The Only Winning Move

I’m not really one for New Year’s as a holiday, or for New Year’s resolutions. But I do engage in a Lent-like bit of sacrifice of my own for six weeks at the beginning of each year just to keep my life in order.

So starting Tuesday I’ll be “vegetarian” for 6 weeks. I put this in shock quotes because I allow myself fish (but try to keep it to once a week), so it’s not real “vegetarianism.” In addition this year I’ll be giving up alcohol and refined sugar. All this lasts through February 12. 

One of the common threads in all the eulogizing about President Ford has been how he was the right man to succeed Nixon and put the nation back together - in short how fortunate we supposedly were to have him hanging around in the wings when Agnew resigned. Here is a typical such paragraph:

It is always difficult to look back and say that a certain president was a failure in the strict sense of being a step backward. Ford was probably the right man for the right place in time. The contours of American history have a wonderful almost magical way of somehow weaving together, coming into focus and making sense only in retrospect. Gerald Ford’s brief, unelected tenure has its own place in the mosaic.

I would just like to say that I don’t think there’s anything the least bit “magical” about the way the “contours of American history somehow weaved together” in this case. Quite the contrary - Ford’s appearance on the scene at the right time is evidence of a functional system functioning. It would have happened at any point in recent American history.

Recall that Ford replaced Spiro Agnew as VP in 1973 after Agnew resigned over bribery allegations (which were true - he paid back all the money he was known to have accpeted in 1983 and was disbarred). Agnew believes that Nixon himself leaked a lot of the information about the bribery as a way of diverting attention from the budding Watergate scandal, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. We all know that Nixon was that kind of person, and anyway the tactic worked for a time.

Now further recall that Barry Goldwater’s nomination as Republican for President in 1964 is widely seen as the first shot in the conservative revolution that would eventually bring Reagan to office in 1980. Nixon, who ran for president and lost in 1960 after having served two terms as Eisenhower’s VP, was very much an establishment Republican. He was America’s Teddy Heath - a “red tory” who was more about “good government” (read: patriotic government) than “small government.” Spiro Agnew was a darling of the conservative insurgency and seen as a promising candidate for president in 1976 for that reason. But Nixon was coming under heavy fire from the Democrats as facts about Watergate emerged. He primarily needed someone who would appease them - someone to soften his image - and more importantly someone who would easily get congressional approval (and Congress was heavily Democrat). Ford it was. It couldn’t really have been anyone else. Ford had made a career out of keeping his head low and smoothing over partisan disputes. He certainly had the experience - 13 times elected Representative from his home district and now Minority Leader in the House. And of course he got where he was in the first place by being acceptable to the Democrats (who had enjoyed recurring majorities in both houses in most of the postwar era) and simultaneously offending neither camp of Republicans - neither the new Conservatives nor the old Establishment.

Anyone else Nixon could have chosen would have offended someone. Ford got the job because he was “the right man for the right place in time.” He was a screened candidate, and what qualified him were all the qualities that the pundits are now saying we were “lucky” to have in the president who succeeded Nixon: sincerity, willingness to compromise, humility, graciousness, ability to mollify the opposition, and generally not being one to rock the boat.

If Democracy has any virtues over and above being the least bad system of government, surely they are in precisely the kind of decentralization of power that made the Ford Administration possible. Any system that encourages open competition for power will tend to find “the right man for the right place in time” hovering about somewhere when it needs him - rather the way that companies that look beyond nepotism for employment strategies tend to do. 

Anyone following the Duke Rape case will no doubt know by now that Mike Nifong has been charged with ethics violations by the North Carolina State Bar. A copy of the complaint is available on Smoking Gun.

There are a number of editorials in major newspapers applauding the decision and condemning Nifong’s general behavior and handling of the case. It’s pretty clear by now that the boys will be found innocent and Nifong will be disciplined in some way - possibly disbarred. It would be nice if someone would prosecute Crystal Gail Magnum as well, but I can understand the reasons for not wanting to do so (it would possibly have a chilling effect on real victims coming forward and also on other liars thinking of recanting their stories).

