Wart’s that you say? A smidgen of good HPV news

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 5:43 AM - 0 Comments

Goodbye, genital warts! Can’t say you’ll be missed! A new study of Australian visitors to sexual health clinics reveals that vaccines against the most dangerous forms of the human papilloma virus (HPV) are turning out to be very effective at eliminating genital warts—so much so that it is actually a bit mysterious. In 2007 Australia introduced a program of free(-as-in-beer) HPV vaccination for schoolgirls aged 12-13, with optional free “catch-up” programs available to older girls and women. This effectively created the conditions for a controlled experiment: Australia now has an under-21 age cohort in which there was near-total vaccine coverage in the populace, a 21-30 cohort that is somewhere around 50% covered, and a 30-plus group among which almost nobody has had the jab.

The clinics, which are all over Australia, were instructed to record incidence rates of genital warts among patients visiting for the first time. As you can see if you peek at the tables, the rates have stayed the same amongst the unvaccinated oldies and have plunged in the younger populations. It’s not just the women who benefit in this regard (while receiving hypothetical protection from future cervical cancer); the incidence rates dropped among younger men, thanks to herd immunity, and even declined significantly among gay men. It is not as though Australians have stopped having sex, as the matching incidence figures for chlamydia suggest. In fact, they suggest that they’re probably at it a bit more. (And why wouldn’t they be, what with everybody having much tidier genitalia and all?)

Most remarkable is the finding (see Figure 2) that genital warts have disappeared altogether among those in the youngest group of women, those almost universally vaccinated in early or pre-adolescence. For the year 2011 there were 235 patients; 235 were wart-free. In the words of the authors, “We were surprised by this finding, as some of these women probably had only one or two doses of vaccine, and false positive diagnoses are always possible.” The vaccine is designed to suppress only strains of HPV thought to cause most genital warts; the docs speculate that either “most” was actually “all” all along, or that the vaccine is knocking out other strains it wasn’t engineered to fight. Either way, this is probably an auspicious leading indicator when it comes to the ongoing cancer-prevention powers of these “quadrivalent” HPV vaccines.

If you check the footnotes of the study, you can see that these researchers are probably quite delighted to have arrived at these conclusions, since some of them are cozy with Merck, makers of the Gardasil HPV vaccine. No doubt this study has been spun to create the greatest possible sensation, but there are plenty of urogenital specialists in Australia; an “absolutely no young people anywhere are turning up with warts anymore” finding is the sort of thing that wouldn’t be accepted if it weren’t close to the truth. Big Pharma is obnoxious in many ways, but we must give the monster its due when warranted.

The birther farce gets a second act

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, May 11, 2013 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Was it Marx who said that history repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second time as even zanier farce? In the late stages of the 2008 presidential primaries, rogue Hillary Clinton fans, desperate to avert defeat, started spreading weird rumours about the circumstances of the birth of rival Democrat Barack Obama. It is one of history’s great forgotten jokes that what has come to be known as “birtherism” began within the Democratic party. The official, acknowledged facts of Obama’s early life were awkward enough, but Clintonites doubled down, attempting to cast doubts on his parentage and his birthplace.

Those doubts have trundled along in defiance of all counterattack and scorn, and a significant fraction of the American public can no longer be convinced by anything that contradicts them. It is not clear, however, whether there is any point to birtherism. Under even the loopiest theories, it is pretty clear that Obama proceeded, somewhere on planet Earth, from the body of Stanley Ann Dunham, American citizen. This almost certainly makes him a “natural-born” American eligible for the presidency.

Act Two of the farce is beginning now, for the brightest early hope of the Republican party in 2016 may be junior senator and former Texas solicitor-general Ted Cruz. Cruz’s following is growing fast. The former star litigator has a plan for avoiding Mitt Romney’s mistakes, his intellectual calibre is impressive, and the Hispanic name and background don’t hurt. But however far his cause gets, he comes to the race pre-birthered. Cruz was born in Calgary on Dec. 22, 1970; his father, a Cuban exile, and his mother, an American from Delaware, were oil-patch folk.

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Lord, send pesticide for the weed of ‘gendercide’

By Colby Cosh - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

All righty. Since Mark Warawa has finally kicked off that grand national conversation about sex-selective abortion we needed so badly, I’ll start by asking a question: exactly which sex-selective abortions should we outlaw? I think we know how Warawa would answer, given his druthers: “All of them, along with all the other abortions.” It is odd, though, how many of the people who are eager for a “conversation” have failed to supply their own answer. We hear that there must be some law—the truly civilized places, the superior polities, all have one!—but no one ever explains with any precision what that law should capture. Let’s imagine some possible cases:

1. An East Indian woman in a traditionalist marriage is found to be carrying a female fetus, and wants to abort it owing to her preference for having a boy.

2. A Toronto feminist in a radical same-sex life arrangement is found to be carrying a male fetus, and wants to abort it owing to her preference for a male-free household.

3. A mother of three boys is found to be carrying a fourth male fetus, and opts for an abortion and an attempt at a fifth pregnancy with a different outcome in the hope of “balancing” her family.

4. A mother who knows she is a carrier of red-green colour blindness, generally an X-chromosome-linked genetic defect, prefers to carry only girls to term because she selfishly prefers to have a more perfect child.

