For some reason it is being treated as news that the Prime Minister said he would work with a Parti Quebecois government in the unfortunate circumstance of a PQ victory.
What else was he supposed to say? The PQ has held power several times since Rene Levesque’s first victory in 1976. It’s a democratic country, and provinces can elect whoever they want. Ottawa doesn’t have a choice whether it wants to work with the victor or not. Harper worked with Danny Williams — well, he tried, anyway — when the Newfoundland caudillo declared himself the supreme power of El Rocko Independanto and waged a personal war against his Canadian oppressors. Pauline Marois, the PQ leader (at least until the next revolt) can’t be half as annoying as Danny was.
Kelly McParland, “Why is it news that Stephen Harper would recognize a PQ government?”, National Post, 2012-06-25
June 25, 2012
QotD: Working with the PQ
June 24, 2012
QotD: The kids really are alright
The phrase I use all the time is, “the kids are alright,” from the Who. It’s amazing to me, you know, I’m 54 years old, and it’s amazing to me watching my peers turn into these cartoons. They say, s*** like, “well you know, when we were kids we weren’t this rude, and we wouldn’t say this stuff. I would have never done this.” And it’s absolute f***ing bulls***, and we certainly have records going back thousands of years that adults always hate the younger generation. Adults always find a reason to hate people that are 20-years-old, and I don’t know why it is. Clearly and provably every generation gets better. Every generation gets healthier, smarter, more sophisticated, and that’s always been true. Twenty-year-olds are just better than us. Old people just can’t seem to get it through their heads that things are getting better and that’s wonderful. Not only do young people not have polio, not only are young people less racist, less homophobic, and less violent – not only is all that true, but they also have some really really cool art, and some of that art we don’t understand. The problem is a question of time.
You know, when I was 15, 16, 17-years-old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games. The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong. The cliché of the nerdy kid who doesn’t go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it’s also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It’s beautiful. That kind of obsession is going to lead to a sophisticated 30-year-old who has a background in that artform. It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead is provably s***ty music. It’s impossible – it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.
Penn Jillette, “Penn Jillette Is Tired Of The Video Game Bulls***”, Game Informer, 2009-11-20
June 23, 2012
The real ending to Krugman’s favourite example, the Capitol Hill babysitting co-op
Tim Harford recounts the tale of the Capitol Hill babysitting co-op, which Paul Krugman is very fond of using as an example to support his economic prescriptions, but he includes the part that Krugman tends to ignore … the ending:
One of the most renowned parables in economics is that of the Capitol Hill babysitting co-operative. It became famous because of Paul Krugman, a winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics and a pugnacious columnist for The New York Times.
Long, long ago (the 1970s) in a town far, far away (Washington, DC) there was a babysitting co-op with a problem. The 150 or so families in the co-op, mostly congressional staffers, shared babysitting duties and kept track of who was owed babysitting, and who was owing, with a system of “scrip” – tokens good for a half-hour’s sitting.
Thanks to an administrative misstep, the co-op ended up short of tokens. Most families wanted more, as a buffer in case they had a run of social engagements, and so most families wanted to stay in and sit for others. Of course, if everyone wants to babysit, nobody goes out, and that means nobody babysits either. The co-op suffered a demand-led depression: there was no shortage of people willing to supply babysitting services, but because of a failure of monetary policy, this potential supply was not called into play. [. . .]
Two-and-a-half cheers, then, for Krugman. But something has been nagging at me ever since I read the original story of the Capitol Hill babysitting co-op, published in 1977 by Joan and Richard Sweeney. Paul Krugman’s most recent retelling does not mention how the original story ends: the co-op prints too much scrip, inflationary pressures spring up and are suppressed, and the co-op seizes up again because nobody wants to stay at home babysitting. Krugman is right when he says that economies sometimes suffer from problems that have technical solutions. Perhaps he is too quick to suggest that those technical solutions are simple.
But let me look for compromise. The babysitting co-op was ruined because it was run, incompetently, by a bunch of Capitol Hill lawyers. In this respect I think we can all agree that it remains an important cautionary tale.