I don’t have anything to add here except to say that this is an excellent blog with firstrate coverage of the case.



 

 Home to North Carolina for a week or so tomorrow.  I’ll probably have occasion to post some, but not till after Christmas, and probably not every day.   Back in Bloomington and back to work on the 31st or thereabouts.

Happy Chistmas!

Yesterday I finished Lost Season 1.



I think I’ll stick with my revised B+ rating. It has a lot going for it, but ultimately there’s no basis for calling it “great.”



First the good things. The production values are firstrate. The acting (given the characters they have to go on) is good, the directing is very good, and the pacing is nothing short of amazing in places. For a show that relies on central mysteries for interest, this is important. Though they slip now and then, for the most part I never feel like story continuity is sacrificed in the service of a cheap cliffhanger. Episodes tend to end at what seem like natural breaks in the narrative; they never really have to go back and revise something that happened in the previous episode to keep things going. Probably best of all, they do a really good job handling subtleties. For example, the safety deposit box that Kate needs opened is number “815,” which also happens to be the number of the flight and, as we later learn, two in the string of numbers that Hurley believes are cursing him. It is to the writers’ credit that no one ever calls attention to this in conversation. And there are tons of things like that - little bits that you notice on your own that the writers didn’t hold your hand and point out to you. Usually, this kind of faith in a viewr’s perception and intelligence is the hallmark of a truly good show. But…



There are a lot of problems with Lost too. Most importantly for me, the characters just aren’t very interesting. With the possible exception of John Locke, I’ve seen all of these characters before in other shows. Now, it’s OK to recycle successful “types,” but you have to do something to flesh them out and make them seem human, and there’s just none of that here. No one has so much as a single detail in their background that sets them apart in any way from the thousands of copies of these people I’ve seen elsewhere. Worse still, they all finish season one off pretty much where they started. Stranded on a desert island, struggling for survival, and yet this experience changes none of them? Implausible. And the two possible exceptions here - Kate and Jin - are both flawed in some way. Now I admit, when the subject of a fugitive on board came up I didn’t immediately think of Kate. But once you know it’s her (which you do almost immediately after the subject gets raised), there’s no reason whatever to change your opinion of her. This only gets confirmed as the show goes on. She never does anything to give the impression that she’s really shady. Cerainly nothing to back up the skymarshall’s claim that he “needs” four guns to keep her in tow! What few sneaky things she does are not much more than we’d really expect from any independent-minded tom-boyish woman in this situation. And of course the flashbacks make abundantly clear that she has a heart, which just ruins the whole effect. It’s the one of the biggest - and worst - cliches on American TV: the beatiful damsel who seems shady but is really good deep inside. Yeah, got it, guys! Worst of all, her status as fugitive plays exactly zero role in the story aside from giving her a “connection” with Sawyer and giving Jack an excuse to keep their budding relationship at the eyeballing level. It’s not clear that we actually needed a criminal background for either of these things. As for Jin, the writers cheated. The man we were shown at the outset of the series simply isn’t the same guy who helps Michael build the raft, and there’s no event or series of events that explains the transformation. Jin’s flahsbacks are wholly inconsistent with the guy we saw in the first 6 episodes or so. The writers picked him up and replaced him with someone else as the story demanded. Not a very convincing character portrayal. And so it is, more or less, with everyone. Charlie’s religious bent is not very convincing, and he seems awfully focused on his fame for someone who is supposedly only in Driveshaft (HA! I admit that’s a great name! It’s so believable it’s almost not satire - a sad comment on the state of Britpop) because he loves the music. But see, this is a story we’ve all heard before. The hack who thinks he’s an artist but is really only in it to paper over his insecurities? Sayid is the foreigner with a troubled past. Jack the doctor who can’t let go. Blah blah blah blah BLAH.



