Pirates defeated again

Another late-night game, another loss, another attempt to field too few players . . . this is getting to be a bad habit. Last night's game was hard-fought, but the Pirates again started a game with too few players (only 9 on the field this time) and our opponents had the full 11 on the field and another three substitutes on the sideline.

Matt K. arrived shortly after kick-off, giving us 10 players, and a hastily recruited younger brother, Joseph M., allowed us to get up to full-strength on the field just before the half. Of course, by that time we were down 2-0.

When the final whistle blew, we were on the wrong side of a 3-0 score, but it could easily have been much worse. Blake M. and Anthony C. did some excellent work in goal, and our guest player Joseph M. was doing very well against players three or four years older — and considerably bigger — than him.

New dog pictures

Well, despite my best judgement, we seem to be close to adopting a new dog . . . but at least Xander is happy about the new arrival:

Happy Dominion Canada Day

Finally got the Red Ensign up in front of the house. Just took a bit longer than I'd planned (like too many other projects around the house, now that I think about it).

QotD: The Clown-Pony Scream

Oh, how they mocked. But my momentary cowardice still allowed me to retain a shred of dignity, and so was worth indulging. Because if I'd gotten on that ride, my friends would have actually heard me scream. Like a little girl. Like a little girl who just woke up because somebody licked her foot. Like a little girl who just woke up because somebody licked her foot, and then when she turns on the light there's an evil clown sitting in the middle of her bedroom, eating her pony.

There's no comebacks from the clown-pony scream.

John Rogers, "Irrational Fear? IRRATIONAL?", Kung Fu Monkey, 2007-06-22

Pirates run out of wind

Another late-night game last night, with a 9:00 kick-off, and another good effort in the first half not being matched in the second. The Pirates once again fielded the bare minimum number of players, with a late arrival at the end of the first half. The game was quite scrappy, with both teams showing the good and bad of their talents. The score was tied 3-3 at the half.

The second half did not go well, as Whitby Red's substitution advantage (four substitute players for Red, with only one for the Pirates) started to give them openings as the half wore on. Red went ahead about ten minutes into the half, and the Pirates couldn't claw back to even. Final score was 7-4, with Nick M., Brad H., Kevin J., and Matt L. scoring for the Pirates.

Next game, another late kick-off, on Monday night.

QotD: Philosophy, the use of

Dragging philosophy into the discussion is not always as effective as you might think it is. Just because Ayn Rand ran to Aristotle for every little thing doesn't mean it works for everyone. Hell, it didn't actually work for Ayn Rand.

John Scalzi, "Today's Example of an Egregious Use of Something a Writer Once Learned in a Freshman Philosophy Course", Whatever, 2007-06-28

Ontario under siege

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) pre-emptively closed Highway 401 near Napanee last night, before a planned blockade was placed:

Ontario Provincial Police, who shut down Canada's busiest highway early Friday morning west of Kingston due to native protesters in the area, have decided to reopen Highway 401.

The OPP had closed it earlier in the day after the protesters blockaded a section of secondary highway and a stretch of nearby railway track on the eve of the National Day of Action.

The OPP closed Highway 401 both ways between Napanee and Belleville and were diverting traffic north onto Hwy 7 due to native protesters "being in the direct area, for safety reasons," said Sergeant Kristine Rae of the Smith Falls detachment.

Hours later the OPP issued an arrest warrant for protest leader Shawn Brant on a charge of mischief.

It's unlikely that the warrant for Shawn Brant will actually be used . . . the OPP have been very cautious in dealing with native protesters (many people feel they've been far more than just cautious). VIA Rail also cancelled all passenger service from Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal, as the protest would also block the railway line, which is in close proximity to Highway 2 and Highway 401.

It's unlikely that the police and the provincial government would be quite as careful to avoid confrontation if it were any other group blocking highways and other transportation corridors.

Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, stressed at a news conference Thursday in Ottawa that his organization is calling only for peaceful events.

Of course, in this sort of situation, things are peaceful only as long as the police don't actually try to enforce the law, which (in the morally inverted universe of political protest) puts the onus on the police to avoid any contact with the protesters for fear of being the "aggressors".

Tens of thousands of people are being forced to either avoid travel or take lengthy detours (all at their own expense) so that the police can't be accused of "escalating the situation". And there is little or no chance of the courts acting to punish or even censure the protest organizers.

Terence Corcoran tried to dig up some background on the underlying land claims:

If Indian Affairs has clear answers to these and other questions, it will not say. All documents are sealed under legal privilege and cannot be viewed by anyone. Even after settlement is reached, no Canadian, and no resident of Deseronto, will ever know what the facts are behind the Culbertson Tract claim.

