Template issues

I'm finding some odd intermittent problems with the main page template: if I edit it online, it accepts the change I make, but then seems to randomly delete strings of text from the file when saving it. Sometimes it's just a link that breaks, but other times (like this morning), significant chunks of markup get bollixed.

I've asked Jon to upload the template directly, rather than through the web interface. I hope that fixes the worst of the issues.

In praise of gridlock

By way of Samizdata, some political wisdom from a man who calls himself "not just stupid", but a "student of stupidity": P.J. O'Rourke:

It occurs to me that America could wind up with a Democratic president. This scares me. Not because I hate Democrats — although I do, come to think of it — but because a strong Democratic president and a strong Democratic Congress could put an end to partisan bickering in Washington and result in politicians from both parties working together to solve America's problems. And then we're really screwed.

I have been covering politics for 38 years. Trust me: we don't want politics to quit. That's why we need a Republican president — not because Republicans are good but because we need gridlock. I love gridlock. Gridlock means government can't do things.

The two most frightening words in Washington are "bipartisan consensus." Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.

Bipartisan consensus — like the stimulus package that has been delivered to us courtesy of Congress and the president. A $168 billion stimulus package that is supposed to change the trajectory of a $13 trillion economy.

Now, even somebody who flunked high school physics — and I did — can tell you that the energy of $168 billion is not sufficient to budge $13 trillion worth of inertia. It's like trying to use Dennis Kucinich to push Hillary Clinton off the Democratic campaign platform.

Much more here (PDF document).

Drug frenzy

Jacob Sullum pens the headline of the week:

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession.

QotD: Expert Witnesses

Lawyers and scientists have completely different ways of discovering truth. The lawyers’ way is dueling witnesses. This is as good as any in determining which of two people is lying about a police shootout. It is no good in determining whether a hair sample matches that of the murder defendant or whether Vioxx caused a heart attack. Do heavy objects fall faster than light ones? Scientists answer with an experiment. A court would answer by having the jury hear from two experts, one saying yes, the other saying no. It would make as much sense to have the jury watch a medieval jousting contest between the two witnesses.

William Baldwin, "An Expert? Prove It", Forbes, 2008-06-02

Why is Rogers "improving" my service?

Elizabeth got a very confusing message from Rogers (our ISP) yesterday, saying that "to improve our service" they'd be eliminating all but one email account from each customer account. That is, of the _five_ free user accounts we were previously entitled to, we'd only be able to keep one. Since Elizabeth and I both use our Rogers accounts for primary personal email, you can understand that we'd be a bit freaked out by the notice. I was even more worried, as I didn't get the notice, indicating that my account was going to be disconnected (only the "primary" email address was to receive this information).

I'm not sure how Rogers figures that reducing our service by up to 80% is an improvement. Perhaps it's some weird form of new math. It goes without saying that there would be no price decrease for this "improvement", right?

Elizabeth called to try to get to the bottom of the issue. Supposedly, the email accounts aren't actually going away . . . they just won't have access to the Rogers portal. It's not clear whether this means only one email address per account will be able to use the Rogers webmail (since that's accessed through their portal) or if they'll still allow webmail access for each email account.

Confused yet?

Update: I originally posted a version of this on my Facebook page, to which Brendan responded:

"New math you say — it's nice to see a creative side coming through on their end . . . INNOVATION!!! It might be a new take on the 80-20 rule — perhaps they've been taking notes from the master-crafted Customer Satisfaction attack plan over at Bell? You see — as a Sympatico customer, leaving me only 20% of my services would mean that they have, in fact, freed me of 80% of my hassles and irritations. Perhaps they'll only be interested in collecting 20% of your payments?"

Great. My backup plan was to switch to Sympatico. That doesn't sound like it'd be much of an improvement after all.

Yahtzee kinda likes Grand Theft Auto IV

My number, he has it

"Understand that this will never, ever change. You will always be lazy, and you will always procrastinate. I know it's tough for you to hear, but it's a harsh truth that you need to internalize."

Ouch. That truth hurts.

"Tepidly gung ho" about education reform

In perhaps the least emphatic possible way, Megan McArdle picks a favourite among the various contending educational reform notions:

But while taking away much of the teacher's union's power is definitely not sufficient, it does seem to be necessary. They resist changes to their work practices that the best evidence [. . .] seems to show works with disadvantaged kids: rote memorization, and phonics. These replace the tools that upper middle class give their kids earlier — even if you went to a whole language school, if you're reading this blog it's a safe bet you had phonics, too, when your parents taught you to "sound it out".