5. A mother who knows she is a carrier of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, always an X-chromosome-linked genetic defect, prefers to carry only girls to term because she selfishly prefers to have a more perfect child.

6. A mother, living in the imminent near future in which fetuses can be gene-sequenced almost immediately after implantation, who has no actual preference concerning the sex of her child, but makes an a priori decision to abort any fetus that displays some level—perhaps trivial, perhaps only the most staggeringly serious—of known genetic defect. The result, since God has arranged matters such that recessive X-chromosome-linked defects affecting only boys vastly outnumber any other kind, is a set of abortions that are collectively and strongly “sex-selective” in favour of girls, even though the mothers are indifferent. Continue…

Republicans have a new friend request

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 6, 2013 at 7:45 AM - 0 Comments

Jim Young/Reuters

The latest TV spot for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is like any other American political ad. “When Lindsey Graham’s in Washington, what does he do?” a voice-over asks. “He stands up for South Carolina VALUES.” The Republican Graham is seen on a talk show tearing a strip off ObamaCare. He complains about wasteful fiscal-stimulus spending. And then he returns to the great theme, the ever-pursued white whale of American political advertising: energy independence. “The President says I’m for ‘all of the above’ when it comes to energy?” asks Graham. “Well, those are words comin’ out of his mouth; they don’t come from his heart. No Keystone pipeline, no drilling in the Gulf.”

The interesting part doesn’t come until the fine print reveals who authored and paid for the ad: something called “Americans for a Conservative Direction.” That’s what has Washington buzzing: Americans for a Conservative Direction is a subsidiary of FWD.us, a lobby group funded by Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire founder of Facebook. This unassuming minute-long commercial represents the arrival of a potentially devastating money vector in American politics.

No one would have expected it to land on the side of a moderate southern Republican, but that is the cunning of FWD.us: its initial effort consists of both a Republican front group and a parallel Democratic one, the Council for American Job Growth, which bought a similar spot for Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska). Zuckerberg’s idea, laid out explicitly in an April 10 Washington Post op-ed, is for FWD.us to focus on immigration reform, improved science and math education and public support for research.

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Your utterly valueless Kentucky Derby tip of the morning

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, May 4, 2013 at 6:25 AM - 0 Comments

Happy Kentucky Derby Day! Post time for the 139th edition of the Super Bowl For The Super-Wealthy is 6:24 p.m. Eastern time this afternoon, and the big Canadian angle this year is the equine duo owned by the diamond king of the Northwest Territories, Edmonton-born Charles Fipke. Fipke’s Golden Soul was 31-to-1 to win in late Friday betting; Golden Soul backed into qualifying for the Derby field only after a few horses higher in the points system got hurt, and his only win so far has been a “maiden” race against other first-timers. So the one to watch might be Fipke’s other entry, Java’s War.

Like Golden Soul, Java’s War is said to have a pedigree that predicts a propensity for turf tracks, and the results of his two-year-old season reflected that. But Java’s War, who stood at 22-to-1 in Derby betting late Friday, earned an impressive calling card April 13 by winning the Blue Grass Stakes, a traditional Derby warm-up held on synthetic dirt. (Synthetic dirt is pretty much the same chemically as real dirt, but with a certain industrial uniformity that supposedly makes it a very different experience for your proverbially touchy thoroughbred.) Java’s War won in a way that may bode well for the mile-and-a-quarter race distance that he, and everyhorse else in the field, will be competing at for the first time. In the old-school phrasing of NYT racing reporter Tom Pedulla,

…it can be difficult to find him at all as other horses bolt from the gate. He is not one to hurry. His way is to hesitate when the gate snaps open, spot the rest of the field many lengths, and gradually pick them off when it is time to grow serious.

I know nothing about racing, but I like the sound of that! Since 1945, just nine out of 67 Blue Grass Stakes winners have gone on to win the Kentucky Derby, but 24 of them, including 2012 winner Dullahan, have ended up in the top three. And while we’re playing the CanCon game, CBC News has another Canadian angle, more tenuous and certainly a bit more dismal, that involves stronger 5-1 contender Goldencents.

The only thing liberated was their wallets

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Alessandro Vincenzi

“Liberation therapy” for multiple sclerosis is dead; yet long will it live, not only in the hearts of desperate MS patients, but in their bank balances too. In 2009 an Italian physician named Paolo Zamboni issued a study claiming that MS sufferers had poor rates of blood outflow from their brains. He proposed a complex new etiological theory of MS on this basis, proclaiming the existence of a new syndrome: “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency,” or CCSVI.

Zamboni’s study made bold, almost patently insupportable claims about differences between the blood vessels of MS sufferers and healthy persons. His theory of CCSVI seemed to contradict much that is known about MS and failed to account for obvious features like the midlife age of typical onset. The research got little attention outside Canada, a country hit hard by the global north-south gradient of MS rates. Inside Canada, it only took one round of zingy, insufficiently critical news stories by CTV and the Globe and Mail to make Zamboni a hero.

Hundreds of patients, perhaps thousands, have travelled the globe seeking venous angioplasty for MS symptoms, usually against doctors’ advice, and millions of dollars have been invested in CCSVI and “liberation therapy” surveillance after pressure was applied by shouting patients and opportunistic backbench politicians. But after years of empirical setbacks for the whole notion of CCSVI, it is all looking like money down the drain.

