In Search of Consciousness, Part Two

If Dennett's ideas (or perhaps better, non-ideas) were ludicrous, what else was there? One I found early on was proposed by Australian National University philosopher David Chalmers. Unusually for an idea published in academic journals, it appeared to have been inspired primarily by LSD and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album. But at least if it was spectacularly wrong, it had an element of the spectacular about it.

I find many of Chalmers's ideas unclear, but in a nutshell, he argues for panprotopsychism, the idea that consciousness may exist in the universe without depending at all on anything physical (i.e., it is a "fundamental property" of the universe, like gravity); and further, that it may just find more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way. Amongst other things, Chalmers says that we are justified in believing that even crude information-processing systems, like thermostats, may be conscious.

The problem, I think, with Chalmers's creative ideas is that they seem unconstrained to the point of being inherently untestable (no doubt why British psychologist Susan Greenfield describes them as "unhelpful"). Somehow or other, we need ideas that empirically can justify belief in them, and I am not sure that conscious thermostats qualify for that. Still, I admire Chalmers for taking consciousness seriously, and for being bold enough to propose such ideas.

Another idea I came across early on was proposed by British philosopher Colin McGinn. Our brains, he says, are the products of evolution. This implies that the brain capacities we have are those which helped our ancestors survive. And because the capacity to answer the question of where consciousness comes from cannot conceivably be of any survival value, McGinn says, we may conclude that our brains simply have not evolved in such a way as to enable us to make any headway on this question, ever. It is simply beyond our capacity, as much so as nuclear physics is forever beyond the mental capacity of an earthworm to understand. In short, human beings will never understand consciousness. (Perhaps as a result of this evidently liberating conclusion, McGinn now spends a lot of time surfing).

This position has been dubbed "mysterianism", and has a few high profile sympathizers (Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker among them). But like Chalmers's position, it seems unhelpful and also doubtful. After all, the human brain obviously possesses high-powered reasoning capacities. Humans have been calculating astronomical distances and orbits for millenia; we devise complex codes and decipher dead languages; we split atoms and create particle colliders and invent computers and create vaccines. We build rockets and fly to the moon. We have already discovered quite a lot about the brain, and there seems to be no reason why we could not in principle understand how consciousness arises. So while I understand that in its common formulation, the question at the core of consciousness research is stupefying, I still can't buy McGinn's conclusion that consciousness is in principle unfathomable to the human mind. It just seems like way too much of a leap.

Anyway, the more I read, the more intrigued I became. I even flew to North Carolina at one point in spring of 2004 partly to chat with Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan, a leading commentator on consciousness. He was surprisingly friendly and even invited me over to his house. We hung out on his back porch chatting for about an hour. (While we chatted, Flanagan's dog came bouncing up with his favourite tennis ball, and I threw it into the woods over and over for him to retrieve...).

But Flanagan, in the end, was as much at a loss to explain how consciousness could arise from non-consciousness, as everyone else was. In fact, I noticed that many commentators, particularly psychologists and neuroscientists (Christof Koch comes to mind), who by temperament and training are far more inclined to producing empirical results, ended up arguing that we ought to continue mapping particular brain functions, like how the auditory or memory system works, instead of sitting around trying to understand where consciousness comes from in the first place. Maybe, the argument went, if we focus on understanding brain functions we already have something of a handle on, eventually the answer to the Big Question will become obvious; in the meantime, let's get some stuff done. A practical enough approach; but the minutiae of how the visuo-motor system works held little appeal to me. It was the dark gap at the heart of everything that intrigued me...

Now, one recurrent claim in the pieces I read was that consciousness was an "emergent" property (John Searle and Michael Gazzaniga come to mind) of the brain. What does this mean? Well...unfortunately - and this is really the problem - it can mean lots of different things.

However, one common understanding of the phrase "emergent property" is that it refers to an exclusively macro scale property of micro scale processes. The free market economy is an oft-used example. Of all the economic systems yet devised, it makes the most efficient use of resources, so much so that the famed Scottish economist Adam Smith once wrote that at the macro level, resources in a free market ecomony seemed to be guided by "an invisible hand", i.e., by a top-down intelligence and power. But in fact, there is no such top-down intelligence or power guiding the free market economy; this is, so the argument goes, a macro-level property emerging from many millions of micro-level economic transactions made by single agents (buyers and sellers), each possessing a very minute amount of information, and who often do not even act particularly rationally (for those interested in this, check out Austrian ecomonist Friedrich von Hayek's work).

This is an immediately appealing example of emergence, because while we all know that buyers and sellers have relatively minute amounts of economic information (as in, this green coat is ten dollars cheaper than that one; therefore, I'll buy this one, the end), we can easily imagine how many millions of data-impoverished economic decisions, in aggregate could produce spectacular macro scale efficiency of resource usage and distribution, and produce the illusion of a super-intelligence guiding the whole system.

Unfortunately, the word "emergence", I found, is also used in very different ways.

More later.

In Search of Consciousness, Part One

There is a mystery at the heart of all research into the human brain, and it is the mystery of consciousness. How, so the question goes, can a lump of non-conscious grey matter give rise to consciousness?

My own interest in this question began about six years ago, when I went through a period of deep introspection, and ultimately, epiphany, over the religion I was raised in. At one point, I ended up feeling like I could "observe", so to speak, parts of my mind in action which I had never before observed. In particular, I felt like I became aware that my subconscious mind had been filtering out certain evidences, questions, conclusions, and even feelings in a way, which would have caused me severe emotional distress. In a way, I felt like I became able, from some sort of detached state, to observe myself deceiving myself.

Becoming aware of this was very disturbing to me. I had no idea, never having read anything about the psyche, that it had been well established that the subconscious parts of the brain routinely filtered out all sorts of things, keeping them from the conscious parts, both for reasons of functional efficiency and to protect us from emotional distress. Thus, it was something of a revelation to read through a big, expensive book I ordered off of Amazon around that time, entitled "Essential Sources in the Study of Consciousness". This book is a compilation of articles written by top consciousness researchers, and a number of them describe studies showing the subconscious in action - including how it filters information (I was particularly struck by articles by Bruce Mangan and John Kihlstrom, psychologists at UC Berkeley).

Even after I gained clarity on the religious questions which had tormented me, I continued to read about consciousness. I was wading into the topic for the first time, but consciousness, to my mind anyway, is surprisingly alluring to novice investigators. The main reason is that no one, not even the most famous consciousness researchers out there, can give any sort of coherent account of how consciousness might arise from non-conscious brain matter. So...it almost seems like even the novice investigator might be able to solve the mystery.

Here is an example. Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book almost two decades ago now called "Consciousness Explained", in which he takes 500 pages to essentially argue that what we experience as consciousness is but an illusion, and that therefore, there is nothing to explain (perhaps the most brazen example of a non sequitir in the history of science writing). So clearly, if a famous philosopher can claim to have explained consciousness simply by claiming that consciousness is merely an illusion, which of course does not follow at all (the whole point is that regardless of whether we are merely imagining ourselves to be conscious or not, our capacity to imagine itself is the very thing which needs to be explained), then anyone could take a shot; no proposal could possibly be sillier than Dennett's, even though it was taken seriously by many (UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle is one exception, and has written one of the most astute criticisms of Dennett's silly ideas).

I read through dozens of books and articles over the next few years. Chalmers, Baars, McGinn, the Churchlands, Levine, Koch, Searle...I blew hundreds on Amazon. They were all interesting, but in the end, with one or two semi-exceptions, none of them really made sense. Here is why.

Remember that the question is: How can non-conscious matter give rise to consciousness?

Another way of putting this question is as follows:

How can a pile of rocks become conscious? After all, to hear all the consciousness researchers tell it, the brain was made up of matter no more conscious than rocks.

To me, early on, the answer was obvious...

But I am getting ahead of myself.

To be continued.

The One, True Bicycle

I hate bicycles. Not per se - I just hate all the designs now. Somehow, they just ain't...right.

Bikes all cost a fortune now, and have a million gears, and they have wires all over the place, and strangely-angled bars and freaky grips, and weird little tiny seats, and because there are so many parts, they're always breaking. Mountain bikes are fine for mountain biking, I admit; but what do you do if you just want a normal, straight-ahead bike?

Most people would say, "get a cruiser". Yes, they are somewhat close to a normal bike; the problem is that they are actually more like caricatures of a normal bike. They're usually painted some weird bright colour, often sport weird designs, they have overly large mud guards and handlebars, and a giant seat...So the whole cruiser package just screams, "Ooo, look at me, I'm doing the whole retro-cutesy thing! Woo-hoo! Here I am! Isn't this funny?!". For more modest cyclists, this just won't do. Moreover, if you buy one of those cruisers at Wal-Mart or K-Mart, they fall apart within weeks.

So what does the guy do - a guy like, say, me - who just wants a normal bike, nothing overstated, just a rock-solid, easy to use, durable bike? Well...what you do is, you look for a vintage Raleigh, and then, you get lucky.

That's what I did. I walked into the bike shop a couple of months ago to drop off, yet again, one of my kids's broken pieces of garbage, and...there it was...up on a display shelf about eight feet off the ground: a 1950's, single-speed, black Raleigh, made in England, with the original leather Brooks Brothers seat, in great condition.

Oh my God...! I was mesmerized. I felt like Jodie Foster at the end of Contact: "It's....so.....beau-ti-ful...."

I'd inquired in this shop before about buying display bikes, just in case one ever came in that I wanted. The answer had always been, "they're not for sale". So I wondered to myself what I could do to make this happen...

I actually couldn't think of anything other than to shift my question from, "Are those for sale?" to "How much for that Raleigh?". So that's what I did.

And, perhaps miraculously, it worked. The guy said, "Hm, I don't know. Let me go ask".

He came back a few minutes later and said, "They'd let it go for $200".

I couldn't believe it. Two hundred bucks is only a bit more than the locks cost these days.

"Can I see it?", I said.

The guy got it down. And then, if you can believe it, he said, "It's heavy" (duh). "I can get you into one of these Fishers here for around eighteen hundred bucks. These are awesome! They're made using a new composite blah blah blah...".

I looked at the bike he was describing. Absolutely ridiculous, I thought. No challenge. No character. No vibe. No mojo. Just a weird little piece of nothing, for some weird little dude wearing a weird little spandex butt-wrap and a weird little helmet to use for his weird little fitness cycling. And way too much money.

"This thing here", he said, pointing back at the Raleigh, "you know...it's, uh, it's old...you can get into something way better here...that Trek over there is on sale. It's only $3599 now...".

I didn't want to blow the deal by popping off, so I just asked if I could take the Raleigh out for a spin.

If you have never ridden a vintage Raleigh, it is hard to describe the feeling. For one thing, the front forks are positioned at a different, more out-front angle, than on bikes nowadays, so the steering, and the whole feel of the bike, are quite different. The weight of the bike (it's pure steel) seems to quickly give it a kind of momentum; and the relatively low height of the handlebars, combined with the seat, make it feel almost like you are reclining, though of course you are not.

And the brakes...they have no wires; they're all connected with rods of steel. Rad.

It took me four seconds out on the street, and I was sold.

"I'll take it", I said, coming back into the shop. The guy looked shocked. These punks have no clue, I thought.

I had them put a little leather pouch on the back of the seat, plus a trap, and a little back light; and now, riding this bad boy around Cadboro Bay has become one of the great little thrills of my life. We live close to a school, and the kids and I will sometimes just go ride around it just for the sheer joy of it, or ride down to Pepper's, the grocery store, or to the beach. It's just so much fun to ride, that it almost doesn't matter where we go...so often, we don't go anywhere in particular at all.

We just ride.

A Response to Smile

In response to my last post, a reader named Smile writes:

"A blanket condemnation of young female sexuality followed by a recommendation of repression kind of bugs me".

I find this comment unfair and irritating. It exaggerates and distorts my comments, and includes what seems to be unthinking assent to the idea that any form of "repression" - whatever exactly is meant by that - is somehow wrong.

So, first things first. I did not offer a "blanket condemnation of young female sexuality". I expressed concern about something specific: the pornogrification, to coin a word, of young female sexuality. That's a big difference, and I do think it will be obvious to 99% of the people who read my post. To repeat, it is not human, or "young female" sexuality I object to, but to a social situation in which, at a formative time of life, a girl's primary sense of identity, purpose, and status derives from how outrageously she puts out. It's like living in a world created by Larry Flynt or a pimp, and it's bad - psychologically, emotionally, and physically - for boys and girls both.

Now, about your comments on "repression"...I am not sure how much I can say, because I am not exactly sure what you mean. This is a big, broad word which you have tossed out, which could refer to all sorts of things, some perfectly acceptable, others foolish, others dangerous.

For example, if one has the inclination to sexually molest children, then I see repression (either through willpower alone or with the aid of castration) as the only acceptable solution. Don't you? If so, then you agree with me that in some circumstances, sexual repression is a good thing, and could hardly condemn me for selectively supporting it. And certainly, there are all sorts of other cases where you would support repression of some kind. If a man is provoked by his girlfriend and wants to hit her, I assume you would encourage him to repress those violent urges. Likewise with dozens of different, destructive urges.

In fact, it is not too much to say that what we mean by the word civilization is no more than the taming, diversion or flat-out repression of certain instincts and desires which, if acted upon, would make society impossible, cruel, or dangerous. So I don't really know why this word should be thought to refer inherently to something bad.

You say my comments bug you. I say that what should bug you is a significant percentage of boys today growing up thinking of girls primarily as sperm receptacles. I think what should bug you is girls running around school dressed like prostitutes and competing with each other in what amounts to a "putting out" contest for the boys. I think what should bug you is citizens paying millions of dollars to support a public school system whose administrators lack the will and the legal or practical ability to enforce order, challenge students and hold them accountable, hire inspiring and purposeful teachers, fire lousy teachers, replace their boring curriculum, and build, deepen, and broaden students's character by inculcating ideals and habits like self-respect, self-discipline, and self-direction.

I mean, on this last point, I gave a guest speech to a high school in Oregon ten years ago, and the whole administration was absolutely petrified that I was going to talk about ethics and morals. Mentioning anything connected to a deity was obviously out of the question. The principal nervously made me promise ahead of time to steer clear of these topics. It was bizarre and chilling - literally like being in the Soviet Union in 1972 or something. I think that should bug you, too.

What should bug you is the equivalent of a million Jodie Fosters in "Taxi Driver", and all the confusion, sorrow, pregnancies, abortions, and everything else, that go with that...

To be continued, I'm sure.

The Porn Generation

I have long felt disdainful of the enduring habit of nearly all Westerners, on the left and right, of viewing everything through the lens of impending apocalypse. For lefties these days, the world - at least humanity - is about to end in a flash of environmental meltdown and resource scarcity. For righties, especially of a religious bent, culture is always "slouching towards Gomorrah", getting more and more depraved and violent.

While both views contain elements of truth, both rely on simplifications and distortions of very select slices of reality. The world's food and water supply, for example, has never been as clean, safe, and bountiful. At least in America, mega churches continue to thrive, AM radio is saturated with Christian, social conservatism, and family-style entertainment options continue to be widely available.

But I think it is fair to say that in one respect at least, the righties might be on to something. From what I can tell, there seems to be a substantial segment of girls these days, from, say 16 to 26, whose biggest dream in life is to dress, talk, and behave like porn stars. Binge-drinking, wild forays into even the darkest regions of human sexuality, completely loutish behaviour...it has become "normal".

Not so long ago, most high school girls were quite conscious of maintaining their reputations for self-respect, and would feel a sense of mortification if it ever got out that they had "gone too far" with a boy. By contrast, many girls nowadays are keen to build up reputations for just how far they'll go. Sex acts which, literally, would have ruined a girl's high school social life not so long ago, now confer a kind of bizarre status on to her, and are often bragged about by the girls themselves. Forget second base - now it's...well, I won't say it.

I don't have any particular religious beliefs, but this all makes me feel nauseous. Human beings - including teenage girls - are, or certainly can be, multi-faceted. We are more than just sexual impulse, aren't we? And that so many girls seem to have wound up identifying themselves primarily via their ability to whip themselves up into a frenzy of orgiastic insanity so that lunkhead boys can get off on them, seems gross. Why sign up to be no more than a trashy, hyperactive inflatable doll, when you can be a beautiful, intelligent, self-respecting young woman? Somehow or other, Jenna Jameson - not Rosa Parks, or Florence Nightingale, or Uberfrau Ma Walton, or Amelia Earhart - seems to have become the great idol. Jenna Jameson, the porn star whose "achievements" boil down to only be able to do what any ape or dog can do - have sex - has obliterated them all. And yet we all look over at the Muslim lady in the supermarket wearing a veil and think, "The poor soul...brainwashed...what a pity". Yet I cannot see how obsessively trying to put more mileage on to yourself than the space shuttle, and walking around with your butt and thong and bellybutton and bra and boobs hanging out for all to see, and dishing out blow jobs in pub lavatories or school parking lots, is more praiseworthy than the choice of some devoted wife and mother to wear an outward symbol of her religious commitments. Something's gone really wacko here...

I have children in high school, and based on my own observation, I would bet a thousand bucks that most of the students are far more versed in every last aspect of sexual depravity than in Milton, Newton, or Mozart. Kids can go through an entire 12 years of public school these days without ever being forced to learn how to punctuate a sentence, spell correctly, or do rudimentary math. Yet they all emerge fully prepared to direct porno movies. What happened?

When I ask, what happened?, let me be more clear. What happened to self-respect? What happened to self-discipline? What happened to the ideal of education both deepening and broadening our souls? What happened to the moral centre of the education establishment? I don't get it.

In my perfect world, parents and schools would join together to inculcate habits of self-discipline and self-respect in the young. I would absolutely favour schools adopting dress and grooming standards for students (yes, uniforms), and holding children accountable at every stage for their academic performance. In designing curriculum, I would accept the fact that humans will always idolize someone or other, and see to it that those men and women truly worthy of emulation are held up as such.

I would also favour tying educators's salaries to their achievement, instituting vouchers so parents can choose between schools, and apportioning tax dollars for religious schools (as they do in Canada) providing they meet certain standards. And if some school wants to include corporal punishment for designated offences, and the parents are okay with that, then great. Better a smack on the butt than, say, a cuff on the wrist, or more to the point here, a bun in your girlfriend's oven.

Here I've mentioned only a feeling of nausea and disappointment about all this. I haven't mentioned the STDs, the heartbreak, the unwanted children, the abortions, all the practical reasons for trying to institute some sort of order in this area. But I guess that's a topic for another post.

Now this was a great day...

It is quite rare for me to have "great days" without the kids being involved - in fact I can't remember the last one - but today was one.

Early this morning, I flew from Grand Prairie, Alberta, where I played last night, home to Victoria. I was nervous the whole time because I had lost my keys. I'd ripped my bag apart, the guitar cases, and couldn't find them...and that meant I wouldn't be able to go to the rugby game this afternoon, where I might have a chance of playing (my kit would be locked in the van).

But I finally recalled, sitting in my plane seat, that the last time I had seen my keys, I had almost unthinkingly tossed them into a plastic bin to go through the X-ray machine on the way to Grand Prairie, so I spent all day hoping that when I returned to the Victoria Airport, someone would have found them and turned them in.

And...they had. Wow. Talk about elation. I said goodbye to T. and J. (bass player and drummer), jumped in the van, and headed to one of the most storied rugby pitches in Canada, the James Bay Athletic Association's pitch. I found K. and asked him how numbers were for the Third Division game.

"Low", he said.

Then D. walked past and said, "Where's your kit?". Then I saw C., and he said the same thing. So I thought I would throw my stuff on and play, even though I was pretty fried from the plane travel.

It was an absolutely perfect day, sunny and very warm. I don't know what the official temperature was, but it felt about 78 Farenheit there on the pitch. I played the first 55 minutes at left wing, was then subbed off for ten minutes, and then came on again for K.L. at right wing for the last few minutes.

With each game, I get a bit more comfortable, and a few new things happen. For example, I picked up a kick today and booted it back - first time I've ever attempted a kick. (The arc was low and it hit a big James Bay forward closing in on me square in the chest and bounced right up into the air). I was also in quite a few rucks, as there was lots of play on the perimeter, and got quite a few passes.

I didn't do anything spectacular, but also didn't do anything stupid (that I know of). At some point, I got knocked in the right knee and could barely walk back to the car (it has settled down now). Other than that, everything went okay, though we ended up losing by a hair.

M., the Fijian, had a very good game at fly-half today, with a few spectacular runs, a couple of which ended in tries. I notice he is always quick, and tricky with the ball, and very adventurous, but always seems composed. Actually, a lot of the fellas had very good games.

I came home and showered, and hung out with the kids. I told Sno-Cone and Trixta a Timmy story and a Pizza story, which they both seemed to love (I had them laughing pretty hard during the Pizza story - a little tale about Pizza burning down a restaurant by "accident"), gave Shortcake some medicine and tucked her in, chatted with A-Rock, E, and T-Bone (Tracy is staying here at the moment in a spare bedroom and watched the kids while I was gone).

After the kids were all in bed, Ashton said he would be in charge and I popped down to the rugby clubhouse. To my surprise, it was quite full. A few guys had guitars and everyone was singing. After a few minutes, knowing that I'm a musician, they all started chanting "Tal - Tal - Tal", so I finally obliged and played a few numbers. Actually, I ended up playing piano for about an hour, taking requests. We did "Hey Jude", "Let It Be", a bunch of Bob Marley songs ("Redemption Song", "Is This Love", etc.), "California Dreamin'", "My Girl", and, well, anything anyone suggested really. I actually felt quite shy at first, not being that talented at rugby, but it ended up being pretty hilarious. R. even ended up doing a solo dance while I played "Superstition", which had everyone laughing. He also attempted to sing "TNT" (with me on acoustic guitar), and he was so bad, it sounded instantly legendary.

Afterwards, I hung out and chatted with the two giant young twins from Ontario, L. and C., about football and hockey. I ended up telling them the story of me trying to sing the national anthem at an Islanders home game...I also chatted with T.C., the talented New Zealander outside-half for the Premier squad. The whole while, the lager flowed, and the Fijians did up a batch of kava, their homegrown root beverage which tasted a lot like muddy pond water...

All in all, this rugby thing has turned out to be quite the adventure, and I honestly think I might have gone insane due to all of the emotional turmoil caused by - well, you know, caused by "marital difficulties" - over the past year without it. Never having played a contact sport before (my last stint on any sort of team was when I was fourteen and played baseball), it has really been a challenge in all sorts of ways. But it has really, in a way, been life-changing.

So today was a great day.

Überwindung

"I don't care who's on the other team", barked S, in his Australian accent. Twenty guys, including me, surrounded him in the locker room. "We gotta (expletive deleted) smash them, hammer them. I want to play on the Premier squad. We have to win this! LET'S (expletive deleted) SMASH THEM! Put your hands in - CW on three - one, two, three, CW!!!"

That was loud, I thought. And...uh...kind of violent. I don't think I belong here...

What was I doing there? It was a question I'd asked myself many times - like when I was at practice a couple of weeks before, and R., the coach, had told us to pick up the man next to us and run fifteen metres, then jump on his back while he carried us back, and then made us do it non-stop for four excruciating five minute segments. Or when, at the same practice, we had to do sequences of push-ups with our same partners lying on our backs. Holy Mother of Gawd what am I doing...?, I began thinking.

But there never really was a clear answer. My best guess was some unconscious, primal need for risk, challenge, danger...some need for overcoming (the Überwindung of Nietzsche). But again, it was a guess. The truth was that I was in the throes of another ultimately inexplicable obsession over which I seemed to have no control, and even though I often felt out of place, never having played rugby before, I couldn't stop.

Anyway, back to the locker room.

I walked out into the blazing sunlight - it was about 85 degrees Farenheit - all suited and taped up for a game which I now realized I had no business playing in. This was last Saturday.

See...A few days earlier, I had gotten an email from the team manager inviting me to come down to the club training and intra-squad game day. It sounded like a good way to get some more fitness in, and more importantly, to get some game time in a fairly friendly atmosphere. After all, it was just an intra-squad scrimmage, playing against all the guys I'd see around the clubhouse, or at touch.

So I showed up at 10:00 AM, and casually passed a ball around with a couple of guys. Then L., the coach, called everyone in, and explained that we were about to do two hours of intensive fitness testing so as to help the coaches evaluate who would play on the top team (the Premier team), and who would be relegated to the team below (the First Division). I didn't even start on the Third Division team last spring, and was nowhere near competing for a slot on even the First Division team, let alone the Premier team.

But I was standing there in my shorts and T-shirt, and I couldn't just leave without looking like a dweeb ten minutes after showing up. So...I decided to try to do all the fitness drills. They included things like sprinting five metres, dropping and doing two push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing four push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing eight push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing sixteen push-ups, sprinting ten metres, dropping and doing two sit-ups, then four, then eight, etc., then a series of squats, etc., for twelve minutes. L. made sure to tell us, after twelve minutes of gasping and gagging, that the rugby league team he helped coach in Australia had been able to do that without any problems at all (thanks). We then moved on to a quick agility, passing, and defensive drill (three on two, then the two without the ball turn around and defend against the next three, etc.).

One of the drills I did step aside for, only because the other guys were familiar with it, and I wasn't, and it looked sort of confusing. By the time I'd figured out the choreography of it, L. had stopped it and we'd moved on.

In any case, we drilled for two hours and then ate lunch, with the recent Springboks versus All-Blacks game playing on the big screen while we ate. And then, around 2 PM, everyone started to get ready for the game.

Well...what I had thought was going to be a friendly intra-squad season-opening warm-up game, in fact turned out to be yet another assessment by the coaches: the Premier squad to play against arch-rivals James Bay next week would be selected based on game performance. So instead of a friendly game, it was an all-out war, the club split in half, each man fighting for a shot at glory, potentially a spot on the national team, and if that, potentially a pro career.

"Hey, uh, R.", I said. "I'm not sure I really belong in this game...I'm not competing for a spot on either team, and I don't really want to get killed". R. said he understood and that he wouldn't put me in.

I'll be honest - there is really no other way to describe what I felt other than fear. Never having played until recently, it still seems foreign...and I felt afraid I'd do something stupid. I felt afraid I might do something to lose the game. I felt afraid of being crushed by some jacked-up lunatic (some of the boys are over three hundred pounds, and some of them have played for the national team and are amazing players). Even deeper than that, I think, is still simply the idea of me, a lifelong musician, even playing the sport. It is just hard to get used to, in a strange sort of way.

But, I watched throughout the first half...and the more I watched, the more the obsession rose within me, until by half-time, I couldn't stop myself. For some reason, I had to.

"R. - I want to go in". What the hell, I rationalized to myself. You only live once.

R. looked surprised. "Okay man. Go in at right wing".

And that is how I wound up playing the whole second half in a game I had no business being in, in any way. And as it happened, it was a total blast.

Just a few seconds after the half started, a guy carrying the ball broke three tackles and hit the gap between myself and the outside-centre, slipping behind me. There was now only eight metres between him and the try line. I whirled around and gave chase, managing to catch his jersey with my finger; and if you can believe it, I managed to stop the guy with just my middle finger and thumb long enough to pull him down, and thus save the try. I then jumped up, got back onside, by which time one of my teammates had completed the tackle and was on top of him, and formed a ruck with a second teammate, driving over. In a flash, the opposing team flooded the ruck trying to drive over us toward our try line, which was only now two metres behind us. I pushed hard and hyperextended my left leg, and ended up buried beneath probably eight guys, all pushing forward and thrashing like spawning salmon.

A penalty was then called ("not releasing"), with a quick break in play, and I must say, it boosted my confidence to hear S., the Australian who had issued the violent speech in the locker room, call out, "Great tackle, Tal!".

As it happened, I was in some pain by that time, but I couldn't stomach coming off the pitch only a minute after I'd gone on. It would have looked completely pathetic. So I took a deep breath and vowed to stay on as long as I could. After a few minutes, my ligament settled down and I felt okay (the next day, Sunday, I could hardly move!).

I got a few carries, one of which brought me face to face with E., a gigantic Pacific Islander (yes, he tackled me). I offloaded and play continued.

I didn't do anything really great - no big hits or anything, no tries, with the try-saving tackle as the only thing approaching an actual contribution - but it was a great thrill to have overcome my initial reluctance, and just get on...There is really no feeling like being in the thick of things on the pitch, bodies flying everywhere, people shouting, giants charging at you, everything depending on split-second decision-making.

That night, we all met at the clubhouse to celebrate. I had a few nice chats with the guys, and also was met with the cry of "Buffalo!" on one occasion, which I was mystified by, until SA said that anyone caught holding his beer in his right hand would arouse such a cry, and the penalty was to drink the beer all at once. Since I'd had no idea, I requested a reprieve. But when I got caught a few minutes later again, I did the sporting thing and finished my beer off.

War, Part II

"Okay, everyone loaded?", I said.

"Check", said T-Bone.

"Everyone put the anti-fog stuff on their mask?"

"Check".

"Everyone ready for action?"

"Check".

"Good", I said. "We'll make a plan once we get up there".

Ten minutes later, we were up on the first course. It was rough terrain: ravines, hills, lots of trees and fallen timber, shaped like an elongated-diamond, with a tower at each point. The objective was to capture the flag hanging from the enemy team's tower, before your enemy got yours.

The five of us, along with the other twenty or so guys on our team, crowded around our tower, waiting for the horn to sound. The five of us decided to head up the right side. The pressure - all of it self-imposed, of course - was huge. The world is depending on us. We have to get the flag.

The horn sounded and we ran as fast as we could up the heavily treed trail, down the ravine, to the halfway point, along the far right perimeter.

"Hold up", I shouted. We all hid behind trees for a minute to look for snipers. Nothing. Through the trees, we could see the rest of the paintballers 35 or 40 metres away converging on each other in the middle of the course. "Let's move up".

We began to leapfrog each other up the right perimeter, James and A-Rock sticking together in a pair, T-Bone, E, and I moving up about five metres from each other, hiding behind stumps, trees, and rocks. Within about eight minutes of the game starting, we had moved to within fifteen metres of the tower. Three or four of their soldiers were inside. T-Bone and I crouched behind a corrugated tin panel, E behind a tree, A-Rock and James behind a boulder. The tower guards spotted us and began firing out the windows. We tried to pick them off, but it was impossible.

There is a strange phenomenon which has happened to me now many times playing paintball, and which I might as well pause here to describe. The first couple of times it happened, I thought I was imagining things. But it has happened so often now, and has been so unfailingly reliable, that now I am not sure what to make of it at all. It is eery.

When a game begins, there is an initial rush of adrenaline as you run to get into position. You don't know where your enemies are, or what their plans are, and often you don't even know what your teammates are going to do. So you run and try to get as far as you can, and then take cover, and try to get some idea of what is happening as you try to plan your next move. Often seeing what is happening is impossible. You get pinned down so you can't look around, or even if you can, you can't make out where anyone is. But something has happened to me now a bunch of times, as I really focus, and then focus harder, and then focus even harder: at some point in the battle, a sudden silence will descend upon my mind, so that I can no longer hear the shooting or shouts, or even my own thoughts anymore. It is just a sudden, pure, total silence, which comes unexpectedly, and then...

Some voice tells me exactly what to do. Like, "run behind the far left trees and then straight for the base. GO NOW", or "the last defender just left the tower while you were hiding; GO NOW".