The point is that I don’t care what happens to these people. I REALLY didn’t care in the first episode, and the writers didn’t do much to improve that situation over the course of the following 23. Locke is the only remotely interesting character. I like the concept of a geek who can do the things he brags about, and I think they’re doing a good job keeping the balance here. That is, on the one hand, Locke is very capapble, no denying it. On the other hand, despite some experiences in his past (and I admit that his flashbacks about his father are pretty cool), he’s still extremely naive. What he calls “faith” is actually just wishful thinking, and it’s interesting that his “wish” involves not having to deal with people in the “real” world - because he knows he can’t. He seems strong, but really he’s just latched on to the first thing that came his way - “the island” (and the weird religion he makes out of it). An especially nice touch is that he’s not really fooling anyone. The only person he got to, really, was Boone, and that made sense given Boone’s own problems. There’s an anger in Locke that’s always just beneath the surface, and the actor does a good job of portraying the fake serenity. I’ll be interested to see what happens with Locke in the second season (which I have already ordered from Netflix) - but he’s honestly the only character I can say that about.



The reason why characters are important to a series like this is…well, there isn’t a reason to watch it twice otherwise. Twin Peaks and The X-Files were similarly plot-driven “arc” shows that suffered from poor planning, but they both stay interesting over several viewings because the characters are believable and compelling. Lost just doesn’t have this at all. Strip away the interesting character story and all you have is a plot. And once you’ve seen the plot once, there’s no need to go back and ever see it again.



Unfortunately, the plot is another problem here. The premise for this show is REALLY interesting. The actual events, though, seem hokey at times. In particular, the stuff with the numbers is kind of dumb. It’s not that I don’t think recurring numbers are cool, because I do. And it’s not that I mind the implied mysticism. Quite the contrary - I like shows and novels that don’t feel the need to explain everything rationally. (I’ve written quite a bit about this with regard to Star Trek.) But if something is transparently a device then it loses its meaning, and “the numbers” are simply a device. They’re too easy to be impressive in any way. All a writer really has to do to cash out “interest” is put them somewhere - like, oh, say on the jerseys of a girls soccer team standing in an airport. They function in essentially the same way as the “central item” in every fantasy novel ever written. You know, some mysterious stranger appears before the hero and tells him to search out and find the sword of [insert appropriate-sounding name here] and take it to [insert appropriate name] castle(/cave/wishingwell/whatever), and all his troubles will vanish. Of course, if he fails, some Truly Terrible Fate will befall mankind - but that never happens, so generally we’re safe. Well, the numbers are slightly more interesting than that - but the point is that they’re still a story-independent device. I can very easily pick these up and take them out and put them in any story without having to substantively change what’s going on. They’re there to be cashed in for “plot” the same way you cash in accumulated chips for money at a poker game. You can leave the game whenever you please, and with devices like this the plot picks up an moves whenever the writers are good and ready. It’s “story engineering” more than “story telling.” They’ve made the process “efficient,” which is sort of the last thing we really want. Claire’s experience with the psychic is a bit better on this count. They’ve left totally ambiguous whether his powers are genuine - and there’s an interesting story to tell about credulity in the face of coincidence involving people like Claire. Not that they’re really telling it exactly, but they’re at least sniffing at it. Hurley’s “cursed numbers” are sort of the poor cousin of this. I’m as much a sucker for them as anyone (I did say they were cool) - but the point is I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m a “sucker” for one of the central plot devices! A good plot “device” isn’t a device at all - because it’s a place the story leads you naturally. No need for literary “call/cc.”