Claims like this exist all over Canada. Since 1973, 1,279 claims have been filed by native bands. So far, only a few — maybe 75 — have been rejected as having no legal merit. Most of the rest have been approved and settled (282) by Ottawa or are awaiting negotiated settlement (790). All documents in all claims remained sealed.

So, as today's protest carries on, it also helps to ensure that more of those thousand outstanding claims will be accompanied by "actions" that the police won't — or can't — control. Long hot summer? It's going to be a long hot decade at least!

Mitt Romney loses the pet-owning-voter

This is one of those little stories which may tell much more about a person's soul than about their "emotion-free crisis management" skills:

It is not true that I like dogs better than people. It's just that I like my dogs better than most people. Having said that, however, this story nevertheless raised my hackles on general principles [. . .]

Parental rage at kid sporting events

I've coached soccer for several years, but I'm relieved that I never had one of the parents as bad as this one:

Here's your Little League Dad of the Moment. First he cusses out his own kid during the game just to grind down his son's self-esteem a bit, then he lets his anger at the coach boil in his chestal area for two days, after which he threatens the coach outside his home. According to charges, he phoned up the coach and said he'd shoot him "like a dog." Brilliant.

This story serves several important purposes:

1. Every year must have a crazed-sports-father case. This is the one for 2007. We keep waiting for a dad from a different sport, like curling, but it's always Little League, soccer, or hockey. Never interpretative dance. Never have a parent stand up and shout I'M NOT GETTING THE IMPRESSION OF A WOUNDED FAUN, YOU #*&*%(#$ LOSER! INTERPRET HARDER! HUSTLE! HUSTLE! No, it's always the popular sports that attract the guys with M-80 tempers

The worst case I encountered was with two mothers who hated one another so much that their kids weren't allowed to be on the field at the same time (the kids weren't the problem, it was definitely the mothers who had the issues). When I pointed out that I couldn't do that — there weren't enough players to allow me to orchestrate my rotation around their personal issues, one of the mothers pulled her kid from the team.

QotD: Michael Moore

I have often wondered whether Moore is for real, or a sort of performance artist secretly working for Dick Cheney.

Johnathan Pearce, "The paradox of 'free' healthcare", Samizdata, 2007-06-27

A moderate review of Sicko

It's not a film I'm interested in seeing, so it's kind of Arnold Kling to sacrifice his own time to see the movie and post his response:

Last night, I saw the premier of "Sicko." One of the examples in the new Michael Moore film illustrates the role of beliefs.

The case was of an African-American man who died of kidney cancer. His weeping wife had been told by a doctor that there was hope from a bone marrow transplant, but the insurance company denied the treatment. You were left to conclude that the decision was based on profits or racism.

After the movie, I did a quick search on Google and Wikipedia for the treatments of kidney cancer, and I could not find bone marrow treatment. This reinforced the gut feeling that I had during that segment of the movie, which is that the guy's cancer was so far gone that none of the standard treatments was going to work, and the bone marrow idea was a desperate, last-ditch "hail-Mary pass" that had no proven track record of success.

[. . .]

But this all gets back to the way that beliefs shape the health care system. My guess is that other countries believe that when someone has passed the point where reasonable, proven treatments are available, it is ok to stop throwing lots of resources at the patient and instead use those resources where they are more helpful. In the United States, this runs up against an intense belief in saving lives, an enormous faith in doctors, and a strong desire never to give up.

In this country, we have not really come to terms with the ethical issues concerning hail-Mary health care. Some people even view desperate, last-ditch measures as an entitlement. As long as we believe that, the component of our health care spending that goes for futile care will not go down.

It's a much fairer review than some I've seen, although he does drop this Godwinian bon mot at the end: "Michael Moore has done that, and the potential damage to the belief system of Americans is something that concerns me. Michael Cannon was taken aback when I murmured on the way out, 'I can see how Hitler came to power.' I think he thought I was over-reacting. I hope I was."

That'll be a vote-winner

Just so I can't be accused of only mentioning Ron Paul among the various presidential candidates, here's Tom Tancredo with a sure-fire, vote-winning idea:

The "crazy people in room doing crazy things" article is a hackneyed one, sure, and I already linked a classic of the genre yesterday, but this Orange County Weekly write-up of a Tom Tancredo rally at the Nixon Library contains some high-grade kookery.

[. . .]