I know it sounds crazy, but everytime I've heard it, I've immediately obeyed it, even when it seemed like the command was suicidal; and every time, I've gotten the flag (or otherwise achieved my objective, e.g., secure the tower).

So, back to the game. I was stuck behind the corrugated tin. There was no way to approach the tower; the people inside were still scanning and shooting at everything. I dashed five metres to my left and hid behind a boulder, got a peek, and saw the flag. It was fifteen metres away, and probably six feet out from the tower on a pole. E, A-Rock, T-Bone, James and I were all within five or six metres of each other, all trying to pick off the tower guards, with no progress being made.

And then it happened again; amidst all the shooting and shouting, suddenly everything went stone silent in my head, and the voice came back, the one I hadn't heard since the last time I went paintballing, and it said, "GO IN FIVE SECONDS: five, four, three, two, one, GO NOW AND KEEP SHOOTING". I obeyed it; I leaped out from behind the boulder; to my amazement, just as I emerged, the shooting from the tower lulled unexpectedly. My right hand veered out and I began spraying the tower (which was at about my 2:30) as I ran, leaping over the rocks and logs...and before I knew it, I had the flag.

The boys were thrilled. The Overlords still had Lord Wotan's magical mojo!

"We're going to dominate", said T-Bone. If it is not obvious, it is particularly important to T-Bone, player of many heroic military video games, that we do well in these games.

T-Bone was right. In every one of the first four games, even though there were almost fifty people playing, our small pod of elite commandos captured the flag. E and T-Bone got the next two, and I got the fourth. The referee - obviously not realizing that no matter he did, the Overlords would come out on top and save the universe - shifted the teams around to try to make us more even.

Not being informed of this, we were caught unaware during Game Five and our team lost.

"No excuses. Unacceptable" was our verdict. "Let them have as many as they want...it's like Agincourt! We must redouble our efforts, men!".

The Overlords charged out in Game Six, and once again, one of us (E) captured the flag. Game Seven was the same. We were on a course featuring four linked towers; in between each pair of towers hung the flag; the object was to capture the flag and touch it to the opponent's base camp. At the sound of the horn, I ran immediately up the ramp, through the first tower, through the second, and grabbed the flag; the enemy unleashed a volley, but none hit me. I got back to base and gave the bag to T-Bone. We then ran into the woods along the left perimeter along with eight or nine teammates, me covering him. And there, we all got pinned down. Our opponents captured the middle of the course, and then came up behind. Unfortunately, we couldn't run forward toward their camp because there were three guys there shooting back at us. One by one, our teammates were getting picked off, and we were getting squeezed. It is hard to describe the feeling of being behind a barricade with three other people, and then over the course of just a minute or two, they all get nailed...and most of the time, you can't even figure out where the paintballs came from.

T-Bone finally got hit. That left E, me, two girls, and as I found out later, A-Rock. The two girls got hit. Six or seven enemies were trying to come from behind; somehow Ashton managed to hold them off all by himself, about twenty feet behind us. I shouted at E to grab the backpack and get down. We were in deep trouble. Then E said, "I'm out of paintballs".

Oh no. We had to do something...we were getting bombarded and there were only three of us left, against at least fifteen of them. I peeked out and saw I had an open shot at someone in the fort underneath the tower. Two shots, direct hits, and he was down...and then, with only a minute or two to go in the game...it happened again.

The voice said, "RIGHT NOW is your only chance. The men just left the base. GO NOW".

It was hard to believe they had left the base - they had been there the whole game - but I jumped out anyway and yelled "RUN BEHIND ME" to E. Just to make sure, I pulled him as I ran past him. And eery as it may sound, it happened again; just as we made our break, there was a sudden lull in the firing, as if all of our enemies had ducked down at the same time. That was fortunate, because we had to run half the length of the entire course to make it to base. And if you can believe it, after enduring all that bombardment for the previous thirteen minutes, we made it to base I think without a single shot being fired at us. We'd caught everyone unawares...and no one could believe we'd ended up winning that one.

The day ended around 4 PM. We had played ten games. Our teams won eight of the ten. In seven out of the eight, though there had been 45 or 50 guys playing, many of whom were competitive paintball players, it had been one of us who had won the game.

"Dad! We completely dominated!" said T-Bone, over and over again.

"We won almost every game", said E. "It's like we're magic!"

And the whole way home, we talked and recounted episodes from the battles, and gave ourselves permission to imagine that we really were elite soldiers of preternatural intuition, smarts, and courage, and that we really would have dominated in real battle a hundred, or a thousand, or seven thousand years ago. And I have to admit - it felt pretty good. The Overlords had saved the world again...

War

"Dad, wake up".

I jolted upright and glanced at the clock. 7:50 AM. My alarm hadn't gone off. What the...? T-Bone, my fourteen year old son, stood in front of me, wearing the genuine US Army camouflage jacket we'd picked from a buddy who frequents military supply auctions.

Twenty minutes later, T-Bone, E (just turned thirteen), A-Rock (sixteen), and A-Rock's buddy James (all decked out in camo) were in the van. Lots of excited chit-chat...but underneath it all, there was an undercurrent of tension. We were all thinking it (except James, not prone to Bachmanian flights of dramatic fancy)...it just hadn't been brought into the open yet.

We are elite. We are the Overlords. We have a reputation to defend. We have a war to win; and winning it is up to us, and only us. If we fail, our whole team fails. If we succeed, our whole team succeeds. It is break or be broken now...and we will break them.

By 9:15 AM, after a McDonald's breakfast, we'd arrived at TNT Paintball, a half hour outside of Victoria. I'd called ahead - a group of 40 kids and parents were coming, plus a couple of dozen more drop ins. We were the first ones there.

"This is good", I said, as we picked out a corner of the barracks. "It gives us time to get in the zone. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae the night before the final battle, when they were all washing up and polishing their armour, focused and calm".

"Hey Dad", E piped up. "Did you know there's no evidence that Ephialtes the herdsman actually betrayed the Spartans and showed the Persians where the mountain pass was, or that he even existed?"

Not again, not E and his weird tangents. "What do you want, a videotape?", I shot back. "It was two and half millenia ago, and the Greeks have been talking about it ever since. That's probably as much proof as you could hope for. Anyway, let's focus".

This was serious, after all. We had been three times before. And each time, we - the four or five of us - had completely dominated, even over the 20-something-year-old ringers who go all the time and have all their own gear. I had even called ahead to alert the ref that we all needed to be on the same team.

"We're an elite squad of commandos", I explained.

"Oh yeah?", said the guy.

"Yeah. We don't split up".

"Well, how many people in your party?"

"Five. Myself plus a thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen year old. And my sixteen year old's buddy", I said.

"Gotcha". He sounded like he was about to laugh. Laugh at the Overlords? We were superheroes about to save the freaking universe! "Well, sure you can be on the same team", he said.

(More to come).

Ghosts of an Ancient Past

I'll be honest - I want to meet my ancestors.

I wonder who they were, what they looked like, how they lived, and what physical or personality traits (due to genetics, that is) we share.

And it is a funny thing...in addition to German, I have Scottish and Ukrainian ancestry, but I feel no affinity with those lines. Like, nothing. I feel as "Ukrainian" as I do Aztec, as Scottish as I do Maori. There is just nothing there, even when I try to make myself feel some resonance...

For some reason, I only feel German, and only ever have. Maybe it is because my grandpa - whose parents immigrated to Canada from the Magdeburg area - was a practical, sensible man; the world seemed to make sense when he would talk. But I have no clue.

What I do know is that - I don't know how to explain this exactly - I feel like I have glimpses inside of me, and they all seem to be set in northern Europe. They include fires at night, chilly temperatures, a certain kind of piny, smoky scent in the cool air, northern skies and constellations, Germanic sounding words, beautiful long songs, and stories, and hard decisions, and furs, and forests which look just like those I've seen in that part of the world...and the glimpses seem to come from a long, long time ago.

One part of the emotional content of those glimpses is the feeling that the world makes sense. For a fleeting moment, I can see and smell and feel something...feel that I loved and was loved; protected and was protected; respected, and was respected back; and the animals and forests and stars, and my people, all fit together. I understand it all...

Another part is a feeling of vigilance, a kind of enervating fear if you like - of predators, human or animals, who might harm those I am responsible for protecting. Another part is some sense of heroism or glory...And I have a woman, a wife, who is all mine, and I'd give my life for her...and we have children.

Do I sound mad? I am not worried if I do, for I feel that I have no control over those glimpses. They are just part of who I am, and who I have always been, and I cannot make them go away. So mad or not, it doesn't matter.

The truth is...I don't know what to make of these glimpses. They seem real, but I suppose, cannot be...They come to me far more often than I would ever wish to admit to; and the truth is, if I could, I would go to that place, and stay there. But I can't.

Vanity and Morality, Part One

It is easy, in the comfort of our own living rooms, to imagine ourselves to be of incorruptible integrity. We would never take a bribe to allow something illegal or evil to occur. We would never stab a friend in the back for our own gain. We would never lie or cheat or steal, maim or kill. We would never take money to injure someone, or work as prostitutes, or allow someone "to treat us that way".

The truth is that we are very fortunate to be able to indulge in such flattering delusions. Most of us live in rich, stable democracies, where we take the rule of law for granted. For us, "hunger" is when we decide to go on our trendy "cleansing fast" for a day, which we then proudly tell everyone about, rather than the involuntary, prolonged, health-destroying agony that it is for millions of others. Many of us are treated pretty fairly at work, and receive fair compensation for our labour. The desperate situations that so many of our fellow human beings have existed in are almost unimaginable to us.

Put us in those dire, desperate circumstances...massively circumscribe our choices... inflict pain on us, or on those we love...and what would we do? Use your imagination, and you will find that there are actually very few "bad things" that you would not do, given certain variables. In fact, you will even find that in extreme situations, many of those bad things begin to appear very much like good things.

Say your child is kidnapped. You live in an area of the world where the police are corrupt and will not help you. You and your friends then are able to capture the kidnapper, who will not tell you where he is keeping your child. Each hour he does not tell, is another hour in which your child may suffer or perish - from hunger, from an assault by others, etc. What do you?

You - to use the technically precise term - torture. You tie him up, beat him, put a Bic lighter to his arm, break his kneecaps, waterboard him. Whatever. You do what it takes to save your child.

In that situation, your choices were radically circumscribed. The kidnapper would not reveal the whereabouts of your child without being tortured. So, the result of refusing to torture the kidnapper would be that you allow your child to be tortured and probably murdered. The result of torturing the kidnapper is that you protect your child from torture and probable murder. Either way, you are at least facilitating torture. So your choice boils down to, which one of these two people gets tortured?

It is remarkable that there are people out there so detached from reality, that they would listen to this little hypothetical and say something like: "The ends don't justify the means" (which certainly in this case qualifies as a thought-terminating cliche); or "There would have to be a better way than torture...".

No, in fact, sometimes, there are no better ways. That's the point. You live in Vermont or Queensland, not in a village in Africa where your child actually was kidnapped by some warlord's henchman. What if you did?

Once we get going, it becomes easy to imagine situations in which we would steal food, push people off bridges, lie, bribe, take bribes, prostitute ourselves, all sorts of rotten things.

Here's another example. You're a cop in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Your annual salary is $1500 (that is actually the average annual wage for a Mexican policeman). One day, a representative from a notorious drug gang contacts you. He tells you that he will pay you $10,000 a year if you simply turn a blind eye to what happens at a certain cantina. If you refuse to cooperate, you will be murdered. You have a wife and kids at home. You want to live. You're also getting a pittance, risking your life trying to enforce the law, when you know that the same drug lords have high-ranking politicians all through the government, and other cops, on their payroll, too. In short, there is nothing, on your own, that you can do to stop the drug gang. You don't know if your own police chief is also on the take; if you report this to him, who knows if he won't tell the gangmembers, and they'll kill you?

In this case, which is the real-life choice faced by quite a number of Mexican cops right now, what choice do you have? And what do you say if your contact one day says to you, "I need you to take this bag to la farmacia and give it to 'Roberto'"? Do you say no?

Say no, and you die, only to be replaced by someone who will say yes anyway.

Say yes, and you survive, and are able to buy your wife pretty things, and give your children more opportunities. Say yes, and you can at least try to compensate for your own corruption by doing good in other ways. Say yes, and rise through the ranks...maybe one day you'll have the power to stop the very sort of corruption which you've been involved in. Say yes, and maybe you can save up and move to America, where such corruption is rarer. But if you say yes, you're a bribe-taker, a drug runner, and you are now protecting an organization which tortures and murders people.

Your conscience says, "If all of us stood up and said 'no' to these thugs, we could defeat them". The problem is that you live in a real world, and that will not happen. There's no way to make it happen. It is just not going to happen. In this real-life situation, the cost of idealism is death.

What do you do?

A Glimpse of Heaven

Last Sunday, I got a glimpse of heaven.

I got up early and fixed up all the family bikes - filled up tires, tightened brakes, replaced chains, etc. - and then my youngest six kids and I rode from Cadboro Bay, where we live, over to Oak Bay (the next bay down). It was really something to see them all lined up riding down the road, especially little four-year-old Trixta (hip-hop name) riding his little bike, his legs pumping furiously since his wheels are only like twelve inches in diameter.

We first rode down to Cadboro Bay Village and then made it up the hilly Cadboro Bay Road, crossing over on to Beach Drive through the large "Uplands" pillars. Uplands is a beautiful neighbourhood, full of big houses and manicured, landscaped lawns, and is on a small bluff overlooking the ocean (and at one point, the Oak Bay Yacht Club). Even our one mishap turned out great - T-Bone got a flat tire, and I had to call Spoiler (my brother) to come help us. We threw a rugby ball around on a small piece of grass bordering the sidewalk as we waited. Spoiler finally showed up in his big old GMC pick-up - a bizarre site in that neighbourhood - and proceeded to drive right over the curb and sidewalk toward us. We attached the aerosol tire-filler thing he brought to T-Bone's wheel, but to no avail - we finally just threw his bike in the back of the pick-up, and the other kids and I continued riding, and met up with Spoiler and T-Bone at Willows Beach. After a game of touch rugby on the grass, we all slipped down to the beach and had a rock throwing contest, and then headed up to Willows Galley, the local fish and chip shop.

Of course, my two oldest sons weren't there; they're off now with friends and girlfriends most of the time. It would have been fun if they had been, but then, they are all but out of the nest now. What I did regret was that Mommy wasn't there...but I guess a discussion of that is beyond the scope of this entry.

It has been a long time since I saw the kids as happy as I saw them on our ride. I guess it was something about all being together, and all experiencing so much pleasant sensory input: the big blue sunny sky, the popping flowers all around, the smell of the ocean and trees and blooms, the feeling of freedom on the bikes, the thrill of novelty (since we had never taken this trip before), the feeling of satisfaction at being able to overcome a challenge, the delicious fish and chips at Willows Galley...the whole experience, simple as it was, made a deep impression, and the kids have been talking about it for the last week.

In life, it is the simple pleasures which count. Being with those you care about, and who care about you, communicating with them, laughing with them, experiencing the world and each other in new ways...those are the moments which remain with me always...those are the moments I cherish most.

Why Does Leonardo DiCaprio Keep Getting the Shaft?

I'm preaching the Hollywood gospel here. Today's topic is Hollywood leading men.
Tom Cruise is a bizarre, control-freak twerp. Nicolas Cage is an embarrassment. Ben Affleck has poisoned his career by becoming a disgusting tabloid figure. Matt Damon has played his cards right and been in some great movies, but has been rewarded by the Oscar committee. What I don't get is, why hasn't Leonardo DiCaprio gotten an Oscar yet?

Leonardo DiCaprio, with the possible exception of his role in the saccharine monument to James Cameron's vanity that is "Titanic", has been great in everything. He was great in "Gilbert Grape", great in "The Departed", great in "Catch Me If You Can", great in "The Blood Diamond"....he's always great. Where is his Oscar?

DiCaprio's performances have been all the more remarkable for their range; yet for some reason...he's not getting the love from the establishment.

What's up with that?

Estranged

I've been waiting for something to strike me here for a couple of weeks, and nothing has. I don't know what to write about anymore.

I did have a rugby game today - a playoff game in fact, against Velox at Windsor Park in Oak Bay. But as a newbie, I only played a few minutes. No carries, one tackle. I hung out at the Castaway Wanderers clubhouse this evening, chatting - that was fun.

But overall, I don't know what to say anymore, and even though I feel that familiar awe as the earth comes back to life, and am having a great time with rugby, I feel a sort of emptiness inside, and it never quite goes away.

Perhaps seeking out religion is one way of coping with that for some people; but then, I always felt that emptiness as a devout religionist, too. Maybe it is something about me, some flaw which can never really be repaired.

I feel - and have felt for a very long time - as though there is a part of me which isn't really here, or doesn't really belong here (here being, wherever I am). And I drive around sometimes, like I used to do in White Rock, where I went to high school, realizing that while everything around seems familiar, everything feels foreign, too, in some way I can't describe. But I can never figure out why, and I never hear anyone else say such things, and I don't know what to make of it. It is as though I am always outside myself.

The E Update

Long-time blog readers will know that my 12 year old son, nicknamed "E" (also known as Skinny Dip) switched from soccer to rugby last summer. I was disappointed at the time - we had put a lot of time and effort into helping him pursue his soccer dreams - but things are going very well. And in fact, I've found his efforts pretty inspirational.

You see, E is the youngest, shortest, and skinniest boy on his team - and probably in the entire league - and yet seems entirely unaffected by this. Putting it another way, playing rugby is like running around in the middle of a wildebeest stampede knowing that you will be trampled; it can be intimidating, even when you're the same size as the wildebeests. But what about when they're twice as big?(Compare his size to that of others especially in the top right photo here). Despite the massive size difference, E - in other ways, an extremely high-strung and at times fearful boy - plays rugby with the cool, determined confidence of a boy twice his size.

And it wasn't that long ago that I stood watching him grab the ball and start running, and then being piled on in the ruck, that I thought, "If he can do it, I can do it". And the next week, I did.

So, good on you, E. Ten points for bravery!

Live from Powell River

I was falling...blissful sleep dangled before my closed eyes...and it kept happening. I had my ear plugs in, but I could hear a faint murmur from the back of the bus; and then, about every fifty or so seconds, the murmur would explode:

"PWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HARR-HARR-OOOO-YEAH!-HAHAHA-ARRR-(COUGH)-HAAA". And I'd wake up again.

It sounded like I was on a 17th century pirate ship. In fact, I was on the bus traveling up to Powell River, BC, to play in my second ever rugby game.

Powell River is a long way - a five hour trip each way. No wonder numbers were low. Only fourteen guys showed up, and of those, five or six were Premier League players. That's the top rugby league in town. They'd been called in to help out; the Castaway Wanderers Third Division team is brand new, after all. I suppose it will take a bit of time for things to establish themselves, including consistent attendance.

Anyway, I did finally doze off. Which was good, since I'd only gotten to bed around 2:30 the night before, and I had to wake up at 6 to catch the team bus. While I was awake, I ended up chatting with Alex - a studious chap for a rugby player - about artificial intelligence and the possibility of machine consciousness, and also with a few other guys.

Fortunately, Powell River agreed to play us fourteen on fourteen. I was at right wing again, and was fortunate to get a lot more carries than in my first game. I didn't score, but I'm getting the hang of things, and that's exciting. In fact, in the Powell River game, it felt like I was playing in an actual rugby game, rather than it feeling like I had just dropped acid and was on some sort of surreal slow-motion trip, which is how I felt in my first game. So, that was good, and once again, all the guys helped out.

Unfortunately, we lost the game due to a young Powell River player, a Fijian, who was able to break through the line and score, I think, four tries. Pity.

But...the frustration didn't last long. We got back to the clubhouse, showered, dressed, and then were treated to a great dinner by Powell River, replete with a drinking contest between four of the players, a few jolly speeches, and a lot of laughs. One thing that got a lot of laughs was this. Someone said to me, "Hey - didn't you win a Juno?".

"Yeah, two actually", I mumbled.

"You seem pretty casual about that", the guy said.

And I was totally serious when I replied, "I'd be a lot more excited if I scored a couple of tries".

For whatever reason, the entire table erupted in laughter, and the little exchange was repeated a few times on the bus home for the benefit of those who hadn't heard it. I can't explain why, but I really would be a lot more excited to score a couple of tries...!

Ah, the ride home. That was something.

You see, someone ran to the liquor store and bought an entire crate of beer as we were in line for the ferry...and, well, long story short is, the ride home made the ride there seem like a prayer meeting. Things got louder and louder, more and more raucous and frenzied, and for the last two hours, I played guitar while a bunch of the boys sang as loudly as they could: Beatles songs, Tom Petty songs, Stone Temple Pilots songs, Chili Peppers songs, Neil Young songs, dozens and dozens of songs.

Playing rugby seems to the closest thing readily available to actually joining the army and getting shot at together (always a bonding experience). Quite the experience so far.

Just keeping a log of my rugby games,

T.

Seals, Fish, Cows - What's the Difference?

The seal hunt started today, and all the usual people have started their annual freakout. The European Union, for example, is up in arms about the seal hunt and wants to shut it down permanently. It is now reportedly considering banning the sale of seal products in protest.

Young seals are killed traditionally by the Inuit peoples of the arctic with a single whack to the head - the same way that fishermen usually kill fish. A single gunshot is now the mode of choice for seals. Either way, what is more "brutal" about a whack or a bullet, than about the mode of slaughter in your local slaughterhouse - the place where they slash the throats out of dozens of cows a day? If anything, the seal hunt is far more humane.

For the EU to be consistent, it needs to ban all meat-eating. Yet the French are still eating foie gras, the Belgians are still eating frog legs, and the Germans are still eating sausage. How does that make sense? How do EU bureaucrats think that the ducks, frogs, and pigs they eat get from the state of being alive, to the state of being dead, except via being killed? It's bizarre. The guys at the EU are probably eating chicken for dinner right now, with no sense of hypocrisy at all.

As if that wasn't enough, amigos, the EU is the same organization which has continued to allow BULLFIGHTING in Spain! Why, how could they ever ban bullfighting, when it's part of Spain's "cultural heritage"? Yet the fact that the seal hunt has been a primary pillar of Inuit culture in Canada for tens of thousands of years, and maritime culture for hundreds, means nothing to these pampered snobs. It doesn't matter even that the Inuit literally utilize every part of the seal it is possible to utilize: bones, fat, eyes, meat, organs, everything, or that the maritimers also try to sell as much of the seal as possible. It also doesn't matter to the protesters that the seal population, if left unchecked, would decimate fish stocks, and then probably start dying of starvation. No - all that matters is that young seals are cuter than fat old bulls, sheep, ducks, turkeys, geese, frogs, snails, cows, goats, salmon, cod, herring, and every other living creature that EU bureaucrats, and 90% of the rest of the protesters, eat.

Killing a seal for food is no different in principle than killing a duck, deer, or moose for food. Unless the activists are also calling for a total ban on carnivorousness, their position is incoherent.

And if they are calling for the end of carnivorousness...well, that is a subject for another blog entry.

Special Olympics Bowling

So Barack Obama is getting crucified today because the other night on the Jay Leno Show, he said, in referring to his inability to bowl, that it was "like Special Olympics or something".

I don't understand the world anymore. It's like the most popular pastime out there is waiting around trying to see or hear something to get offended by, after which the challenge is to make the biggest fuss possible about the offense. And if you can somehow launch a lawsuit over your wounded feelings, even better. Meanwhile, the offender has to grovel and bootlick until the offended party announces that enough is enough. It's like some weird perverted master-slave ritual which people now participate in, unquestioningly, instantly.

One of the all-time classic idiotic examples of this came a few years ago, when a (white) comptroller for the city of Washington, D.C. used the adjective "niggardly", and was forced to resign his job because of the word's similarity to the "n word". That "niggardly" is an ancient word, probably of Old Norse origin, which has no relationship whatsoever to the corrupted Spanish word for black ("negro") which is the "n word", was too complicated a fact for many of the offended to understand.

Anyway, I don't know why the Special Olympics people had to freak out over a stupid joke. If I were the president of that organization, I think I would have said, in the best of humour, "President Obama has thrown the gauntlet down, so I want to formally invite him to stand up to his challenge, and to compete in a charity bowling tournament against some of our Special athletes. President Obama, you name the day!". And Obama couldn't refuse without looking like a total dweeb. And that way, the organization gets tons of publicity, MONEY, public support, and they don't look like just another pack of whiners waiting around to feel offended.

Just my two cents,

Tal

Live from the Pigpen

The referee blew the whistle. Line-out to Castaway Wanderers.

Quickly, the Castaway Wanderers lined up against the Cowichan Piggies (yes, that is their name - you'll find out why below), waiting for the throw-in, over on the right side of the field. I stood a few metres behind Chris, the scrum-half, wearing a Castaway Wanderers jersey like the rest of my brand new teammates, having just run on to the pitch to play in my first rugby game ever.

A lot of things could happen now, I thought. One thing that could happen is that the Piggies could steal the line-out throw, charge past the players in front of me, and then en masse trample me. The hulking Cowichan forwards made that seem like an awfully painful prospect. Another, more likely, thing, would be for Chris to get the ball and pass it left, away from me.

Just then, the line-out throw came in, and play started. Holy cow...this is it. Chris got the ball and began running forwards and to the right. I ran about eight feet to his right, and two steps behind...and as there was no play to his left, and I was the only person to his right, I knew in a split-second that I was going to get a pass - three seconds after I'd stepped into a game for the very first time.

Chris glanced as he was running and tossed it over. It was behind me, as it happened, but I was able to reach back with my left hand as I was running and grab it, reeling it in. Thank God. Two steps later, I was at full-speed, determined to break as many tackles as I could before being crushed by the brutes in black and green jerseys now closing in on me (the Castaway Wanderers jerseys are black, blue, and red).

I pushed off the first would-be tackler and kept running. Another guy was running full speed at me from a diagonal angle (from my 10:30 on the clock). I stopped on a dime and he flew past me. And in that split-second, I sensed the possibility of glory...while the horde was closing in fast, there was only guy directly ahead of me. Other than him, there were fifty metres of open space (actually, open mud, hence the pitch's name: "The Pigpen", and the name of the Cowichan team, the Piggies) to the try line. The second tackler now flying past two feet in front of me unable to stop, I took an accelerating step, determined to beat the last guy - when some guy I never saw coming flattened me from behind (from about 5 o'clock). And as he did so, he punched the ball out of my right arm. ARG. Knock-on (the ball went forward). The ref blew the whistle and the ball was turned over to Cowichan.

That all happened in my first ten seconds of my first rugby game last Sunday (I was at right-wing, the number fourteen position). We ended up losing the game, but it was great to finally be able to play in a game, and I really appreciated the support from the other guys on the team.

I became very keenly aware of just how much more muscle mass I need after my eighty minutes on the pitch...I'm fit enough, but lithe, and my focus now is getting muscular bulk as quickly as possible, so that next time I step on to a pitch, I don't get killed. Surviving would be really cool (and for some reason I can't explain, not playing again is not an option).

Sunday night, my brother and I popped into a local pub where a bunch of the guys from one of the more elite Castaway Wanderers teams were hanging out. I got to talking to one guy, and he said, "it's exciting, isn't it? It's kill or be killed".

And I guess this would be the time to ramble into some deep insight about the primal thrill of risk for some sense of personal achievement, or some glory...but I'm not really sure the sheer joy of getting your head kicked in running around in a mudpit can translate into words. So...I think I'll just end it here. Looks my amateur rugby career has officially begun :)

Where Did We Come From?

For most of my life (as a believing Mormon), I was under the impression that humans had spirits, and that those spirits came from some sort of sexual union between Heavenly Father and one of his innumerable polygamous wives, up where they lived, near a star called "Kolob".

How Kolobian reproduction exactly occurred was never really specified by Mormon leaders; the process was especially mysterious since Mormon doctrine states that God and his wives have "bodies of flesh and bone" - so one question always was, how do perfected human beings, with bodies of flesh and bone, sire children who don't have flesh and bone, and who are only some sort of barely material spirit? Hm...

Anyway, to make a long story short, I no longer find KSRT (Kolobian Spirit Reproduction Theory) plausible. I don't really find any religious answer to this question plausible. So the question is, where does human life - or life in general - really come from?

The answer is, no one has a clue. No one has ever come even remotely close to showing, let alone plausibly arguing, how life can emerge from non-life. The once-vaunted Stanley Miller experiments have long been recognized as pretty much useless...there are hazy suggestions about lightning striking a pond, or oceanic vents, or volcanoes, and even life showing up here on a comet from another planet (known as the "panspermia" theory). But no one can explain how the vital equivalent of a bunch of rocks could somehow become alive; and not just alive, but in that moment, posessing some kind of will to keep on living, and some desire to reproduce, and some ability to reproduce. And in fact, the very idea seems at least as absurd as the one I began this entry mentioning.

I don't like this. I'd like to know where we - where I - came from. Where, how, did it all begin?

Nanny 911

If you haven't seen it yet, "Nanny 911" is a reality show featuring British nannies who spend a week with a family with unruly children, trying to bring order to things.

It is absolutely amazing to me how clueless the parents are in this show. In some cases, the dad is the clueless one; in others, the mom. Often it is both. Peering in to these homes is like watching hell on earth: kids shrieking, smashing things, biting, kicking, and parents acting, in many cases, far less intelligently than their own toddlers.

What's funny is my kids will sit and watch this show for hours. They've never seen kids like that. We even ended up making up our own "Nanny 911" game, where I roll up a newspaper (so it's sort of floppy), and then I start snarling and drawling with a Bible Belt twang like the clueless parents on the show, and the kids start running around screaming, and I run after them trying to swat them with the rolled up newspaper. The cool thing is that because it's loosely rolled, it doesn't hurt at all, but it does make a giant "thwack!" sound. And the more I run after them, the more they scream and run around laughing and pretending to be the outrageous brats on the actual TV show.

I am not, and never have been, really capable of understanding why any adult would allow a three year old to bite them, kick them, and in effect, completely dominate them. Why have kids if you're going to have a miserable time with them? Why become a slave to anyone, let alone a three year old? The whole point of having children is to have a great time with them, establish and enjoy those intimate bonds of love and connection with them, and prepare them for responsible adulthood. That preparation means having fair, sensible expectations, articulating them effectively, and then holding children accountable for their decisions. My previous two sentences are really the whole key to parenting, I think.

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't judge the parents on "Nanny 911". No doubt they are doing the best they can...still, I just don't...get it.

Go Cardinals

I grew up following the NFL during the era of Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and Lynn Swann. The Steelers of the late 70's, early 80's, were big, bad, mean, uncompromising...and while I was keenly aware of the spell that they cast on so many people around the country, I never fell victim to it for some reason. Maybe it was because I was way out west, in Washington state, excited by the upstart Seahawks - Pittsburgh seemed like a long ways away. I was more into Jim Zorn, Steve Largent, and Steve Raible.

Even so, I was never really blown away by anyone I saw, until many years later when Kurt Warner - fresh from his job bagging groceries - exploded on to the scene as the Rams's starting QB. I'd watched Staubach, Bradshaw, Plunkett, Montana, Young...but I'd never seen any quarterback with as much total composure, as much peaceful intensity, as Warner. That was inspiring. I'd gotten married very young, and with small children and a young immigrant wife, I often felt a lot of pressure - felt often that there were a lot of problems and crises I had to solve or everything would fall apart - and I suppose that a part of me liked to imagine that I had a fraction of the same composure and wherewithal that I saw in Warner. And, I aimed to get more of it.