Finally, there’s just nothing going on thematically. This premise has nearly endless possibility for philosophical exploration. Throw a bunch of deeply flawed people on an island and give them a chance to start over and … well, in this case, NOTHING HAPPENS. No one grows, no one learns anything, we don’t feel any closer to the mysteries of life than when we started. There is exactly nothing profound about this show. Now in some cases this is a blessing. For example, I’m REALLY glad they spared us the potential “man vs. nature” theme, which I don’t think would have been appropriate here. There is plenty of food on and free shelter on the island - so we don’t have to go through the drudgery of watching a Scout video presented as fiction. Thank God. But there are plenty of other themes that would have been interesting to work in … and they just didn’t. In particular, something about “starting over” seem to be in order but just isn’t here. And there are interesting things to say about the civilization vs. “the wild” thing too. Not in the cheesy way that Sawyer means it when he brings it up early on, mind you. No replays of “Lord of the Flies,” thanks! But it still seems strange to throw a bunch of random passengers together away from civilization and say essentially nothing whatever about how they organize themselves. The closest they really come is Jack’s “every man for himself doesn’t work” speech - and they really could and should have spared us that. Not just because it’s not very realistic (in actual disaster situations, people are a lot less selfish than you think), but also because Jack’s authority to say these things at the time hadn’t been properly established by the story. That everyone stands around and listens like the faceless extras they are only reinforces this impression.



So I give it a B+. It’s a true pleasure to watch, but there’s nothing lasting here. Having seen it once, I’ll never wanna see it again, and I won’t spend much time thinking about it when it’s not on the screen in front of me. It has superior production values and a damn intriguing premise, but the actual literary execution is generic. And I mean “generic” as in “nothing over and above the genre specifications.” Granted, I guess there isn’t really a “crash on a mysterious island” genre - but if there were the prototype would be exactly this show. There’s nothing here in the way of a story that depends on people and themes. It’s really just a skeleton plot (which may not have even been properly planned - the show will be pretty pathetic if there aren’t some substantive answers by the end of season two) with made-to-order playing pieces standing in for characters. And nothing of substance anywhere to be found. Mostly it’s a trail of “sparklies”. True that it’s a superior “trail of sparklies,” but that’s not enough to garner it an A. The truly discriminating viewer will want to stay well away. People looking for a nice weekly escapist relaxer, however, will get exactly what they’re looking for in spades. 

 Here’s a case of the academic namby-pambies if I’ve ever seen one: a professor in Nova Scotia has cancelled a debate on diversity because his opponent’s views are “too offensive to be voiced on campus.”

“It’s all about providing a public stage for views which are considered by many Canadians as deeply, deeply offensive,” said Devine.

Love the sly suggestion that the opponent’s (who happens to be one Jared Taylor) views are somehow more offensive to Canadians than to anyone else. Mr. Taylor, as it turns out, is not a white supremacist. He’s a white separatist, which isn’t the same thing at all. White supremacy is indeed an “offensive” view - but I don’t see why white separatism should be. It’s a view I find foolish, personally, but that’s a long cry from being “offensive.” Certainly there’s nothing “offensive” enough about it to warrant this kind of censorship. And indeed, isn’t one of the points of academic institutions supposed to be to wall off a place where views that don’t get as much airtime in the so-called “real” world can be expounded on and explored?

More to the point: if the debate is about the relative merits of “diversity,” then I can’t really think of a more appropriate opponent for Mr. Devine than Mr. Taylor. The very antithesis of “diversity,” as Mr. Devine uses the term, is racial separatism, no? It really begs the question of what Mr. Devine was actually expecting in an opponent. If he didn’t know Mr. Taylor was a white separatist when he invited him to speak, then what, exactly, did he think Taylor stood for? What search method did he use, if not, oh, say, reading some material from the person he invited? I guess what he was expecting was someone who doesn’t think diveristy is an intrinsic good, but doesn’t otherwise mind it. That’s roughly my view - I don’t mind meeting and befriending people from diverse cultures and backgrounds, but ultimately I think people are just people, we have more in common than we have things that separate us, and in any case ethnic background is an inappropriate criterion for admission to university, which should be based solely on academic promise. If that’s what he was expecting, then he shouldn’t have had any trouble finding someone to fit the bill. This opinion is common, as far as I know, and there are plenty of writers who espouse it. It’s somewhat harder to find people like Mr. Taylor, who actually believe ethnic diversity is a negative. Indeed, one wonders what Mr. Devine has to lose in debating him. Taylor’s viewpoint is so out of fashion these days (to the point of being virtually taboo) that I have trouble imagining a crowd at a university that would support him. Now granted, the article says the talk got mention on Stormfront, which is a discussion site for white nationalists. Maybe Mr. Devine was worried that hooligans would show up. It’s a legitimate fear, and in my opinon also a legitimate reason to cancel the talk. But that isn’t the reason Devine gave. What he said instead was that Taylor’s views are “too offensive to be voiced on campus.”