Tancredo closes out the emotional night by reminding the audience that hunting down all illegal immigrants, sending them home, and building a 2,000-mile wall between us and Mexico is our calling, much like a previous generation "saved the world" during World War II. "Next, we build a wall along the Canadian border," he proposes to thunderous applause.

Wow. I thought he was making a gaffe when he originally proposed that in the pages of Marie Claire. He wasn't.

Of course, that idea would only win a lot of votes among Canadians.

Wired on the Ron Paul phenomenon

Wired looks at the online presence of the Ron Paul presidential campaign:

When Texas Congressman Ron Paul entered the race for next year's Republican presidential nomination, few political analysts paid much notice.

Paul has no backing from political bigwigs or any campaign war chest to speak of. As the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988 he won less than one-half of 1 percent of the national vote.

Yet despite his status among the longest of the long shots, the 71-year-old has become one of the internet's most omnipresent — and some say most irritating — subjects.

According to Technorati, "Ron Paul" is one of the web's most searched-for terms. News about Paul has an outsize presence on Digg and reddit, two sites that allow users to highlight their preferred content. Paul's YouTube channel has been viewed over one million times, dwarfing efforts from competitors like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. The Ron Paul internet boom has born everything from Belgians for Ron Paul to a reggae music video promoting Paul's views on monetary policy and habeas corpus.

Who else do anti-war Republicans have to support? Who else do small-government Republicans have to support? Those two views alone would make Paul a factor.

QotD: Public Education and Kieran King

What fascinates me about the case of Kieran King, the Saskatchewan high school student who was threatened, punished and slandered by various officials over the past three weeks for talking with some pals about the health effects of marijuana, is that it explodes almost every single utopian cliche about public schools that has been ever propounded by their employees and admirers. It's almost glorious, in a way. Ever heard an educator say "We're not here to teach students what to think — we're here to teach them how to think"? BLAMMO! "We encourage children to make learning a lifelong process." KAPOW! Poor Kieran didn't even make it to age 16 before someone called the cops.

"Diversity is one of our most cherished values." But express a factually true opinion that diverges from what you've been taught and — WHOOMP! "Public schools aren't crude instruments of social control, they're places where we lay the foundation for an informed citizenry." BOOM!

I could go on, but I'm running out of sound effects and I really don't have time to fire up an old Batman episode on You-Tube to gather more.

Colby Cosh, "Put Kieran on a poster", National Post, 2007-06-22

Those damned billboards

I'm glad I'm not the only person irritated by those David Suzuki billboards:

Don't worry, ad agencies, there's Green for you in this fake-ass crisis too!

Maybe David Suzuki can illuminate and levitate light bulbs through sheer awareness-power, but I am fallen, a denier, no less, and I have to rely on the old fashioned environmentally unfriendly methods. I would just end up dropping the bulb on my floor, and having to vacuum up all that mercury and dump it in my compost heap. What a hassle!

Even if the mini fluorescent bulbs really are the right solution, the ad itself is 3/4 of the way to being a self-parody.

Facebook vs Myspace

Danah Boyd looks at the factors which come into play when teens select their primary social network site:

Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I've been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I'm having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren't so good at talking about class and I'm definitely feeling that discomfort. It's sticky, it's uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don't have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it's also hugely problematic. I don't have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I'm going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.

Hmmm. I recently got invited to join Facebook, and I've already found it to be a better networking tool than one of the more "professional" sites I've used for the last couple of years. I didn't realize there was a backstory. As Danah says, this isn't an academic paper, so it's not attempting to prove or disprove a theory; it's just Danah's interpretation of the data available.

Update: Oooops! Forgot to credit John Scalzi for pointing out the original link.

Update, 27 June: The author has some further thoughts on the strong response to the essay:

Wow. ::jaw on floor:: When I posted my article last night, I sent it to some friends and academic lists figuring that it would stir a conversation. I figured that some usual suspects would read it and offer valuable critiques. I was not expected Slashdot, Digg, Metafilter, del.icio.us/popular, Reddit, and other aggregators to pick it up.

Meme flow on the web intrigues me. When I post a well-thought out, well-written analysis, I get a few thousands hits and maybe a BoingBoing mention. So far, I've received 90K hits for this latest piece, the most problematic of essays I've ever shared publicly. Figures.

I know that there are problems in that essay (and I tried to caveat and caveat away till I annoyed myself). So I am not surprised that folks are up in arms about all sorts of things. Still, the response is fascinating. I guess there's nothing like something problematic to get a conversation started, eh?