Now here we are, in 2009, years after we all thought we'd seen the last of Warner, on the eve of his third Super Bowl, and yeah, I am totally rooting for the Cardinals. It's not just my admiration of Warner's unique poise; Cardinals's coach Ken Whisenhunt, in my view, got the shaft being passed over by the Steeler's organization (no disrespect to Steeler's coach Mike Tomlin), and it would be nice to see him get some revenge. But maybe more is that people have dissed the Cardinals's for so long...and the media love affair with the Steelers is so intense...and the Cardinals are out here, out west...and that Warner and I are close in age...it'd be really cool to see the underdogs bring their A game and win.

My guess is that we will see the Cardinals pretty much go with what got them where they are: a lot of passing. I also think they'll use Fitzgerald as a decoy to get a lot of shorter passing options. I expect the Steelers to come out very aggressively offensively, but I also expect the Cardinal defence to be prepared for that.

Prediction: 38-27 Cardinals.

Go Cards!

Comments on "Lost"

1.) Can someone remind me of what Jack has ever done? How did that spaz ever get to be the "leader" of anyone? I don't get it. He's the most irritating character on the whole show, and maybe, on TV right now.

2.) Does anyone else keep thinking that we're going to find out eventually that Ben is actually a good guy?

3.) When do we get to see the charming Claire again?

4.) Who else thinks Sun is up to something sinister?

5.) Why couldn't Hurley have just said no to Ben, instead of giving himself up to the police, especially after AnnaLucia told him to not get arrested?

6.) I think Jin's still alive...

Add comments or questions below.

Ten Mediocre Things

I think of good, bad, and mediocre as sort of being on a circle. Imagine a clock. The six is the dividing line between horrific and flawless - that is, they are adjacent. Twelve is mediocre, and it just fans down from there on either side.

For me anyway, mediocre is a lot farther away from horrific and flawless, than horrific and flawless are from each other. In reality, the dividing line between horrific and flawless is often very slim, which is why I hate mediocre a lot more than horrific. Remember "Springtime for Hitler"? It was so bad, it was great. Neil Young solos are like that, too, as are Michael Bolton vocal performances. My friend Kevin tells me that the John Travolta movie "Face Off" is the same - so horrific that it's actually brilliant. I could say the same for Bret Michael's TV show "Rock of Love", or McDonald's, or Robert Plant ad libs.

Anyway, here is a list of ten mediocre things. They're not horrific, they're not great...they're just out there, floating, refusing to take a stand one way or the other, being really mediocre. Booooo.

10.) The Phillips screw (the Robertson screw, the standard in Canada but unavailable in the US, is far superior).

9.) The Snickers Bar

8.) CNN legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin (close to horrific because of intolerably smug attitude, yet his mediocrity overwhelms even that).

7.) CNN

6.) Swiss Army Knives

5.) Kellogg's Corn Flakes

4.) The Vancouver Canucks

3.) Gibson acoustic guitars (and hugely overpriced)

2.) Colgate toothpaste

1.) English Leather aftershave

Add your Ten Mediocre Things below.

A Boy Named Pizza

They were obsessive. Every morning, every night, breakfast time, dinnertime, in the car, in the tub, everywhere...

"Dad, can you tell us another story?". J-Dawg was four, A-Roq was three. I was flattered, in a way; this must mean my stories are pretty good, I thought. But other times, staggering in mentally exhausted from the studio, I would sometimes think, What am I, Hans Christian Andersen? I need some peace - please!

But I figured that those enchanting days wouldn't last, and so I always tried to indulge my two little boys. I was a pretty new dad - not the grizzled veteran I am now (:P) - and hell, I was enjoying the adventure. So I was always on the lookout for new story ideas - in the paper, in magazines, on TV. I'd get an idea and adapt it so they would understand.

Sometimes the stories were true; most of the time, I would invent stories, about little boys with a pet dinosaur, or performing some heroic mission as a soldier, or sailing off in search of lost treasure. I remember one story series from when J-Dawg and A-Roq were six and five, which I entitled "The Silver Dragon". It was about a boy who became the assistant to a samurai warrior in medieval Japan. The boy's master was the most fearsome warrior in the whole army; but then the master fell desperately ill and couldn't fight anymore. Knowledge of this would cause the army to lose heart, and their enemies to gain confidence, so it had to be kept secret. The master tried to get better, but only got sicker, with the army continuing to send messages for him to come and help them.

Fearing death and worried about the fate of the army, the master finally came up with a plan. He had seen his assistant's devotion and intelligence. In fact, the boy seemed very special indeed - the master had never seen his equal. So he decided there was only one way to help the army: teach his young assistant all the secret tricks to being the ultimate samurai swordsman, and then send the boy out wearing his armour (disguised as his master) to fight in his stead.

Each night, the story advanced; it just seemed to write itself; and J-Dawg and A-Roq, along with T-Bone, who was just getting old enough to understand, would listen in rapt silence as the master taught his pupil everything. "To be fast, you must be slow"; "to be strong, you must be weak"; "to succeed, you must fail": the master would always start his lessons with a contradiction, but would then go on to explain just what he meant, and how it really made sense.

Finally, one day as the boy sparred with another servant, the master realized the boy was ready. End of the story is, the boy goes on to be a hero, and becomes known as the "The Silver Dragon", etc.

But that was not the most successful story I ever came up with. It was one night, after dinner, when the boys began clamouring for another story, another story, another story...I just couldn't think of anything else. I'd exhausted every last story idea I had floating round in my head, and I was totally blank. And then I remember very distinctly, just starting yet another one with no idea where it would go:

"Okay, here's another one. Once upon a time there was a boy named..."

And in that split second, a word came out:

"...there was a boy named Pizza".

I remember the look on the boys's faces. They were suddenly dumbstruck, their eyes wider than ever in excitement and anticipation. Total silence.

Wow. Maybe I have something here...

"Pizza was five years old, with red hair and freckles. And....um....Pizza was a very, very naughty boy".

I glanced at them. A-Roq sucking his thumb, eyes still wide, J-Dawg, riveted gaze...

"One day, Pizza went out to the garage where his dad was working on the car. All of a sudden, the phone rang. Pizza's daddy said, "Okay Pizza, I have to go get the phone. Make sure you don't touch anything in here. Just stay right there and I'll be back in a second. Okay?'"

"'Okay', said Pizza".

"Pizza's dad walked through the door and into the kitchen. Pizza was now all alone in the garage...and he started to think about how cool it would be to drive a car around all by himself. 'I can hardly wait till I grow up', he thought to himself".

"And the more Pizza thought about how cool it would be to drive, the more he wanted to sit in the front seat of the car and pretend, until finally, he decided that it would be okay if he just snuck into the front seat, just for a second, to pretend to drive the car. So he opened up the door and slipped in. 'Vrrrm vrmmm!', said Pizza. He moved the steering wheel back and forth. He had seen his dad turn the car keys a bunch of times, and decided he was going to pretend to start the car just like him."

"But.....just as Pizza put his fingers on the keys, he sneezed; his hand shook and he turned the keys by accident - and the car started!"

The boys remained rapt.

"And then Pizza got super scared. Maybe he was going to get in trouble. So he tried to turn the keys so as to turn the car off, but as he was fiddling around, he accidentally knocked the car's gear shift into reverse! The car started going backwards! Pizza tried to put his foot on the brake like he'd seen his dad do, but by accident, he put his foot on to the GAS! And the car suddenly jolted backwards and smashed right through their garage door! OH NO!"

By the end of the story, Pizza had smashed over fire hydrants, driven off a bridge, been chased by sharks, gotten hit by a passing freighter, got taken to a hospital where he disobeyed the nurse's instructions by hanging out the window to look down below, whereupon he fell into the back of an open garbage truck and was then deposited at the city dump covered in rotting slime, had to walk home freezing and injured all night, had broken his left arm, bleeding lip, and all because he hadn't obeyed his dad (subsequent stories would include mom).

I finished the story with Pizza lying his bed with a cast on his arm, bandages around his head, with a black eye, with his mom and dad saying, "Pizza...we love you, but you must remember: when we ask you to obey us, it's for your own good. Please be a good little boy now, and go right to sleep. Please don't try to walk around - your leg is injured. Call us if you need something, but whatever you do, don't get up and try to walk around".

I stopped talking.

About five seconds passed. And then, all hell broke loose.

"DAD CAN YOU TELL US ANOTHER STORY ABOUT PIZZA WANNA PIZZA STORY DAD PLEASE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT DAD PLEASE TELL US ANOTHER PIZZA STORY CAN YOU TELL ME A STORY ABOUT PIZZA PLEASE"

And as God is my witness, I was hounded by those two for like the next, I would say, three solid years, for more Pizza stories. It never got old (for them anyway). It was really the same story over and over: Pizza's mom or dad would ask him to do something perfectly sensible, his curiosity would get the best of him, he would decide it was okay to disobey, one thing would lead to another, and by the end of the story, he would have been grabbed and taken away by gigantic eagles, been framed for a bank robbery, captured by Malaysian pirates, drafted into the Iranian army, would have crashed a motorcycle into a train, slipped down eight flights of stairs and knocked his teeth out...and J-Dawg and A-Roq's appetite for cosmic retribution for disobedience (or maybe I should just say, their appetite for perversity) seemed limitless, and we ended up spending hours laughing at how ridiculous the stories got.

And now, a decade later, my little boys Sno-cone and Trixta, six and three, continue to pester me to tell them Pizza stories (my little girls aren't as keen on Pizza stories...).

One day, maybe I'll write up a few and pitch them to a publisher...but then, it's hard to believe I'd ever get anywhere. What school librarian would ever recommend books about a really bad boy who winds up strapped to the outside of a submerging submarine, or being trampled by a herd of goats, or falling down a manhole into the city sewer?

Cicero's Dust

Are we who he says we are? It seems
Both true and untrue, sane and insane
Yet all the same, beyond the power to deny

For...

There is a stillness at the heart of being
A quiet awe, a reverence amidst the clash
Of battles, sorrow, anguished falls
And prizes lost and blood that runs
A quiet spanning back and deep
Inside a tunnel round and endless
Where light never fades

There is a memory, only shadowed, flick'ring
A glimpse within each cell, within each mind
Apart from any stilted credo
In and through each everything we are
Forlorn and distant from that place
Preceding hour or day

And all those notions that we can't but scorn
When thinking thoughts in rightest, sharpest mind
Well up from under reason's gloss
Like clovers through a mortared stone
Who can shout them down, or chase
Them into nothingness?

We come, he says, from out there, from the stars
From gods who created us, some race of unknowns
Yet known through echoes of intuition
We live, he says, forever, somehow,
Some way, more than dusty dust
He says, "We have some other sort
inside" -

A diamond dust of the divine
For all our madness. He says
He knows it, feels it, knows it,
Knows it, knows it, knows it.

I feel it, too, but do not know it
I sense it, but cannot grasp it
I see it, but cannot describe it
I love it, but cannot fathom what it is
That stillness at the heart of being

Ten Worst Things

10.) The worst picture of Hilary Clinton: See left.

9.) The worst fast-food restaurant: Burger King.

8.) The worst Beatles song: "Revolution #9".

7.) The worst car: AMC Gremlin.

6.) The worst NBA executive: tie between Isaiah Thomas and Stu Jackson.

5.) The worst make-up: now that Tammy Faye Bakker is dead, Gloria Allred.

4.) The worst hair on a male TV personality: Ted Koppel.

3.) The worst non-fiction best-seller of the past five years: "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.

2.) The worst big movie of the year: "Twilight".

1.) The worst NHL team name: tie between The Predators (you're supposed to pick a specific predator) and The Senators (who names a sports team after politicians?).

Post your ten worst things below!

Ten Best Things

10.) The best peanut butter: Jif Extra Crunchy.

9.) The best acoustic guitar for the money: Yamaha FG-720S (and 730S).

8.) The best overall temperature: 68 degrees (no wind chill).

7.) The best fitness magazine: Men's/Women's Fitness RX.

6.) The best wheat ale: Widmer, from Portland, Oregon.

5.) The best birthday activity: paintball.

4.) The best NHL captain: Jarome Iginla of the Calgary Flames.

3.) The best actor under forty: Leonardo DiCaprio.

2.) The best men's clothes manufacturer: Boss.

1.) The best overall cut of meat: rib steak.

Add your suggestions below.

A Sad Day for British Columbia: Two Mormon Fundamentalists Indicted for Polygamy (Revised)

Wally Oppal, pompous buffoon and British Columbia's current Attorney General, has finally caved in to the hysterical demands of illiberal ideologues and charged two of BC's Mormon fundamentalist men with polygamy. Words cannot express how I loathe this sort of thing, and I don't even know where to begin in trying...everything about it is totally wrong. It is totally outrageous.

Where to begin?

Canada passed a law in 1892 banning "conjugal" relationships, though not sex, with more than one person. This the anti-polygamy law under which BC polygamists are now being charged.

So...it is okay for Mr. Jones to have a wife but also a revolving door policy towards girlfriends. It is okay for him to sire kids with a bunch of them. It is okay for him to have a mistress, or 100 mistresses. But if Mr. Jones, with the full consent of all the women involved, lives with any of them as a husband, even sporadically, and/or supports them and his children financially as as a husband would, he ought to go to jail.

I don't get that. Can someone explain it to me? If government in fact has some compelling interest in, or some viable argument for, maintaining a monopoly over the legitimation of certain social/sexual relationships between consenting adults, I can't imagine what those might be. Certainly I've never heard any sensible account of either; and why government should worry about who hooks up with whom, or for how long, when it cannot even stop us from killing, maiming, raping, and stealing from each other, is quite beyond my comprehension.

Even granting that government could make some sort of sensible claim over monopolizing the legitimation of certain human relationships, I'm curious to know how they came up with the "one man-one woman" "one true definition of marriage" conclusion. After all, the Mormon fundamentalists they're charging are certain that they know the "one true definition of marriage", and that it is "one man, many women".

In truth, neither the province of British Columbia, nor the religious believers they are now prosecuting in the most bigoted fashion, knows anything about a "one true definition of marriage", because no such thing exists. There are only people; and in different cultures and different times, and according to their own desires or needs, they engage in all sorts of different marital relationships...and as far as I can see, the only thing that matters is that the participants consent, and that they are old enough to know what they are consenting to.

Every time anyone starts saying any of this, there are always people who pipe up and say, "What about the underage marriages?". But in reality, underage marriages have nothing to do with any of this - they can, and should be, prosecuted in polygamous contexts as much as in monogamous contexts. There is no, and never has been any, dispute about that. But it is not even what we are talking about here.

What we are talking about here is a form of relationship which, in its essence, is actually identical in nature to that practiced by many British Columbians, but which is being prosecuted in only one case: when a certain type of religious believer practices it on religious grounds.

And that is total BS, the definition of government bullying. I don't really see how some man-about-town with eight or ten ladies who he "sees" is doing anything essentially different than some guy who lives in Bountiful with eight wives. That the latter talks about Mormon founder Joseph Smith while the former talks about Hugh Hefner, makes, or should make, no difference. You can't punish a guy for committing Act X just because of the religion he belongs to, and then turn a blind eye to everyone else committing just the same Act X only on grounds that they're not religious at all.

Wally Oppal should be ashamed of himself. As the attorney-general, he is supposed to ensure that BC law is applied fairly. With this act, he is actually spearheading an effort to apply it in the most bigoted fashion.

If men and women wish to remain celibate, be monogamous, be gay, be straight, be in "open marriages", act like sluts, enter into polygamous or group marriages, and do so for whatever reason...who cares? What business is it of Wally Oppal's? He doesn't crack down on homosexual promiscuity. He doesn't crack down on everday heterosexual promiscuity. He doesn't crack down on all his buddies who have mistresses. But he cracks down on religious believers who do the same thing?

Not fair. Wally Oppal is a weak-willed bully who ought to be replaced by someone with respect for provincial and Constitutional law, and their fair application.

Roland Burris Should Be Seated

Under Illinois law, the governor has the legal authority to appoint a new senator in the case of a vacated seat. So to fill Barack Obama's seat, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris. Yet Senate Democrats today refused to allow Burris to take his seat.

The argument seems to be that because Blagojevich is under suspicion of having tried to sell the Senate seat, no candidate he appoints should be seated. This is ridiculous. Blagojevich may very well be corrupt and guilty, but he has not been found guilty and is still serving as governor. More importantly, there is absolutely no evidence that Burris has in any way purchased his seat.

This whole episode has been a farce, right from Patrick Fitzgerald's ham-fisted (if not unethical) handling of the whole case, to the Democrats's preference for public image over fairness and the presumption of innocence. Good on Dianne Feinstein for publicly voicing her disagreement with her party's leaders. I think that's the first thing she's ever done that I agree with...!

Who Invented Romantic Love?

For many decades, at least in the West, the most prevalent view of man/woman romantic love has been that it is a very recent invention, emerging along with the code of chivalry sometime in the Middle Ages, being most forcefully introduced into modern consciousness by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 18th century.

I first heard this as an undergradate years ago, in a political philosophy class funnily enough, and have since heard or read it numerous times. The last time was only a few weeks ago, in an Intellectual History class at the University of Victoria.

But...I've always thought it was nonsense. It requires believing that there has been some mammoth reconfiguration of human brain circuitry in just the last eight or nine centuries, such that no one ever fell in love 2000, or 5000, or 15,000 years ago; or even worse, that no one fell in love in a non-Western country until "we" invented and exported the concept. It requires believing that all of those obsessive thoughts, all the spectacular feelings of ecstacy and longing and even worship, are culturally conditioned, like deciding to wear trousers rather than a toga. Like I said, nonsense.

A more plausible view is that while the world's different cultures have mediated (and continue to mediate) the formal expression of man/woman attraction in many different ways, that no culture is, or could ever be, strong enough to eradicate the human propensity to fall in love, which is innate, or biologically rooted. In a word, I think that boys and girls, men and women, have fallen in love for many, many thousands of years. And thank God, finally someone with academic clout is making a hard case for this view.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers, writes in her 2004 book "Why We Love":

"Thousands of romantic poems, songs, and stories come across the centuries from ancestral Europe, as well as the Middle East, Japan, China, India, and every other society that has left written records...from Siberia to to the Australian Outback to the Amazon, people sing love songs, compose love poems, and recount myths and legends of romantic love. Many perform love magic - carrying amulets and charms or serving condiments or concoctions to stimulate romantic ardour. Many elope. And many suffer deeply from unrequited love...

"From reading the poems, songs, and stories of people around the world, I came to believe that the capacity for romantic love is woven firmly into the fabrice of the human brain. Romantic love is a universal experience".

Yeah baby. You're preachin' the gospel.

Fisher marshals a lot of evidentiary support for this view. For example, she begins Chapter One by quoting from a poem written by a Kwakiutl from southern Alaska, translated into English in 1896:

"Fires run through my body - the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you...consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me...I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I've said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye".

She then retells a fable from 12th century China, in which Meilan - a pampered fifteen year old princess - falls in love with a charming lad named Chang Po. The problem is that Chang Po is from a lower class: their love is forbidden by the whole structure of Chinese society. Nevertheless, the two meet secretly in a garden, where on one occasion the boy tells the princess, "since the heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I was made for you, and I will not let you go". Meilan and Chang Po then decide to run away together. They are pursued by Meilan's family; Chang Po escapes, but Meilan is captured. As punishment, and as a warning to other youngsters, she is buried alive in her father's garden. So...it's not that romantic love "didn't exist" in ancient China; only that other values were considered far more important. And certainly Meilan's punishers would not have made an example out of her unless they were well aware of the propensity in others to fall in love just as she had.

In the rest of the book, Fisher presents evidence from fMRI studies, endocrinological studies, survey results, etc., for the thesis that romantic love is rooted in the hardwiring of the human brain, not contingent upon purely cultural accident.

So...to the question of who invented romantic love?, I think we can answer - not Rousseau (as if Alaskan natives were secretly reading Swiss philosophers in between hunting polar bears and building igloos, or the Persian love poet Rumi had a time machine...), and not medieval knights...

It was the same force which "invented" sympathy, patriotism, religious feeling, or maternal instinct...if not a deity, then nature through eons of natural selection. It is just part of who we are as humans.

More on this later. I'll try to make the next segment on this less boring!

T.

Life's Little Twists of Fate, Part I

Something happened when I was twelve. It changed my life, but sometimes I'm not sure it should have.

You see...I was very curious and read constantly. I also was totally into sports: baseball, football, and while soccer wasn't very popular in those days, I liked playing at school, and was thrilled one day when I heard my PE teacher introduce me to some kids as one of the best soccer players he'd ever had (those days are over - I stopped playing after we moved back to Canada, and I'm pretty lousy now as a result).

It's not that I wasn't into music: I listened to music constantly, too. It's just that it wasn't an exclusive obsession. I was into loads of different things.

But as it happened, one day when I was in the seventh grade, Mr. Bertrand, the band teacher, approached me in the hallway (this was down in Lynden, Washington). He invited me to join the concert band and play the baritone.

"I don't know how to play the baritone", I said.

"It's easy. Come and try. There's no pressure, and we need the people. And I know you have a good ear".

Prior to this, I'd had a beginning guitar class with Mr. Bertrand. (Our big hit was "Silver Bells"). Maybe he thought my guitar playing was alright. Or maybe it was just his desperation...

I say that because I heard rumours afterwards that a bunch of the concert band had quit due to Mr. Bertrand's bad temper. I heard once that he'd even thrown his baton at one of the kids in a fit of rage. I do know that a lot of kids joined around the time I did, so maybe it was true.

But I never saw any of that from Mr. Bertrand. In guitar class he'd been pretty cool - if we were good, he would sometimes put on The Who's "Who Are You?" at top volume for the last few minutes of class, which always sent all the boys into an air-guitar playing frenzy, and got all the girls dancing. This, I think, was fairly daring given that Lynden was a small, extremely conservative, extremely Christian, farming town. Especially daring given the "F" word in the song! In concert band he was the same. Cool guy.

Anyway, I showed up at concert band one day, fairly nervous. Mr. Bertrand got me set up with a baritone, showed me how to blow into it, and then gave me an instruction book with the fingerings for each note. I brought it home each day to practice, and pretty soon I was alright.

Now what made this pretty cool for me was that Mr. Bertrand was fairly ambitious - one of the pieces he wanted all of his twelve year olds to play was a piece by Tchaikovsky which, if I remember right, was called "March Entracte", though I've never been able to find it listed anywhere since (I presume it was a segment from some larger piece). Another piece was an arrangement of Haydn melodies. This sort of approach was right up my alley. Why fool around with mediocre pieces written by nobodies, when we could learn how to play some of the greatest music ever composed? Yeah baby!

This started my band career. In Washington, I ended up playing not only in the concert band but in the marching band as well. When we moved back to Canada, I played (at various times) trombone, tuba, and baritone in concert band, guitar and drums in jazz band, and sang in the madrigal choir (great tunes), jazz choir, and concert choir. At lunch times, I'd grab my Gretsch and hit the band room with Blair, the drummer, where we'd blow our faces off playing Hendrix and Zeppelin tunes. As I was friends with most of the other kids in our high school (which was quite small and very close knit), it never occurred to me that I was in any sort of clique, or that there was anything geeky about being involved in music. In fact, I think the first time this ever occurred to me was when I was being interviewed live once on the Vicki Gabereau television show. She asked me how I'd learned how to sing, and I said, "Well...I don't know really. I guess it was just always singing in the choirs at school". And she snorted derisively and made some little crack!

Anyway, I wonder sometimes what would have happened if, instead of Mr. Bertrand approaching me that day, someone else had. Like, say, the basketball coach, or the football coach, or the wrestling coach. Or what would have happened if, once back in Canada, someone had invited me out to play hockey or rugby. I'd ended up doing well at baseball, making the high school team my last year in Washington (ninth grade)...but once I got into band, sports fell by the wayside.

Maybe the worst thing that could have happened is if no one had ever invited me to do anything, since it probably would never have occurred to me to go try out for something brand new all on my own.

It seems to be a strange fact of life that often, very little things end up making big differences for us. If one little thing doesn't lead to another little thing, and to another little thing after that, some other little thing doesn't happen to you, and you end up...not meeting someone who becomes very important to you, or not doing something which changes your life, or becoming someone different from who you are. And disconcertingly, it often seems a lot like chance, whether something happens or doesn't...

And all this makes me wonder how much effect little things which I do might have on others...

Delusional Atheism: A Reply to a Reader

A reader named Guy Monty posted the following on "The True Meanings of Christmas, Part II". I want to respond to it in detail, because I think it is a good example of delusional atheism. Guy's comments are in italics.

Although I am not affiliated with any group, movement, or cadre, I am an atheist. From what I have witnessed and learned in 44 years here on planet Earth, I have to agree that religion is stupid, offensive and that it does actively erode man's quality of life. Why? Because it requires one to accept things for which there is no evidence, as if there is. As soon as one sets foot on that path, the mind is left open to all kinds of nonsense. This can manifest itself in a fairly benign form of delusion (crystal and faerie worshipers for instance), but it is delusion nonetheless. Any creature which chooses to allow fantasy to take the decision making reigns, is a creature which will eventually get itself into trouble. With social animals such as humans, this inevitably leads to getting ones fellows into trouble as well. The moment when your argument against atheism fails, is when you assume that atheism is some form of dogma, theology, or even an ideology. It's not. It simply means that one does not believe in a deity.

Ready Guy? Here goes.

You conclude by summarizing your version of atheism in this way: “it simply means that one does not believe in a deity" (call this [ND]). This is what most atheists usually say, but it is a flattering delusion, as you yourself show.

Consider what else you have written in this paragraph:

1.) "Religion is stupid”

2.) “Religion is offensive”

3.) “Religion actively erodes man's quality of life";

4.) “Religion actively erodes man’s quality of life because it requires one to accept things for which there is no evidence, as if there is".

5.) “Accepting (any) things for which there is no evidence eventually gets us, and others, into trouble”.

These five beliefs go far beyond (ND), don’t they? So, your belief (ND) is false, isn't it? And, you are unable to see this fact, aren't you? Indeed, it is remarkable how you can type out all five of those specific beliefs – about the nature of religion, the nature of the best sort of belief, etc. – and then type out (ND) without noticing that it cannot possibly be true given what you'd typed mere seconds earlier.

Moreover, those five beliefs very much appear to serve as the anchors of a genuine ideology. Yet you write that your version of atheism doesn’t constitute an “ideology”. That seems to me like another instance of a sort of delusive blindness.

But let me get more specific. Take belief (3). It is a universal claim. As such, it is a denial that there is, or could ever be, a single case in which religion would not erode the quality of a person’s life. On that basis alone, I would say this extreme belief looks very much like dogma. More to the point is that your belief has absolutely no evidence for it. By your criteria, it is therefore a delusion.

Worse, though, is that (3) is contradicted by the positive results of innumerable psychological studies which show that by a number of criteria, religious belief and activity enhance the quality of life of certain people. (3) also betrays a gargantuan presumptuousness, in that, on no evidentiary basis whatsoever, it denies the validity of the first-person-reported experiences of many tens of millions of religious converts who claim that the quality of their lives has improved as a result of their religious adherence. In other words, (3) constitutes an assertion that you, Guy, know far more about the quality of people’s lives that you have never met, and never will meet, than the people in question do.

Yet the lack of evidence for (3), and the abundance of evidence showing it to be incorrect, has not induced you to revise (3). The point is - if this all does not constitute some serious dogmatism, some serious delusions about the knowledge you posess, I don’t know what does. That alone should be enough to show that there is something totally wrong with this sort of atheism. But let me mention something more.

Notice (5). It expresses the belief that there can be no such thing as an adaptive unjustified belief. There is also absolutely no evidence for this belief – it is therefore an unjustified belief (a “delusion”, according to you).
But even worse is that this belief of yours is in conflict with the Darwinian principles of evolution that all good atheists subscribe to. After all, what Darwinian evolution says is that the human brain has evolved so as to form beliefs which confer survival advantage - a claim which obviously allows that such beliefs may very well have no supporting evidence, and very well may not even be true. Darwin makes this pretty explicit in his famous passage from "The Descent of Man":

"There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection".

In this passage, Darwin contemplates that the following sorts of beliefs would confer survival advantage on to groups:

"My tribe is the very best tribe in the whole world" (patriotism);

"I ought to suffer inconvenience, or more, to relieve the suffering of a fellow tribesman" (sympathy);

"I ought to run toward enemy lines to distract them while my tribe escapes, even though I will die doing so" (sacrifice for the common good);

Etc.

And what is key here is that none of these beliefs can muster any sort of evidentiary support. So, these are "unjustified beliefs" which Darwin says are adaptive. That is, Charles Darwin believes that there can be such things as adaptive unjustified beliefs, but you don't. Hm.

Now, let's introduce the elves which you mentioned in your note, since these would push these beliefs away from being merely unjustified, toward being false.

So let's say our tribesman believes the following:

"There is a small green elf named Burkle who lives inside my head. Burkle has told me that I should exercise and be strong, instead of remaining lazy and growing very weak and fat".

That is a false belief. We could crack open our tribesman's head, and we would find no green elf there at all. Yet one result of this false belief will enhance the tribesman's ability to survive. It doesn't matter that the green elf portion of the belief need not be there; the fact is, it could very well be there, and if it is, then this is just one of innumerable beliefs which are both false and adaptive. We could easily replace the green elf in the head with Jesus living in the sky; the belief would stay the same: an adaptive unjustified or false belief, that is, a religious belief which does not "erode" the quality of a man's life, but enhances it. And the fact is that most religions have quite a few beliefs as beneficial as this one. Duh. "A bearded man who lives in the sky wants you to be chaste" may be a false/unjustified belief; but chastity confers real health benefits in an era of sometimes lethal STDs, like HIV. Doesn't it? How could this be any more obvious?

Your denial of the possibility of adapative unjustified/false beliefs, and by implication adaptive religious beliefs, is, I think, very blatantly wrong; and certainly it is at odds with evolution as Darwin conceived of it. And funnily enough, whether a belief contradicts Darwinian evolution seems to be an important standard for atheists when evaluating theist beliefs. Yet here you have shown you have an atheist belief which also contradicts Darwinian evolution. Why should it not be regarded as just as delusional, by your own standards?

Although it would be offensively wrong to argue that no atheist ever committed a crime (I've yet to hear that from anyone who professes to be a theist), I cannot agree that the presence of an atheist within a morally bankrupt political ideology amounts to "crimes committed in the name of atheism". In the case of the atrocities committed by Bolsheviks, the heinous crimes against humanity were committed in large part to consolidate the power of madmen, not in the name of "atheism".

Here's one problem with this, Guy. You cannot make this argument without disallowing atheists from making their favourite argument for "crimes committed in the name of theism"; for following your example, and with as little justification, we could just glibly assert that "the heinous crimes against humanity were committed in large part to consolidate the power of madmen, not in the name of theism".

But the bigger problem is that this statement about theism would be no truer than your own about atheism; for atheism is as crucial, as fundamental, to Marxism, as theism is to Catholicism. There is no way around this. That atheism is a disbelief in God, rather than a belief in God, makes no difference. The point is that fanatical devotion to each has helped inspire people to commit heinous crimes.