June 22, 2012
Microsoft Surface: “Lacking a physical product to test, all we can do is talk bollocks based on conjecture”
While I’ve been avoiding tablet computers, having an actual keyboard that can attach to a tablet makes it more like something I might be able to find a use for. In The Register, Alistair Dabbs explains why he’s already very fond of the announced-but-not-available-yet Microsoft Surface:
I don’t wish to suggest that Microsoft Surface is truly vapourware, but surely it’s suspicious that it’s announcing a product that no one’s going to be able to buy for half a year.
One supposes that Microsoft intends to create a buzz and get us talking about their forthcoming (new) foray into tablet computers. Yet the problem with jumping the gun — apart from the ‘false start’ accusations that lead on from this metaphor — is that commentators are left with a void to fill. Lacking a physical product to test, all we can do is talk bollocks based on conjecture.
This, as you know, is my specialty.
First, let me say that I don’t care a hoot about the provenance of the name ‘Surface’ — ho-ho, it used to be a table, so fucking what? Making fun of a name tells us nothing about the product.
Take ‘Metro’.
“We call it Metro because it’s modern and clean.” Oh, and here’s me thinking they called it Metro because it’s populated by young Algerians brandishing flick-knives and smells of wee. It’s just a word to put on the packaging and its actual meaning has no significance. After all, what does the word ‘pod’ have to do with playing MP3 files?
June 18, 2012
There, but for the grace of God …
Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Just think: if Napoleon had won we could now be part of some ghastly federal Europe.
— Dick Delingpole (@DickDelingpole) June 18, 2012
June 14, 2012
Winnipeg is not a hellhole
I’ve spent a few weeks in Winnipeg, and while it was a pleasant place to stay in June, others perhaps didn’t have as much fun:
The local affiliate is interrupting the 4th quarter of the #NBAFinals to show city council election results!!!#TrappedInAHellHole
— Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) June 13, 2012
And Scott Feschuk rounded up the reactions very well:
https://twitter.com/scottfeschuk/statuses/213209975537942529
Colby Cosh is late to the scene:
If you’re a journalist, sometimes it’s more interesting to come to a story later rather than sooner. (It’s also way easier!) When I first heard that Winnipeg was ablaze with mob fury about a Rob Lowe tweet that described the city as a “hellhole”, I sort of chuckled to myself and thought “Welp, right or wrong, he is definitely talking about the ‘Winnipeg’ that’s in Manitoba.” [. . .]
Lowe indicated later that he was referring to the bar, and not Winnipeg as a city, when he joked about being in a “hellhole”. And, in fact, if you look at what he wrote, he never did say that Winnipeg was a hellhole. (Parts of it are not remotely like hell at all during several months of the year!) But for some reason, an awful lot of Winnipeggers immediately assumed that that’s what he meant. Am I wrong, or does this say more about what they think of their city than it does about what Rob Lowe thinks of it?
June 10, 2012
QotD: Journalism, in theory and practice
In the same way that many children naively assume adults are infallible, I grew up with the fantasy that anything in print must be true. This created some logical conundrums in the supermarket checkout aisle, where I’d see the Weekly World News and wonder, “But if aliens haven’t abducted Elvis, how can they print it?”
I mean, if journalists don’t hold themselves to standards of accuracy, why would they take the trouble to print an Errata column for the few minutiae they happened to miss? “In last week’s issue,” such a column would say, “we mistakenly identified the smiling man in the photograph as Nathan Daniels of Ballwin, Missouri. In fact, while he is indeed Nathan Daniels of Ballwin, Missouri, what we called a smile is more of a tempered grin. We sincerely regret the error.”
If that’s the kind of error a newspaper regrets — and sincerely, no less — surely the major facts behind any story are watertight.
But the Errata are a trick, and not even a new trick. I use the same trick to ingratiate myself to my wife when I realize I’ve neglected to do something important for our 1-year-old daughter. “I remembered her shoes and socks,” I’ll say, “but I couldn’t find the pink sippy cup, so I brought the green sippy cup.” By apologizing for this lesser transgression, I’m hoping my wife won’t notice that I’ve forgotten to arrange for our daughter to wear pants.
Adam Ruben, “The Unwritten Rules of Journalism”, Science, 2012-05-25
June 9, 2012
The future of dining
What’s the restaurant of choice for Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama? Watch what happens when Brian tries to order lunch at Nou Nou D’Enfer!
H/T to Nick Gillespie.