Instead, they agitate for things like smaller class sizes. It is true that schools with smaller class sizes tend to do better — but this is not surprising, since they tend to be more affluent. Pilot programs with disadvantaged kids also seem to show a benefit, but these suffer from the same problem that I discussed in a previous post about the Perry Pre-School: who's staffing your smaller class sizes? If smaller class sizes means employing more marginal teachers, it's far from obvious that this is a net boon. To the kids, I mean. It's an obvious win for the union.

This is why almost all educational ideas fail: they don't scale when you take the highly motivated grad students and gifted teachers out of the equation. That's why I'm tepidly gung ho about Direct Instruction: it has been proven to work with ordinary teachers using ordinary resources.

I don't care if the teachers have unions to negotiate over salary and benefits. But I think the power to block terminations and set work rules should be entirely stripped from them.

QotD: Sign of the times

Would you find it odd to walk into a place that billed itself variously as an "internet café" and a "cybercafé" in the year 2008, only to be told "Sorry, [we] don't have wireless [internet]?" This happened to me on Sunday and I am still trying to figure out whether I am the crazy one.

Colby Cosh, "This is a sincere question", ColbyCosh.com, 2008-05-13

150,000th reader

A mini-milestone to mark the start of the fifth year of blogging: the 150,000^th visitor came in a few minutes ago from ncsu.edu (I'm guessing that'd be North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC). Typically, it was a very short visit . . .

Hurrah for Jindal!

Until his name came up as a potential running-mate for John McCain, I don't remember ever hearing about Bobby Jindal. I think this will change regardless of whether he joins McCain or not. Megan McArdle is a fan:

With a river of federal money flowing in, Louisiana, which used to be stuck at the bottom of state corruption indices, could have gone back to business as usual while the politicians and the powers that be diverted a few rivulets to their own use. Instead, Jindal and the legislature passed anti-corruption laws that in a surprising turn of events actually seem to have done something about corruption — suddenly the state is getting the best scores in the country. They pushed through disclosure rules for all government officials — state and local, appointed and elected. He got a law passed that forbid legislators from doing business with the state. And he took on a tax and regulatory structure that had been built around the notion that companies couldn't go anywhere, and could hence be bled dry.

Huey Long deliberately built a bridge lower than standard so that boat traffic couldn't go upriver. The days when New Orleans could enforce that kind of dominance are long gone, but the old institutional structures remained. For example, Louisiana had special taxes on utilities, on new equipment purchases, on businesses that borrowed money. The unsurprising result was that companies deferred maintenance and refused to buy new equipment, making them uncompetitive unless they paid low wages. It's classic rent seeking behavior by the legislature, and Jindal actually got rid of it; new businesses are now locating there, and others are upgrading.

QotD: Invading Burma?

Now in all probability if the "good old U.S. military" actually does invade Burma it will incinerate every vestige of armed opposition in its path. Burmese Army units will stand about as much chance as ants before a kid's homemade flamethrower. And then all of a sudden the assumptions will collapse in reverse order. People are going to say, 'we didn't realize invasions meant killing people'; 'we didn't realize we wouldn't have allies'; and finally 'we did not think it would be so expensive'. And then we will hear that classic line: "I was for it before I was against it."

"Wretchard", " Invasion Burma", The Belmont Club, 2008-05-10

Lemons to video lemonade

When you can't afford studio time to record a music video, what are your options? In Britain, you can take advantage of the omnipresent Big Brother cameras:

But all is not lost. Boing Boing reports...

The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, 'performed' in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.

Staving off disaster in Massachusetts

Katherine Mangu-Ward realizes that she missed some key elements after her move to Massachusetts:

Massachusetts must have been a terrifying place in 1995. A relatively recent arrival in the commonwealth myself, I had no idea that the mid-90s was a time when health care was unobtainable. I didn't know about the washed out bridges and unplowed roads. Nor do I recall seeing bands of feral children roaming the streets from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm due to the lack of public schools.

But a popular ballot initiative to eliminate Massachusetts's income tax — thus bringing the state budget back to 1995 levels — is being greeted with howls of protest and predictions that the state will degenerate into underfunded chaos.