The first question to be answered about CCSVI ought to have been, “Is there actually any such thing?” Attempts to reproduce Zamboni’s results have met with mass consternation; researchers cannot even get to the point of determining whether CCSVI is treatable because they cannot detect it as promised. Radiological imaging does not seem to exhibit consistent relevant differences between MS sufferers and healthy patients, and Zamboni’s original criteria for a CCSVI diagnosis are hardly even coherent or well-specified enough for practical use.

The April issue of the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, for example, contains a report of a Texas study of 276 MS patients and 70 healthy controls: ultrasounds of their necks produced “findings consistent with CCSVI” in four per cent of the MS group—and in seven per cent of the non-MS group. Examples of results like this could be compounded ad nauseam: the Texas paper is not even the only negative CCSVI-Zamboni result in that issue of that journal.

What went wrong? For those seeking an answer, I would recommend a paper open-published in late February by the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism. Conveniently, its title is: “What went wrong? The flawed concept of cerebrospinal venous insufficiency.” This paper is important because the doctors who wrote it are among the leaders in using ultrasound and other means to study normal venous blood flow. Zamboni depended on their research for background when he was trying to devise diagnostic criteria for CCSVI. If CCSVI were real, they might be expected to be the first to applaud.

They’re not applauding. The authors go point by point through Zamboni’s proposed criteria, showing how he repeatedly misinterpreted earlier literature on vein behaviour and confused abnormal blood flow events with harmless typical ones. They emphasize the basic implausibility of Zamboni’s theory and show that it conflicts with non-Zambonian findings on MS and venous drainage. And they criticize the “open-label” nature of early CCSVI studies and patient registries assembled on the fly for political reasons. The best-designed of these, the authors note, was probably one paid for by the government of Newfoundland; a brusque June 2012 press release announced no evidence of objective benefit, but no peer-reviewed publication of the results has followed.

The “What went wrong?” paper concludes unequivocally that “only a complete halt to [liberation] therapy seems sensible.” The story of CCSVI will not be over until the last frustrated Canadian pays the last Bulgarian or Bengali doctor to be “liberated” for the last time; but from a scientific standpoint, the proverbial fat lady is about halfway between the main performance and the encore. On web forums for MS patients, liberation therapy is already receding into the shadow world of I’ll-try-anything curatives, there to linger with cobra venom and upper-cervical chiropractic.

It would be nice to be able to ladle out guilt for this ignoble episode in medical history, but it is not clear that even Zamboni, whose wife has MS, did anything consciously wrong. On the other hand, the doctor is not likely to miss any meals because he messed up. A Canadian MS patient who forked over for repeated unnecessary angioplasties might.

For more Colby Cosh, visit his blog at macleans.ca/colbycosh

Church: The happiest place on earth

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, April 20, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Rob Melnychuk/Getty Images

“Organized religion” hasn’t enjoyed very good press for the last 50 years. People only use the phrase when they mean to speak ill, as with “organized crime.” A lot of people remain quite keen on religion, or even unbelievingly convinced there are benefits from its existence; they are not so happy with the hint of menace and control that comes with the “organization” part.

But what if the “organized” bit in “organized religion” is actually the useful half? What if, as the philosopher Alain de Botton has been arguing lately, we would be better off dispensing with supernatural or mystical ideas but keeping the activities, the buildings, and the other external forms?

A weird but important new study out of the University of Saskatchewan’s psychiatry shop may serve to endorse this Bottonite impulse. The research on religion and mental health is a vast, contradictory mess that you can ransack for evidence of almost any hypothetical relationship. But doctors Lloyd Balbuena, Marilyn Baetz and Rudy Bowen have extracted new longitudinal data from a huge sample. They used repeated interviews of 12,583 people in the National Population Health Survey (NPHS), made over a period of 14 years, to check whether religion had any effect on the future incidence of major depression.

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A spitball for the madness in Boston

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 19, 2013 at 7:03 AM - 0 Comments

It has been a night of extraordinary scenes from Boston as the late shift gawps at an unfolding true-crime story as extraordinary as any since the O.J. Simpson saga. Earlier in the day the FBI published photos of two suspects in Tuesday’s bombing attack on the Boston Marathon. Men closely matching the description of those individuals knocked over a 7-Eleven in the city Thursday night, then are alleged to have slain a campus cop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and briefly taken a hostage. They were tracked to the suburb of Watertown, where they engaged in a spectacular firefight with at least a dozen different police forces. One man, the suspected marathon bomber depicted wearing a black cap in the FBI photos, seems to have rushed the police with an explosive attached to his chest; he was dead on arrival at hospital and doctors said he presented with “blast injuries to the trunk” along with an uncountable number of bullet holes. The other man, the one supposedly spotted at the marathon wearing a white cap, clambered into a vehicle, drove through the police cordon, and remains at large.