There is no such thing as a view “too offensive to be voiced” in what’s supposed to be a free speech zone. Individual attendees can decide for themselves when they’ve heard enough, can’t they? It’s sort of the way I avoid the Jesus freaks when they preach behind Woodburn. They have nothing to say to me, and I have better things to do than listen, so I move on rather than stop. I find the suggestion that I should dedicate my life to something I’ve never seen nor felt a bit offensive, in fact. But nothing in what I just said in any way implies I want them banned from campus! Please! Ditto socialists. I find lots of left-wing viewpoints deeply offensive. The idea that I should give up wealth that I create to support layabouts at the government’s discretion or else be carted off to prison, for example, strikes me as the root of all immorality. But again, you don’t see me pressing to censor this view, backward and tribal though I think it is.

Academia is in a pretty sad state if people like Taylor are denied public forums. More importantly, if a champion of “diversity” can’t handle a racial separatist, his natural opponent, then I really start to wonder what the intellectual basis for the “diversity” movement actually is? Does it even have one?

Here’s the best part:

But Devine says academic debate has its limits.

Instead of a debate on Jan. 15, Devine will give a lecture on diversity including a summary of Taylor’s views.

Wonderful! Because why hear a case from the source when you can hear a straw man version from one of its opponents instead?

I don’t know what this is, but it’s nothing like what academia is supposed to be. Let a thousand flowers bloom indeed.

Well whaddya know? Charges of rape in the Duke rape case have been dropped now that the accuser is no longer sure she was penetrated during the “attack.” Well, duh! You can’t get penetrated by your imagination, sweetie!

Alright - I half apologize for that last comment. The case hasn’t gone to trial yet, and until it does we technically don’t know who’s telling the truth. Maybe it is as she says, and maybe the explanation for her constantly-shifting memory is that she was afraid the police wouldn’t take her seriously or something - or else it has to do with the trauma of the attack. Fine - it’s possible.

It’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to believe. For one thing, the prosecution has had since March to get its story straight. Even accounting for trauma, it’s hard to imagine that they could still be waffling about matters so crucial as what the charges are. Then there’s all the accumulated baggage up to this point. The “other” stripper has also changed her story more than once, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that says the boys charged weren’t at the party at the time of the attack, we know that the prosecutor used an improper screening method when asking her to photo-ID her attackers, the prosecutor himself has a lot of political motivation to pursue this case regardless of its merits, and DNA tests have failed to turn up any of the accused boys’ DNA even though they now clearly show that she had sex with someone that night.

The fact that they’re dropping this particular charge is especially telling. Recall that originally Nifong gave a fairly unconvincing argument that DNA evidence was less important than testimony and other physical evidence. It went something like this: there is no DNA evidence in 70-80% of sexual assault cases, and yet convictions are obtained. True enough - but what he’s leaving out is that in most cases the victim doesn’t report the attack until days or even weeks later, by which point most of the DNA evidence has been cleaned off. In this woman’s case, a rape kit test was administered the same night the attack supposedly took place, so however “normal” it may be to prosecute a case without DNA evidence, it’s highly irregular in this particular kind of case. Nifong originally said that the DNA tests would provide “conclusive evidence” that a rape had occurred. In this case, lack of same should be equally conclusive evidence of innocence, as Nifong well knows. And yet he chose to press ahead with the rape charge anyway, saying that the victim’s testimony was enough. Well, now he doesn’t even have that. He’s tried his best to make this charge stick and hasn’t been able. Isn’t it time to maybe start rethinking some of the other charges too?