By the way, your statement that "I cannot agree that the presence of an atheist within a morally bankrupt political ideology amounts to 'crimes committed in the name of atheism' is shocking in how grossly it distorts the fundamentality of atheism to Marxism. This isn't about "the presence of an atheist" in a "morally bankrupt political ideology"; it is about a political ideology which itself is fundamentally, crucially, officially, irrevocably atheist. As I said in my earlier post, for this reason crimes committed by Marxists to advance the Marxist cause are - unavoidably - crimes committed in the name of atheism, just as unavoidably as are crimes committed to advance Catholicism crimes committed in the name of Christianity. The belief that they are not, is just another example of the delusions to which atheists of your stripe are prone.

When a political entity attacks a specific religion because they are trying to gain sole political power, I can hardly see where this constitutes an atheist Jihad. So would the world be better if without religion? I think it would. I don't feel the need to toss anyone into a lake of fire for all eternity if they don't agree though.

---Again, your belief that the world would be a better place without religion is a belief without any evidentiary warrant, especially given the atrocities committed in the name of an ideology for which atheism was a crucial pillar just in the past century. Moreover, your belief seems to rest on the assumption that "a human race without religion" is even possible – which I would say is itself a total delusion, given that innumerable findings from anthropology, psychology, history, sociology, etc., are that religion is endemic to human brains.

And that you can "hardly see" how crimes committed in the name of a fundamentally atheist ideology are no less crimes committed in the name of atheism, as are crimes committed in the name of a fundamentally theist ideology crimes committed in the name of theism, is precisely the point. You can't see it even though it is as plain as day; and you just repeat the same sorts of defensive slogans that theists repeat when guys like you start talking about how religion is the primary cause of evil on the planet.

This whole business, this sort of contemporary orthodox "Dawkins-style" atheism, goes far beyond mere disbelief in the existence of God. That is its problem. It prides itself on being an expression of "critical thinking" and science-based skepticism, when in reality it has nothing to do with critical thinking or science-based skepticism at all. It is nowhere near critical or skeptical enough. It is, rather, mostly a pile of bigoted, dogmatically-held, false knowledge claims - delusions - about the supposedly evil nature of religion, about how to save humanity from itself, about what is possible in human affairs, etc. - slopped on top of a blinding, self-congratulatory disbelief in God, and which is no different in principle from a pile of delusions which just happen to be theist. It is just the other side of the same coin.

This type of atheism, in short, is no less delusional, no less unjustified, no less false, no less dogmatic, no less ideological, than the religions it claims to be superior to.

I welcome your reply, Guy.

The True Meanings of Christmas, Part III

So, Christmas.

In almost every sermon in almost every Christian church each December, speakers encourage their listeners to remember "the true meaning of Christmas".

But there is no "true meaning of Christmas" in any objective sense. The closest thing we have to that are the facts of history:

Despite the holiness attrributed by Christians to this celebration, the fact is that there is no virtually no feature of Christmas which has a Christian, as oppposed to a pagan, provenance, other than the idea of it as a celebration of the birth of the supposed founder of Christianity. "Christmas" is a thoroughly pagan celebration with some Christian mythology imported in - the equivalent of giving some new Christian name to the old Roman drinking festivals called the bacchanalia, and then claiming that "Christianalia" is henceforth "really" a celebration of Jesus's first miracle (turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana). Nothing's changed; it's just that some mythology was retroactively inserted, and a new label stuck on top of the thing.

The tree, the gift-giving, the merrymaking, the foods, the holly, the lights, the charitable activity, the yule log...all these beloved features and more of Christmas existed in European winter celebrations (Roman Saturnalia and New Year, German and Scandinavian solstice celebrations, etc.) long before it ever occurred to Christians to start celebrating the birth of their religion's supposed founder sometime in the latter part of the 4th century A.D. In fact, it was the almost thoroughly pagan character of Christmas which, historically, motivated devout British and American Christians (the Puritans) to oppose Christmas for many years. In the 17th century in Boston, the Puritans even succeeded in legally banning Christmas for a few years altogether. A contemporary Christian might take theological issue with the Puritan view that Christmas, as but a thinly veiled pagan winter festival, is blasphemous; but they could never take issue with the historical basis of that judgment. It is just a matter of fact.

This all makes the ongoing fuss from Christians about "the world trying to take Christ out of Christmas" seem even sillier. They've got some nerve, don't they? Cynical politicians and party-loving Christians in a former age hijack a winter celebration spanning back innumerable centuries, which never had anything to do with a Jewish religious reformer which certain superstitious fanatics took to worshipping, and now their descendants complain that pagans are trying to hijack the "Christian" holiday of Christmas? AND, they complain about it when they themselves are still enjoying all the pagan features of that celebration?

Like I said, some nerve. The Puritans had a point: if Christians are serious about making Christmas as Christian as possible, they should stop mixing it into a pagan Winter Solstice celebration in December, and start celebrating it sometime in spring, which is when almost all scholars now believe Josh Josephson was born. AND, they should reject Christmas trees, holly boughs, mistletoe, gift-giving, Santa Claus visits, etc. They should reject every last feature of current Christmas celebrations which has a pagan provenance (basically all of them), and redo Christmas from the ground up. But...they'll never do that, so I can't take any of their complaints about the de-Christianizing of Christmas seriously. Just by celebrating it as they do, they themselves support a "deChristianized Christmas" nearly as much as any pagan.

Even more ignorant is the Christian fuss over the usage of the abbreviation "Xmas" for Christmas. It was, after all, educated devout Christians who started abbreviating "Christmas" in this way, hundreds of years ago. And no wonder - the "X" comes from the Greek letter X (which we transliterate as kh- or ch-), which is the first letter in the common Greek word Χριστός (christos), which we anglicize as "Christ".

"X" is Christ's initial, for Pete's sake. Evangelical Christians drive around with bumper stickers that say, "WWJD?", for "What Would Jesus Do?". "J" here is the initial for "Jesus" - in English. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, "X" is the initial for "christos". So Christians - why get upset over a Greek initial, but not an English initial? Another bizarre thing - Christians drive around with fish stickers on their car. But the fish represents an acronym, with each letter of the Greek word for fish (ΙΧΘΥΣ, or "ichthys") standing for the phrase "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ": "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior".

So, Christians drive around with a Christian fish symbol on their back window, which only exists because the letter "X" is in the word "i(ch)thys" and also is the first letter in the word "Christos". But when they see a sign that says, "Merry Xmas" - the exact same initial - they see it as "an assault on Christianity"...Not sure how that makes any sense.

On the other hand, I'm also not sure, given all this, what sense it makes for anti-Christians to think they're scoring some big point by using "X" instead of "Christ" (though perhaps the fact that the usage antagonizes most Christians is really what matters to the anti-Christians). Besides, linguistically, there isn't anything unique about the word "christos" at all. It's just a word meaning "anointed". And if Joshua Josephson was a talented itinerant preacher but no more (which is what anti-Christians believe), there is nothing even historically or theologically unique about the word when applied to him, either - many people could have been anointed for all sorts of reasons. So there's no reason for anti-Christians not to use "Christmas". Moreover, their replacement of it is easily viewed by Christians as an inadvertent indication by anti-Christians that "deep down, they know there is something sacred about Jesus"; that is, as betraying some intuition similar to the belief which motivates orthodox Jews to refuse to spell out the word "God" (they write "G-d"), which they do to indicate reverence.

And lastly, as I mentioned last year on this blog, if anti-Christians use "X" instead of Christ because they don't want to dignify the concept of a supernatural deity, then they should start saying "Xbye", since "Goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with ye".

Hmm...where was I before I started upsetting everyone? :P Oh yes - the true meaning of Christmas.

Where I'm going with this, if it is not already screamingly obvious, is that as far as I can tell...there IS no "one, true meaning of Christmas". There are only true meanings of Christmas, of winter celebrations...as many meanings as there are individuals to discover and create meanings. In a sense, all the history I mentioned above doesn't really matter (except maybe insofar as it calms the fanatics down...).

I think what matters vis-a-vis Christmas is what matters every other day of the year...and I think what that is, is...

Who we really are, and what our lives are about...who we share them with, and more importantly, how we share...and how we find and create love and trust, joy and light, friendship and solace, meaning and purpose, in a world which does not seem to readily provide those things.

A famous musician friend of mine - a lifelong bachelor - pulled me aside one day a few years ago when I was feeling low about a personal situation, and said, "Tal - you know it's all about you, don't you? You do what you need to do to be happy, and that's what it is".

I said, "What about when you have kids?"

He repeated, "It is all about you".

Is it? I was not able to believe that then, and I can't believe it now, notwithstanding the selfish things I have sometimes done. And I guess, in a way, I don't want to believe it. I want to believe "it" is about far more than me. I want to believe life is about doing great things with others, and for others, and belonging and "being a part of"...

Christmas, for me, has become a time to stop to evaluate all those things, and especially, where I am going with my children...who they are, and how I can help them grow and be everything they can be. It's become a time to hang out with them, reading stories and going out for adventures, hiking or skating or swimming, planning for the year to come, and keeping everyone close. What else is there?

For me, that has become "the true meaning of Christmas"....And I know that, facts of history aside (which ultimately probably don't matter anyway), that everyone else has their own "one true meanings", which are sacred to them, which help them live their lives as best they can...

And now that I think about it, maybe that is "the one true meaning of Christmas" :)

Merry Christmas, Solstice, Yule, etc.

T.

The True Meanings of Christmas, Part II

So, if we are Christians, but then come to see that there is just no more reason to believe the claims at the heart of Christianity than the claims at the heart of Hinduism or Sufism, what about Christmas? What about Christianity in general?

There seems to be three main options. I'll call them Strategic Commitment (SC), Anti-Christian Animus (ACA), and Skeptical Stoicism (SkS).

In the Strategic Commitment option, you recognize at least that there is something fundamentally awry at the heart of Christianity, something outlandish which cannot and should not be taken as literally true...but you decide not to let it bother you, because all sorts of other valuable things are built on, or emanate out of, continuing commitment to it. So, as one of my evangelical Christian friends said when I pressed him on a few of these things, "In the end, it doesn't really matter to me if it's true or not. My family is happy, I feel happy when I go to church with them, my kids have lots of nice friends in our church, so it just doesn't matter". My friend - who attends church every Sunday - told me he never reads the Bible for just that reason.

I am a huge fan of Dostoyevsky, though I can't say I'm any sort of expert; but my own reading of him makes me think he falls into this category. In books like "The Brothers Karamazov", "Crime and Punishment", and "The Devils", he argues obsessively (though not always explicitly) that Western civilization is doomed to anarchic fracture - to a horror-ridden, nihilist dystopia in which anything and everything will be permitted - unless it remains thoroughly within the Christian tradition. A similar argument ran through my friend Mark Steyn's recent book, "America Alone". But it is still entirely unclear to me whether Dostoyevsky (or Steyn, for that matter) themselves really believe the story at the heart of Christianity - the one with divinely-required murder and symbolic cannibalism, with Galilean Josh Josephson as the disguised creator of the entire universe or the product of non-sexual "miraculous" conception, etc. If I had to guess, I would say no, they don't actually believe it. They just see a huge value in everyone at least committing to it.

Anyway, I guess the bottom line is that Strategic Committers would pretty much celebrate Christmas with as much fervour and joy as any sincerely believing Christian. They would just, at their core, be indifferent to whether Christianity was the product of human invention.

The Anti-Christian Animus option goes like this. You begin by seeing Christianity as the product of human invention, but you don't stop there: you end up subscribing to the notion that Christianity, or maybe "organized religion" - is the cause of almost all wars, all oppression, all poverty, all racism, etc. Make Christianity go away, or "organized religion", and most of the world's problems would go away. Thus, in your own little way, you declare war on Christmas, and on Christianity altogether. It is your service to humanity.

This is, by far, the dumbest option. Consider that what it's all about is the transformation of an initial skepticism into a gullibility about as extreme as that required to believe in talking snakes, stationary suns, and staffs which turn into serpents. I am saying you have to be totally gullible to believe that human evil requires an organized (theist) religion, or Christianity, for its existence. You also have to be extremely ignorant, or extremely bigoted, to believe it; there are, in fact, innumerable instances of people committing all manner of evil not on any sectarian ground at all, and they are all around us. Each one of us, ourselves, knows that we have done plenty of things we shouldn't have done, but that they were not motivated by any particularly religious belief at all. Our motives in many instances, were - need I say it? - purely selfish.

Neither Sam Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, or Dennett have ever satisfactorily answered the tens of millions of objections - in the form of human corpses - which our past century gives us against their claim that the world would be a much better place without any religion (as if that's even possible). Atheist responses to these objections range from utterly incoherent to pathetically inadequate; and they can offer no explanation as to how a crime committed in the name of communism is not, by inevitable extension, as much a crime committed in the name of atheism, as is a crime committed in the name of Catholicism a crime committed in the name of Christianity, or "organized religion". Nor, in saying things as ludicrously bigoted as "religion poisons everything" (as does Hitchens), can they account for the many good things which religious belief can and does bring to the lives of its adherents.

Atheists like those mentioned above, and for all I know, some of those reading this, always pride themselves on their critical thinking skills. But any type of thinking which metasticizes into an historically and evidentially unsupported Utopianism is not, by definition, critical thinking. It is delusional. It is no different than the type of "thinking" which accepts that God will torture us forever unless we torture him.

In any case, there is not even any reason to believe that religion can be eradicated without eradicating all of humanity, since all indications are that it is endemic to the human mind. And certainly there is no reason to believe that the world would be a better place - war-free, poverty-free, etc. - if everyone were an atheist.

Skeptical stoicism, as far as I can figure, makes the most sense, though I cannot say it would most satisfy emotional needs. I think, for example, that there must be something extremely satisfying emotionally in adopting the Anti-Christian Animus option. Its popularity suggests as much. That position, after all, allows its adherents to think they know something very important about the world (that religion is the main source of evil); it allows them to think that their anti-religion activism is a form of humanitarian service - that they are "making the world a better place for our children";, etc. It allows them to share camaraderie with other religious bigots (just like hating Jews does for Klansmen, who evidently love their group picnics). In a way, I sort of envy them, just like I do the religious believers they think they're so much different than: the sheer power of belief within a community of believers can facilitate the satisfaction of a lot of human needs.

Skeptical stoicism feels quite lonely, speaking from personal experience. It regards the atheism of Harris, Dawkins, and to a lesser extent Hitchens, as unspeakably crude and about as delusional as the religions those guys think are so - well, delusional. It also regards religious beliefs like, say, that the communion wafer actually "transubstantiates" into the flesh of Jesus or that Mohammed flew to Mecca as delusional. And...there just isn't really a community for that, that I know of. I pick up "Skeptic" and "Skeptical Inquirer" magazines every once in a while, but they too seem quite in thrall to the Utopian atheism of Dawkins. Every issue there's some new barrage of attacks on religion as evil, and how it must be eradicated for the good of the world. But this just nonsense...So what I'm saying is that "Skeptic" and "Skeptical Inquirer" are not skeptical enough.

So....what I'm saying is, there is absolutely NO reason to believe that religion is anything other than a permanent facet of the human experience, and second, that there is NO reason to believe that "the world would be better without (theist) religion". In fact, this past century suggests the contrary. AND, if we take Darwinism seriously, it becomes quite impossible to fathom how theism could have been selected for over atheism, if it is inherently as rotten, dangerous, and crazy-making as the Dawkins's fanatics say it is. Dawkins himself can't even answer this objection, judging from "The God Delusion".

Putting it another way, true skepticism sees the demonization of theism by atheists as no less delusional than the demonization of atheism by theists. The purpose of these delusions seems to be to blind us to the disturbing conclusion that good and evil are an ineradicable part of human existence; that is, to the conclusion that neither atheism nor theism in the end can offer a means of saving us from ourselves.

The stoicism comes in when contemplating what to do about this. It allows for attempts to improve things, but it cautions against expecting too much from the efforts; and it tries to find peace with the world nevertheless.

I can't say I am a great skeptical stoic; it is hard at times for me to feel wholly at peace with the world. And that there don't seem to be a lot of others out there makes me kind of long to be some other way sometimes.

But then...I don't seem to have any choice. I can't make myself believe what I see as atheist or theist delusions, and there's nowhere else, for me anyway, to go.

Oh yes, I forgot: Christmas!

Next time.

The True Meanings of Christmas, Part I

Christmas used to mean something different to me than it does now.

You see, I once believed devoutly that for human beings to avoid eternal torment (just by virtue of having been born), we had to torture and murder God/God's son, and then in commemoration, had to symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood. Christmas was the day we celebrated the birth of our victim.

Of course, I didn't use this language. Like other believers, I employed a wide variety of self-deception techniques (like euphemisms) to shield my conscious mind from the grotesque, and I might say, truly profane, nature of the story I had based my life on. But at its core, the story is just as I have written it above.

Anyway, I now believe something different. It goes like this.

"Jesus Christ" is the anglicized version of the words "Iesous christos", Greek for "Joshua the Anointed" (the New Testament was written in Greek). "Joshua the Anointed"'s real name (in Aramaic, his first language) was Yeshua Bar-Yosef - Joshua Josephson, in plain English.

Josh Josephson grew up in the Galilee area, and was one of many Israelite reformers of his time. Like them, he performed miracles, attracted disciples, developed a set of teachings, and was viewed with suspicion by Roman authorities and Jewish elders.

Unlike his depiction by most modern (Protestant) Christian artists, who like to paint him as tall, blazingly handsome, with Nordic features, longish, golden hair, and disposed to gleaming, sparkling white robes, Josephson looked pretty much like his disciples - dark-skinned, short-ish, short-haired, and dressed in the same rough clothing (the painting included on this entry is an educated guess about what he would have looked like). At least, this is what the Bible (as opposed to our imaginations) indicates. After all, why else would Judas Iscariot have to identify his leader to the Roman authorities with a kiss, if he didn't look like everyone else? If he had long hair - which would have been extremely unusual anyway for that time and place - why would Paul [who claimed to have seen Josephson in person, and who knew many people who had known him in person] say in I Cor. 11 that long hair on a man was a disgrace? The modern Christian image not only has no warrant, but is actually contradicted by the text of the Bible, and by everything we know about the customs of the time.

Josephson's miracles? Devout Christians seem to forget that, historically speaking, miracles - or maybe better, "miracles" - are a dime a dozen. There are thousands of accounts from all over the world, from all different religious traditions, of people flying, or turning into wolves, or sprouting wings, or coming back from the dead, or seeing the future, or fighting devils, or talking to angels and fairies and ghosts, of healing and being healed, of visiting the underworld, of turning into different people for awhile...just last night I re-read the account of Athena turning into Menthes so as to infiltrate the dinner party at Odysseus's house in The Odyssey (Book One). Such accounts are not unusual; they are the way that our ancestors, living in a pre-scientific age, interpreted the world.

After all, they had no other explanation available to them, did they? When a man suddenly drops to the ground, wets himself, starts shaking violently and foaming at the mouth in an era when no even knows that the brain controls such things, let alone has ever conceived of such a thing as epilepsy, then "possession by evil spirits" makes a sort of sense, doesn't it? Especially when you already believe in spirits. At least it's something. And when the seizure stops, you want an explanation for that, too. And on it goes.

Besides this, the propensity to "improve" stories in the re-telling, especially when they involve a person we are precommitted to believing has extraordinary powers, is too widely acknowledged, even now, to warrant me defending. Everyone knows it. I myself have been the fortunate object of just such "improvement". When I was in Argentina years ago, I learned a number of phrases in the aboriginal language of Toba. Everytime I visited a settlement of Toba natives, I'd trot them out: "how are you?", "It's a nice day, isn't it?", etc.

A year after I returned home, I called back down to my old apartment to talk to the missionaries about how my old friends were doing. Upon hearing my name, the missionaries fairly freaked: "you - you're - you're THE Elder Bachman?! I - I - wow. We've - heard TONS OF STORIES ABOUT YOU, MAN! I mean, like, wow! Yeah, the aborigines down here have told us ALL ABOUT HOW YOU TOTALLY LEARNED THEIR LANGUAGE, and you were, like, RAPPIN' WITH THEM ALL THE TIME, just like you were a native Toba! Total gift of tongues, dude! It's an honour to speak with you!", etc.

So...that was exactly one year after I left the area. Miracle-making, or at least one form of it, is sort of like planting a seed: do a little something out of the ordinary amongst certain people who like you and who are prone to superstition (cut up some bread and fish, perhaps), and with time, your little something grows, and grows, and grows in the fertile soil of human imagination, until it becomes some fantastic, even supernatural, feat that only someone with "something extra special" could ever have done. So, in my case, a few phrases in Toba multiplied by a year and the power of human imagination equalled a genuine miracle. Think of how the story would have (or has) grown over five years? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty?

WELL - the stories recorded in the four gospels were passed on orally for at least four decades before being written down - and it is likely it was more like five and six decades. How drastically might they have been "improved"? AND, except in the case of John - who wrote, it must be said, almost a century after Josephson's birth (supposing that the book's author really is who he says he is) - there is no reason to believe that the writers of the other three gospels (whoever they actually were) could even pretend to have been eyewitnesses to the events. No wonder there are so many troubling discrepancies and contradictions.

Moreover, even just taking the gospels seriously as the founding documents of Christianity (since they purport to be biographies of its supposed founder) gives us another problem: there is simply no indication in the four gospels of Joshua Josephson wanting to start a brand new religion. He says over and over that he is devoted to the law of Moses. He never mentions changing the Sabbath. He never mentions the mass invitation of Gentiles into the tribal religion he wished to reform. He never mentions abolishing Jewish dietary laws. He wants to reform - not start a brand new religion apart from Yahwehism. It is just not there. It is Peter and Paul, according to the Bible itself, who essentially invent a brand new religion or cult based on the worship of their deceased leader. But where Paul and Peter are recorded as contradicting the plain teachings of their leader...who should Christians follow? If they follow Josephson, they would be simply be a certain sort of practicing Jew. If they follow his disciples, then they are following what the Bible itself suggests is a religion at odds with the whole mission of Josephson as recorded in the gospels.

Much more could be said, but just one more thing. Even if we can make ourselves believe that some loving God would create us at the same time he doomed us to eternal torment unless we tortured, murdered, and symbolically ate him (or his Son), or that the Israelite religion was somehow God's "one, chosen religion", how in the world can we imagine that this sacred murder could have rightly been performed not by the properly designated Israelite priests according to the prescribed mode of ritual slaughter, but by Roman pagans nailing the sacrifice on to wooden planks? True Yahwehism would not have viewed the Roman crucifixion of a wee little lamb as an efficacious Israelite atonement sacrifice. Why, then, the crucifixion of Joshua Josephson, who, after all, is supposed to be, as the human "lamb", the ultimate atonement sacrifice? It makes no sense.

At least, it makes no sense, unless we assume that the cosmology built over the past two millenia, and helped along in many instances by government lackeys masquerading as "priests", is the product of primal human needs and desires, human creativity, and political convenience, rather than - well, rather than something true.

More soon.

Soccer Sucks

Yes, there are soccer players of incredible skill. Some of the highlights are fantastic. But overall, soccer as a sport sucks.

It sucks, okay? You have to go back to the days of Georgie Best (who I watch on the classic games channel on the satellite dish) to find anything like tolerable games.

Okay, I need to be more specific. Here's why it sucks.

1.) The referreeing is wildly inconsistent/poor, probably because there's one guy - ONE guy! - on a giant pitch trying to keep an eye on 22 guys all by himself. Impossible. No wonder there's so much diving - when you're thirty feet away, a dive looks exactly like a trip. How many games have we seen, especially in World Cups, decided on some dubious penalty shot call? I mean, the England-Argentina semi-final game at the '86 World Cup is probably the best game of the last thirty years - and the first goal in that game was the result of a totally blown call by the ref. Maradona punches the ball into the net with his chubby little hand, and it stands?! What the...?

And by the way - does pro soccer have video replay yet? I don't think they do. And if they don't...SHOCKING! They won't put an extra ref on; they won't introduce video replay even though your average soccer game contains more dives than the dolphin show at Sea World...than a Greg Louganis birthday party...oh wait - more dives than downtown Detroit. What is up with the FIFA referree people?

When the universal soccer strategy seems to be, "get into the penalty area and then fall down and roll around clutching your ankle", why not do something? That leads me to the second reason why it sucks.

2.) Soccer players are, with almost no exceptions, total babies. That reminds me of a little joke: What's the difference between soccer and rugby? Soccer players spend 90 minutes pretending they're hurt, and rugby players spend 80 minutes pretending they're not.

The rolling around, the clutching, the diving, the theatrics, the pouting and arguing when the ref doesn't fall for their bogus dives...you'd think these guys just had a shiv jammed into their left gerbil with all the waterworks...it is embarrassing! And the best is, after rolling around for two minutes clutching their leg like it's being sawn off in a World War I medic's tent, they magically get back up and - "all better!" - take their free or penalty kick. Magic! Or else...no, it couldn't be...it couldn't be acting, could it?

3.) Not enough scoring, and not enough good, genuine scoring chances. For that, they'd need to throw two or three more balls out on the pitch, which of course, would turn it into a different game altogether.

Anyway, there has to be some explanation for the popularity of soccer around the world (alcohol?) which does not posit that it is exciting to watch, because where it is not infuriating for its manifest unfairness, it's as boring as watching grass grow.

I mentioned rugby above.

I think it can safely be said that if any rugby player were ever caught taking the sorts of pathetic dives that soccer players attempt literally in every game, that his own teammates would probably kick the crap out of him. That's one reason why rugby's a better sport than soccer - it's a sport, not a theatrical performance. Soccer players increasingly look like they've graduated from the Bob Fosse school of choreography, just completed the Stanislavsky method acting course or something...

Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerating? I just looked on YouTube for a video illustration of what I'm talking about. Check this out. Or this. And note, these clips are not extraordinary at all. One can find similar dramatic excursions in any game, and the higher up the league, the worse it gets. This is why it's more entertaining watching your 13 year old play than watching Premier League schmucks - your thirteen year old, at least not the ones around here, aren't faking when they go down.

Anyway, I have no reason to doubt that soccer was once a great game, back in the days, I imagine, of Matt Busby, Pele, Jackie Charlton, Georgie. Now, it is not so much a sport as an alternately boring and infuriating theatrical performance by prima donna metrosexuals who wouldn't last four seconds on a rugby pitch, yet who strut around like they've just descended from Valhalla.

Soccer - so 90's (as my brother Brigo always says).

Rugby - so the future. I hope anyway.

Out,

T.

Patrick Fitzgerald, Attention Hound

People

No, strike that

Some people get to a point in life where they come to believe that the percentage of angels and demons, geniuses and blockheads, and the normal bell-shaped distribution in between, is about the same in every field, in every club, in every everything.

Take me, for instance. I used to think prosecutors were the good guys. Now I don't think they're any better on the whole, in terms of competence (the OJ trial convinced me of that) or more importantly, virtue, than defense attorneys. Certainly, once one becomes familiar with enough cases in which prosecutors fight against the judicial consideration of rock-solid evidence which exonerates a wrongly convicted man, it just becomes impossible to feel sympathy with "sides" in general.

I guess what I'm saying is, there was a time when I probably would have regarded, without much thought, Chicago-based federal super-prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as a hero. His behaviour in the Scooter Libby and Conrad Black cases, however, pretty much blew it for me. (And by the way, former Hollinger honcho and book-fixer David Radler, who cut a plea with Fitzgerald, tonight is sitting at home in Vancouver drinking warm cocoa and getting ready for Hannukah, while Conrad Black - whose guilt, such as it may be, to my mind is still unproven - is sitting in a penitentiary, as he will be for the next five years). Anyway, Fitzgerald's behaviour now with the Governor Blagojevich case is the last straw - it shows him to be a man far more interested in fame, scoring points at a personal level against his targets, and in everyone knowing what an "ass-kicking macho man" he is, than getting the job done right.

Getting the job done right, in the Blagojevich case, would have entailed, I think (could be wrong), actually waiting until the guy takes a bribe. You know? Wait till the guy takes the bribe, document that, and then you charge both him and the new Senator for paying the bribe. Bingo, you just two giant fish.

Instead, Fitzgerald gets a bunch of phone conversations on tape where Blagojevich talks about getting something back for a Senate appointment, then BOOM! - he calls another one of his big one-man-show Emmy caliber "Iiiiiiiiit's.....the Patrick Fitzgerald Show!" press conferences, worked up the indignation, called Blagojevich all sorts of names, talked about how outraged Abraham Lincoln, for Pete's sake, would have been...Like, I'm sick of this guy's drama queen theatrics. Enough already. Shut the hell up and do your ***xxxx job, you frigging publicity hound. (Can you believe he actually signed up to be on a radio game show last summer?) He's probably jeopardized the integrity of the case now by prejudicing pretty much every potential juror in the city. Even if he manages to get a conviction, there will now always be that taint.

Anyway, quite beyond the shamefulness of Fitzgerald using the court system as a platform for his rock star pretensions, he has now broken the code of ethics for prosecutors a number of times, and should be officially reprimanded. Victoria Toensing wrote an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on just that, and I think she's spot-on.

For the sake of the integrity of the American justice system, I think it's time for Fitzgerald to make his choice: be an ethical prosecutor, or quit law altogether and get your own "shouting head" talkshow on MSNBC.

Somehow, I think I know which one he'd choose...

Not Sure I Can Buy the Prorogation...

Just re-elected Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper asked for the Governor-General Michaelle Jean of Canada to temporarily shut down (prorogue) parliament once it became clear the opposition parties were about to form a majority coalition and force him and the Conservatives (who had only a plurality of seats) out of power. And she granted it on December 4th.

I'm not sure I really get this. I am friendly with a Conservative Party official, and his defence of this move has been off-putting. He keeps saying, "the Conservatives just won a mandate to govern; they won the election; they deserve to rule; this coalition is trying to usurp democracy".

Are they? Between them, they can claim nearly 60% of the Canadian popular vote. How can a coalition of parties with 60%? of the vote be "usurping democracy" by replacing a party with only 40%?

To put it another way: the Conservative Party won the largest number of seats, yes; but they did not "win the election" any more than the potential coalition "won the election". That is the way it works in a parliamentary system: parties have a perfect right to form a coalition government. It happens all the time. It is the way parliaments work. Everyone knows that. There is just no precedent in parliamentary theory for the idea that a mere plurality confers some sort of right to govern over a majority coalition. Yet Stephen Harper keeps repeating that the coalition is trying to "overturn the results of the election"! No - the "results of the election" are going to stay exactly the same, with everyone retaining the same number of seats. It is just that a majority coalition of MPs would govern instead of a minority (plurality).

From what I can tell, all this "usurping democracy" business is all nonsense, and worse, partisan nonsense. And I'm saying that as someone who would never vote for the Liberals, NDP, or Bloc.

I mean, can you imagine what Canadian Conservatives would be saying if they were the ones who had signed a coalition agreement and were about to force out a minority Liberal Party government, and then Iggy or Paul Martin met with Michaelle Jean and got a prorogation based purely on the leader's desire to avoid losing power? I cannot doubt that the Tories would be going absolutely nuts right now, talking about how the Liberals were trampling on centuries worth of parliamentary process and custom, etc. And they'd be right, wouldn't they? AND - what if Iggy, in addition to getting a prorogation of parliament just so as to avoid getting turfed in a non-confidence vote, ALSO announced that during the prorogation, he was going to appoint EIGHTEEN new senators, especially if he had long campaigned against the prime ministerial power to appoint senators? The Tories would be screaming bloody murder!