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Massive fertilizer plant explosion levels buildings in West, Texas

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 6:11 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Ainsworth/The Dallas Morning News/AP

The town of West, Texas, population 2,849, awoke to a scene of horror after a large explosion at a fertilizer plant containing as much as 27 tons of anhydrous ammonia. The farm community near the city of Waco was built by Czech immigrants in the late 19th century and is still renowned for its kolaches and its smazeny syr. A fire started at the West Fertilizer Co. at around 7:29 p.m. local time Wednesday night, and what happened next is a mystery. Ammonia is typically stored as a refrigerated liquid, and material-safety sheets do not describe it a source of extreme explosion danger, but at ordinary atmospheric temperatures it boils and becomes a gas that can combust explosively in certain concentrations. It also seems possible that other fertilizers, more dangerous in the presence of fire, were stored at the site.

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The greatest story Ted Byfield ever told

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 12, 2013 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

John Ulan/Epic Photography

It’s official: Ted Byfield, Alberta’s legendary conservative media entrepreneur, has completed the latest in the series of audacious, contrarian, financially tenuous projects that has defined his life. In the early ’60s, the Old Man, as he likes to be called, dropped out of newspapering to help found a series of traditionalist Anglican private schools. In the early ’70s, he started to miss journalism the way old soldiers hanker for combat, so he founded the newsmagazine that would become Alberta Report, the notorious but influential voice of Western dissent and orthodox Christian values.

He spent much of the ’90s editing and compiling an enormous, popular, illustrated history of Alberta, with the idea of providing the province’s overlapping, restless demographic waves with a shared narrative spine, a structure of story within which even those who arrived last week can find a niche. (That’s assuming they can find the books.) And now he has applied those lessons to the most ambitious task of all: a 12-volume history of the Christian faith from the Pentecost to the present, covering everything from the Crusades to Calvinism to the Cathars.

The series bears Ted’s personal stamp, partly because, as with many of his projects, Ted came to find that every bit of editing and writing he did himself was one less bit he had to budget for someone else to do. But he has been careful not to make it too polemical or idiosyncratic. Himself a member of an Eastern Orthodox denomination nowadays—capital-O Orthodoxy being an attractive refuge for high-churchish intellectuals who cannot swallow the notion of a Pope—he took advice throughout the production of the series from Catholic and Protestant scholars. Offshoots of the faith, from the Jesuits to Jehovah’s Witnesses, get a fair but frank hearing, and the books are at times startlingly candid about issues like slavery (a “brutal business” upon which Jesus remained mysteriously silent) and the early American republic (chapter heading: “The America that won independence could not be considered Christian”).

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Rehtaeh Parsons: a self-portrait

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 3:31 PM - 0 Comments

No one dies anymore without leaving a little of themselves behind—in this case, on Twitter. The picture Rehtaeh left of herself in the last few months of her life (which includes a snapshot of a report card) may not be the one her parents or her self-appointed postmortem defenders would make, and who knows how faithful it might be to the broad sweep of her life. Probably not very. But it is a picture she assembled for the consumption of others, piece by piece; and her desperate deflection of darkening spirits by means of gangsta bravado, humour, and idealism is heartbreaking. I will leave it to the reader to treat this as forensic data and imagine possible implications for some revenge project or other. Such a thing might or might not be warranted; she hasn’t left us any clues here.

Blue Jays and green beans

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 6:48 AM - 0 Comments

The Globe reported late Tuesday, on the basis of six home games, that “Rogers Centre has become a home run haven”, claiming that extra-long gophers are being hit under the don’t-call-it-Skydome at “a record-setting rate”.

Through the first homestand last week that saw Toronto win two of six games, the home side and their opponents combined for 23 homers, the most in the majors, and at 3.83 home runs per game, second in the 30-team league. Rangers Ballpark in Arlington saw four home runs per game.

The home run average across the majors the first week was 2.14 per game, so what has transpired at Rogers Centre so far represents a huge increase. Should the trend continue–a big if, considering 75 regular-season home games remain–upwards of 310 home runs stand to be clubbed at the Rogers Centre, which would set a major-league record.

That last part, of course, is sheer foolishness: almost every ballpark will have some six-game stretches in which a “record-setting rate” of home runs is achieved. This particular streak is being noticed because it came at the start of the season, a reporter took notice, and the phenomenon can be tenuously pegged to some hypothetical or downright imaginary changes in airflow and other conditions at Rogers. Fans love home runs, though, so I’d like to express the Rogers empire’s appreciation to the Globe for whipping up interest.

What I wondered, as a journalist wary of the Sin of Small Sample Size, was how much of this home-run phenomenon we can attribute to the park, as opposed to the team. The Jays, after all, went bananas with trades and free-agent signings in the offseason, and they were already a power-heavy team. The road teams visiting Rogers hit 12 home runs over the six games in 254 plate appearances. That’s a rate of 5.3%. Overall this season, non-Jays teams have hit 250 in 8,771 plate appearances outside Rogers Centre: a rate of 2.9%. The difference looks impressive, but how significant is it statistically?

By the conventional standard, the answer is “just barely”. If you run what’s called a “chi-squared test for equality of proportions”, you find that a difference of that magnitude would arise by chance only 4.875% of the time; in the sciences the usual habit is to set the significance cutoff at 5% or less. And this goes to illustrate one of the big problems with classical hypothesis testing in the sciences. If we checked all thirty big-league teams through early-season samples of similar size, and the teams all actually hit home runs at the same rate in the long run, we would still expect 5% of the 30, or one-and-a-half, to have a “significantly” unusual apparent home-run rate.