One really does start to wonder where Nifong’s “certainty” is coming from if not from political expediency. His single testimonial is clearly unreliable. True, a medical test shows injuries “consistent with rape,” but the prosecutor of all people should know that those injuries could just as easily have come from any man. There is nothing about them that links the people specifically accused to the crime. Put bluntly, Nifong’s case seems to rest on the idea that a woman wouldn’t lie about the details of a sexual attack - but women lie about these things all the time. There is independent reason to believe that this particular woman would do so.

It has been suggested that the injuries came from her boyfriend and she’s lying to protect him. That’s a pretty standard reason for making up a rape story, and I see no reason why Nifong shouldn’t independently pursue that angle. That’s why its so infuriating to read things like this:

But Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor who now teaches at the New England School of Law, said the decision could actually help Nifong by keeping any discussion about the results of the DNA testing away from the jury.

“It may be that this is a strategic move to insulate the trial itself from a sideshow that certainly would have overwhelmed all the other evidence,” Murphy said. “A sideshow about her sex life.”

With all due respect (which doesn’t seem to be much), her sex life is not “a sideshow” at this point. It’s a crucial fact of the case. It would be a “sideshow” if Nifong had direct evidence linking those injuries to the players, but he doesn’t. Absent such evidence, it bleeding well DOES matter who else she might be having sex with and how often.

How, even in cases of trauma, can a story go from “I was shoved in a bathroom and vaginally and anally raped” to “I was in the bathroom and they touched me wrong?” It doesn’t seem possible. And so I find it really hard to believe that there’s a case here at all anymore. I’m guessing this rape just didn’t happen, the chick’s making it up, and I guess Nifong probably knows that by now too. Maybe he calculates that it’s worse to just back out - and he’s probably right. It’ll go to trial and he’ll lose, and hopefully the voters will quietly send him packing at the next available opportunity. I can’t say I’m a big fan of getting Gonzales involved, as has been (formally) suggested. But I wouldn’t mind the state legislature taking up the issue. Since the legislature and Governor Easley don’t get along, and since Nifong is (originally) an Easley appointee, it’s not an unrealistic hope.

 With the Republican Primary in 2008 looking increasingly likely to be a head-to-head between John “First Amendment?” McCain and Rudi “Due Process?” Giuliani, I was starting to wonder if there’d be anything to keep me interested. I mean, if Newsweek’s latest cover is to be believed, then the Dems face an even worse pair of choices: Sen. Barack Obama who, in addition to being a certifiable socialist, has approximately 20min. of total national political experience, and Hillary Clinton nee Rodham, who is possibly the sleaziest pol to run for the office since Johnson. (There’s also a rumor that Boy Wonder may try again. *Yaaawwwnnn*) So whoever wins the Republican nomination is pretty much guaranteed to be the better choice for the job.

Which isn’t to say he’s going to be anything like a good choice. And indeed, if it’s down to McCain and Giuliani, I think I may take up (very) heavy drinking till it’s over.

Not that I’m voting Republican anyway. I’ll stick to my voting algorithm - which means I vote Libertarian in every running where there’s a candidate and Republican when there’s not. I admit I got a little excited when I heard Gingrich might be running, but while I still think he’s worlds better than McCain or Giuliani, he’s been saying some pretty dopey stuff recently. So after calm reflection I think I won’t break my perfect Libertarian voting record if he manages to get nominated.

Today I heard one other interesting suggestion, though, that gave me a couple seconds’ pause: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Yup, Mr. Pig Shit himself.