I can't stand leftism, but still, I just don't get the Tory argument on this. Maybe there's some great one, and I just haven't seen it anywhere. But from here, it just looks like action based not on any regard for principle or custom, but on desperate desire to retain power. I hope I'm wrong.

Guess What I'M Allergic To?

The more we eliminate things really worth being afraid of, the more trivial are the things which rise up to fill the void.

Take peanuts. Nowadays, any mommy who happens to pack along a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Junior may very well get an indignant letter back from the elementary school control-freak principal about how "we have many children in the school who are deathly allergic to peanuts. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SENDING THIS TOXIC LETHAL POISON TO OUR SCHOOL" - even though there has never been a recorded case of someone having a lethal allergic reaction to peanuts without...actually ingesting peanuts. (The way these hens cackle, you'd think kids were force-feeding handfuls of anthrax to their classmates...).

Here's the thing: lots of people are allergic to lots of things. If you happen to be allergic to something, you don't eat it. It's really simple. If Suzie's allergic to strawberries, she shouldn't eat Timmy's strawberries. If Timmy's allergic to seafood, he shouldn't eat Suzie's sushi. You don't insist that everyone in the entire school district never again bring sushi or strawberries or bananas or orange juice or a peanut or whatever. Besides, it is far from certain that most of the kids reputed to be allergic to whatever substance actually are - there are no bounds to the things some mommies can manage to feel worried about.

Yes, I'm saying I think it is very possible to imagine that one is - or one's children are - allergic to something. Consider lactophobia, due any day to be replaced by...heck, probably hydrophobia ("I used to think it was milk - now I know I'M ALLERGIC TO WATER!"). There are millions of people out there who have become convinced that they, or their children, are allergic to dairy products, when there is no good evidence that they are. The most "evidence" the lactophobes ever seem to have is that they once went to an allergy witch doctor (they're all over, but if you can't find one, just ask any homeopath, iridiologist, etc.; they're all lactophobes and will all tell you the same thing) who gave them his little bogus skin test, and who then who solemnly informed them that they're allergic to milk, and "that's what explains all the things wrong with you". Okay, great, lactophobes - I couldn't care less if you never drink milk again - or orange juice or soy or rice, for that matter. Let's just not pretend that your local allergy quack is a reliable source of information about lactose intolerance. And let's not pretend that the odds of you actually being lactose intolerant, especially if you're a caucasian, are not extremely low.

Lactose tolerance, by the way, is a fantastic benefit - the ability to consume large quantities of dairy products conferred such a survival benefit on to the people of northern Europe, that the ability to do so spread like wildfire through the population. There is a fascinating little section in Nicolas Wade's "Before the Dawn" on this subject, but maybe that's a subject meriting its own entry.

Where was I? OH. Yes. Here's the greatest one of all: COLOGNE.

Who would have ever thought that cologne - a splash of aftershave, for Pete's sake - would one day be identified as a vicious bio-hazard? More and more I see signs in public saying, "PLEASE DO NOT ENTER IF YOU ARE WEARING ANY PERFUME OR COLOGNE AS THESE MAY TRIGGER ALLERGIC REACTIONS". Well - all "perfume" or "cologne" is, is a type of fragrance. So let's talk about fragrance.

Almost every soap out there now has fragrance added. So why don't the signs say, "Please do not enter if you have washed any part of your body in the past week with soap"? Actually, forget bodies. What about washing the dishes? The liquid detergent and anti-static dryer sheets have fragrance added, too. And so does your laundry detergent. And toothpaste has mint flavour added to it, as do breathmints (and there must be people out there allergic to mint). So does hair gel and hair spray. And shampoo and conditioner. And deodorant and anti-perspirant. And by the way, certain types of make-up, like rouge and lipstick, give off an odour, too. But why only focus on deliberately added fragrance? What about all the foods which impart a lingering smell? Garlic, onions, curry, chile peppers, etc...and what if someone's allergic to the odour of pepperoni pizza!!! OH MY GOD!

So, I want to say to all the the hypochondriac control freaks out there posting signs about perfume and cologne, be consistent, and put a big sign that says, "Do not enter if you bathe, brush your teeth, shampoo or condition your hair, wear laundered clothing, wear make-up, use deodorant or anti-perspirant, apply any sort of hair product, or eat or drink anything". Basically, the sign should say, "ONLY HOMELESS PEOPLE ALLOWED INSIDE". Or they could have a little picture of Charles Manson by the front door, with a sign that says, "Unless you look like THIS, KEEP OUT!".

Anyway, I have come to conclude that what I am most allergic to is the capricious, hypochondriac, narcissistic paranoia of the allergophobes.

Okay, next time I'll try to post more of a pleasant one :P.

The Maple Leafs Can Have Him: Hype vs. Reality in the Case of Brian Burke

Brian Burke was the General Manager of the Vancouver Canucks for six years. In all that time, the Canucks won one - one - playoff series.

One playoff series in six years? How did that happen?

Well, I'm sure Brian Burke would say it happened because he didn't have the necessary autonomy from ownership to develop the Canucks into Stanley Cup contenders. But you can bet your booties that no one from Orca Bay Entertainment (which owned the Canucks at the time) told Burke to stick with hapless goalie Dan Cloutier year after year after year. Yet he did. Why? A man-crush? No one that I know can imagine why. There's an old saying in rock n' roll: a good band with a mediocre drummer is a mediocre band; a good band with a great drummer is a great band. With a few notable exceptions, it is the same with hockey teams and their goalies, and why neither Burke nor Crawford (the coach) could ever get that about Cloutier is unfathomable. A hundred injuries, a hundred chokings under pressure, a hundred bad goals...and bad goals at the worst times, too: in the 2002 playoff quarterfinals, when the Canucks were up two games to none against Detroit, Cloutier in the third game let in a FIFTY FOOT SHOT from Niklas Lidstrom, and that was the turning point. The Red Wings got pumped and won the next four games, and blew the Canucks out.

And this whole business about thirty win seasons with Cloutier - it was all nonsense. What matters in evaluating goalies is save percentages, not wins per se. After all, if you have a fantastically prolific scoring line like the Canucks did during those years (Naslund-Bertuzzi-Morrison), you can let in four goals and still win. Mere wins just don't tell you all that much about your goalie...And in terms of save percentage, Cloutier's was always near the worst of any starting goalie in the NHL. His playoff save percentage was even worse - I remember checking once during the 2003 season, and it was in the mid-EIGHTS!

And while this was all going on, year after year of choking in the playoffs, Burke strutted around town undaunted, popping off as though he were the greatest hockey genius since Toe Blake. But it's just a lot of talk, a lot of attitude, a lot of soundbites and bluster.

Ah, you say, but what about the Cup? Well, Burke deserves credit for bringing in Niedermayer and sending prima donna Fedorov to Columbus...but the bottom line is that the Anaheim Ducks were pretty much in place when Burke arrived. Kevin Lowe (who, by the way, knows about winning Stanley Cups - he's won SIX of them) only said what everyone already knows (no wonder Burke got so mad - the truth hurts). It's like Marc Crawford's much-vaunted Cup with the Avalanche in 1996: his team featured Adam Foote, Sandis Ozholinsh, and Uwe Krupp on defence, Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg, Owen Nolan, Adam Deadmarsh, and (loathsome cheap-shot-artist) Claude Lemieux as forwards, Chris Simon for toughness, and Patrick Roy in net. I'm sorry, but that team could have won the Cup with my eight year old daughter coaching it. A good measure for a coach is if he can replace a team's coach and elevate its performance without major personnel changes over a period of time. Crawford had that chance with the LA Kings after being fired from Vancouver, and did jack squat. And since LA fired him, he's been doing TV commentary. That's the guy Brian Burke left in place for six disappointing seasons as the coach of the Canucks. Again - why?

The GM career of Brian Burke reminds me of the career of Richard Dawkins as a public intellectual or Daniel Dennett as a philosopher; all they do is shout the loudest. In terms of actual contributions, they are no better than many others, and in many ways, far worse (Dawkin's "The God Delusion" is probably the most ridiculous book I have read in the last ten years; Dennett's hyper-neologic reprises of Ryleanism just do not make any sense to anyone on the planet except for Dennett and apparently his groupie Susan Blackmore. It's all hype, all nonsense).

Anyway, I'm getting off track here. All I'm saying is, I will be the first to congtratulate Burke on success in Toronto. Hell, that team has been so bad for so long, that if he can turn them into a Cup-contending franchise for any length of time, then he should be considered a very good hockey man. And actually, it is hard to see any real downside to the Toronto job for Burke: if he can't make steady progress, he can always blame it on the decisions of his predecessors (traded away draft picks, poor prospects and scouting, etc.). But even getting the Maple Leafs to the point where they consistently make the playoffs would make Burke look like a genius, so starved is the franchise for consistent success.

Anyway, the point is, everywhere Burke's been, even when he worked in the NHL head office, his performance has been about average (the only extraordinary aspect of his performance has been his unusually invincible ego). I just do not see anything in his last ten years as a GM that should make Maple Leafs honcho Richard Peddie view Burke as "the one guy in the world who can save us!!!". He got lucky with Anaheim. Other than that, what? Serious lameness, year after year. I just don't get it.

My advice to the Maple Leafs: prepare to enjoy Burke's Cowardly Lion schtick ("I'm as tough as nails! Our teams needs to be BIGGER and STRONGER! We need hitting! We need smashing! We need to beat these people up! I make no apologies! We'll rip 'em to pieces - send 'em to Kingdom Come!"), because if the past is any guide, that's about all you'll be getting: it will take more than Brian Burke (or Burke plus his Man Friday Dave Nonis, now evidently trying to move from Anaheim to where Master now works) to make the Maple Leafs into a consistent Stanley Cup contender.

Of course, I could be wrong. For the sake of a once great franchise, I hope so.

The Best Sport You've Never Heard Of: Rugby League

Rugby league is the best sport that North Americans have never heard of.

It is not quite the rugby that we are vaguely familiar with over here. That sort of rugby is actually called rugby union. It is also a great sport. Rugby league is a different thing, though.

The game is simple (much more so than rugby union). In league, two teams of thirteen players each try to score more points than the other by either moving the ball down the 100 meter, rectangular pitch, and across the try line (that is, into the end zone) and laying it down on the ground (called scoring a "try", worth four points), or kicking the ball through the uprights (either as a conversion kick after a "try" for two points, a drop goal [where the ball bounces off the ground prior to foot contact], or a penalty kick).

Each team, upon getting possession of the ball, has six tackles (equivalent to downs) to advance the ball as far as they can. As in football on the fourth down, often teams choose to punt the ball downfield after the fifth tackle.

Here's how the tackles work. Upon tackling the ball handler, defenders will then back away while the runner stands up, puts the ball down on the ground, and rolls it backwards to a teammate with his foot. The player behind him will then grab the ball and either run with it, or pass it, and so on for each player that handles the ball. The only trick is that there are no forward passes allowed. Passes must be either perfectly lateral, or backwards. However, players may kick the ball forward at any time, and any teammates who were parallel to or behind the kicker may run up and try to recover the ball before the defenders do.

There are no huddles, no real scrums, no rucking, the rules are relatively few - the action is non-stop and the players, wearing no, or hardly any, padding, move very quickly. It requires as much grace as it does toughness, as much finesse as it does brute strength, as much endurance as it does quickness, and as much quick-thinking as it does overall game sense. My guess is that rugby league players (along with the MMA guys) overall are probably the most fit athletes in professional sports.

I first got into rugby league visiting Australia a few years ago. I went to a packed pub with the Sony guys to watch the State of Origin match (Queensland against New South Wales - the State of Origin is sort of the equivalent of the Super Bowl). I ended up thinking, "this is the greatest thing I've ever seen". It had it all: blood, smashing, leaping, diving, spectacular passing and kicking, drama, everything.

It's why I got my satellite dish - so I could watch all the rugby league games on the Setanta Sports. Which I just spent the last nine months doing (the Rugby League World Cup, held once every four years, just ended, with New Zealand upsetting Australia to win the final for the first time ever).

Anyway, I don't really have any story to tell; I just wanted to plug rugby league, the best sport you've never heard of.

See ya,

T.

Quantum of Clarity

Let me see if I understand this right.

EON Productions takes a moribund James Bond franchise - one almost a parody of itself - which appealed mostly to 60 year old women who just liked cooing over Pierce Brosnan, picks a new, young Bond in Daniel Craig, adapts the first Bond novel for the screenplay, assembles a fantastic supporting cast with a fantastic director, and makes the best Bond movie in years - and arguably, ever - with "Casino Royale". The movie has action, interesting characters like Le Chiffre and Vesper, clear, compelling plotlines, and is beautifully shot. The movie is a smashing success, far beyond what its creators could have hoped. People who never see movies twice (like me) go to see it twice (like me). Ian Fleming's James Bond is introduced to a whole new generation of moviegoers. Everything is in place for a spectacular sequel, and a spectacular resurrection of the franchise.

So, for the sequel, they put together the same team, figuring "why tamper with smashing success?". OH - wait. Sorry. That wasn't them - that was ME, if I'm running EON.

Instead, the geniuses at EON evidently decided to ditch director Martin Campbell, who did a spectacular job with "Casino Royale", and instead hire a guy who has never done ANYTHING to suggest he could successfully direct a Bond movie: young German dude Marc Forster (pictured above). (No doubt the EON folks spent days congratulating themselves on their "bold decision". I wonder if next they'll hire Burt Reynolds to play Prissy in their remake of "Gone with the Wind").

Surprise - the movie is a let-down. Forster is a dud. The photography overall is often irritatingly "jolty" and spastic. The plotlines (what there are of them) are difficult or impossible to make out under all the cinematic "noise" - crashes and chases and fires and shooting and all the crap that Forster puts in to try to (over)compensate for the fact that he has no idea what he's doing here (hint to Forster: those things are supposed to be the icing, not the cake). Worse, dozens of things happen which don't seem to follow from anything we have yet witnessed on the screen, so which are actually fairly confusing (why was Mathes shot? What happened? I went to the movie with six other people, and none of us had any clear idea about what a whole bunch of things meant in the movie). And oh yeah - why is there a luxury hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert?

And the characters. I do not get this. The characters in "Quantum of Solace" aren't even one dimensional. I mean...Olga Kurylenko as Camille Montes...a great beauty, a very good actress...what do we get to know about her character except that she wants revenge? She never develops like Vesper did in "Casino Royale". Sad to say, but all Kurylenko is in this movie is a pretty face. I don't get it. A huge opportunity wasted.

And I'm sorry, but Gemma Arterton is quite ridiculous here: wooden, out of place, self-conscious (not that I blame her so much as I blame the Teutonic automaton Forster).

There is a deep sterility to this movie, a lack of human-ness. In the first one, we saw deep emotions - serious love, serious hatred, serious regret, seriously HUMAN elements (remember the scene where Bond starts laughing as he's being tortured, strapped to the chair, in the first one?). In this waste of time, there is no raw emotion, nothing. This movie has no soul.

My advice to people everywhere: don't disassemble your team when it's winning the World Series. And don't hire Marc Forster to direct your action movie.

Did Hitler Have a "Fully Christian Ethos"?

In the previous post, I typed the words:

"Yet I have shown how easily it is to come to just that conclusion without ever invoking the concept of God. It is only a matter of logic, given once we begin with certain (atheist and utopian) premises.

"And of course, this wasn't really a hypothetical. It was this same reasoning which licensed the persecution of religious believers in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, etc."

(My language was sloppy here; I would never say Hitler was a pure atheist, nor did I; his beliefs were too muddled for that. What I meant was that the rationale for persecuting religious believers was not itself religious or sectarian).

In response, Anonymous wrote:

"Hitler, who claimed again and again in speeches that 'I am a Christian,' who sent his soldiers into battle with their belt buckles emblazoned Gott Mit Uns, 'God With Us,' who in fact derived his borrowed justifications for extermination of the Jews from the New Testament itself, could not rightly be called an atheist, nor could his cause be said to have been championed under the banner of atheism.

"No, his was a fully Christian ethos that he adapted and integrated to become part of his cult of the Third Reich".


So, did Hitler have a "fully Christian ethos", as Anonymous claims? Let's see what the record, and historians, have to say.

First, it is absolutely the case that Hitler often paid public lip service to Christianity; but it is a credulous observer of politics who believes that public expressions always reveal private convictions. The truth is that while Hitler seemed to believe in "providence" and "destiny", he was in no sense a believing Christian. In fact, not only did he not abide by a "fully Christian ethos", he despised Christianity. I think it can be fairly said that the only correspondence between Hitler's program and New Testament Christianity was that Christ and his followers sometimes used vituperative language against Jews. That, and maybe the idea of some destiny to the cosmos (an idea not specifically Christian at all)...but as far as I can see, that is it.

The evidently popular idea that Hitler was actually a believing Christian, or that he had a "fully Christian ethos", or that Hitler's National Socialism was some sort of sincere but misguided attempt to implement a specifically Christian "heaven on earth", is not warranted by any substantial evidence, and in fact is contradicted by almost everything we know about the beliefs of the lead architects of National Socialism. Nor am I alone in the view that, for reasons of political pragmatism, Hitler's occasional public expressions did not represent his private views on this (I have to wonder why anyone would doubt that Hitler would lie in public for political purposes!).

Anonymous argues that scholars view "Hitler's Table Talk" (a collection of anecdotes recorded by private observes of Hitler speaking casually) as largely spurious. I doubt it - but for argument's sake, let's ignore that book until the end.

Let's instead go first to Duke history professor Claudia Koonz, who notes that "during (1933-34) Hitler virtually never mentioned the three controversial themes that shaped his covert political agenda: crude antisemitism, contempt for Christianity, and preparation for a war of conquest". (From "The Nazi Conscience", p. 79).

Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans writes:

..."Hitler and most of his leading advocates were aware of the breadth and depth of Christian allegiance in the majority of the population, and did not want to antagonize it in the course of suppressing parties such as the (Catholic Centre Party). They were thus careful in the early months of 1933 to insist repeatedly on the adherence of the new government to the Christian faith."

(From "The Coming of the Third Reich", by Richard L. Evans, pp. 362-363).

University of Sheffield historian Ian Kershaw writes:

"Relations between the Catholic Church and the Nazi Party remained chequered throughout the period of the rise to power. The evident anti-Christian strain in Nazi doctrine, epitomized above all in Rosenberg's writings, evoked stringent condemnation from the Catholic hierarchy...Hitler's own concerted efforts to deny the slur that he headed an anti-religious movement were far from convincing to Catholic opinion-leaders...Despite the high expectations placed in the Concordat with the Papacy, ratified in summer 1933, it soon became obvious that the fears about the anti-Church thrust of Nazi ideology and policy were well-founded".

(From "Hitler", by Ian Kershaw, pp. 103-14).

Richard Overy, professor of history at the University of London, Fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for military history, adds:

"Hitler saw the relationship (with the Deutsche Christen church) in political terms. He was not a practicing Christian, but had somehow succeeded in masking his own religious skepticism from millions of German voters...His few private remarks on Christianity betray a profound contempt and indififference. Forty years afterwards he could still recall facing up to a clergyman-teacher at his school when told how unhappy he would be in the afterlife: 'I've heard of a scientist who doubts whether there is a next world'. Hitler believed that all religions were 'now decadent'...

"Hitler, like Stalin, took a very modern view of the incompatibility of religious and scientific explanation. 'The dogma of Christianity', he told Himmler in October 1941, 'gets worn away before the advances of science'...'Scientific truth', Hitler announced in an after-dinner conversation some months later, 'is the indispensable formulation'. There was nothing to offer anyone who looked for 'needs of a metaphysical nature' in the party. Truth lay in natural science, and for Hitler that meant the truth of racial biology - natural selection, racial struggle, 'identity of kind'.

"Hitler was politically prudent enough not to trumpet his scientific views publicly, not least because he had to maintain the distinction between his own movement and the godlessness of Soviet communism. Nor was he a thorough atheist. His public utterancees are peppered with references to 'God' and 'spirit'. For Hitler the eschatological truths that he found in his perception of the race represented the real 'eternal will that rules the univers'' in the infinite value of the race and the struggle to sustain it men find what they might call God, and inner sense of the unity and purposiveness of nature and history'...What Hitler could not accept was that Christianity could offer anything other than 'false ideas' to sustain its claim to moral certitude".

(...)

Once again, I am quite unable to understand why anyone would take at face value Hitler's public expressions of piety. It's not like William Shirer's now canonical "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" only came out yesterday. Under the chapter heading "The Persecution of the Christian Churches", for example, Shirer writes:

"The Nazi war on the Christian churches began more moderately. Though Hitler, nominally a Catholic, had inveighed against political Catholicism in Mein Kampf and attacked both of the Christian churches for their failure to recognize the racial problem, he had, as we have seen, warned in his book that 'a political party must never...lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation'...

"In his speech of March 23, 1933, to the Reichstag when the legislative body of Germany abandoned its functions to the dictator, Hitler paid tribute to the Christian faiths as 'essential elements for safequarding the soul of the German people', promised to respect their rights, declared that his government's 'ambition is a peaceful accord between Church and State' and added - with an eye to the votes of the Catholic Centre Party, which he received - that 'we hope to improve our friendly relations with the Holy See'.

"Scarcely four months later, on July 20, the Nazi government concluded a concordat with the Vatican in which it guaranteed the freedom of the Catholic religion and the right of the Church to 'regulate her own affairs'. The agreement..was hardly put to paper before it was broken by the Nazi government...

"On July 25, five days after ratification of the concordat, the German government promulgated a sterilization law, which particularly offended the Catholic Church. Five days later the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. During the next years thousands of Catholic priests, nuns, and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped-up charges of 'immorality' or of 'smuggling foreign currency'. Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, was, as we have seen, murdered in the June 30, 1934, purge. Scores of Catholic publications were suppressed, and even the sanctity of the confessional was violated by Gestapo agents...On March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, 'Mit Brennender Sorge' (With Burning Sorrow), charging the Nazi government with 'evasion' and 'violation' of the concordat and accusing it of sowing 'the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church'". (pp. 324-325).

Well, yes. The Nazi government did possess a "fundamental hostility to Christ". How could it be more obvious?

(Nor was it only Catholics Hitler had contempt for. Shirer reports that about Protestants, Hitler once said to an aide: "You can do anything you want with them. They will submit....they are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them". [p. 329].)

Speaking of Article 24, Overy notes:

"Article 24 of the party programme accepted 'positive Christianity', but also called on the churches to do nothing to offend 'the sense of morality of the German race'. This injunction placed the moral outlook of the party above that of all religions. That moral outlook was rooted in 'the acknowledgement and ruthless exploitation of the iron laws of nature'. The primary law, and the 'source of all genuineness and truth', was the unconditional defence of the race and its blood".

Overy continues:

"From the mid-1930s the regime and the party were dominated much more by the prominent anti-Christians in their ranks - Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, Heydrich...Religious youth movements were closed down or merged with the Hitler Youth, from which all religious instruction was excluded. In August 1937 Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction. Dissident Protestants were barred from universities. State-sponsored denomination schools were closed by 1939, together with private ecclesiastical school. Religious education by clergymen was eliminated. Religions were prevented from publicly collecting for charity. The new generation of Germans was taught to despise the characteristics of the Christian man as tainted with a degenerate, Jewish effeminacy and to seek within themselves the strength to assert and defend the race.

(...)

"Both Stalin and Hitler wanted a neutered religion, subservient to the state, while the slow programme of scientific revelation destroyed the foundation of religious myth".

(From "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia", by R. Overy, pp. 280-286).

I submit that we need a lot more than a belt buckle slogan and a few calculated utterances in public speeches to establish that Hitler had a "fully Christian ethos", especially when there are so many evidences that he loathed Christianity.

So, about that ethos:

In his brilliant little book "From Darwin to Hitler", historian Richard Weikart echoes the historians quoted above:

"Hitler's morality was not based on traditional Judeo-Christian ethics nor Kant's categorical imperative, but was rather a complete repudiation of them. Instead, Hitler embraced an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence, especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter of morality...He scorned humaneness and Christian morality, which would promote weakness, thereby producing decline, degradation, and ultimately the demise of the human species...

"Hitler's view that morality is purely a human construction undermines any system of ethics claiming transcendence, such as Judeo-Christian ethics or Kantian ethics. Hitler clearly did not believe in the existence of immutable, universal moral standards.

"Hitler derided any morality inimical to the increased vitality of the 'Aryan' race, especially traditional Christian values of humility, pity, and sympathy...In Hitler's mind Darwinism provided the moral justification for infanticide, euthanasia, genocide, and other policies that had been (and thankfully still are) considered immoral by more conventional moral standards". (pp. 210-215).

In his autobiography "Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs", Hitler's architect Albert Speer writes:

"Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking: 'You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" (p. 115).

NOW...about "Hitler's Table Talk". I have not read any of the claims mentioned by Anonymous that Hitler's comments on Christianity (or the whole book) is spurious. On the face of it, it seems a bizarre claim, as virtually every single quote seems in accord with a hundred quotes and evidences. Certainly his comments on Christianity fall into that category. I ask readers to judge for themselves, after reading all of the above, whether it is more likely that someone invented the following quotes and falsely attributed them to Hitler, or that these are Hitler's comments:

"The Christian religion is an enemy to beauty" (p. 246)

"Since my fourteenth year I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach. Apart from the Holy Joes, I can say that none of my comrades went on believing in the miracle of the Eucharist" (p. 246).

"It was Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome - not the Germans or the Huns" (p. 193).

"While we're on the subject, let's add that, even amongst those who claim to be good Catholics, very few really believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church" (p. 258).

"I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie" (p. 259).

"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity" (p. 8).

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization of the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society" (p. 60).

"It's striking to observe that Christian ideas, despite all St. Pauls's efforts, had no success in Athens. The philosophy of the Greeks was so much superior to this poverty-stricken rubbish that the Athenians burst out laughing when they listened to him" (p. 63).

"What is ruining Christianity today is what once ruined the ancient world...as soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world was bound to collapse" (p. 254).

"Kerrl, with the noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don't believe the thing's possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself...Pure Christianity...leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics" (p. 112).

"When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity...Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline" (p. 48).

"It's Christianity that's the liar" (p. 49).

"Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure" (p. 41).

To summarize my own views, and those of the historians quoted above:

Hitler did not have a "fully Christian ethos". Rather, he had a "fully ANTI-Christian ethos". He viewed Christianity as "weak" and "flabby", and for that reason, as an enemy to a National Socialism, the job of which was to preserve the volk through struggle. He had contempt for both Catholics and Protestants, and showed it repeatedly.

Moreover, he did not rationalize his persecution of religious believers with theist arguments, but with secular arguments, nor were his motivations in persecuting religious believers (or anyone else), themselves religious.

The broadest point is that whether we start out with atheist, theist, or somewhere-in-between premises, we can always wind up, seemingly logically, at the conclusion that we may do evil. Neither atheism nor theism in themselves can provide salvation.

Are the Four Horsemen Any Less Deluded?

Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens all claim that religious believers are deluded. So they may be. But are they themselves any less deluded?

Consider what the so-called "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" believe.

They believe (amongst other things) that:

1.) Religious belief on a large scale can be eradicated;

2.) Religion is what, more than anything, causes evil;

3.) The world would be a much better place if everyone were atheist and embraced a strictly scientific worldview.


But - how is this not obvious? - one has to be extremely credulous, if not actually delusional, to believe any of these three things. The Horsemen want everyone to be more skeptical, but their own beliefs are only possible because they have suspended their own skepticism. In this sense, they are but mirror images of religious believers themselves.

After all, there is no reason to believe that "religion can be eradicated"; for there is no reason to believe that religion arises from anything other than innate features of the human psyche (hence its ubiquity in the human family). So to believe that "religion can be eradicated" is like believing that "sexual attraction can be eradicated" or that "inferring causes from events can be eradicated". It is to believe in magic; the only thing that history and psychology - let alone common sense - tells us is that the only way to "eradicate religion" is to eradicate human beings. (Interesting, given the humanitarian pretensions of all four.)

There is also no reason to believe that "religion" causes evil, or even that that phrase has any real meaning, not least because in the end it is very difficult to pin down how we should even define "religion" (in contradistinction to "ideology", say). Should Catholicism be considered a religion, but Marxism not? What about Buddhism or Confucianism, which have no god figures? What are our definitions? This is not a pedantic point; it is a necessary one when we are talking about causation from a social science perspective, for even under the very best of circumstances it is very difficult to establish causes for human actions. Ambiguous slogans like "religion causes evil" do not cut it.

What may make more sense, I think, especially given the fact that the human brain is seemingly hardwired for creating cosmological narratives (whether theist or non-theist), is to draw a distinction not between "religion" and "non-religion", but between unjustified beliefs (which may be theist or non-theist) or justified beliefs. So maybe it would get us a little farther to say that unjustified beliefs, rather than religion, cause evil.

The problem with this, though, is that whereas the claim "religion causes evil" is essentially meaningless, the claim "unjustified beliefs cause evil" is obviously untrue. There are innumerable unjustified beliefs which may inspire very good behaviour. (It is perfectly possible to be inspired to share our food with the hungry by the belief that elves, or the ghost of Elvis Presley, will reward us if we do).

Worse is that justified beliefs can inspire us, or at least license us, to do evil. Consider that evolutionary theory on its own terms, in the end, makes it essentially impossible to attribute some sort of cosmic value to human life while denying it to, say, slime mould. So, we would kill off bothersome slime mould with a jug of Clorox without a second thought; why then, confining ourselves to a purely biological theory like evolution, should we think think twice about killing off a bothersome human being (other than for fear of incarceration)? Logically speaking, staying within biology, I'm not sure there is a good reason.

Put another way - is there anything at all, in the most justified biological beliefs we can have, that allows us to say that Jeffrey Dahmer did something "evil"? I don't think so - biology, after all, doesn't even pretend to tell us anything about good or evil.

The point here is, I'm not sure how justified versus unjustified beliefs in any way correspond to good versus evil behaviour. And the bigger point is, if they do not so correspond, then neither does science correspond to goodness. The claim that it does is only wishful thinking on the part of people incapable of religious belief, because the alternative (that maybe there is no solution to the problem of human evil) is too horrible for them to contemplate. But this is only as much to say, again, that believing that religion causes evil, or that we can be saved through science (see below), is itself an unjustified belief, if not a genuine delusion.

Lastly, and especially given the history of the last century, there is no reason to believe that the world would be a better place if everyone were atheist. All of the same atrocities and more which have been justified by theist thinking, can be justified with non-theist thinking - and have been. Here is just one simple, not-so hypothetical, example.

If we begin with the belief, as does Dawkins (see the first couple of pages of "The God Delusion"), that:

Premise 1.) Creating heaven on earth (obviously a good thing) is possible;

and then we posit that

Premise 2.) Religion is making the creation of heaven on earth impossible;

we can conclude that

Conclusion 1.) Religion must be neutralized or eradicated - for the good of everyone.

And indeed, this is just what all four of the writers mentioned say.

So then, what would our next syllogism be?

