high standard of living when the oil runs out. And believe me, their standard of living is high: a cradle-to-grave nannyism that revolts conservatives but seems to work for Norwegians. (In Norway, life is so soft that even cows are required to have rubber mats in their stalls so they can rest comfortably between shifts).
They’re so perfect they’re annoying. Even Swedes get tired of hearing about them. So it’s kind of fun to read about how they’ve completely buggered up their supply management system, so that the entire country has been stripped of its butter supply just as Christmas arrives and everyone gears up to make lots of stuff for which butter is required. And if it reminds you of Canada’s own supply management system (think: dairy products and Quebec), all the better.
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He’s willing to admit that he misunderestimated Gingrich earlier in the campaign:
I was wrong about Newt. Or, as Newt would say, I was fundamentally wrong. Fundamentally and profoundly wrong. I was as adverbially wrong about Newt as it’s possible to be. Back in the spring, during an analysis of the presidential field, I was asked by Sean Hannity what I thought of Gingrich. If memory serves, I guffawed. I suggested he was this season’s Alan Keyes — a guy running for president to boost his speaking fees but whose candidacy was otherwise irrelevant. I said I liked the cut of this Tim Pawlenty fellow, who promptly self-destructed. There would be a lot of that in the months ahead: Michele Bachmann ODing on Gardasil, Rick Perry floating the trial balloon of his candidacy all year long, only to puncture it with the jaunty swing of his spur ten minutes into the first debate. And when all the other Un-Romney of the Week candidates were gone, there was Newt, the last man standing, smirking, waddling to the debate podium. Unlike the niche candidates, he offers all the faults of his predecessors rolled into one: Like Michele Bachmann, his staffers quit; like Herman Cain, he spent the latter decades of the last century making anonymous women uncomfortable, mainly through being married to them; like Mitt Romney, he was a flip-flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai . . . oh, wait, that one he may still be in favor of. So, if you live in the I-95 corridor, you might want to buy blackout curtains.
But, when you draw them, Newt’s still there, shimmering beguilingly, which is the one adverb I fundamentally never thought I’d be using for this most fundamentally adverbial of candidates. A year ago, we were still talking about Palin and Daniels and Christie and Jindal and Ryan, an embarrassment of riches. Barely a month ago, Cain and 9-9-9 were riding high, an embarrassment of a different kind, and Gingrich was still a single-digit asterisk. But, like Gussie Fink-Nottle, we are all Newt-fanciers now. On the eve of Iowa it seems the Republican base’s dream candidate is a Clinton-era retread who proclaims himself a third Roosevelt, with Taft’s waistline and twice as many ex-wives as the first 44 presidents combined; a lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg; a self-help guru crossed with a K Street lobbyist, which means he’s helped himself on a scale few of us could dream of. For this the Tea Party spent three years organizing and agitating?
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I used to work for an ad agency, and I often had animated discussions with my colleagues about the danger of confusing cause marketing with product marketing. I have always maintained that they are separate disciplines that don’t mix, while many of my colleagues disagreed.
As a society, we have become distressingly pious and self-righteous — and as a natural consequence advertisers wish to capitalize on this instinct. Like my erstwhile colleagues, they see this as an easy path to identifying their product with a strong public sentiment. This is such a bad idea that it merits a blog entry of its own, but what lead me to write today was a satisfyingly spectacular self-immolation by a large American brand that managed to make the wrong choice in just about every decision their communications and marketing teams have made over the past few days.
[. . .]
Worse, Chiquita Brands seemed to forget completely about their Canadian market. It’s easy to underestimate Canada. It’s a little country with a tenth the population of the United States. On the other hand, it’s a terrific export market, and much too accessible and rich to be ignored.
Canadians are understandably touchy about the Oil Sands. The majority of Canadians are very proud of the fact that they’ve transformed the country into an energy superpower by successfully accessing a resource that was considered nearly worthless only a decade ago – and they have done this with unprecedented care, investing billions of dollars in developing new technologies to protect the environment. Canadians are also very proud of the fact that they are the only net exporter of oil that is a liberal democracy and respects human rights. They’ve even coined the phrase “ethical oil” to describe their unique approach to oil production.
What Chiquita Brands succeeded in doing with their announcement was to make millions of Canadian consumers very unhappy. People who couldn’t have told you on Monday morning what brand of bananas they bought were determined by Thursday afternoon that it wouldn’t be Chiquita. Worse yet, hundreds of consumers decided to make their feelings known by commenting on the Chiquita Bananas Facebook page. And this is where Chiquita’s marketing and communications team took one bad decision and turned it into a disaster
As the most common comparison of the late Christopher Hitchens is to George Orwell, it seems inevitable that Brendan O’Neill would find fault with that:
Since Christopher Hitchens’s untimely death, his impressively less talented imitators in the Liberal press and blogosphere have been singing the praises of his Orwell-style arguments against tyranny. At a time when some sections of the Left are happy to snuggle up with weird-beards and dictators, we need more Orwell-inspired, Hitchensesque intolerance of authoritarianism, they tell us. It would indeed be a good thing to see some proper Left-wing liberty-mongering. However, there are two important differences between Orwell’s anti-authoritarianism and that practised by his modern-day acolytes in the Hitchens and post-Hitchens sets.