C’mon - the “only in South Carolina” political stunts aside (it isn’t just the pigs - Sanford has also been serving free grits to state guests, driving himself around in an SUV rather than the traditional chauffeured limo, and sleeping on a cot in his office rather than in the Governor’s Mansion. Of course, this DIY approach means he sometimes forgets important things.) - you gotta love a guy who started off his term by vetoing all 106 spending bills proposed. Sanford took the reigns during the first period since 1955 that the state took in less in tax revenues than the year before, and despite a weak veto mechanism (it’s typically easy to overried a governor’s veto in Southern states) managed to keep South Carolina solvent anyway.

I don’t know that much about Sanford, and he’s not likely to win the primary anyway, so I don’t know that it matters. But if the linked article is right, people may be putting pressure on him to run for President. And he may have a better chance than you think if the Republican base really is fed up with Bush’s single-minded ambition to be the biggest deficit spender since Johnson.

Here’s hoping.

 Via Noah - behold, the Geek Hierarchy!

Ok, not the most imaginative use of anyone’s photoshop skills, but good for a chuckle or two. (I especially like Heinlein fans outranking Piers Anthony fans. Right on! Speaking of which - I have Starship Troopers on tape for the ride home. In fact, I made it to this ripe old age without ever having read the book or seen the movie. I also have Santuary as an insurance policy if it craps out, though.)

But I wouldn’t be posting about it if I didn’t have something to complain about, so here goes. They have “Anime fans who insist on subtitles” outranking “Anime fans who use the term ‘Japanimation.’” Hello? Isn’t that the other way around? That is, isn’t the only reason we call anime “anime” because the supergeek fans (the ones who have stopped being able to see natural colors) insisted on using the Japanese word (which is really just a nipponization and shortening of the English word “animation”) because they were offended that “Japanimation” can be as easily parsed as “Jap-animation” as “Japan-imation?”

I like anime/japanimation, and when I first got into it (I mean, modulo watching Voltron as a kid - which I didn’t know was Japanese at the time) in 1990 or so, “japanimation” was the only available term. It was annoying to hear people insist on “anime,” which if I remember correctly they started doing around 1994. And yes, it was generally the people who were trying to show that they knew more about it than you did at first. Eventually I switched to “anime” too - but reluctantly, only becuse it somehow managed to become the more popular term to the point where “japanimation” started sounding stilted.

It’s sort of like “The Ukraine” vs. “Ukraine.” I’m doing my best to hold out with “The Ukraine,” which is what I grew up with. But I have to admit it’s been almost a year since I saw it written like that in print. The media has wholeheartedly adopted “Ukraine,” as have most of the people around me, which means it’s probably only a matter of time before “Ukraine” starts sounding more natural to me and I end up reluctantly using it too. Right now, both versions are roughly equal in gut-level acceptability, which just goes to show that the process is underway.

In any case, I don’t think people who call anime “japanimation” are the geekier of the two, are they? As far as I know, there aren’t really such things as people who say “japanimation” anymore. The bad guys won.

Another reason that Stephane Dion shouldn’t be Canada’s next prime minister: he has a dog. And see - Stephen Harper is a cat lover, so…

OK, I’m not really taking that angle. It has more to do with what Dion named his dog. Yup: “Kyoto.” After the Protocol. (As if I could make this up!)

It is important that Kyoto fail. Climate change may be real, but that doesn’t say anything whatever about whether Kyoto is the appropriate way to fight it. And in fact, it’s about the least appropriate way I can imagine.