QotD: Political Economics

Leading the charge was the once and future presidential candidate and Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He shot off a letter to the SEC (along with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Ca.)) asking the agency to hold up the Blackstone IPO while Congress puzzled out the best way to demagogue the issue.

Kucinich and Waxman fretted that small investors could be harmed, simultaneously worrying that trading Blackstone on the stock market was "exposing unsophisticated investors" to risk, while "depriv[ing] them of control over the management of the funds and of many of the protections provided by fiduciary duties typically owed to them by management."

To review: Investors are too stupid to know when they're getting screwed, but also deserve a chance to control the "management of the funds." In fact, the biggest hit small investors are likely to take is if they buy Blackstone and then Congress tanks the price by imposing a specifically targeted tax.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, "Idiot Investors? Congress protects people from making money on the stock market", Reason, 2007-06-25

Important PSA: wear your safety gear

H/T to "John the Mc".

Not the most convincing anti-Taliban vehicle

The British Army is introducing a new vehicle for travelling through Helmand province in Afghanistan (notable for a lack of paved roads): the Mad Maxmobile:

Photo from the Daily Mail article

Some rather good lines from the Fark.com thread:

Isotope ok, so I see I'm not the only one concerned that the vehicle will survive better than the crew...

Prank Call of Cthulhu The vehicle is missing something....hmmmm...what could it be? Oh, I know. It needs the Lord Humungous (The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!) driving it. That'd be sweet!

Cormee I'd like to see the design brief.
'Design a vehicle - suitable for hunting Basset Hounds.'

A Shambling Mound Armored?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

reverend_alex Wow, you can almost feel the fevered patriotic drool dripping from the author's lips as he pops a Daily Mail boner over a new *BRITISH MADE* vehicle for exterminating those filthy towelheads. Anyone else notice the barely-restrained glee with which this guy spells out exactly how awesome and powerful the almighty British Army is? Maybe because they're usually sent out into the desert with just some sunscreen and a cap gun. Not that that thing looks any more likely to protect them than Piz Buin factor 15.

Good luck to our boys and all, but the Americans called us 'The Borrowers' during Gulf War I for a reason.

Old technology reduces car theft risk

As manual transmission vehicles become less common on the roads in North America, they become less likely to be stolen:

Two U.S. car thieves failed to make their getaway in a car they had just stolen because they couldn't figure out how to use its manual transmission, a witness said on Wednesday.

QotD: Knighthood

Maybe this nonsense still impresses foreigners, but to the British "knight" simply means "famous dickhead in his fifties" or "fat crook who donates to the Labour Party".

Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Jimmy Saville, Sir Elton John, Sir Bono . . . I could go on. Giving one to someone with talent and brains, rather than yet another ignorant blatherskite of the Ian Botham type, is most unusual, even if it wasn't a deliberate slight.

"Everybody has a summer holiday.
Doin' things they always wanted to.
So we're goin' on a summer holiday
To make our dreams come true . . ."

It seems to me that if you award knighthoods for that sort of thing, the bar has been set pretty low. Unless you want to try and argue that Sir Cliff embodies the knightly virtues of wysedom, verite, humylite and swiftness.

Harry Hutton, "The Order of the Fat Dickhead", Chase me ladies, I'm in the cavalry, 2007-06-23

Only in America

Mark Steyn finds an unexpected source of illegal guns:

I love America! Even the anti-gun groups are full of gun nuts packing totally awesome heat.

L. Neil Smith on the oil industry

L. Neil Smith has some issues with the way the oil industry is conducting itself:

Let's review, and along the way, examine some details I didn't go into before. Despite those who hold a contrary view (some among us, perhaps unduly influenced by Ayn Rand, never seem to have absorbed the unpleasant fact that corporations are not our friends and don't give a rap about freedom) I do not for an instant believe that the current price of gas — over four dollars in some places, with predictions going as high as six — has anything at all to do with natural market forces.

The commonest maundering you hear when this topic is discussed, is that there's a lack of refinery capacity, brought about by a couple of disastrous refinery fires a few years back. If this is true, then the oil industry isn't simply evil, it's impossibly stupid for not having included such a contingency in its plans. Moreover, as my wife points out, they can throw up a new office building in three months if they really want to. What's so much mysteriously harder about rebuilding a refinery?

The simple, ugly fact is that, while ordinary, productive-class Americans are going to the poorhouse, just to buy gas enough to get their kids to school, themselves to work, and go to the grocery store, the oil companies are raking in record profits — as who wouldn't, selling the world's second most abundant liquid for four dollars a gallon?