Myths my organic propagandist told me

I found this article to be an eye-opener: I knew that many people seriously over-estimated the value of organic foods, but the situation is much, much worse than I thought:

Myth three: Organic farming doesn't use pesticides

Food scares are always good news for the organic food industry. The Soil Association and other organic farming trade groups say conventional food must be unhealthy because farmers use pesticides. Actually, organic farmers also use pesticides. The difference is that "organic" pesticides are so dangerous that they have been "grandfathered" with current regulations and do not have to pass stringent modern safety tests.

For example, organic farmers can treat fungal diseases with copper solutions. Unlike modern, biodegradable, pesticides copper stays toxic in the soil for ever. The organic insecticide rotenone (in derris) is highly neurotoxic to humans — exposure can cause Parkinson's disease. But none of these "natural" chemicals is a reason not to buy organic food; nor are the man-made chemicals used in conventional farming.

Myth four: Pesticide levels in conventional food are dangerous

The proponents of organic food — particularly celebrities, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, who have jumped on the organic bandwagon — say there is a "cocktail effect" of pesticides. Some point to an "epidemic of cancer". In fact, there is no epidemic of cancer. When age-standardised, cancer rates are falling dramatically and have been doing so for 50 years.

Far too many people believe, strongly, that organic produce is better (for many different values of "better") than non-organic produce. They're willing to pay extra for organic-grown produce, and that's fine for them . . . it's still a (mostly) free world. But they're fooling themselves to think that non-organic foods are worse for them than the organics for which they pay premium prices.

Locally grown produce may or may not be better for you, but if it can be picked closer to full ripeness and take less time in transit to you, it'll almost certainly taste better. Freshness matters a very great deal. But for most of us, the time during which our local farm crops are ready to harvest is very brief.

We planted some tomatoes in our garden a few years ago, almost as an afterthought. Once the tomatoes started to ripen, they were fantastic: the best I'd ever tasted. It was wonderful . . . but the plants all ripened at about the same time, so we weren't able to eat them fast enough. Worse, no matter how good they were, there's a definite limit to how many you can eat. We got sick of eating them before the last one was ready to pick. We probably threw out more than we ate . . . and this was from only half-a-dozen plants.

Since then, I rarely bother to eat tomatoes because the ones that are available through most of the year aren't even a pale imitation of the great tomatoes we grew: they seem to be mostly "wood" with very little flavour.

The article above? It's from The Independent . . . one of Britain's more green-oriented newspapers. That they're willing to poke holes in the common beliefs about organic foods is very heartening.

H/T to SDA.

QotD: Title IX and the candidates

USA Today asked the three remaining major-party candidates how they feel about Title IX and about performance enhancing drugs.

Refreshingly, all three said neither steroids nor gender participation are any of the government's business, and that, being private entities, sports organizations should be free to set their own rules free of meddling from the federal government or grandstanding congressmen.

Just kidding. All three favor using the federal government to bend pro and amateur sports to their liking.

Radley Balko, "Sports and Election '08", The Agitator, 2008-05-11

Bioethics

Steven Pinker has a look at the use and misuse of the term "human dignity" in the realm of bioethics and politics:

Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy — the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing.

Goaded by Macklin's essay, the Council acknowledged the need to put dignity on a firmer conceptual foundation. This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable, addressed directly to President Bush. The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.

H/T to Nick Gillespie.

First sign of impending old age

You know you're not as young as you think you are when a little thing like staying up until 4 in the morning wipes you out the next day. The wine? That couldn't have had anything to do with it. Unpossible.

The performance was good, the dinner was delayed, but the conversations afterwards were worth hanging around for. Elizabeth bailed at midnight — clever of her, actually — but I somehow stayed awake and talkative for a little while longer.

The after-performance gathering wasn't quite a cast party, nor quite a going-away party, but had sufficient elements of each to satisfy the two different groups of participants. It was Brendan's final party in Stratford, as he's taken a job that will require him to move to Brantford . . . not too far away in actual distance, but quite some way in travel time if you don't have a car.

Yahtzee answers his critics

Oh, just in case you've never watched a Yahtzee review . . . er, not safe for work. Or if you're squeamish. Or if you're one of those people who hasn't yet grasped that life is a contact sport. Toughen up, princess!