P3.) Religion must be neutralized or eradicated;

P4.) The actions of certain people - e.g., missionaries, priests, publishers of Bibles, activist believers - are impeding our effort to neutralize or eradicate religion/establish heaven on earth;

Therefore,

C2.) The "bad" actions of these "enemies of heaven on earth" must be stopped.

And what would next syllogism be?

P5.) The "bad" actions of these "enemies of heaven-on-earth" people must be stopped;

P6.) Those "bad" actions can be stopped by either punishing the people doing them, or, if it comes to that, killing them;

Therefore,

C.3) Missionaries, priests, activist religious believers, e.g., should be punished or even killed.

Now, if it not an evil thing to punish or kill people just because of their beliefs, I don't know what is. Yet I have shown how easily it is to come to just that conclusion without ever invoking the concept of God. It is only a matter of logic, given once we begin with certain (atheist and utopian) premises.

And of course, this wasn't really a hypothetical. It was this same reasoning which licensed the persecution of religious believers in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, etc.

AND - it is quite close to the reasoning which leads Sam Harris himself, in "The End of Faith", to suggest that there are certain beliefs which are so bad, that people should be killed just for having them. This is the same Sam Harris who wrote an entire book about how rotten religious belief is, not least because it leads to atrocities like killing people for having the wrong beliefs! (This isn't the only contradiction in Harris...).

It is a comforting fantasy that there is an ultimate solution to the problem of human evil. Theists have their preferred solutions (Jesus will come again, everyone should convert to the "one true religion", etc.), and non-theists have theirs (science can rid the world of hunger and oppression, everyone should convert to atheism, etc.).

But neither theist nor non-theist "solutions" have any basis in evidence or experience. The beliefs of the Four Horsemen are no less delusional in this respect than those of religious believers, of which they are but a mirror image. Along these same lines, there does not seem to be any correlation between whether a belief is theist or atheist, and the goodness or evil of the actions it inspires. Although, if there is any large-scale correlation, the 20th century suggests atheists (and religious skeptics) would come out worse. At a small level, the Sam Harris atheist argument for "killing people for their beliefs", which I put in syllogism form, gives a small indication of why. So does the Clorox slime mould example.

So, where does that leave us?

To find out, tune in next time for another episode of "A Lone Ignoramus Tries to Understand Everything in the Entire Universe"!

Shooting for Immortality

Sure, I'd like people to notice when I die. That would be nice. I can't explain why really, since I'd have to already be dead for people to notice that I was dead. But...still, as irrational as it may be, I'd still like to leave some sort of lasting legacy to the planet.

My achievements so far, I think, have been fairly meager. Yes, I have had some success at radio, but that seems like a long time ago. I'm grateful for it...but in some way, it just doesn't seem like enough.

What would be enough? One thing might be some cool phrase that I invent, which enters common speech and just goes on forever. I thought for a few seconds this past week that I'd finally come up with a good candidate; but four seconds later, after a Google search, I discovered that it was already in common usage. I must have heard it but just not remembered (the phrase was, "who you are is more important than what you know").

There is one phrase I think I might actually have invented which seems to express something true - or at least true to some extent - and which might be a good candidate. It came to me when I appeared on Global TV a few years ago commenting on the Canadian federal election, and in particular, Liberal Party candidate Paul Martin's shambolic campaign. The phrase was, "if you can't run a campaign, you can't run a country". Yes, it was in Canada - but it was on national TV.

Now - I have run a google search on my phrase, and interestingly, what few usages of it all post-date my appearance. Could it be...?

I hope so (even though if I'm not credited, it will be as if I'd never come up with it anyhow). But in the absence of some cool aphorism or slogan or word known as my own coinage, I suppose I should concentrate on what legacy I am leaving for my kids. God knows I've tried...and I did get what for me was a nice "atta boy" one day a couple of weeks ago from my ten year old daughter, Lady Lu (once again, hip-hop nickname).

She said, "Daddy, it's fall again - and that means it's time for all our fall family rituals. Like stew. We have to start making our stews again! With the bread bowls!".

WOW. Someone noticed; someone remembered; someone appreciated; someone saw the stew as more than the stew; someone saw it as 'sacred family ritual'. That's what I was shooting for! Cool!

And so it was that last night, I took Sno-Cone and Lady Lu and Peaches out to the little local grocery store, and we bought chicken, and barley, and bean mix, and lentils, and potatoes, and we washed everything up, and threw it all into the crockpot along with some rosemary and basil and a bay leaf...and today, I picked up some sourdough bread bowls...And tonight, we turned off all the lights, and lit a fire and a bunch of candles, and all gathered round the table to eat our super-duper chicken stew out of our very own sourdough bread bowls, just like we do every couple of weeks every fall, and we drank a special punch that Skinny Dip made...And afterwards, we all gathered in the living room, and I taught all the little kids an old Kinks song about a witch called "Wicked Annabella" (Halloween and all), and then we finished by reading "Hansel and Gretel". And my story sort of went awry - I ended up doing a Bullwinkle imitation for Hansel's voice, and a Rocky imitation for Gretel's, and all sorts of other things which I think only little kids might find hilarious...and we all went to bed feeling cozy and happy...and I dare to hope that maybe they will remember some part of tonight, forever...

And now that I think about it...if they do, it will be far more than enough. :)

Little Miracles

One of the best things about having children is that through them, we get to see the world for the first time, and feel all those first blushes of wonder, over and over again.

I was reminded of that today. E and I took my three year old son Trixta (I'll be using their hip-hop nicknames for privacy's sake) and my six year old son Sno-cone for a walk up to the University of Victoria library where I had to photocopy an article (E's hip-hop nickname is Skinny Dip).

On the way there, Trixta - a very attentive little chap - noticed that there were no more blackberries on any of the bushes along the trail by our house.

"Where did all the blackberries go, Dad?".

"They're gone now" (ridiculous answer, I know).

"Where did they go?".

"Well, the blackberries stopped growing, and the ones that were there fell on to the ground, and...the birds probably ate them all".

Trixta stopped and investigated the bushes more carefully. I thought I could guess what he was thinking and feeling:

Why do blackberries just start growing all of a sudden, and then just stop growing all of a sudden? How does that work exactly? It seems all kind of strange...kind of mysterious...

And in that moment, I realized just how good those questions were. I didn't have any better idea than he had.

We finally got up to the library. I swore them all to silence and made Skinny Dip promise to not throw the rugby ball around inside (we'd brought it with us to play catch on the way up). We entered and made our way over to the photocopy machine. I didn't realize it, but neither Trixta nor Sno-cone had ever seen one in action. Both were entranced. They took turns pushing the big green button, and "oohed" and "aahed" every time a new sheet of paper popped out. ("WO. That's cool!")

And hearing all their questions about how the machine worked made me realize how little I myself knew about it. The best I could muster was, "it takes a quick photo of the piece of paper". That that was the extent of my knowledge left me, again, feeling quite a bit of wonder myself.

And now I am about to push the "send" button on this laptop computer; and the words I type here will magically float through the air, and - I guess - into an antennae, and through a wire, and into something called "cyberspace", and be instantly available to people all around the globe. And I have no idea how any of that works, either.

And I wonder just how much more, really, I understand about the world, than my kids...

Problems of Philosophy, Indeed

When I was a little kid growing up in Lynden, Washington, I used to listen to Seattle classic rock radio station KZOK (102.5 FM). What's funny is that if I turn the station on now, the playlist is exactly the same. It's all still "All Along the Watchtower", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Barracuda", the whole deal. Nothing's changed since 1980.

Philosophy is like that. One day I'd like to write a follow-up to Bertrand Russell's classic "The Problems of Philosophy" called "The Problem with the Problems of Philosophy", and chronicle the inability or pathological unwillingness of modern philosophers to ever ultimately solve, or even want to solve, any of their philosophical "problems". (That reminds me - last year I chatted with a well-known philosopher at the London School of Economics. I asked him if he knew of any philosophical problems that had ever been solved. He acted as though he'd never considered this before, and after a few moments, admitted that he couldn't think of one). Point is, a list of current "problems of philosophy" in 2008 would be pretty much indistinguishable from a list made twenty, fifty, or even one hundred years ago.

So ingrained is the habit of yakking forever about problems is that even if some philosopher somewhere were to "solve" some "problem of philosophy" - like, say, the "problem of induction", the "problem of other minds", or the "problem" of how one thing can be two things and yet one thing at the same time (thanks, Heraclitus) - no other philosopher would acknowledge it.

Perhaps I am putting the matter a tad too harshly. You see, it is not quite that philosophy is characterized by total stasis. There is "progress" of a twisted sort: "progress", in the world of professional philosophy, is when someone, somewhere, thinks of a BRAND NEW unsolvable "problem" for philosophers to yak about. But such "progress" is fairly rare. After all, so many philosophers have been trying for so many centuries to come up with brand new "problems" to talk about, that the creative faculties of the human mind appear to have been fairly mined out. Besides, most folks just aren't that creative to begin with.

That's why most professional philosophers now spend their time yakking about the exact nature of the yakking of other philosophers before them - AND, yakking about the yakking about the yakking of other philosophers. As if the pointless ramblings of Hegel were not pointless enough already, philosophy journals now treat us to articles like "Husserl on Hegel's Teleological Animus Mundi in Light of Heidegger's Theory of Being". Such stuff at worst is one step away from an inmate-written insane asylum newsletter. But what it mostly is, is just pointless.

I'd like to think of some snappy ending to this post, but I can't. Besides, this post is probably pointless itself...

The World Can Go To Hell (and for some reason, that feels great)

At the moment anyway...I really couldn't care less if the world went to hell.

I don't care who wins the US presidential election (though maybe that's because I can't stand either candidate). I literally didn't spend one single minute paying attention to the just-passed Canadian election. I didn't read a single newspaper article, didn't spend a single minute watching election coverage.

I'm sick of hearing about how McDonald's is the root of all evil, how I should buckle up, how I should go green, how I should only use recycled printer paper, how everything in the world is poisoning me, how I should stop wearing cologne, how "Bush lied", how every bank in the world is collapsing, how I should attend all four thousand PTA meetings they have each year, how I should volunteer for yet another soccer fundraiser and on and on and on. I feel like lighting most of my stuff on fire (I'll keep my book collection and the computer), setting up the Island Kingdom of Bachmania (subjects by invitation only), and staying there for the rest of my life. Or else requesting a transfer to a far distant galaxy from earth's alien overlords (I know they're there because I have had "special spiritual experiences").

All I want to do anymore is hang out with trusted friends (which currently include my children, my brother, and three or four others). Everything outside that bubble seems, now, either rotten or soon-to-be rotten.

Yet strangely, I feel sort of at peace about it all...

A Failed Prediction?

As I write this, Barack Obama appears to be heading towards a clear victory over John McCain in the upcoming US presidential election. However, I predicted a McCain victory months ago, long before Obama even won the Democratic nomination.

I did so having no idea gas prices would spike as much as they have, and no idea that there would be a massive financial meltdown. And rightly or wrongly, American voters tend to view the Democrats as stronger than Republicans on domestic economic issues: these crises have significantly benefited Obama.

It seems now that for McCain to win, some new issue will have to induce greater fear than these economic crises, and McCain will have to be seen by voters as more likely to erase that fear. That seems to be how it works: which ever candidate voters believe is most likely to remove their most pressing fear, wins. In practical terms, I think this means that the only thing that could get McCain elected now is a brand new Osama bin-Laden video, or God forbid, a terrorist attack.

In any case, if my prediction fails, as it now seems certain to, it will be another testament to the difficulty of establishing an impressive track record of long-term political prediction (by impressive, I mean notably above what random guessing would yield). There is an inverse correlation between the possibility of accurate prediction and the amount of (uncontrollable) variables. And certainly, not just political science but all the social sciences - if indeed it is even accurate to call them "sciences" - labour under the difficulty of trying to understand phenomena which occur as the result of an infinity of uncontrollable, unknowable stimuli. And this is not even to factor in the possibility that humans have something like genuine free will. If we do - if volition in some way is not constrained by physical laws - then the possibility of ever being able to accurately predict social or political phenomena - history maybe I should say - seems even more daunting, if not impossible.

To attempt predictions where the variables are few and the relevant laws may be inferred, as Thales showed with his eclipse, makes sense; but to attempt predictions where the variables are, practically speaking, infinite, and the relevant "laws", if there even are any, are not only unknown but probably in principle unknowable, as in the case of an election many months in the future whose candidates have not even been selected - appears so impossible in principle that only a complete idiot would try :P.

Fasionable Murder

One might think that murder - arguably the worst crime - would remain taboo. But that would be to presume that human beings are inherently sane, or ethical.

In fact, humans are both sane and insane, ethical and unethical, savage and urbane, a mixture of best and worst motives. There is often no coherence or balance to what we believe, feel, or do; and in my lower moments, I wonder what essential difference there might be between the human and any other animal. Perhaps it is the capacity of some people for self-discipline in conformity to nothing more than abstract ideals of virtue; I don't know of any animal which demonstrates any capacity like that. But a little time on the planet shows that even that trait is in fairly short supply.

But back to murder. A visit these days to any North American university campus will reveal the fashion craze of wearing a black and white PLO scarf, as though it were nothing more than a leather bracelet or earring. Evidently, it doesn't matter that wearing the PLO scarf is only a step away from wearing a swastika armband. Forget Huey Lewis's old "it's hip to be square"; I guess it's now hip to champion murder, and to speak the truth, genocide, since that is what the PLO's founding premises add up to.

The PLO is, and always has been, dedicated to wiping out the state of Israel through murder. Its record of bloodshed includes murdering school children at the Ma'alot School, murdering Israeli Olympic athletes, murdering airplane passengers at Ben-Gurion Airport...the list goes on and on. Its late leader, Arafat, was a corrupt, bloodthirsty, psychopathic virtual dictator, who in no sense could ever be conceivably linked with ANY characteristic of liberal democracy: not rational discussion, not democratic procedures, not free press, not free speech, not checks and balances, not rule of law, nothing.

Yet the same students who constantly chant that Bush is a "war criminal" for "murdering Iraqi civilians", who denounce "Chinese atrocities in Tibet", who feel perfectly free to denounce what they view as "terrorism" anywhere they see it, carve out a big exception when Jews are the victims of the violence. In that case, the murder's great! So great that we all ought to wear PLO scarves to show our solidarity - like wearing a New York Giants jersey the week before the Super Bowl.

As though murder, genocide, and terrorism weren't bad enough on their own, there is also the underlying question of Israel's right to exist. And on that question, I think it can be safely said that if Israel does not have a right to exist, then no country in the world has a right to exist.

But that's probably a topic for another post.

In Defense of Vanity

All this talk about how much I enjoy gorging myself right before bed has led me to ponder why I don't continue the gorging. The answer, I think, is vanity.

It's not really a concern about my health. My short-term craving for shoving my face would definitely overcome any attachment I could develop to a long-term plan for health. And it would also overcome some attachment to an abstract ideal like self-respect. I think, in the end, it's just vanity. And vanity, to my mind, only means one thing for a (straight) guy: appealing to a particular woman, or women in general.

That's right: the only reason I don't gorge myself every night, is that my vanity has managed the spectacular feat of overcoming my gluttonous desire to do so. Put more simply, I just wanted my wife to like me more.

Strangely, losing weight didn't achieve that (but that's another story). But at least I can content myself to some small degree with the idea that however plain I might look, I'd look worse with more weight on. Or something. Hell, I'm not even really conscious of what's going on in terms of motivation, now that I think about it.

But let's just say it is common old vanity. If so, I like it. It makes humans bathe and stay healthy, brush their teeth, be polite, perform feats, do things which others will praise them for. In that sense, vanity clearly has survival value. Maybe we'd all be dead if our ancestors weren't vain.

I know I'd certainly be a lot chubbier!

The Sweet Joy of Laying In Bed Shoving Your Face Full of Food

This post is in response to comments posted by "anonymous".

First, I should say I hear anonymous's point that there is a natural variation in metabolisms, and that it is much harder for some people to keep fat off than others.

As it happens, I have had some experience with sustained overeating myself. The fattest I've ever been was this past spring - I hit 200 for the first time ever. That is about twenty five pounds over my normal weight, and it was virtually all chub (not muscle). (Also, I should mention I'm six feet).

What I did was shove my face full of food every night before bed, for months. Usually it was three (or more) pieces of my favourite sourdough bread, toasted, with melted cheese on it, with two giant glasses of milk, or a chicken pot pie and fries from the local pub. I also regularly augmented my cheese on toast with fried rib steaks. Every once in a while I'd eat an entire little tub of Haagen-Dazs (vanilla or vanilla bean). Sometimes I'd wash everything down with a Strongbow Cider (or two). Frankly, I friggin' loved it. I'd be eating right now if I could without packing on all that chub.

It's kind of easy to lose perspective on yourself, but I got a wake-up call when I went to the doctor's and weighed myself. "200! 200?! I've got to get myself together", I thought. So, I tried to change my eleven o'clock pig-out habit. It was tough. Laying there in bed, watching rugby on the big screen, whaling like Henry VIII...how could I give that up?

I started to scale down my nighttime meals, and since I wanted to start playing rugby anyway, I also managed to track down the former strength and conditioning coach for the Canadian national rugby team, Dave Smit. He agreed to train me, so I paid for twelve sessions.

These turned out to be extremely intense "crossfit" style sessions, and I often could barely walk to my car after an hour (no exaggeration). By then I'd cut out my midnight mini-medieval feasts, and I was pretty amazed at how quickly I lost chub and started to get toned.

I haven't weighed myself for awhile, but I think last time I did I was 185 or thereabouts, but the extra weight is muscle, not chub, so I guess I'm okay for now.

But dang...I sure miss those feasts!

From Helen to Captain Marvel - and back again

Three years ago, my son E, then nine, said he wanted to play soccer.

I was excited. After all, E has a lot - a LOT - of energy, and can be a difficult child. Some great passion, I knew, would be great for him, something he could really excel in, give him something to focus on. It would also give him and me something to do together, so we could grow closer. It seemed like it would be a great father/son adventure.

After having so many children, it is rare to feel a lot of shock over things anymore; but E's first game shocked me. And mortified me. He was entirely unable to form any conception of direction or orientation. His coach sent him in to play defence; he began running all over the field, sometimes off the field, trying to score on his own goalkeeper as often as on the other goalkeeper...and all the while, his Chinese-Canadian coach was shouting, "E! Wha' you doo-ing?! E!! You go wrong way!!! NO E - COME BACK - NO, THAS OTHER FIELD!!! You pray DE-fence, E! Go back to your own goal!".

But E couldn't remember which one was his goal. He couldn't remember which direction to go. He couldn't figure out who was attacking and who was defending. It was like watching Helen Keller. It was, without question, the weirdest, most horrific athletic performance I'd ever witnessed in my entire life.

E didn't play much that first game. His coach kept him mostly on the sideline, and when he had a chance, tried to explain to him what was going on. But E, standing there in his gold and blue uniform, only stared blankly, confusedly, out at the chaos of players.

"E", I said when I got home. "We need to go over some stuff". I drew a picture of a soccer pitch on a piece of paper.

"Your team is the X's, the other guys, the O's. Your goalie is here. Which goalie should you score on?"

"That one", he said, pointing to the O goalie. Thank God, I thought. "And that one", he said, next pointing to the X goalie.

"No - you don't score on your own goalie, dude. You only try to score points on the other team". I was trying to keep things calm and light.

"That's weird", E said, in his quick, rapid-fire delivery. "I-think-if-there's-a-goalie-then-you-should-be-able-to-score-on-him-it-would-make-the-game-way-more-exciting-and-"

"E - stop. Stop. Let's just go through the game, step by step. K?"

"K".

And so we did - over, and over, and over, and over. And over. I ended up buying one of those soccer coach whiteboards so we could go over what had happened after every game. And slowly but surely, things started to click in E's head. And he began to practice more and more.

And then all last year, he really, really focused and practiced; and by the end of the year, he had locked down the center-midfielder position, and was setting up plays, regularly scoring goals, calling for the ball, beating guys one on one, taking free kicks, covering the whole center portion of the pitch with a really good sense of the whole game, brimming with confidence and determination, directing the defenders, directing the forwards - a HUGE leap, especially given how shy he has always been. E had finally come into his own.

The club director couldn't believe it. His coaches couldn't believe it. The other parents couldn't believe it. Every game, people would come up to me and say, "I can't believe how much E has improved!". And he finished the season with highlight reel stuff: in the last game, E scored two goals, and set up the third.

"I've told the club director I definitely want E for my gold team next year", said Cecil, the gold team coach, in his east London accent (the league places kids in bronze, silver, and gold according to skill level). "He's brilliant. He reminds me of Bryan Robson (the Manchester United star from a few years ago). They used to call him 'Captain Marvel' because of the way he ran up and down the pitch and controlled everything. We definitely need him".

From Helen Keller to the Gold team's Captain Marvel in three years - wow. That was an achievement! Especially for a kid who still couldn't pour milk into his cereal bowl without spilling it everywhere.

"You did it!", I said to E exultantly after my chat with Cecil. "Can you believe it? You're a lock for the Gold team!". I called up the older brothers and told them to make sure to congratulate E. We talked about it at the table. I even got my brother to call him and congratulate him. E seemed like he was on a high, and the whole family rallied to cheer his achievement.

And then summer started, and E said he wanted to take a break from practicing. Okay, I thought. I can understand that.

The end of June came - but E still didn't want to practice. And all throughout July, he didn't want to play. And he began to say, "I don't think I want to be a soccer player when I grow up". Weird - he's spent the last three years saying that's all he wants to be, and now all of a sudden, right after his break-out year, he changes his mind? "You don't have to be a pro soccer player when you grow up, E. But it's still fun to play, and you might as well do your best. Maybe you'll change your mind again".

But August came, and E still didn't even want to pick up a soccer ball. Formal Gold Team assessments arrived in mid-August. E went, and was horrible. It was as though he'd lost his game sense in the space of ten weeks, and most of his personal skills. Scrimmage after scrimmage, E was non-existent to a liability. He was Helen Keller again.

Finally, after five scrimmages, the club director pulled me aside and said, "What happened with E? He was a shoe-in for Gold, and now he can't play anymore".

"Uh - well - he seemed to lose interest over the summer. I don't really know what to say; he is kind of a strange kid; all I know is he just seemed to totally go off soccer once summer hit".

Long story short is, E has been passed over for the Gold team, and he seems very certain he no longer wants to play soccer. Now I've got coaches, parents, emailing me, saying "what happened? Please try to convince him to play. He turned into one of the best players in the club!".

But how can I force a kid to play a sport he, for whatever reason, has absolutely zero interest in anymore? Even though it kills me - after all, I put in hundreds of hours with him, taking him to the park myself to run drills, watching and dissecting televised Premier Leagues games with him, driving him back and forth to soccer academies, buying him soccer books, drawing up plays, picking out soccer shoes, teaching him to kick, the whole thang...

I guess I will have to cherish in memory those moments for their own sake, rather than as the exciting steps to something more.

"Religion Without Dogma": Uh huh

I walked past a booth on the lawn of the Univeristy of Victoria advertising the Unitarian Church today; the banner across the booth said, "Religion Without Dogma".

Hm. Isn't that like saying "dinner without food", or "war without conflict", or "sexual intercourse without penetration"?

If we make the definition of religion so elastic as to accomodate both institutions founded on, and thoroughly saturated by, dogma (like, say, the Catholic church), AND an institution virtually inherently free of dogma (like, say, a fire department, or to hear Unitarians tell it, the Unitarian church), then we have defined the word "religion" right out of existence - and then we couldn't even talk about "religion" anymore. As any kind of meaningful concept, it wouldn't really exist. And if that is the case, then the Unitarian slogan really ought to be simply, "Without Dogma".

But that poses another problem, because as anyone who has ever visited a Unitarian church knows, it is not that it is free of dogma - only that it is free of certain dogmas. But that is only to say as much as we would about any other church in the world, including the Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, or Moonie. It's not dogma versus no dogma, but one dogma versus another dogma.

Unitarians, for example, do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the saviour of mankind, or that he makes people speak spontaneously in unknown languages. But they do believe in certain "progressive" ideals, like the morality of "eliminating poverty", "eliminating sexism", etc., which, insofar as they turn out to be coherent ideas, have as little rational basis in the end as the belief that Jesus is still alive and living up in the sky watching everything we do. And I'm not sure how to characterize a devoutly-held belief lacking any rational or evidentiary basis as anything other than a dogma...(?).

My conclusion:

Any institution entirely free of dogma does not qualify as a religion (your local poker club, for example, as opposed to your local Catholic church). So, taking the Unitarian slogan seriously, we would be forced to say that Unitarianism isn't actually a religion.

But since the Unitarians are actually deluding themselves by thinking that Unitarianism does not rest on factually and logically unsupportable beliefs (dogmas), Unitarianism does in fact qualify as a real religion. It has just substituted humanist dogma for sectarian dogma.

Sizing Up the "Obesity Epidemic"

First point:

You wanna know what an "epidemic" is? The Bubonic Plague of the 1340's. That's an epidemic. It came, so to speak, out of nowhere, and killed 75 MILLION human beings, including around half of the European population.

The Spanish Flu outbreak after World War I was another epidemic. It killed many tens of millions of people, possibly as many as 100 million, around the world.

"Epidemic", at least until the last couple of decades, was always a special word reserved for referring to a sudden outbreak, or increase in, the incidence of a particular disease. As such, the word was very useful. Now it has become just another victim of "word definition inflation" by, presumably, people who don't want to hurt the feelings of obese people, or perhaps, by obese people themselves who can't bear the horror of actually taking responsibility for their obesity, and so must imagine that they are as little to blame for adding one hundred extra pounds to their frames, as 19th century London street urchins were for falling dead after inadvertently drinking contaminated water. And there's something really wrong with that.

Obesity is caused by overeating - and overeating is a bad habit. It's not a "disease". One may be predisposed genetically to obesity (see article here); one may experience thyroid gland malfunction; but regardless, obesity requires eating far too much relative to one's expenditure of energy for prolonged periods of time. That is just a fact.

Second point:

But bad habits, including obesity, per se aren't the end of the world, are they? Everyone has them; most are just not as obvious as obesity. And why a collection of schoolboard control freaks, bureaucrats, media people with nothing better to write about, and health food Nazis should care so much about the bad habit of gluttony - versus, say, the bad habit of trying to tell everyone else on the planet exactly how they should live - is quite beyond me. As long as we're not paying for their food or medical bills, and we're not forced by government to hire them to do jobs (like chimney sweeping, rodeo clowning, or teaching gymnastics) which their obesity has rendered them incapable of performing, who cares if they're obese? It's not like they don't know that obesity is bad for them. So why not leave them alone?

I like to stay fit myself, but I'm also sick of hearing about a "disease" which isn't really a disease, and an "epidemic" which isn't really an epidemic, and endless haranguing about how unhealthy obesity is when everyone already knows it, and obese people obviously don't value fitness enough to begin eating and exercising properly. What is there to talk about really anymore?

Well, I Never Saw This One Coming...My Official Response to the PromArt Controversy

I found out yesterday morning that I was at the centre of a national controversy involving something called the PromArt program. I never saw this one coming...!

Anyway, here is my official response.

******

In early 2005, I received a call from my then-manager, Steve Warden, informing me that my booking agency, Vancouver-based Feldman and Associates, had received an invitation from the Canadian government for me to visit South Africa as part of a two-pronged diplomatic initiative. The trip to South Africa would include both charity work and raising the profile of Canadian arts and culture. Admiring as I did the humanitarian efforts of people like Bono and Angelina Jolie, and excited at the opportunity of officially representing Canada abroad, I immediately accepted.

My trip included performances at a township community hall for underprivileged youths, an outdoor concert for township children, a private "story and song" performance at the Canadian consulate in Pretoria to which other Pretoria-based foreign diplomats were invited, appearances at two music festivals, and a small public performance in Capetown. It also included quite a bit of physical peril and hardship (but that's another story).

The highlight of my trip, however, was the day spent at a large orphanage with which the Canadian consulate was affiliated outside of Johannesburg, in the company of the Liberal-appointed Canadian consul, a Mulroney-appointed senator, and a Bloc Quebecois MP. This orphanage houses several hundred children, quite a number of whom are the orphans of AIDS victims, and I felt privileged to be able to meet with them, share stories, sing and play for them, and hear them sing in return. I am not sure if my visit there made any difference to the kids, some of whom were terminally ill, but I hope so.

In my only interview to date about this story, a journalist asked me about "applying for PromArt funds to serve career interests". The truth, I am sort of embarrassed to admit, is that until this story broke, I'd never even heard of "PromArt", had no idea my trip was part of a formal government program, had no idea that other acts had been invited anywhere under the same program, and had no idea anyone could apply for such funds. Needless to say, I never "applied" for anything from PromArt (I got an invitation, which I thought was from an arm of the Canadian diplomatic corps). That I know of, I haven't experienced any career benefit from my trip, nor was that ever my expectation. Indeed, I didn't even have anything to promote during my trip - I had no CDs commercially available in the country at the time of my visit, nor have I ever had any there since. I didn't even bring T-shirts to sell. My trip just wasn't about that.

For the record, I do not believe that the cancellation of the PromArt program constitutes "censorship", and I very much resent the enduring tendency of artists to so easily and violently misuse this word. Censorship is when a government punishes its citizens for expressing their opinions (as is the wont of, say, provincial "human rights commission" thought police). It is not the mere cancellation of a diplomatic or arts funding program. I should also like to state for the record that if in fact, as has been reported, the PromArt program has been used to fund political propagandizing abroad, rather than for the diplomatic and charitable purposes which motivated the invitation I received to visit South Africa, that I myself wouldn't lament at least its dramatic overhaul.

South Africa is a beautiful and troubled country, and I felt proud to be able to represent Canada there, and hopefully, spread some message of hope and joy to people who struggle with the burdens of disease, crime, poverty, and a legacy of institutionalized racism. Because of the way the invitation was explained to me, and what I actually did on my trip, I never imagined that there might have been anything untoward about it. I thought that I was doing something good.

The Glasgow Strangler

Yesterday, my children and my brother heard the elderly Scottish man who lives next door shouting death threats at our new puppy from across the fence.

"Yair a mangy cur! I'll wring yair nack w' me bare hands! Ai'll put a gun to yair head I will! Yair a dairty stinkin' disgustin' mongrel!", he apparently shouted.

I found out there was a problem just as my brother was coming in from having tried to calm the guy down. "Your neighbour's a psycho", Brigham said.

This is the old guy who I thought was my flower friend; I've been trying to turn my property into the Garden of Eden for a solid year now (and it's looking pretty good, I think), and we often chat as we're out landscaping. What can I say? I was shocked.

"Why was he shouting?", I asked the kids.

"We don't know - he just saw Bonnie and started going crazy", said L, my nine year old daughter.

"Maybe's he's losing his marbles", I thought. After all, the guys's like 85 or something. But age or not, I don't like my kids hearing death threats, and I don't want anything happening to Bonnie, and I don't want him filing some false report because he has some mental problem with respect to dogs; I would have gone and tried to talk to him, but shortly after the incident, they got into their car and left to go somewhere.

So I called the pound to get them to make an official note about the incident. The lady at the pound informed me that making death threats against someone's pet is actually a violation of the Criminal Code of Canada, and that the case ought to be reported to the police.