The first is in the use and abuse of the f-word. Today’s Orwell wannabes use the word “fascism” with gay abandon. For them, everything horrible is fascism. Four idiots from the north of England carrying out a terror tantrum in London? Fascism. Saddam Hussein? Fascist. Gaddafi? Fascist. Three men and a dog in a bedsit in Karachi fantasising about destroying the world? Fascists. Hitchens himself suffered serious bouts of this ahistorical Tourette’s syndrome (branding everything from Thatcherite policies to Islamic militants as fascistic), though not on the same level as his fanboys, who, lacking Hitchens’s linguistic flair, just come across like whiny teenagers railing against their parents when they bandy about the f-word.
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A few weeks ago, I said “If you really want to have your team’s quarterback enjoy an early Christmas gift, there’s nothing better than setting up a date with the Minnesota Vikings pass defence: your quarterback’s stats will improve dramatically after just one game!” I also predicted “Next week, it’ll be Drew Brees racking up a personal best passing performance for the New Orleans Saints.”
Drew Brees’ performance against the Vikings on Sunday wasn’t just brilliant, it was historically brilliant. According to the experts at NFL.com (via @DanBarreiroKFAN), Brees on Sunday became the first QB in NFL history with a game of 400+ yards, 5+ TDs and an 80%+ completion rate with no INTs. In other words, Brees’ gashing of the Vikings’ defense today was arguably the most incredible such mauling in the entire long and storied history of professional football.
Update: To say that the Vikings secondary is awful is merely acknowledging reality:
Here is Quarterback A: 69.1 completion percentage; 31 TD passes, 6 INTs; 110.8 passer rating.
Here is Quarterback B: 71.5 completion percentage; 37 TD passes, 11 INTs; 109.1 passer rating.
Quarterback B is Brees. Quarterback A is a combination of everyone who has thrown a pass against the Vikings this season. Yes, that includes Brees and Aaron Rodgers (twice), who are having phenomenal years.
But essentially the Conglomorate known as Quarterback A is having — at the very least — a Pro Bowl season. And if you want to go deeper, the 110.8 rating would be the 8th-best single-season passer rating in NFL history were it one QB. So you could say QBA is having an historic season.
Update, the second: Christopher Gates on the toxic waste pit masquerading as the secondary:
If Sean Payton had wanted Brees to throw for six hundred yards and seven touchdowns, he could have, and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing that the Vikings could have done about it. Because this might be the worst secondary in Vikings’ history. Worse than the Willie Teal years. . .worse than the Wasswa Serwanga/Robert Tate years. . .worse than any collection of secondary players in the 51 seasons that the Minnesota Vikings have been playing football.
Of all the current defensive backs on the Vikings roster, I can’t think of a single one that should feel confident that they’re even going to be on the team next season, let alone playing a significant role. That may sound like hyperbole, but I’m really not sure that it is. I mean, I don’t count Antoine Winfield in that, because he’s done for the year, but really. . .and nobody’s a bigger Winfield fan than I am. . .the guy turns 36 before camp next season. How long can you rely on him?
Chris Cook? The odds are just as good that he’ll be in prison in Week One of the 2012 NFL season than they are that he’ll be in the NFL. Husain Abdullah? Possibly, but now he’s fighting a concussion, and you can never really gauge how well a guy is going to come back from that. Outside of that, there is not one guy in this secondary that should be under the impression that their job is secure. Hell, right now our best defensive back. . .by a significant margin. . .is Benny Sapp, a guy that was watching games at home on his couch three weeks ago.
Update, 20 December: This picture explains why it’s a bad idea for Minnesota to try to come up with trick plays:
Yep. That’s Joe Webb, backup quarterback, faking a hand-off to Christian Ponder, starting quarterback. On a team that includes Adrian Peterson, the best running back in football. I loved this comment at the Daily Norseman from dsludo:
CP7 and Musgrave convo
CP7: What’s the play call?
BM: Derp
CP7 What are you talking about coach?
BM: Derp Derpity Derp
CP7: Fuck it, I’ll be the running back
BM: Derpity Herpity Derp
CP7: Webb you shotgun this shit. AP get back to the sidelines where you belong, while fucking over everyone’s fantasy team. Loadholt pretend you’re an NFL caliber Olineman.
Ready break.
CP7: Damn coach that didn’t work
BM: Derp it again
CP7: Seriously?
BM: Do I look serious, I SAID DERP IT AGAIN BITCH.
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A few weeks ago, 