The issue is illustrated well by a famous web cartoon about green jellybeans. And that’s exactly what we have here: a big pile of green jellybeans. Unsurprisingly, it is too soon to start telling just-so stories about how balls are travelling further because of the mojito fumes from the centre-field bar at Rogers. How pleasant to think so, though.

Ottawa’s misguided approach to e-cigarettes

By Colby Cosh - Monday, April 1, 2013 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Ina Fassbender/Reuters

I had cigarettes licked once. One day in the autumn of 2008, I went to a local clinic complaining of a persistent low-grade headache and, within a matter of a few confusing hours, I was looking at a CT scan of my very own bouncing-baby brain hemorrhage. A CT scan isn’t very compelling: it’s all white and grey blurs. The MRI photo taken later was much more impressive, a true wonder. In that photo, it looked as though I had inhaled a medium-sized cashew into the left lateral ventricle of my brain.

It was literally a small but urgent crisis, one requiring a few days of bed rest and groovy chill-out drugs while the doctors and nurses battled my blood pressure. When I left the hospital, I actually got less of a lecture about smoking than one does at a typical checkup. But it occurred to me that I had already been chemically quick-marched through the hardest part of quitting nicotine. It seemed like both hint and opportunity. For the first and only time since I took them up, I decided to try living without cigarettes.

Any writer-smoker can guess what came next. The first time I tried to rap out a column, I was helpless. Ideas for material receded beyond the fixed stars. Finishing a complete sentence was out of the question. One shopping trip later, I was smoking—and writing. I’m smoking right now. I call cigarettes “idea sticks” and I am as serious as a bullet about that. With them, I’m voluble and useful. Without them, I’m a slow-tongued, ham-thumbed mass of flesh whose most marketable abilities involve party tricks. Nicotine is a business input to me, as essential as drilling mud is to an oil well. I should probably be able to deduct it from my taxes.

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Ralph Klein, R.I.P.: the deceptive shape of a shadow

By Colby Cosh - Friday, March 29, 2013 at 5:45 PM - 0 Comments

Ralph Klein, the former premier of Alberta, has died at 70. He shall not now ever be able to collect on the vast debt of apologies he is owed by calumniators, false chroniclers, lazy pundits, and political enemies. The misunderstandings of Ralph have been copious and mostly deliberate. He is still routinely characterized as an anti-gay social conservative in league with sinister theocratic forces, even though he was personally about as churchy as an alley cat. More importantly, he took a diamond-hard line against the use of the “notwithstanding” clause after the Supreme Court wrote sexual orientation into Alberta’s discrimination law in the Vriend decision; and he insisted the public accept the court’s verdict.

He is accused of failing to maximize the public benefits of Alberta’s resource wealth and “save” oil and gas funds for the future, although government resource revenues grew more than fourfold in his 14 years as premier and the net financial position of the province improved by $43 billion. Both promptly collapsed under his bamboozled successor Ed Stelmach, and have not yet recovered to Ralphian levels. Klein is also charged with failing to pay enough conscious attention to economic diversification, a concept that served as the pretext for a hundred costly boondoggles under earlier Conservative regimes; yet somehow he succeeded in presiding over an Alberta economy whose GDP moved sharply away from energy-dependence, and which saw the emergence of previously unimaginable non-energy businesses like software maker Matrikon and game manufacturer BioWare. Whether or not you care to give an iota of credit to Klein, his rule coincided with Alberta becoming a place young technicians and entrepreneurs don’t have to be stupid not to leave.

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The truth about the gladiator Spartacus

By Bookmarked and Colby Cosh - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 8:26 AM - 0 Comments

Italian classicist Aldo Schiavone has written a little 19th-century sort of book, a book whose main body is just 153 pages but expresses the concentrated effort of a lifetime. There is an intoxicating intensity in classical studies that is hard to match in any other field, with entire theoretical structures standing or falling on a single word or an interpretation of a verb tense. Schiavone has become known, and deemed worthy of English translation, by approaching the old standards of literary elegance and erudition about as well as anybody.

What we know about Spartacus, the gladiator who broke out of his training camp with a few dozen pals in 73 BCE and nearly mastered Italy, amounts to a few lines from half-mangled manuscripts. On the whole, it is better than the surviving documentary basis for Jesus’s life, but not much, and Spartacus was naturally adopted as a sort of alternative Christ by revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries. His rebellion almost seems like a sudden outburst of modernity in the centre of the Roman era. In old Rome, the naturalness of universal slavery was never questioned. The Thracian gladiator explodes forth vividly from the setting, routing experienced legions and trying to strangle the Empire in its cradle: an early avatar of liberty and equality, fighting a doomed struggle for the future.