I replied that I wanted to calm the situation down, and thought my neighbour wouldn't respond well to a visit from the police. "Let me just talk to him", I said. "No need to involve the police at this point". She said she understood.

Nevertheless, about an hour later, she and a police officer showed up to take witness statements (I guess the local police don't have a lot of stuff to take care of these days...). As we stood there, I kept thinking about how much the entire scene reminded me of a scene off of the fake reality comedy show "Reno 911", about the Reno, Nevada sherriff's department. L. was the star witness, and seemed quite captivated by all the drama.

Anyway, the good news is that my brother and I have gotten a lot of comedy material out the incident. We've been trying to outdo each other with imitations of the "Glasgow Strangler" ever since, mixing in quotes from "Braveheart", old Sean Connery movies, and every other things we could think of:

"Every man dies; but not every little puppy gets to live!"

and

"Don't yoo hear it? Don't yoo hear what she's sayin' to me? Listen to the VILE, FOUL mouth on that beast! She's taunting me I tell yoo! She's got yoo fooled! DON'T TELL ME YOU DIDN'T JUST HEAR THAT, WHAT SHE JUST SAID ABOUT ME MOTHER!! It's me or this sick disgustin' creature now, kill or be killed! NAY SURRENDAIR!"

and

"REMEMBER BANNOCKBURN!"

and

"This is my clan against yairs now; I didn't stairt this war, but I intend to FINISH IT!".

and

"I'm pretty shair James Hetfield was refairring to puppies when he said 'kill 'em all, let God sairt 'em out', and that's what I aim to do!".

"Yair wife's English, int she? WELL THAT EXPLEENS IT! YOO AND YAIR LIMEY WIFE ARE IN TROUBLE NOO; IN THE NAME OF ROB ROY MACGREGOR I DECLARE WAR ON YOO AND YAIR SICK, DISGUSTING, NAUSEATIN' LITTLE PUPPY!"

etc.

Last thing to say is, it's a good thing my wife is visiting relatives in the UK right now. If she'd been here, she would have been over shrieking obscenities at the guy within five seconds, which I think would really have complicated things. As it is now, any more problems now from the guy and he'll be charged.

Sairves him right, the loon!

Dear Santa

Dear Santa

I know it's kind of early, being July and all...but what can I say? I just wanted to write, and I figured this way, my letter wouldn't be competing with all the others you start getting in November.

I guess I should apologize for not having written since I was five. I still remember that Christmas, by the way: the sounds and smells and lights, the view of Tipperary Park through the front window across Queen's Avenue in New Westminster, the snow that fell on Christmas Eve...I got an Ernie puppet, and a hockey goalie chest protector, and a cool little battery-powered tower which dropped steel balls on to drums, and they would bounce in a particular pattern, and then fall into a funnel and go back again to the tower. They don't seem to have toys like that anymore. And of course, my fave of all: "Chip Away", the little block of white plastic that you could chip at, to reveal some dinosaur, which you could then paint.

And that night, before bed, my dad and my uncle told me that if we left out milk, cookies and apples, you and your reindeer would eat them. And sure enough, when I woke in the morning, the milk had been drunk, the cookies reduced to a few crumbs, and the apples had big bites taken out. It was a thrill picking up those apples - they were my link to you. So cool!

Anyway, instead of getting all nostalgic, I guess I should get to my list for this year. My problem is that there's a lot I want, but since I now know that you're not real, I feel kind of stupid asking for them. The other problem is that all sorts of people may read this, and basically, everything I want is extremely personal. Maybe I can just mention one or two things here, and send the rest in a private email later - to santa@thenorthpole.com - 'cause if you had an email address, I figure that's what it should be.

One thing I'd love is superior recovery time after workouts. See, I'm trying to get in shape so I can be a better rugby player, and I don't want to get into 'roids or anything. If you could just give me a serious boost here, just to get really cruising, that would be great.

A reason to live would be cool, too. I mean, I know I have the family and all, and that's great, but I mean, one outside the family. Maybe if you could get me rolling with a few local friends, that would help.

Last thing I can mention broadly here is...well, let's say things have been quite volatile in some areas of life over the past few years; but what I really need now, is deep, lasting peace and understanding in my life. I need that. I think I need that even more than I need to improve my rugby skills.

Maybe it doesn't make sense, but I don't have a whole lot of options other than to ask you for whatever you can do, even though you don't exist, and I know that.

Looking forward to Christmas 2008,

Talmage

Cellular Degeneration

I don't want to download music on my cell phone. I don't want to check NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. I don't want to watch TV shows, make movies, pay bills, take crappy photos, check a Facebook page, play video games, or catch up on the latest football news, either. I don't need a colour screen, or "great graphics", or 4000 features that I'll never use. All I want is a phone that makes and receives calls, that doesn't fall apart in six months, and has a long battery life. And that's what, evidently, no longer exists. All you can get now are overly complicated, infuriatingly fragile phones, with battery lives about as long-lasting as a trip to the backstage broom closet with Colin Farrell.

Take my last cell phone - a Sanyo from Bell. It began falling apart within two months (headphone jack got loose, charger stopped working, etc.). Now, not two years later, the battery no longer holds a charge. I'm lucky if it lasts 90 minutes - when I'm not talking. It also had an infuriating snooze feature: within at least two minutes of the alarm going off, a follow-up "snooze" alarm would go off, and if you can believe it...there was no way to disable that feature. I emailed Sanyo customer service twice about it; both times the agent confirmed that there was no way to disable the follow-up ring. And making it worse was that it was quite difficult to turn the follow-up alarm off; so frequently, the phone alarm would go off every two minutes for a ten or twenty minute period after the initial wake-up, while I tried to remember just how to turn it off.

My wife had another Sanyo on the same contract package; that one stopped working altogether about six weeks ago. So, she started using mine. No problem, I thought; this piece of garbage is on its last legs anyway. I'll just try to find a more durable, sensible phone.

So, I drove down to London Drugs and picked up a new phone compatible with new, no-contract provider Koodo. I got the base model Samsung - which started malfunctioning almost immediately (dropping out for a few seconds about every minute, no matter where I was). I brought it back and swapped it back for a Motorola. That one worked fine on the way home. Finally I'm in the clear, I thought.

But...no such luck. I realized as soon as I got home that the phone didn't have the standard 2.5 mm headset jack. It was on to bigger and better things - the USB port. GARG. I like wearing the ol' headset when I'm driving, and I actually like the cord since it makes it harder for me to lose. Well...no problem, I thought. I'll just get a new corded headset which fits into the USB port.

I then visited every electronics shop in Victoria - none of the salespeople had ever heard of a corded USB port headset. The only compatible headsets were Bluetooth.

The old corded headsets you could get for twenty bucks - the Bluetooths were all four, five, six times as much. And they also seemed fragile and small: perfect for breaking and losing. More GARG.

I bit the bullet and decided I'd try a high-end noise-reducing Bluetooth headset. Another bummer - turns out I needed to charge that just like I charged the phone (one more charging thing to worry about). And though the battery was supposed to last "a really long time" (according to the sales agent), it peetered out in no time. Who knows - maybe there was an on/off switch I was supposed to have turned off overnight - or five other switches. Even getting the dang thing to work in the first place was a chore; for some reason, my phone's Bluetooth capability kept shutting off, so I kept having to go in to turn it back on, and the piece itself had two different buttons...anyway, you get the idea: high maintenance, fiddly, probably going to break, etc. More GARG.

"Progress" in cellular phone technology, in my case, no longer exists: each gain is at the cost of losing some feature I valued, like durability, battery length, and ease of use. The old Audiovox CDM9000 I started with ten years ago on Telus was the best phone I ever had: while there was no text message feature, it was slim, simple, indestructible, and the battery lasted forever. Normal headphone jack, normal features, easy charging, no problem.

Why don't providers offer phones like that anymore? Maybe it's because folks like me are in an extreme minority.

But maybe, just maybe, it's because cellphone companies have overlooked an enduring customer preference, of some size anyway, for durable simplicity over fragile complexity. And if the day ever comes when one of them stops overlooking it and offers the solid, sensible type of phone I want, I'll be the first to sign up. But I'm not holding my breath.

Lone Star Falling

People around the world have been watching the ongoing story of Texas's removal of 400-plus children from a Mormon fundamentalist polygamist compound like it was some kind of entertaining TV movie. Where is the outrage?

The Texas Child Protective Services raid on the "Yearning For Zion" ranch was absolutely disgusting. I'd actually like to see its instigators imprisoned. On the basis of just ONE anonymous (fictitious) report of abuse, now known to have been placed by a mature, mentally-deranged member of Mormonism's mainstream variant (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) from Colorado with a history of prank phone calls and no affiliation with the FLDS, CPS goons busted in on private property and took over four hundred children away from their parents. It was basically a state-sponsored mass kidnapping. And no doubt, it has been terribly scary for the children.

Where is the outrage? Why should it have taken the state's Supreme Court to clarify that there was no legal basis for CPS confiscating the children - and subjecting them to invasive physical tests, testing by psychiatrists and state bureacrats, putting them into foster care with perfect strangers?

How did it come about that in so many countries with legal systems based on a presumption of innocence, that bureacrats have been given free reign to presume guilt whenever they like, act like thugs, and then force those they decide to accuse to prove themselves innocent?

There is an entire class of people on the planet (and they span from the left to the right) who are incapable of believing that any sane human being could, or should, desire a lifestyle other than what they think of as "the" ideal. For the secular social activists cheering on the raid, "ideal" means egalitarian marital relationships. For the evangelical Christians cheering on the raid, "ideal" means following the "true Jesus", and getting out of Joseph Smith's cult. And boy...they just couldn't wait to bust up the ranch, could they? The Mormon fundamentalists were doing it all wrong, weren't they? Thank God for that one phone call. Manifestly, in 2008, in the state of Texas, that's all it takes.

The levers of government - at least those of American government - were never designed to be used to enforce any particular mode of living. The Declaration of Independence itself states that people have the inalienable right to the "pursuit of happiness". And if that happens to mean in some case, living in a desert compound sharing one man with ten other women...that's what it means. What business is it of anyone else's?

Where there is solid evidence of a child being abused, then of course law enforcement should investigate (that case). But that's not what happened in Texas. What happened there was an outrageous abuse of state power, on wholly illegitimate, specious grounds. Really sick.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Lost Plot

I saw the new Indiana Jones movie tonight...

I don't know what my problem is. After all, this movie's probably getting great reviews. I've only come across one review so far (which was favourable), but I'd lay money on all the standard superlative-laden cliches on 95% of all the reviews that ever come out: "an action-packed thrill ride!"; "Blanchett is fantastic!"; "a fun-filled adventure that leaves you on the edge of your seat!".

But the only reason I sat through it was because I'd invited my wife out for the evening and I didn't want to spoil everything. Yes, I'm saying I thought the movie was a waste of time. The story is convoluted and gap-laden; there's a crystal skull with magical powers, and some old professor friend, and Indy has to travel to Peru, and there's some lost city of gold, which turns out not to be of gold at all, but of "treasure", which turns out to not have "treasure" at all - or I should say, the "treasure" turns out to be knowledge, though we never even get to find out what the knowledge might consist of...and weird aliens who number fourteen, but also assimilate into one, and can waft in and out of our dimension, who are from "the space between the spaces"...and I would bet a thousand bucks that not one of ten of the people who emerge saying they loved the movie could give any coherent account of its plot.

However, there are all the requisite giant explosions and people-eating insects and car crashes and cutesy jokes and magical survivals after falling down three gigantic waterfalls and being shot at by fifteen Russian soldiers with machine guns ten feet away. And because the bad guys are the commies, there is also Spielberg's misguidedly dutiful depiction of how evil American anti-communists were (sort of a scaled-down reminder of Spielberg's attempt in "Munich" to show "both sides" of the 1972 PLO kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes. "Both sides" of murder? Maybe Spielberg in the future will also take time to show us "both sides" of the Menendez Brothers story, the Ted Bundy story, and the Charles Manson story).

Cranky? Sure. I couldn't even stand all the hammed-out "Indy and Marion Together Again" nostalgia show (probably not least because the indescribable glee that Karen Allen understandably feels at finally finding another Hollywood job after twenty years just seemed to ooze off her in every scene. Everytime the camera panned over to her, her facial expressions were such that I thought she was going to start screaming, "thank you Steven! Oh God! Thank you! Thank you SO MUCH! FINALLY ANOTHER ACTING ROLE! FINALLY SOME MONEY!"). And that Indy and Marion ended up falling in love and getting along famously and then getting married, when their incorrigibly on-again off-again love-hate dynamic was firmly established two decades ago, seemed awfully forced. I just don't see it.

Anyway...I think that in an effort to keep things rolling, this movie tried to do way too much. It could still have featured lots of action; but clearer, tighter plot lines and more actual drama - as in, believable characters interacting with each other as humans in believable ways - would have helped (see "Casino Royale", which, for my money, combined these things very successfully).

Just my two cents,

T.

Everything in the Entire World Causes Cancer

Forget about making a list of suspected carcinogens - I'd like to know what items have not been labeled "carcinogenic" by one stupid study or another over the past thirty years. Why doesn't the entire scientific community just put out a press release which says, "we have now determined that EVERYTHING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD CAUSES CANCER FOR EVERYONE FOREVER", and be done with it?

Look at your newspaper tomorrow; somewhere inside it, there will be yet another article on how goldfish, or dental floss, or picnic baskets, or anything, "has been linked to increased risk of cancer". Evidently, like the speed of light, it is an immutable law of the universe that there is no better way for a scientist to secure funding for a study than to announce s/he is hot on the trail of a "hitherto unknown possible cause of cancer!". And evidently, no better way to secure a headline, or sell papers or TV ad space, than to trot out the old "c" word again.

Nor does the ease of the cancer game make it any less effective. For example, if you don't really get any solid evidence of a link in your study, but you still think there might be a link, or would just rather there be a link, you just announce, "we have concluded that there may be a link between Item X and cancer".

That is, you only say what everyone in the world actually already knows: that there "may" be a "link". Well, yeah - sure. There "may" be a link between what I ate for breakfast this morning and who will win the World Series next year; there "may" be a "link" between any two things in the entire universe. It's just that this doesn't tell us anything important. Very rarely are we even told what kind of "link" it "may" be, which is another problem. For example, I could justifiably say that there is a "link between being alive and cancer", since only live people get cancer. But this doesn't tell us much. Anyway, none of this matters, because the merest reminder that something scary is possible is enough to rivet us. It's certainly enough to get us to buy the newspapers and books, watch the shows, etc.

Fortunately for the cancer-scare industry, it is quite easy to wind up with "evidence" of carcinogenesis. All you need to do is locate a chemical in some substance safe for human use - say, in a pesticide or disinfectant spray - and then multiply its concentration to astronomically high levels, wildly in excess of what any human would ever encounter in real life; and then, voila! CANCER! Hooray!

There is something deeply irrational in this. The evidence showing that DDT, or a thousand other items, is perfectly safe when used correctly, just melts into nothingness when humans hear about evidence that the item is UNsafe when used INcorrectly. We can even talk about our latest cancer fears sitting next to our children at dinner, all of whom are holding a utensil called a knife, which if used incorrectly, would be lethal, and not notice any irony there.

A large enough amount of anything will kill us. A large enough amount of many substances will specifically trigger carcinogenesis. If we are doing things like constantly inhaling ash into our lungs, or eating forty crates of unwashed, pesticided cabbages every day for six years, yes, we should be concerned about cancer and change our behaviour accordingly. Overall, though, it seems to me that the incessant onslaught of cancer scare media pieces is hardly worth our notice 95% of the time. (Maybe it's 99%...).

Just my two cents.

Paul Harvey Turns Four Hundred and Twelve, and Other Random Thoughts

Random Thought 1:

It's funny - I still catch Paul Harvey now and again on the radio, just like I did ten years ago; and ten years before that; and ten years before that; and just like my parents did when they first got married, and when they were in high school, and when they were in junior high, and elementary school, just like their parents did as relative newlyweds. He was broadcasting from Pearl Harbor before Pearl Harbor was bombed. He's one of those guys who was old, like, in 1972. Yet he's still going strong (maybe it's all those vitamins he always tells everyone to take). Now my own kids catch him every once in a while...and literally, he could still be on air when I have grandkids. Pretty amazing.

Random Thought 2:

"Raisin' Raisin Awareness"

Well, all those Minuteman went down with their guns to the US/Mexican border to keep Mexicans out and "raise awareness" of illegal immigration. But I'm a lot more concerned about another kind of "immigration", which definitely should be made illegal. I'm talking about the immigration of RAISINS into foods where they don't belong. I'm talking about perfectly good cinammon rolls RUINED by the shriveled little blights. I'm talking about otherwise perfectly good chocolate chip cookies. I'm talking about otherwise good salads, and buns, and cakes, and breakfast cereals. I don't get it. Why are they there?

As far as I can tell, raisins belong in things like muesli and trail mix, and that's about it.

Random Thought 3:

Madonna looked great during the "Ray of Light" era. Now she looks like she's trying way too hard, and it's embarrassing.

Random Thought 4:

What's up with pro soccer jerseys not ever having the name of the team on them? All you see is the sponsor. Turn on any Premier League game and you'll spend twenty minutes trying to figure out which one's Reading and which one's Wigan. Can you imagine baseball or hockey jerseys looking like that? Instead of that "NY" on the Yankees uniform, you see the "Denny's" logo like the evil team on "The Bad News Bears"? So lame.

Random Thought 5:

I still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about last year's Rugby World Cup, and it's starting to concern me. I keep reliving plays in my mind, like I'm in some kind of waking dream state...

I keep thinking about how tightly disciplined the South Africans were. It was like watching a single organism out there, or fifteen guys who could all read each other's minds. And Bryan Habana was fantastic. And kicker Percy Montgomery made Wilko (England's Jonny Wilkinson) look almost bush-league.

And I keep thinking about the Argentine team. As a former resident of Argentina, I was thrilled to see them do so well (third place overall, after South Africa and England). Coolest of all was watching their style of play. They were very unlike the super-disciplined South Africans - they were creative, passionate, spontaneous. Even the English fans were full of compliments for them (I watched most of the matches in a pub in Forest Hill, outside of London).

Random Thought 6:

Time for me to go to sleep.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

No matter what happens now, the 2008 election will probably always be my favorite. Why? Because it's the year in which the distasteful fruits of the founding philosophical seeds of the Democratic Party were made most evident.

Consider this: for the last six months, the Democratic Party has been ripping itself apart over whether Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton should be the party's nominee. The high-profile supporters of each have been going on television shows broadcast all over the world calling each other "idiots", "lunatics", and everything else. Bill Richardson, on "Larry King Live", went so far as to say that the Clinton machine seemed to think its candidate had some sort of "divine right" to the presidency. Clinton diehard James Carville has publicly labeled Richardson a "Judas". As I type this, the Democratic Party is at war.

Yet here is a fact: not one in a hundred supporters of each could muster so much as a guess, let alone an evidenced, definitive answer, as to any major policy difference between Obama and Clinton. And the reason why is that there ARE no major policy differences between them. The Democratic Party has been ripping itself apart over two candidates which, positionally, are almost indistinguishable.

Does this sound insane? A bit, yeah. But underneath the surface, it is actually quite a logical outcome for a party which has always viewed humans more in terms of groups, and their group affiliations and rights and histories, than as individuals with individual rights.

After all, once we commit to thinking of humans primarily, and even ultimately, in terms of groups, we take on the task of finding, and then always keeping in mind, distinguishing group characteristics. And humans not wishing to make more work for themselves than necessary, the most obvious distinguishing group characteristics (call them "DGC"s) tend to wind up as the preferred DGCs. So, for those in this mindset, someone's sex, or race, or sexual orientation, or income level, wind up more important than the content of one's character, or one's personal ethics, or one's ideas and opinions. The more superficial the marker, the more preferable it is. The more meaningless it is, the more loudly the "groupophiles" claim it matters.

Thus, for virtually the whole core of the Democratic Party, it really, really matters whether their candidate is a half-black male or a fully white female. The characteristics below those external markers, like past successes or personal integrity or actual policy positions - things which I would argue are infinitely more important - have been all but forgotten by them. The result is a completely stupid civil war, the consequences of which have probably already guaranteed Republican nominee John McCain the presidency.

The Rocket's Red Glare

I don't really have much to say on this particular entry - I just wanted to post that title. (I wonder if anyone else has thought of that?)

Let's say it's been a bad year for Roger "The Rocket" Clemens. Just a few months ago, his legacy as the greatest right-handed pitcher of his generation seemed rock solid. It was even often argued that he might just be the best right-hander, ever.

Now, as I noted in an earlier blog post, his legacy is in tatters after former trainer Brian McNamee, and former pitching colleague Andy Pettite, nailed him for juicing during those fantastic, award-winning seasons a few years ago. He is also now in serious legal trouble after apparently perjuring himself in a Congressional hearing which he himself demanded be held. And just today, the New York Post broke the news that while Clemens was in Boston as a married, 28 year old father of two, he began a decade long sexual affair with a fifteen year old girl named Mindy McCready, who would go on to country music success.

Fifteen? That's young. That's illegal young. Jail young. Unforgivably young.

Clemens admitted today through his lawyer that he and McCready had been close friends for year, but denied there was any sexual component to their relationship. Taking Roger at his word, my question is: how many 28 year old guys go out of their way to become merely "close friends" with fifteen year old girls? Or...let's make it more accurate: How many millionaire, famous, 28 year old guys, go out of their ways to strike up friendships with obscure fifteen year old karaoke bar singers, just out the goodness of their heart, with no ulterior motives at all?

Or...at least we might ask: what kind of 28 year old guy sparks up a "close friendship" with a fifteen year old girl?

I think the first two answers are very, very few, and the last one is a total creep.

Clemens was always a jerk. That was his schtick on the mound. He was never a finesse pitcher. He won through bullying, intimidation, pure power, brushbacks and beanballs. But that's why people liked him, including me. He was really entertaining. It was like watching a bull on the mound.

But jerk "charm" has now given way to pure jerk horror: perjury, throwing his wife under the bus during the HGH scandal, 'roids, committing what I presume is statutory rape in the state of Massachussetts, the chronic lying...it's way over the line, and there's just nothing remotely charming about it.

Roger Clemens ought to hold a press conference and completely spill his guts - not just about these issues, but all the other things we've never heard about - and beg forgiveness from the public and by all his potential prosecutors. It's the only way now - he must obliterate himself as a sinner to have any chance at turning back into a saint.

But somehow, I can't imagine Clemens will do that. He still seems to think he's fooling people now...that people believe his lies...but no one really does now, except for a bizarre few. He really still ought to have a good conscience; but we still haven't seen any sense of shame - no rocket's red glare at all. All we've seen is an unblinking, belligerent defiance, as if the vehemence of a lie could make that lie more true.

Clemens was once a lock for the Hall of Fame. Now, it is impossible to imagine how he could ever get in.

That was fast.

Prime Time Food

If anyone had suggested twenty years ago that an assortment of food shows would one day regularly beat out sit-coms during prime TV view hours, they would have been thought insane. Everyone "knew" that cooking shows were daytime fare, and their only potential audience, a few bored housewives. And everyone also "knew" just what the format was for a cooking show: some cook standing in front of a range making something, the end. Even the Julia Child shows, better and more influential than the rest at the time, didn't exactly make for scintillating TV. Bo-ring.

My view is that two factors more than anything have changed all this. The first was the publication, in 2000, of the book "Kitchen Confidential", by an obscure line cook and failed novelist named Anthony Bourdain. The second is obvious: the rise of Reality TV.

"Kitchen Confidential" was, in effect, the autobiography of a kitchen nobody: a man seemingly lacking any touch of culinary greatness, but a man entirely in love with - addicted to - professional cooking all the same. It was brutal and bawdy, funny and touching, honest, and perfectly captivating. Bourdain intended it to be something of an underground piece: "I had no expectation that anyone - other than a few burnt-out line cooks, curious chefs and tormented loners - would ever read the thing", he wrote.

As it happened, "Kitchen Confidential" exploded. It became a New York Times bestseller, became fodder for water cooler talk in offices all over the world, and made Bourdain a wealthy, famous man. Most importantly, it cast most cooking crews not as groups of delicate PBS-style figures, but more akin to pirate crews or street gangs who got the job done by forming into primally rigid, virtually all-male hierarchies, held together by physical intimidation, appropriately-crushing insults, obscene, macabre humor, and a need for surrogate family. And let's face it - reading about that is a lot more exciting than reading Julia Child's placid explanation of how to flay a trout.

In a word, Bourdain's book cast professional cooking as an adventure tale bristling with derring-do and masculine energy - perfect material for a "reality TV" craze just about to hit. And somewhere or other, it clicked for some TV executive. Plug the real life drama of real cooking, punctuated with competition and outside confrontation, into the Reality wave, and it'll be a hit. And it was.

I don't really get watching Nigella Lawson make buttered scones for an hour. But I DO get Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" or "Hell's Kitchen". I do get "Iron Chef". I do get Bourdain's own show "No Reservations", in which he travels around the world eating native cuisine. (In fact, in some ways, Bourdain's show is the best of all, in that it's the one which best shows the potentially religious meaning that food preparation and communal consumption have.)

There is something viscerally thrilling about taking crude elements and shaping and refining them into something new. It is even more thrilling when that shaping facilitates family and friends coming together to share their experiences and hopes and fears, joys and sorrows - their lives - with each other.

I'm not saying Bourdain's recent criticisms of the Food Network aren't well taken in many respects; but on the other hand, food TV is miles ahead of where it used to be. And that's good news for everyone who appreciates the joys of dining...and deep human communion.

Stuck with the Canucks

Last year, as another mediocre hockey season ended for the Vancouver Canucks, my then-thirteen-year-old son Ashton and I were driving somewhere. The car was silent for a few seconds, and then, out of the blue...he spoke. It was with a tone of...not despair...just a kind of grimness.

"I think I'm going to start rooting for a new team".

"What?", I said.

"A new team. I just don't think I can take the Canucks anymore. Every year...it's so frustrating. I'm going to start rooting for the Flames".

A second passed. I breathed in. It was time to reveal cosmic law, no matter how disappointing it was.

"You can't", I said.

"What do you mean I can't?".

"You can't change", I said.

"Sure I can".

"Uh -- no you can't", I said. "We're from here. Manta (my dad) rooted for the Canucks, I rooted for the Canucks, you do, and your kids will...and...there's no way out. It's like trying to 'change your ancestry'. You can't".

Ashton snickered. "Funny".

"It's not funny - it's the law. Not my law - just the law. You can't change".

"The Flames are great, though. All I need to do to 'change' is to start rooting for them. It's-"

"You don't understand", I interrupted. "I don't mean you 'can't'. I mean you CAN'T. It's not possible. It's against THE LAW - the cosmic law of team affiliation".

I went on.

"I sympathize with you, I really do. I've been following the Canucks since I was five, when Manta used to take me to the games at the old Coliseum. They've never won a cup. They probably never will. Every year opens with such promise, but outside of two lucky runs to the final over the past four decades, they never get anywhere. I get that. But...all I'm saying is...there's no way out. We can't change".

Ashton fell silent. For a moment I thought he would burst into tears. But within seconds, it was as though he understood; we couldn't escape it. We were powerless to change it. It just was.

And sure enough, this year was another frustrating, stupid season for the Vancouver Canucks. I'm frustrated - frustrated with how delusional so many of the fans are, frustrated with how goalie Roberto Luongo left his pregnant wife 5000 miles away in Florida which ended up distracting him down the stretch (we went from one point out of first in our division to out of the playoffs in the last two weeks of the season), frustrated with Markus Naslund, frustrated with how Nonis and Vigneault didn't rip the captaincy off him last year, or Crawford the year before...and I honestly don't see any promising changes in the next few years.

To get anywhere, the Canucks would have to trade Roberto Luongo for a solid goalie and some offensive talent. And that will never happen. It won't happen because Dave Nonis, the Canucks GM, has a serious mancrush on Luongo, and Luongo (thanks to Nonis) also has a "no-trade" clause on his contract which he would have to agree to waive. It will never happen; and as a result, the Canucks will begin next season similarly unable to score, and it will be another struggle which will end either by missing the playoffs again, or being eliminated in the first round. They're turning into the west coast version of the consistently mediocre Toronto Maple Leafs.

There is always the possibility of a miracle, of course. That can happen. The Canucks of '93-94 got on a roll as the playoffs started, and even got to Game Seven of the Stanley Cup finals against the powerhouse New York Rangers (Canucks lost by one goal).

But miracles cannot be counted on...and certainly, this team doesn't seem particularly miracle-prone. The foreseeable future looks just like the last ten years: frustrating.

And there's no way out...those of us who have inherited "Canuckness" are stuck with them, forever.

Against Utopia

The world can become paradise; we are so close; all we need to do is...

Does it matter what comes next? It could be "eradicate religion" (Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris); it could be "convert everyone to Islam" (your local imam); it could be "abolish private property and share everything equally" (your local communist); it could be "hasten the return of Jesus Christ" (your local rapturista); it could be a million things, but which one doesn't matter, because the truth is that Utopia - insofar as that concept can have any meaning whatsoever - will be unachievable as long as there are humans around to imagine it.

Pessimistic? No - realistic. Think about it: human beings are not even capable of "putting an end to conflict" within themselves. We love our boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse but yearn for someone else. We want the cheeseburger but also the fish and chips. We like Obama's speeches but are worried about his lack of experience. We wish to discipline our teenagers but don't want to drive them away from us. We want freedom to do what we want, but also want to evade responsibility for some of our actions. We want a million different things, and their opposites, just within ourselves. So on what grounds could anyone seriously imagine that all potential conflict between two human beings, let alone two hundred million, or two billion, could ever be eliminated?

All attempts thus far at creating a true heaven on earth - where all people are of "one heart and one mind", where the lion shall lie down with the lamb, etc. - have failed. And not only have they failed, but often they have led instead to the creation of hell on earth. The grandest experiment in paradaisacal living in world history, for example, ended with somewhere between sixty and one hundred MILLION human beings being slaughtered in service to its guiding (Marxist) ideals, with millions more being imprisoned, harrassed, and tortured. Ah, but of course - humanity could become perfect, but humanity just keeps getting in the way. So, humanity must be eliminated. Funny how it always works out this way.

I submit that there is no intellectual excuse anymore for Utopian thinking. That self-styled critical thinkers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins could seriously entertain Utopian fantasies ("we can achieve heaven on earth as soon as we banish religious belief!") in their recent anti-theism books ("The End of Faith" and "The God Delusion") is embarrassing. It is especially embarrassing in view of the example just mentioned, since communism, if nothing else, constituted an atheist fundamentalism. Dawkins, for some reason which he cannot explain, thinks that the tens of millions murders committed under communism weren't committed in the name of atheism; but atheism being absolutely central to Marxist ideology, this simply cannot be true. To commit a murder in the name of communism is to commit a murder in the name of atheism, as inexorably as to commit a murder in the name of Catholicism is to commit a murder in the name of theism. There is no way around this. The man who wrote a book entitled "The God Delusion", himself turns out to be just as deluded as those he criticizes.

More on this later.

Lady Black and Her Portrait

The extremely few people following this blog will remember my description a few weeks ago of an evening spent at Lord and Lady Black's Toronto house last year. In that description, I mentioned my surprise at seeing a Hitler portrait hanging in the Blacks's living room.