You’ve all heard the drill. Kyoto transfers wealth artificially to underdeveloped economies because these are not covered by the treaty. More emportantly, it transfers wealth to India and China - which will acquire it on their own eventually with or without our “help.” Most importantly, China and India are huge polluters, so without their compliance the treaty is pretty much ineffective anyway. And even with their compliance, the year chosen (1990) just so happens to be politically expedient for a number of players. Germany, for example, had just reunified in 1990, so they get to count all the communist carbon production from industries that hadn’t been shut down yet in their general package. They basically meet the goal for free. The UK, likewise, gets to benefit from a transition from coal-based electricity production to oil-based production that really got underway about 1990. So they get compliance for free as well. Russia suffered major industrial collapse in the 1990s, so they’re actually a net beneficiary of the treaty as written (though they have decided to pull out anyway - presumably because they expect their industry to start recovering soon and know that it will look a lot like third world industry in the early stages of the recovery). France has but to continue its nuclearization program. So yes, the treaty pretty much is designed to punish the US for being…well, for being the US. Canada and Australia get caught in the crossfire - but Australia, at least, had the good sense to know a sucker’s bet when it saw one and got out when we did.

The real tragedy of Kyoto, though, is that environmentaism has taken over for religion in a lot of people’s psyches. All evidence indicates that the world is, in fact, warming. What we don’t know is how much of this really has to do with human activity, or what the real economic tradeoffs are for dealing with the portion that does have something to do with us, or even what the consequences of doing nothing about it are likely to be. And we’re not going to know so long as vast swathes of the human population simply take it on faith that industry is bad and Mother Nature loves us.

One thing in particular that seems to be off the table for discussion is technology-based solutions. For example: the US could easily cut its emissions seriously by switching over to mostly nuclear electricity production - but the environmentalists won’t hear it. True, the oil and coal industries aren’t happy about it either - but at least for them I can see a motive in trying to protect jobs and profits. The environmentalists don’t like nuclear power because they don’t like technological advancement in general. It’s more or less the same reason that all the focus in the climate change debate is on carbon emissions, despite the fact that methane is just as implicated. But methane, you see, comes from rice paddies and cows - so it can’t be neatly blamed on Detroit.

What we need on climate change is a healthy and open debate. Which is to say we need a lot less “religion.” And by that I mean a lot less anti-Americanism, and a lot less nature-worship.

Kyoto is the worst government policy since the War on Drugs. You have to be seriously mentally deficient to think it’s a good idea. As it stands, it buys you absolutely no progress in combatting climate change at a HUGE price. It doesn’t even come close to passing a cost-benefit analysis - so why are we even still talking about it? I cannot seriously believe that most people who support it do so in good faith. True, some argue that Kyoto is merely a way of putting the regulatory aparatus in place that will eventually Save Us All, and I suppose this is something like a good faith argument in favor. But notice where this argument leads. It essentially admits that the Treaty is a trojan horse to ever more painful emissions caps. And it does so without bothering to present convincing math that this “pain” is worth it.

It’s difficult to believe that we’ll always be as dependent on fossil fuels as we are now. Fossil fuels have a limited supply, and industry presumably wants to keep profits rolling long after they’ve run out. If there are ways to produce energy as or nearly as cheaply with alternative sources as we’re currently doing with oil and coal, rest assured they will be found. If the government absolutely must play a role in stopping climate change, then research on developing such sources seems like a better place to put our money than in building an international regulatory apparatus that will only get more painful as time goes by - sapping, in the process, the capital base vital to doing the research into alternative fuels that needs to be done.

But Stephane Dion didn’t name his dog “Nuclear Power.” Or “Alternative Energy.” He didn’t even name it “Hybrid Car” or “Green Investment Strategy.” Nope. Out of all the millions of names on the table, he settled on “Kyoto,” and even jokes that its nickname is “Protocol.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the climate change debate if he gets elected isn’t going to be very…oh, what’s the word…open-minded? The good news is that Canada’s vote on Kyoto (they’ve signed it, but Stephen Harper has been staying up late nights trying to work out a way out of it, bless him!) matters to no one, so Dion and his dog aren’t adding even a milisecond to its lifespan even if they do make it to Sussex. So I guess the only thing to say about this, really, is that if Canadians make him their 23rd Prime Minister in the spring (or whenever the hell the election happens), they’ll have the government they deserve and no one but themselves to blame. It ain’t like they won’t have seen it coming!