QotD: Looking for a new England

"I do wish Billy Bragg would stop banging on about Englishness" wrote one correspondent, before going on to suggest that "as a socialist, Bragg should be celebrating the internationally minded South African trade unions who refused to unload arms destined for Mugabe's regime — rather than some highly dubious notion of Englishness". The implication that, as socialists, we should disavow all notions of Englishness plays into the hands of the far-right, leaving them free to define who does and who doesn't belong on their own terms. Our folly would be compounded if we were to go around taking down St George's day bunting and ordering those celebrating to replace it with slogans of solidarity with the South African Congress of Trade Unions. Such behaviour would only serve to give credence to the lies that the BNP spout on the doorstep.

I doubt it will come as a surprise to learn that this is not the first time that I have been shouted down for putting forward challenging ideas about what it means to be English. Hoping to provoke debate by styling myself a progressive patriot, I seem more often to provoke kneejerk reactions from fellow leftists. Last week was no different. "The idea of the 'progressive patriot' is worthy but misguided," argued one letter. "The prospect of watching an England game with bellicose fans belting out 10 German Bombers or Dambusters doesn't appeal." Unsurprisingly, that doesn't appeal to me either, but we are never going to escape from that mentality unless we make the effort to counter it.

As socialists, we are all too familiar with the tactic of opponents who are quick to portray those who question the free-market system as supporters of the worse excesses of Stalinism. It's a blinkered mindset that refuses to accept that there are different strands within socialism, preferring instead to dismiss as a commie anyone who argues for a more compassionate society. Such simplistic attempts at stifling debate are mirrored by those on the left who fail to recognise that there are different types of patriotism, some adamantly opposed to that voiced by the xenophobic minority.

Billy Bragg, "A different strand of socialism", Comment is free, 2008-04-30

Happy birthday tomorrow

It'll be the fourth anniversary of the blog tomorrow . . . and I probably won't be online to note the occasion, as I'll be attending the PlayMakers! performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona in Stratford (2pm at City Hall Auditorium, if you're in the area).

Should you want to see how badly the quality has declined since then, you can check out the entire month's blogging from May, 2004.

RCMP lowers the bar . . . again

The bold gendarmes of the RCMP/GRC upheld peace, order and lousy policework yesterday in Kamloops, BC. At great risk to themselves, they fearlessly tasered an 82-year-old.

Three times.

While he was lying in his hospital bed after heart surgery.

I'm not making this up . . .

QotD: Peter Jackson Isn't A Better Choice

Anyone who suffered through the Star Wars prequel trilogy — or Godfather III — will understand when I suggest that it's not always wise for a director to return to his old stomping grounds. Jackson left Middle Earth as a hero to geeks and film investors, and on such a creative high note, he essentially slacked through King Kong and no one gave him any crap for it. That being the case, what's the upside for him to re-direct in Middle Earth? If he does it perfectly and sticks the dismount, it's still not fresh. If he screws it up, the fan response will make the Phantom Menace backlash look like a group hug.

Jackson put a huge target on himself by agreeing to return to Middle Earth; getting someone else to direct gets him out of the line of fire. Now, if it works, he'll still get (producer) credit. If it fails, the audience will blame del Toro — because among other things, he's not Jackson, or more accurately, the imaginary Jackson who did the film perfectly.

That said, I don't think Jackson hired del Toro just to aim flak toward someone else. I think he hired del Toro because Jackson's aware that — contrary to O'Hehir's worry — these films need someone who isn't very much in love with either Tolkien or the world that he made.

This has to do with the subject matter, namely, The Hobbit. That book, written by Tolkien to amuse his kids, is a twee bit of fluff at best. Beloved, yes, but a bit squishy in the middle. This is fine for bedtime readings and Rankin-Bass animated adaptations, but for the continuation of one of the most successful film series of all time, every installment of which was nominated for Best Picture? The Hobbit needs someone willing to slice through the fat and mush and not ask himself WWTD (What Would Tolkien Do?) at every critical juncture. Jackson did this with The Lord of the Rings, which is why, among other things, the film series is thankfully Tom Bombadil-free, but The Hobbit needs an extra wash of astringency. Del Toro's love of the fantastic has never descended into huggy cuteness, which makes him perfect to save The Hobbit from itself.

John Scalzi, "Is Guillermo del Toro the Right Man for The Hobbit?", AMCTV SciFi Scanner, 2008-05-08