But Spartacus was probably not an enemy of slavery as such. When he captured Roman soldiers, he promptly made them fight to the death for his army’s amusement; there is no indication he wanted to renovate the social order. Schiavone’s Spartacus is no arch-liberator, but a prophetic gambler who found himself with no easy escape from Italy and thus sought to turn Rome’s beaten-down neighbour cities against it. Schiavone’s step-by-step analysis of Spartacus’s actions is reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor’s eccentric interpretation of Hitler; this Taylor-ish tome could have been titled Origins of the Third Servile War. You’ve seen the movie: now get the straight dope.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

Why the NDP may not be able to go home again

By Colby Cosh - Friday, March 22, 2013 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments

Liam Richards/CP

These are hard times for the New Democratic Party in Saskatchewan—the party’s ancestral wellspring, the mecca it faces at prayer. Not so long ago, the NDP’s provincial leader was typically, by virtue of his office, the second-most prominent figure in the movement nationwide. Typically, that is, when he wasn’t in first place. And the New Democrats had the kind of sweet corner on Saskatchewan’s legislature that the Liberals had on the Dominion’s. From 1942 to 2009, every leader of the provincial party also served as premier at least once.

But the winner of the Saskatchewan NDP’s March 9 leadership tilt, Cam Broten, takes charge with the benefits and the burdens of low expectations. Broten now commands an Opposition of just nine members to the government’s 49, and Premier Brad Wall’s approval ratings are the envy of Confederation.

Broten, the 35-year-old MLA for Saskatoon-Massey Place, ran on a platform that was light on ideological tub-thumping and heavy on plans for rebuilding the NDP’s political institutions. Like the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, the New Democrats had grown too dependent on the voters’ total psychological identification of the party with the government, and were perhaps not careful enough to ensure that the former could thrive if detached from the latter. Two years of drama at the Ottawa level of the NDP do not seem to have done Saskatchewan’s New Democrats any favours, and federal Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair’s views on resources and national unity have been—well, what’s the opposite of a favour?

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What the state must learn about higher education

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, March 17, 2013 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

When you join a national newspaper or magazine as a writer, you start getting a lot more email from three kinds of people: PR folks, the insane and journalism students. Over the past decade I must have had 30 or 40 appeals for help, interviews, or extensive advice from J-schoolers. More famous colleagues must be well into the hundreds. This seems pretty paradoxical, from a labour-market standpoint. Although Maclean’s is a happy exception, the overall enterprise of journalism is shrinking, not growing. At least it is if we’re talking about paid journalism. This goes double for paid print journalism, and triple for paid print general-interest journalism.

If I were to drop dead tomorrow, the column inches I left behind could be filled pretty easily, perhaps by a cat trained to walk across a keyboard. But the journalism students who want to know about my career path and trade secrets are not idlers. They are people who have already invested heavily in training and effort to take my job, or one like it. This is puzzling, not only because I have only the one job for dozens to fight over gladiator-style, but because I never bothered with any of this training myself. Nor did many of the people who haunt, or even boss, big Canadian news institutions.

• The future of jobs in Canada
• Green tech: No longer a niche
• College-corporate partnerships
• After the oil boom

This cannot help but create an impression of perverted incentives, even mass charlatanry, in the education system. New journalism programs are still being founded all the time at the community college level, as if big cities still had four morning papers apiece and the busy reader had a choice of dozens of weeklies and newsmagazines to suit their political and stylistic affiliations. The sincere journalism student may believe he is the one among dozens who will prosper in a world of cheap commentary and semi-automated newsgathering. Most will probably turn out to have been deluded. Some probably sense this, and are co-operating with an educational institution to put one over on a gullible parent. Others know they are sponging off an equally gullible state that subsidizes delayed entry into the workforce.

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Flaky limits on free speech

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Free-speech advocates have been waxing wroth all week over the Supreme Court’s long-awaited ruling in the case of Bill Whatcott, an itinerant street-corner politician who fancies himself a one-man crusade against the gay conspiracy to infiltrate schools, media and Old-Testament-God-knows-what. University of Saskatchewan law professor Michael Plaxton took to the Globe and Mail to accuse the court of “all but strangling” some kinds of religious speech, and the paper’s editorial voice, cranky “Junius,” called the unanimous decision “too vague.” Andrew Coyne’s analysis for Postmedia was punctuated with exclamations like, “I cannot quite believe I am reading these words.” Religious and conservative bloggers even spoke of “the death of free speech in Canada.”

The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt “hate speech.” The court specifically insists that true statements arranged in certain ways can be officially “hateful,” conceding a total lack of interest in truth and basically handing its banner over to the commissions’ targets. For liberals who share the goals of these commissions, this is a moral disaster that can only multiply Bill Whatcotts ad infinitum. People of the Whatcott type already believe themselves to be in special possession of suppressed facts, and now the court has said explicitly that spreading falsehoods is no part of their offence.

But since we columnists are in the business of telling truth, whatever a court thinks, it ought to be admitted that, dead or alive, free speech in Canada was never in such good shape. The Supreme Court’s decision is an elaborate partial rescue of standing precedent; the constitutionality of hate policing by provincial commissions was established many years ago, and the unpleasant surprise is only that it wasn’t killed on this occasion.

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Was free speech in Canada in good shape before the Whatcott ruling?