June 6, 2012
QotD: Those demon drugs
As “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber” in an old Saturday Night Live sketch, Steve Martin tells a patient’s father that people once foolishly believed disease was caused by demonic possession, but “nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.” Likewise, whereas people used to think the devil was the source of evil, today we know that drugs are — even if we’re not sure which drugs, or whether a particular criminal has actually consumed them.
Jacob Sullum, “The Devil in Rudy Eugene: The “Miami Cannibal” story reflects our perennial readiness to believe that drugs make people do evil.”, Reason, 2012-06-06
Cassy’s guide to naming spaceships
You have to put a bit more thought into how you name your spaceships, people of the future!
Dear People of the Future,
Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve just received a state-of-the-art spacecraft, and you’re probably about to take it on an extremely dangerous mission. Your journey may even concern the safety and continued survival of the human race.
But don’t worry! I’m betting your new ride is pretty sick. It’s probably got a warp drive and maybe a solar sail and lots of other technology I couldn’t even begin to understand.
At this point, you’re probably wondering: What should I name my spacecraft?
It’s good advice. Really. But I was surprised to find that there had been a USS Custer, a USS General Burnside, and even the USS Benedict Arnold.
H/T to John Turner for the link.
June 5, 2012
QotD: The settling of the west (revised edition)
America was built on the principle that a man could make choices about his own life. This has been a complete failure. You remember when pioneers set out by themselves into the untamed frontier? And you remember what happened to them? That’s right: They all died. Lacking a government to tell them how much soda to drink or salt to eat, they became too obese to run away from bears and mountain lions. It’s a sad chapter in our history, but luckily when people headed out west the next time, they brought lots and lots of government with them and founded California. And thanks to its huge amount of laws telling people what to do, that area has flourished (well, I haven’t read any news about California in a decade or so, but I assume it’s still doing pretty well).
Frank J. Fleming, “The Tyranny of Having Too Many Choices”, PJ Media, 2012-06-04
June 4, 2012
June 2, 2012
The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Union
Mark Steyn on the similarities between the top TV event in Europe and the EU itself:
One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.
Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, The Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-A-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.
May 27, 2012
Fifty shades of suburbanizing stuff to make it boring
In the National Post, Darrin Rose laments the “mainstreaming” of BDSM, or badly written erotica, or something:
The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has sold 10 million copies in only six weeks of sales, and in doing so has shed a lot of light on what suburban moms are looking for in the bookstore, if not in the bedroom. It has been banned in some U.S. libraries, generating controversy in equal measure for pornographic content and terrible writing. If you like books that read like a triple-X version of your Grade 8 diary, then you’re in luck. But trouble looms on the horizon.
The book has become part of the zeitgeist, leading to all kinds of new sexual ideas in the suburbs. I should confess that as a city dweller, I like to encourage the notion that urbanites lead sexy, dangerous lives already. But the suburban soccer moms who make up the majority of the book’s readership are discovering a sexy, dangerous world of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism, also known — by lazy people and perverts — as BDSM. While BDSM is currently a risqué, fun activity, the suburbs will do what they always do when they find a new sexy idea — turn it into an exercise you do at the gym, thereby simultaneously destroying its sexiness and enjoyability. They did the same thing to the Lambada and stripper poles.
[. . .]
The same thing happened to stripper poles, which you can find in the aerobics room of many gyms these days. It takes a really asexual person to see a stripper pole and think “that’d be great for low impact muscle development.” So stripper poles were installed in the sweat factories, and real life took a hit. If you go to a strip club and think the best part is the gymnastics, you’re really missing the point. They did the same thing to lap dances and stripteases, two related disciplines now doled out in 60 minute lessons at strip malls across the nation.
And now Fifty Shades of Grey has BDSM lined up next for the exercise treatment. That way middle-aged women can take flogging classes, where personal instructors literally beat you into shape. We’re probably a couple years away from spending 30 minutes on the elliptical machine while a personal trainer whispers in your ear “do you like that?” and “you’re such a dirty little jogger.” A workout seems much more intimidating if you need a safety word to make it stop, but I would rather be spared the sight of a gym full of moms being spanked while they do hamstring curls.
QotD: Being a good host
With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven’s sake have the good grace to throw away the damn cork. If you are a guest and not a host, don’t find yourself having to drop your glass and then exclaim (as Amis once did in my hearing) “Oh — thank heavens it was empty.” The sort of host who requires that hint is the sort of host you should have avoided in the first place.
Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