I was surprised today to see that Lady Black mentions this very portrait in her recent "Maclean's" magazine column, 'I Lie in Bed...' Feb. 18, 2008); but imagine my surprise upon reading her claim that it's not a portrait of Hitler at all, but of Joseph Goebbels.

Sure, it's kind of dark, semi-abstract...but still, I'm not sure how I could have missed that - it's not like Hitler and Goebbels look similar. Certainly my buddy (and new global pin-up boy for freedom of speech rights) Ezra Levant gave me every impression he thought it was Hitler, too. If it ain't, I'm embarrassed.

I presume the odds of Lady Black lying about this, or being mistaken, are very low, so I'm not really sure what to think - other than that I'd like to have another look at it! (By the way, Black says she has the painting because it's a wonderful representation of evil).

But if I may, I'd like to mention a few things for the record here about Lady Black. I've never met Lady Black, and doubt I ever will, but over the past few years I've wound up with some sympathy for her, even before her husband was convicted. Everyone says she's a bitch; maybe she is. Maybe she's the kind of bitch that had to be a bitch to contribute anything to the world - the good kind of bitch, in other words. And if she is, I give the bitchiness a pass.

I admit that my soft spot for Lady Black first formed for a fairly weak reason - I read Peter C. Newman's low, petty, National Enquirer-style, gutter-scum hack job on her in "Maclean's" a few years ago. Mostly through the repetition of innuendo and rumour, the article came close to depicting her as a conniving, unscrupulous, soulless slut who'd slept her way to the top. I thought it was very unfair. I then read Tom Bower's hack job of last year, "Conrad and Lady Black", and it had the same effect on me as Newman's grotesque article had.

Lady Black (Barbara Amiel) might have bizarre tastes in living room paintings, but she is a talented journalist, seems to have an admirable hatred of the nanny-state, and sadly, is now the pining wife of a man who, it appears, will be spending the next several years in a federal penitentiary. Until I know of good reason to do otherwise, I'll be wishing her the best.

Culinary Crimes, Part One (One Man's Crusade Against Evil)

Somewhere along the line, paprika became the culinary equivalent of teal in the late 80's: a gaudy, vulgar, embarrassing affectation mistaken by the hopelessly middle-class for some mark of sophistication and upper-class élan. How did this happen? What cook came up with the idea of finishing off his dish at the Middle Class Family Restaurant, by dumping paprika all over everything? And why did anyone ape him? Why did anyone think he knew anything?

And if dumping paprika all over dishes which have NOTHING to do with paprika wasn't unforgivable enough, not mentioning the paprika dump on the menu must be. You never know anymore when that prime rib, or veal cutlet, or three cheese omelette, or fish and chip plate, is going to show up at your table with that rotten orange powder all over everything. So now, out of a sense of justice, culinary sense (I like to imagine), and because I hate the stuff, I immediately send everything back which has the paprika dump, and then I deliver a cutting two minute speech to the manager or waiter about why they should respect paying, hungry customers by telling them ahead of time that the dish they ordered will have weird crap that totally alters the taste dumped all over it - and "why do you dump the stuff on there anyway?", etc.

Reactions vary. One guy said once, "they do that to add color". (WTH?) I'm like, "Color?! What about the TASTE? Would you spread tomato paste or blue tempera paint all over everything just for 'color'?". Another lady, at an otherwise nice Greek restaurant, said, "I don't know why the cook started doing that. And I've told them a million times to put it on the menu, but they won't". I heard something similar a few months ago here in Victoria when my perogies and sausage showed up showered in the loathsome dust. I rolled into my speech, and the waitress - SORRY, "server" - said that she had told the managers to announce it on the menu repeatedly, as more and more customers had been sending the "Paprika Surprise!" dishes back ("let us begin the revolution, comrades!"), but that they hadn't changed it yet. (In any case, they did make me up another plate of [untainted] perogies and sausage, so - deo gratias - I was able to calm down...).

But what about a high-class culinary crime? What about...(shudder)...the rejection of big, sloppy, gloriously sinful chocolate cake by high-falutin' restaurants all over the place? For going on a decade now, the chocolate "cake" these pretentious tombs serve has been getting drier, harder, denser, and tinier. It's like the Big Bang in reverse or something. (There's something really wrong when you need a STEAK KNIFE to cut a piece of your chocolate cake). Where is the AIR, people? Where is the FUN? Where is the SAUCE? Where is the MOIST, MELT IN YOUR MOUTH FROSTING? Where is the OOOOOOZE?! ("Hallelujah"). "Where is the LUSCIOUS, PEOPLE?!" ("Amen!"). "WHERE IS THE LUUUUUV IN YO' CHOCOLATE CAKE, BRUTHAS AND SISTAHS?!" ("Amen, Lawdy!").

All that stuff is gone now, not just in the high-end joints, but even in many middle class pubs and diners. We are experiencing a veritable apostacy from the one, true chocolate cake. All you can get now in most restaurants is something resembling a miniature hockey puck, which tastes vaguely like one of those little Ex-Lax wafers your grandma used to eat (and is getting to be about the same size [as the Ex-Lax wafer, not your grandma, that is]). About the only place you can still get True Chocolate Glory (TCG) anymore is at Denny's, or low-end mom and pop family restaurants which are so "out of touch" they've never even heard they're not "supposed" to be serving it anymore.

There IS hope, however. For years, mashed potatoes were abandoned by fine restaurants around North America (what idiots these people are....) Now, everyone has them. So maybe the fancy places will get their Choco-Mojo back on soon. It doesn't hurt to hope.

Please add your nominations for culinary crimes in the comments section. Together, we can destroy these monstrous expressions of evil BEFORE THEY DESTROY US.

The Knower

The most striking moment in the recently released Tom Cruise Scientology video (see it on www.gawker.com) comes about five minutes in, where Cruise laments his inability to, say, frolic mindlessly on vacation, because he "knows". Just what does Tom Cruise know?

It is no good looking for any explicit answer to this question in the video itself - Cruise is - almost unnervingly - nearly incoherent through much of it, leaving sentences unfinished, speaking in the vaguest terms, jumping instantly from topic to topic, etc. But from the context and other remarks in the video, it seems that what Cruise thinks he knows is just how the world really is. Mindless frolicking is out of the question because his special knowledge about the true state of the world imposes on him the obligation to eschew idleness and help redeem the world from its impurity; or as he might put it, from its overabundance of "SP"s (Scientology-speak for "suppressive personalities").

This is what Cruise thinks he knows. But what does he really know?

I suggest that the most Cruise can know is that Scientology has "worked" for him (which is to say, that he likes Scientology); and that it has worked for others (that is, that others like Scientology, too). But that is only what everyone already knows. In short, what Tom Cruise really knows, is hardly anything at all, and nothing that any normal eight year-old couldn't instantly grasp. His actual knowledge can be summed up like this: "Scientologists like Scientology". (Or, if you like, "Scientology has worked for Scientologists", or "Scientologists believe in Scientology").

But here is something that Tom Cruise doesn't know, but which he thinks he knows: that "Scientology will work for everyone". This conclusion comes from the following (invalid) inference. We could call it the Fanatic's Inference:

P1.) X (Scientology in this case) has worked for me;
P2.) X has worked for others;
C.) Therefore, X works (for everyone).

And implied in this invalid inference is another invalid inference (call it C2): that if Scientology doesn't "work" for someone, it means that that person didn't really give it a proper chance, or wasn't really sincere to begin with. There is yet another implied invalid inference here (C3): "Therefore, X (Scientology) is all it claims to be (X is 'true')".

The point is that neither C, nor C2, nor C3, follow from the premises, and so they cannot constitute knowledge. It is, in fact, perfectly possible that X (whatever it may be) can rescue someone from drug addiction, or an unhappy marriage, or suicidal depression, or anything else, and yet not do anything for others with different natures, goals, and experiences. It is also perfectly possible that X be a fraudulent claim, salutary effects notwithstanding. For example, we might tell an ill-behaved child that if he obeys, Santa Claus will fly from the North Pole and give him lots of presents - and the story might very well "work": Johnny will change his behaviour, and find his life much improved as a result. But this doesn't mean the Santa story is true. Indeed, it only worked because it wasn't true. It was a fiction calculated to appeal to certain aspects of Johnny's nature: acquisitiveness, for example. So Johnny might "know" that his life has improved (after all, he's now getting smiles instead of frowns, and treats instead of time-outs), but that's pretty much it. He doesn't have "special" knowledge at all.

So, that Scientology has "worked" for Tom Cruise - whatever that may mean in his particular case - cannot validly lead to the conclusion that it will "work" for anyone else, nor to the conclusion that ex-Scientologists weren't sincere about improving or weren't intelligent enough to understand Scientology, nor to the conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard's stories about an alien dictator named Xenu who, 75 million years ago, presided over "The Galactic Confederacy", are true.

And this means, I suggest, that Tom Cruise doesn't actually know what he thinks he knows, by any stretch; and by extension, that he doesn't bear the burden of redeeming the world through Scientology that he thinks he does.

And of course, that means that he might as well go ahead and enjoy his vacations, guilt free.

I know you're sincere, Tom - but honestly, you don't need to worry about us or 75 million year old dictators from outer space. Go forth and...mindlessly frolic!

"Leave Britney Alone!"

If you're one of the four people left on earth who hasn't done this yet, go right now to YouTube and punch in "Chris Crocker Britney", or else "Leave Britney Alone!". Certainly, this is one of the funniest YouTube videos ever - right up there with the DEA agent shooting himself in the leg during a gun safety demonstration and the fat guy miming to the Romanian dance song.

But the weird thing is that...like...Britney's weird hysterical transvestite fan is, uh...pretty much spot-on: the schadenfreude demonstrated by all of us in our Britney obsession is now so perverse, it seems almost to be bordering on the joy ancient Romans felt watching human beings ripped apart and eaten by lions or something. I bet that if the messed-up Britney announced that she would kill herself live on YouTube tomorrow at exactly 6 PM EST, that we'd all tune in. And certainly we'd all watch, if we could, the footage of some paparazzo running her into a concrete median in a tunnel and her dying in the crash. We can't get enough. The mess of a girl is in every magazine, newspaper, and TV news show, and the more horrific or bizarre or sad the story, the more we love it; but the real story is ourselves - how our insatiable appetite for the ongoing tragedy of one girl's life has laid bare some of the most grotesque qualities of human nature.

And by the way, what kind of flake is Dr. Phil, visiting her in hospital and then blabbing all about how nuts she is to everyone? What kind of "friend" is that? She needs HELP, you idiot - not one more guy trying to cash in on her. HELP. Is everyone nuts?

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm going to be trying to maintain my own little boycott from now on of the Britney story, and send as many good thoughts her way as I can. She's one sad, messed-up girl.

A Friend Lost

Once, I was friends with super-producer Bob Rock (with whom I co-produced my Columbia Records CD), and now I'm not. I feel sad about this, not least because as far as I know, there's no reason why we shouldn't still be buddies.

And when I am honest with myself, I suppose I feel sad most of all for selfish reasons. You see, the last four years have been the most tumultuous of my life, and often I've wanted to talk to another guy about being the father of so many children, how to handle certain wife issues, child discipline issues...and for a few reasons, I can't talk to Dad about those sorts of things. I've often wished my granddad was still alive so I could talk to him, but he died fourteen years ago. I've wanted to talk to Bob most of all - he's the only other guy I think who would understand things. (He has seven kids and has been through a few wars with them, but managed to keep things pretty together). But...it seems, he doesn't want to talk.

I first found out there was a problem when I returned a phone call of Marc Reiter (of Q Prime Management, my then managers) a month or so after the 2000 Juno Awards (Canadian music awards). After a bit of chit-chat, Marc said, "Tal, you really ought to call Bob. He's pretty upset about this Juno thing".

"What Juno thing?", I said.

There was a pause.

"Come on...", said Marc.

"What do you mean, 'come on'? What are you talking about?". I felt my throat constricting.

"You're trying to tell me you don't know?"

"What are you talking about?"

Well, the story he told was this. Evidently, when the presenter at the recent Juno Awards ceremony (which I didn't attend and didn't see on TV) announced the winner of the producer of the year award (which Bob and I won), he or she didn't announce Bob's name at the podium - only mine. (To this day, I don't even know if that's true, but that was the story). Supposedly, the Juno people told Bob's manager Bruce Allen afterward that the reason they only announced my name, was that I had called up the Juno committee prior to the awards and demanded that the award be given only to me. And now, Bob was upset that I had backstabbed him by trying to steal his glory!

"WHAT?", I exploded.

The skepticism in Marc's voice when he asked again, "You're telling me you don't know an-y-thing about this? Not even a bit?", still stings when I think about it.

I hung up with Marc, grabbed my cellphone and jumped into the car to pick up my kids from school in Langley (BC).

I dialed Bob's house. His wife Angie answered the phone. "Bob's just leaving", she said.

"Angie", I said. "I just heard this totally insane story from Marc Reiter about the Junos...have you heard anything about it?". I was hoping she'd say no.

"Actually, yes".

"Okay - Angie - I don't know anything about this at all. I have to talk to Bob. Can you get him? This is important".

After a few minutes of dead air (turns out cellphone calls from BC to Maui are pretty expensive :P), I heard a click-clack and then a gruff-sounding Bob.

"Hello".

"BOB - I just got off the phone with Marc Reiter and he told me you think I somehow arranged to get our Juno just for myself or something. It's-"

Bob interrupted. Still very gruff, very low voice. "I thought we were friends".

"Bob - listen - I don't know ANYTHING about this. This is totally insane. I didn't even know when the ceremony was. I only found out about that we'd been nominated because I read it in the paper! I've never talked to anyone at the Junos and I'm PROUD that we both did the album - it couldn't even cross my mind to claim the award for myself. I don't know anything about this, really".

Silence.

"I was really surprised you would do something like that".

What the...?

I tried to calm myself.

"Okay", I said, breathing deeply. "Let me ask you a question: Why do you think I could have gotten the Juno committee to not give you your award, when we're both listed as co-producers on the CD? It's absurd".

"Because you're a Bachman in Canada", he said.

That got me a bit riled.

"I've had one hit in Canada! That's nothing! Listen - if you and your co-writer get nominated for song of the year, you can't call up the Grammys and say, 'hey, I want the award all to myself, so just give it to me alone'. It's totally crazy! How could you guys even believe this? You guys have been in the music business for like twenty five years! It doesn't make any sense. If someone forgot to announce your name at the Junos, it was probably some printing error on the card or something".

More silence, and then:

"Like I said, I thought we were friends".

"BOB - what I'm saying is, I DIDN'T DO THIS AND I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT. That's the whole point! We ARE friends and it couldn't even occur to me to do something like that...".

But for whatever reason, Bob didn't seem to really hear me.

Well, I have to say that I felt pretty stung that both Bob, and evidently, the guys at my own management company, could have so swallowed such a cockamamie story, and imagined I was so petty...I kept wondering, "What is it about me that would make them think that? I must not be the kind of guy I like to imagine I am".

So the next thing I did was have a couple of people at Q Prime call the Juno committee (called CARAS) directly to try to get to the bottom of everything. Within days, I'd received a faxed copy of the original Sony submission form, which - of course - listed both Bob and me as co-producers of the album, and a letter of apology from the head honcho at CARAS saying that the error had apparently originated in their publicity department. I immediately faxed copies to both Bob's studio in Maui and to Bruce Allen's office in Vancouver. But...they didn't fax or call back. Hm.

Well, I called up Bruce Allen at home that Sunday to talk to him about it. He said to call him at his office the next morning. "What time?" I said. "Ten", he said, then hung the phone up.

The next morning at ten I called up Bruce's office to just make sure he and Bob had gotten the material from CARAS and were clear about everything...but do you know, that when I called, Bruce wouldn't take my call? "Bruce is busy", said his assistant, Sandy.

"Uh, okay. When should I call back?"

"Tomorrow".

"What time?"

"Ten", she said.

The next morning at ten I called again. Sandy put me on hold, then came back on a few minutes later and said, "Bruce is busy".

"When should I call back?"

"Tomorrow"

"What time?"

"Ten".

Wednesday at ten I called back...but...(surprise)...Bruce wouldn't take the call. I don't know if he was embarrassed that it hadn't had anything to do with me when he'd been running around telling everyone it did for six weeks, or what...but, he never would take my phone call. This is the same guy who I'd chummed around with just a couple of months earlier at a Christmas party, who came to my wedding reception, who I've known since I was five, who I'd talked to on the phone, with whom I'd discussed the possibility of him managing me...and so, we haven't spoken since. (I found out later that Bruce had been slamming me week after week on his CFOX radio show!).

Well, all I could do after that was write a letter to Bob and Bruce, which I faxed to them, just trying to clear things up...but again, no response I've since left a few phone messages for Bob, sent an email...but Bob's never spoken to me since.

The only thing I can think of that I might have done to ruin things was this. When I had my first meeting at Q Prime Management (early 1999, almost a year prior to the Juno fiasco), I was very desirous that they would take me seriously as a songwriter and musician and producer (after all, quite a few journalists and industry execs up till then had seemed to think I was only a company creation, and I wanted to really make my mark as a musician; I wanted Q Prime to help me get producing gigs - it's something I always thought would be fun to try). So, I made a point of telling the Q Prime guys during that first meeting that I really had co-produced my album - that the co-production wasn't just an idle credit. So, I mentioned that I'd arranged a lot of the material, played a lot of it, and that I thought I could help other artists as a producer or co-producer, etc. And...maybe I either came on too strong that day, or what I said was exaggerated before being repeated to either Bob or Bruce, or both, at some point by someone at Q Prime, as if I'd meant to say that Bob hadn't done anything at all on my album. Heck, I don't know.

What I do know is that Bob's reputation as a world-class producer is well-deserved, and I'll always feel grateful I had a chance to spend five months in Maui recording down there with him. It was a fun, challenging, and educational experience. We had a lot of laughs.

For years, I stuck up for Bruce Allen when I heard others tell stories like the one above. I guess I couldn't really believe them, and I probably wouldn't even now but for this happening. It's really made me wonder...

There have been a lot of times over the past four years I really wish I could have talked to Bob about all those things we used to talk about: being a dad, being a husband, trying to teach your kids right from wrong, how to even tell right from wrong in a lot of cases...but I guess those days are over.

In Search of Art

What is art?

No idea, really - though I think it would take an extremely expansive conception of "art" to make the term cover anything I've ever done. But maybe, one way to think about art is this:

Maybe it is the revelation of things that were there all along - even the most important things that were there all along - but which we hadn't noticed before (like a microscope or a telescope, or "X-ray vision might do); and maybe also it can be the creation of a kind of an alternative "world" which is intelligible to us, yet unlike any other world with which we are familiar in its "rules" and norms. Just a few examples...

On this depths of insight business...what about Tolstoy? I do think that "Anna Karenina" is probably the greatest novel ever written - the insights into the minds and souls of each character ring so true, that reading it is almost overwhelming. The day I finished reading it was one of the saddest days of my life. (Homer is another author who perfectly captivates you, and blows your mind with just how deeply and truly he explores human nature...How could these authors have been mere humans?).

Or, what about the paintings of Norman Rockwell? (Cue reverie) I used to spend hours staring at his paintings, collected in a coffee-table anthology, as a kid, just savoring the whole "story" I could imagine behind the scence..and I always felt like I knew just what had happened leading up to the scene, just how the characters were feeling, and what would happen after...

There are so many insightful, enriching Rockwell paintings - ones that seem to "deepen" you instantly. What about "Girl at Mirror"? Isn't that perfect? Doesn't that just totally give you a sense of what it must be like to be a girl at that age, experiencing those first inklings of womanhood and insecurity and wonder? What about "Breaking Home Ties"? Or "New Kids in the Neighborhood", painted during the first wave of American racial integration? Art critics hardly paid any attention to Rockwell at a time when they were wetting their panties over vainglorious garbage from the likes of Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, and Barnett Newman, and it's really a shame. Thank God in the past fifteen years he has finally gotten his due from contemporary critics (the old cranks all had to die out first, obviously. Good riddance!).

What about the other criterion: an unfamiliar, even strange world, with rules and norms unlike any we know, but which are intelligible, or even comforting, to us?

One classic example of this for me is Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" - though perhaps it takes early exposure, as with language, to develop a real grasp of the thing. There is something completely bizarre, when you think about it, about a beagle as a World War I flying ace, a talking school building, or a kid (Charlie Brown) developing a rash on the back of his head in the shape of baseball stitches, making sense to us. Yet they do make sense, like so many other strange little features of the strip...things make sense in that world, that really don't make sense anywhere else - and we don't even notice, so fluent do we become in that world. Even the humor only works within the bizarre context of the strip.

Other examples come to mind: a lot of the Queen stuff, for one trivial example. "Bohemian Rhapsody" - who else could have pulled it off? From who else would something that bizarre have "made sense"? What about the lyrics of Morrissey? Certainly with "The Smiths", Morrissey created a whole little cosmos of morality and meaning - senses of irony and tragedy and comedy and right and wrong and love and hate, that seemed coherent and believable in that world.

What about the poetry of William Blake? Even leaving aside the freak-out mythology of "The Four Zoas", the poems in "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" form an intoxicating world unto themselves...and when we emerge from it back into the real world, we are never quite the same. (Who could be after reading about his "little black boy" [the chimney sweep], or his "poison tree", or his little lambs and burning tigers?).

Something similar happens in Wes Anderson movies. "The Royal Tennenbaums" doesn't have one character in it which acts anything like any human I've ever known; yet they are all immediately intelligible...and just..."make sense" on their own terms, and within the skewed "world" of the movie. But in no other. And I love it.

Wait a second - is anyone actually reading this?

Gotta crash,

T.

Is America Ready for a Black or Female President?

Is America ready for a black, or female, president?

I'd like to answer that with another question: Why do media commentators keep asking this stupid, insulting question? American voters - male, female, and of whatever race - have been voting for years for black or female (or both) candidates: for city council, for school board, mayor, for state senate, for governor, for the House of Representatives, for the Senate...but somehow, the fact that there's never been a black or female president of the United States strikes media commentators as slamdunk evidence of "racism" and "chauvinism".

I'd like to propose another theory: the United States has never had a black or female president because hardly any blacks or females ever run for president (or higher office, for that matter) - and those that do run for president, seem unsatisfactory for reasons entirely unrelated to their sex or race.

Let's take the three most promiment losing black candidates for president over the past twenty years: Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Alan Keyes. Jackson is a (fake) "Christian" minister with a few mistresses on the side (to one of which at least he was funneling his tax-free "donations" as hush money), who has a problem with Jews, who actually makes his money as an extortionist. While he did serve as DC's "shadow senator", I don't think Jackson's ever even run for city council anywhere, let alone established a legislative track record as one. He simply has done nothing to reassure anyone he could be entrusted to ethically manage a Little League soccer team, let alone preside over the United States. He's a huckster, not a president, and most people - black and white - recognize that.

Al Sharpton was the unnamed standard in Joe Biden's comment that Barack Obama was "clean". The dude looks like he hasn't bathed since the Tawana Bradley fiasco. Not necessarily a disqualification for president, but...let's say twenty years worth of Afro-sheen and Royal Crown and God knows what else mouldering and fermenting in that pompadour ain't doing him any favors in the image department. Superficial I know, but...this is a television age. More importantly, the guy's never held elective office. He himself has claimed that he often doesn't run to win, only to "raise the profile" of some issue or other (like himself). Or rabble-rouse. Or pimp. He just...hasn't given anyone any reason to believe he's a serious political candidate. Who could vote for him?

Alan Keyes at least has a Ph.D. in political philosophy, but - what can I say? He can't shut up. Everytime he appears in a debate he appears irritatingly strident, disrespectful of the debate standards and the other candidates, and like the others, has never been elected to legislative office. He is also, shall we say, out of the mainstream on many issues. In fact, I think during his Illinois senate candidacy, he revealed that he knew that Jesus Christ wouldn't vote for his rival, Barack Obama (must be cool to know just what people who either don't exist anymore, or exist in some other galaxy, are thinking!). And by the way, arguing against the stupid racism allegations of the media is the fact that the peak of Alan Keyes's 2000 presidential primary run was the 20% of the vote he received in UTAH.

In sum, none of these three has shown any ability to even run a viable campaign for city councilman, let alone win one, or prove their worth as a legislator even at the lowest levels of government. Why then should they be given, as a political entry-level position, the job of presidency of the United States? It's ridiculous. It's why Pat Robertson and Buchanan never got anywhere, either. It isn't because they're black or white; it's because....they haven't shown that they're presidential material.

Obama, by contrast, won a Senate seat, has a track record, is positionally within the Democratic mainstream (though, as a straight-up leftist, just within), can articulate his message fairly well, and in sum, is a legitimate, viable candidate. And what is the result? He just won the Iowa caucus (like Utah, a very white state). (And by the way, Obama is half-white and half-black; calling him "black" seems like a tacit adoption of the old "one drop" rule. The whole Establishment fixation on blackness is just...totally stupid).

About women: the truth is that few women run for high office. That fact too is blamed on "society" by media commentators and airhead Gender Studies professors (as though "society" were some entity entirely independent of human biology). But anyway, the bottom line is that the fewer the females who choose to run, the less chance there is of any female being elected (brilliant insight, I know). But where a female does run, and shows fitness over her rivals, she wins just as easily as a male. Could that be any more obvious? How else did Boxer and Feinstein and Dole and Clinton win? They were elected by people who voted for Schwarzenegger, Helms, and Spitzer, and a host of others. How can that be if "American voters have a problem with women"? The whole thing is nonsense, a baseless slur.

I suggest that most voters love their country and genuinely wish the quality of life to improve for themselves and their children, and would therefore vote for whoever they think is the best candidate, regardless of their race or sex. I further suggest that the main reason why there aren't more women or blacks in the US Senate is because hardly any blacks or women run, and those that do, often aren't viable candidates - not because Americans are so stupid or bigoted that they would vote for a lousier candidate just because he's white or male.

More on this later.

Could It Really Soar Again?

I keep thinking of so many things to say about this Zep thing, that I can't even fathom how to put them in order. So here's another entry off the top of my head, which doesn't necessarily follow from the one I posted a few days ago.

Could Zeppelin genuinely soar again? I mean, like even with a new album?

I'm going to offer a qualified yes. To explain:

Bands are packs, and packs have alphas. This doesn't mean that other pack members don't play indispensable roles. For example, without Lars, there wouldn't be any Metallica; yet James is the alpha. Same with U2: The Edge is absolutely indispensable, but...not the alpha.

And sometimes pack (band) alphas change...and when they do, the character of the pack changes. And this is what happened to Led Zeppelin, and it's why, even if John Bonham hadn't died, they probably would have broken up not long after, or at least, really begun to suck big-time. What I mean is, after "Physical Graffiti", Zeppelin's alpha - Jimmy Page - began a self-(read "drug-")induced evaporation. The next album, "Presence", is the document of a band in transition: Page was no longer the captain of old, but no other had stepped up to fill the void. And "In Through The Out Door" is the first Zeppelin album with its new alpha - Plant, aided by his new first lieutenant, Jonesy - at the helm. (Supposedly, Page and Bonham didn't even show up for most of the daily recording sessions).

"Presence", it need hardly be said, is a bleak record. Every other Zeppelin album before that contained elements of a sort of joyful, if not sociopathic, riotousness; but "Presence" is the after-party. It's some lonely guy sitting alone with a needle hanging out of his arm, in a cold, windowless room, with one bare sixty watt bulb providing the sole means of light. There was some of the old magic there - "Nobody's Fault But Mine", for example - but overall...to me, it sounds grey...jaded...weary. A drag.

The problem with "In Through The Out Door" is its lapses into unforgivable "muso" musical inanity. As it happens, previous Zeppelin inanity seemed, somehow, tolerable, even charming. (Like the bizarre live Plant ad libs on "The Song Remains the Same": "Twenty nine! Twenty nine!", "PUSH! PUSH! OOOOOOOOOOOOO PUSH!". At times, Plant sounded like a chipmunk in labor...but somehow, it seemed okay). But "In Through the Out Door"'s inanity reaches new, intolerable depths.

Let's take the song "Hot Dog", for example. Actually, let's NOT take "Hot Dog", except to say it may very well be the dumbest song Zeppelin ever recorded. "All My Love" seems pretty insipid to me - just not Zeppelin. "Carouselambra" - this is what happens when Jonesy gets a new synthesizer and starts trying to write his own songs. "South Bound Suarez" - way too chirpy. (My favourite moments on the record are the guitar solos on "Fool in the Rain" and "I'm Gonna Crawl"). "In the Evening" could have been a genuine classic with its cool riff...but - and this is another big problem with both "Presence" and "In Through the Out Door" - Plant had lost his voice, and sounds pretty bad on it. Plus, the whole thing is (uncharacteristically) drenched in reverb, which sort of ruins it. What can I say? Led Zeppelin was ALWAYS Page's band - and when he began to disappear....well, so did Led Zeppelin.

My buddy Kevin Kane (from the 80's Canadian pop band "The Grapes of Wrath") and I received a bitter reminder of the changed pack dynamic when we went to see Plant and Page at the Vancouver Coliseum in May of '95. The first moments of the concert were like an electrifying religious experience: the lights went down, and all of a sudden, the first notes of "Thank You" (from "Led Zeppelin II") rang out, and in the next instant, there was Pagey, leaning back, playing his sunburst '59 Les Paul, all alone, aglow from a lone spotlight. Totally electrifying.

Yet the rest of the show was like "The Bob Plant Egyptian Review, with special guest Jimmy Page relegated to playing rhythm guitar, with Porl Thompson of the Cure playing most of the leads". WRONG!!! What was Plant thinking? Page, for a lot of the show, didn't even have a spotlight. He was in the semi-darkness off to the side of the stage, with Plant upfront next to Thompson. And one of the most infuriating parts of the show was that Plant had THOMPSON, not Page, playing all the "chicken pickin'" leads on "The Song Remains The Same"!

I said to Kevin: "All I wanted to do was see Page try to play this stuff once - you know - once, before he dies! I don't care if he misses every note. I just want to see the guy play these songs! I DON'T WANT TO SEE PORL THOMPSON PLAY THEM".

And while I'm talking about this show, I might as well say that the OTHER horrific moment of the show was when Plant, with a tone of great self-satisfaction, announced that they were going to play a song from "one of the seminal bands of the 1980's - The Cure!". We're sitting in the Vancouver Coliseum with 20,000 stoners who spent their entire high school careers BEATING UP Cure fans - and Plant wants to play a CURE song? "PLAY A ZEPPELIN SONG, YOU DOLT! LED ZEPPELIN!". And to make it even worse, it was one of those early Cure album tracks. It was like eight minutes of A minor to F, at a really slow pace. I love The Cure, but....come on. There's a time and place.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I think that Zeppelin could do another fantastic album IF (and only if) it is Page's band again. Not Plant and Jones's. If Page doesn't have it together, if he can't keep Plant's constant "wink wink I get how goofy we used to be" thing from destroying it all, it could be huge. Chances seem small; Plant - never short on ego - would have to let Jimmy steer the album. And after thirty years of calling all his own shots, that might be tough.

Can you imagine, though, a new record? And Jonesy - he's invaluable as long as he's doing his proper thing, under Page's direction...it could be incredible.

More later, gotta go to sleep.

T.