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, March 6, 2013 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Watt/Reuters

Free-speech advocates have been waxing wroth all week over the Supreme Court’s long-awaited ruling in the case of Bill Whatcott, an itinerant street-corner politician who fancies himself a one-man crusade against the gay conspiracy to infiltrate schools, media and Old-Testament-God-knows-what. University of Saskatchewan law professor Michael Plaxton took to the Globe and Mail to accuse the court of “all but strangling” some kinds of religious speech, and the paper’s editorial voice, cranky “Junius,” called the unanimous decision “too vague.” Andrew Coyne’s analysis for Postmedia was punctuated with exclamations like, “I cannot quite believe I am reading these words.” Religious and conservative bloggers even spoke of “the death of free speech in Canada.”

The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt “hate speech.” The court specifically insists that true statements arranged in certain ways can be officially “hateful,” conceding a total lack of interest in truth and basically handing its banner over to the commissions’ targets. For liberals who share the goals of these commissions, this is a moral disaster that can only multiply Bill Whatcotts ad infinitum. People of the Whatcott type already believe themselves to be in special possession of suppressed facts, and now the court has said explicitly that spreading falsehoods is no part of their offence.

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Solving the NHL’s big problem

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, March 2, 2013 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Frederick Breedon/Getty Images

There is one thing about the game of hockey that has not changed since before hockey was hockey. It is an axiom older than the six-a-side game, older than the division into three periods, older than even Lord Stanley’s cup. It is there in the official rules of the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada, created in 1886 to select a national champion: goals are to be “six feet wide and four feet high . . . unless otherwise agreed.” One hundred and twenty-seven years later, those are still the official dimensions of the goal wherever hockey is played, from Hamilton to Hong Kong.

But the goalies did not, alas, stay the same size in the meantime. Many of you can probably name the starting goaltenders for any postwar year of the Original Six NHL: in 1960, they were Johnny Bower, Glenn Hall, Harry Lumley, Jacques Plante, Terry Sawchuk and Lorne “Gump” Worsley. None of these men was above six feet, and the Gumper was five foot seven. By contrast, the first six goalies taken in the 2012 NHL entry draft average six foot three, and the league already features galoots like the Senators’ six-foot-seven Ben Bishop and Tampa Bay’s six-foot-six Anders Lindback. The Oilers have a six-foot-five starter, Devan Dubnyk, and just traded for a six-foot-seven AHL goalie, Niko Hovinen.

As anyone who has seen footage of a 1985 NHL game since 1985 will be aware, the equipment goalies wear has grown in tandem with the men who play the position. It is a shock to see the tiny and ill-protected goaltenders in old games that are, for some, fresher in the mind than 2009. Efforts to rein in egregious advantage-taking have been semi-successful, but the arms race is unrelenting. For a while, goalies were adopting taller leg pads, threatening to deny shooters the “five-hole” between the legs altogether. The league has adopted a maximum pad height in response, but it has to be adjusted for each player: taller guys do have taller legs. Unfortunately, that may just create an incentive to invest in taller legs. You think six foot six is tall? Just wait.

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Colby Cosh on the real tension behind Bill 101 and the Pasta Affair

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 7:12 AM - 0 Comments

In Sunday’s Montreal Gazette, Don Macpherson offers a convincing argument that Quebec’s pasta-police scandal has been deliberately obfuscated by the Parti Québécois ministry. The Office Québécois de la Langue Française, he suggests, did not misinterpret the law in a fit of “overzealousness”: he figures they probably interpreted it correctly, as written. The main text of Bill 101 specifically insists that menus must be written in French; there are exemptions in the regulations for packaging of “exotic product[s] or foreign specialt[ies]”, but the exemptions don’t make any mention of menus.

Macpherson suggests that, in the great tradition of Westminsterian democracy, some anonymous uncivil servant is being thrown under the proverbial autobus for following through on both the letter and the actual intention of the law. “The point here,” he says, “is not that the names should be illegal, but that in Quebec, they are”—along with, as other reporting has revealed, English-language knick-knacks on restaurant walls and English-language buttons on their telephones and microwave ovens. “Zealous” surveillance of businesses for linguistic purity, after all, isn’t some wacky unintended consequence of Bill 101. It’s the essence of the thing.

But couldn’t this analysis be carried up to another level? The original flashpoint of the scandal was the OQLF’s orders to a restaurant that had the word “pasta” on the menu. Given the premise of cultural protection that justifies the existence of an Office of the French Language, shouldn’t the real objection be to the presence of… the stuff itself? Isn’t Italian cuisine just as much of a homogenizing, globalist cultural intrusion as the English language? Montreal is famous for just about every kind of cooking that’s not authentically Québécois, from French-French food to bagels and smoked meat to Joe Beef’s spaghetti homard. Doesn’t this represent a definitive failure of the PQ’s cultural immune system?

This is perhaps the real tension behind the Pasta Affair. The purpose of Quebec language law is to reinforce the permanent “just visiting” status of every ethnic and cultural group other than French-Canadians, including Montreal Anglos who are hardly less indigenous to the province than its francophones. It is thought unseemly to make this explicit; how much less so to point out that when it comes to a hundred non-language aspects of culture, Montreal is a resplendent machine, possibly unique in the world, of cultural remixing and appropriation and innovation.

One might even say it’s the English language of cities. And, of course, it’s precisely the lack of engineered cultural defence that made the English language so dominant on the globe. (It was carried abroad on a vast military empire, but then, so were Dutch and Mongolian.) But the minute the Parti Québécois accepted that premise, it would have to, in the words of Douglas Adams, vanish in a puff of logic.

Disabled America: where work is for suckers

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Kevin Wolf/AP

In autumn 2010 I travelled through southern California to cover the gubernatorial race that brought Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown back into power. I was struck by the same paradoxical phenomena that impress everybody who visits SoCal—the quiet, ominous, omnipresent army of Hispanic servants; the orgiastic water use in a naturally arid land; the curious physical plasticness of so many Californians. But there was one thing I didn’t anticipate. Having badgered dozens of people from Bakersfield to Balboa Park about their voting intentions, I was blown away by the sheer number who mentioned being “on disability.”

I could not learn to anticipate who would plop this into conversation; none of these people were visibly “disabled.” Apparent race or class didn’t give any clues, nor did demeanour. The effervescent L.A. blonde in bespoke sweatpants seemed just as likely to bring it up as the glowering, hoodied teen from Fresno.

Just looking at fiscal and demographic stats from California will cause a cold, invisible hand to clutch at one’s throat, but talking to an endless series of seemingly able-bodied people who casually disclaim any capacity for honest work is even more chilling. When I got home I found out it’s not just California’s problem. In the OECD’s 2010 “Going for Growth” report, the percentage of the working-age labour force (20 to 65 years) receiving any kind of disability benefit or worker’s compensation is estimated at around 5.1 per cent for Canada. For OECD nations as a whole, the figure is 6.7 per cent.

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Justin: serious about edumacation

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

The Liberal Party of Canada held its third leadership debate over the weekend; you probably heard about how it led to an argument about the terrible things Martha said to Justin and what Marc said about what Martha said to Justin and whether or not there is actually anything in what Martha said to Justin… well, the news-cycle hivemind cannot help making things personal.

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Clarity, and How To Get It

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 1:47 AM - 0 Comments

I have a joke I’ve been cracking about the controversy over the Clarity Act. “It’s simple! I’m with the New Democrats: fifty percent plus one is totally fine as a standard. But I also say this: let’s make it a contest of three out of five falls. And, remember, the federalists are already up two-zip.”

It’s not a very funny joke. But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good joke in at least the sense of having a kernel of truth within it. The expectation for a “clear majority” on a vote authorizing secession negotiations is usually presented by federalists as a sort of mystical axiom. Even in the Supreme Court reference on the subject the idea is not really broken down logically, perhaps because it won’t do to point out that the popular will is a very slippery abstraction, an awful shuddery foundation for any notion predicated on it.

Awkwardly, these notions include, in our system of government, elections and referendums. A government seeking a democratic mandate “goes to the country” and “consults” the populace, whose conflicting interests, goals, and ambitions are smooshed together by various clumsy formulae to produce the appearance of a single consensus. Democracy cannot bear too much purely deductive analysis, though its empirical underpinnings are mighty.

One notices that our metaphors for democratic testing, our ways of choosing between candidates or policy ideas, are competitive. Did Yes “beat” No? A mathematician might say there is a strong isomorphism, an analogy of form, between democracy and sport. There is certainly an obvious analogy between a referendum and, say, a hockey game; and when we place particular emphasis on finding out whether one hockey team is better than another, we don’t usually allow the matter to be settled with a single game, in one team’s building, at a time chosen by the home team, with rules selected and enforced exclusively by the home team. It’s a question of removing signal from noise, of excluding transitory or illegitimate influence from the competition.

Those who support national unity are keen to prevent Quebec separatists from pulling off a swindle of the sort they came close to in 1995: choosing a fleeting moment of advantageous sentiment to accomplish the permanent destruction of the Canadian state, which most Quebeckers have, through many generations, supported most of the time. But the extreme opinions on neither side are tenable. Strong unitarians embed assumptions in their language to “demonstrate” that Canada is sacred and indivisible, pretending that a historical conquest somehow has the irresistible logical force of Euclidean geometry. (Which even Euclidean geometry didn’t turn out to have.) At the same time, as Colleague Wells has pointed out, Quebec would practically need much more than a one-vote margin in one referendum to earn the necessary global assent to its independence project. It would need a majority that was “clear” in the sense, not necessarily of meeting a particular arbitrary bright-line standard, but of being able to endure a difficult political struggle—i.e., a “negotiation phase” in which an appeal to force was always possible—and to still appear irreversible and convincing at the end of it. If such a situation existed, there can be no question that to permit secession would be right.

So why not a “three out of five falls” rule? The applicability of the sports metaphor is quite real: ascertaining which hockey team is essentially “better” under never-existing neutral conditions is very much like extracting a “popular will” from an opinion sample of a population. Recognize, I say, the reality that fifty percent plus one is a “majority”; sidestep the fundamentally irresolvable arguments between three-fifths and two-thirds and three-quarters as a standard. But require that 50%+1 be achieved several times over a period of years, with a slightly different electorate being consulted each time. Even the voter-eligibility criteria can vary; the case for giving minor children a vote on a question of permanent future import is, after all, particularly sound. Let the government of Quebec frame the question in one vote and Parliament do it in another. Count noses in one and ridings in another. If the moral conditions for secession exist, it should not be hard to extract not just a “Oui” from Quebec, but a resounding “Oui, oui, oui” that would convince English Canada as Slovakia convinced the Czechs.