Prorogation

There’s a great Youtube video of the opening ceremonies of the 1976 Olympics. The whole thing looks like a long American Apparel ad — check out just after the 5 minute mark when the mayor of Munich appears in some awesome folk getup. He must have been performing at the drums in the park off Mount Royal before heading over to the stadium.

And because I’m so excited, I’m going to spoil the absolute best moment of it for you. HOW COOL IS THIS??

Twelve years after it was published, the Lancet has finally retracted Andrew Wakefield’s study linking the MMR vaccine with autism. Not soon enough; certainly not before tremendous damage was done to public health. Following the study’s publication, vaccination rates in Britain plummeted – no small thanks to Tony Blair, who refused to say whether he’d had his own child vaccinated. Meanwhile, measles cases continue to explode, and the WHO  – which was on track to eradicate the disease in Europe this year – has conceded that it isn’t going to happen, because vaccination rates are just too low.

Will the study’s retraction change that? Not a chance. Partly because the autism industry has too much invested in the vaccine linkage, not to mention idiot celebrity supporters like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey.

But the bigger problem is that Europe and North America are becoming increasingly enamoured of all sorts of magical thinking. It isn’t just the hysteria over vaccines, there’s also the inane fetish for all things “organic,” and the growing market for homeopathic remedies and other “alternative” medicines.

I explore the moral and political forces that are driving this rejection of science and the return to pre-modern worldviews in The Authenticity Hoax, out in a couple of months (yoiks!). But an excellent new book cataloguing this mentality in all its sordidness is Denialism, by NYT writer Michael Specter. The chapter on vaccines is very good, as is the one on racial profiling in medicine.

If I had a time machine, I’d make my fortune off hipsters, selling them tickets back to 1950s Canada:

Continuing in the new Liberal tradition of proposing actual policy alternatives to the Conservative government, over the weekend Michael Ignatieff served up his own ideas for how to reform the Senate. He’d limit terms to 12 years, and look at passing the appointments through some sort of arms-length board or commission.

This is, I think, a better proposal than Harper’s current plan, which – assuming he isn’t just dicking around – seems to be to stack the Senate with incompetents, blind partisans, and other pieces of ambulatory play-doh, and hope that when he figures out what he actually wants to do, they’ll be more than happy to play along.

A few remarks, sort if in response to some good comments under Aaron’s post:

Yes, the Liberal-dominated Senate asked to send Harper’s bill establishing 8-year limits to the Supreme Court. But the 12-year limit might have a better chance of passing as a unilateral (i.e. non-constitutional) change, since that is pretty much the actual average tenure of Senators. The bonus is that it would have the effect of equalizing Senate appointments.

I like the idea of a public appointments commission, but I wonder if it might actually make the chamber more effective if it retained some provision for partisan appointments as well, like the hybrid system for appointing life peers to the  House of Lords. Conquest’s second law has it that any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. Maybe, but given what we know about bureaucracies in Canada, at the very least the appointments commission will be open to the charge by the government of the day that it has become politically compromised. A mechanism for some partisan appointments will help offset that charge, while giving the Senate a healthy representation of partisans.

Together, Ignatieff’s proposed changes will have the effect of increasing the Senate’s legitimacy and effectiveness as a deliberative body, which I think ought to be its primary function. With legitimacy will come a sense of political responsibility, which means that these might need to be accompanied by a third change, viz., some attenuation of the Senate’s powers, assuming we want to retain the more-or-less unicameral character of our system of responsible government.

Cripes, the Senate is a can of worms. Still, I think that Ignatieff’s proposal, though sketchy, already has more promise than whatever it is Harper hasn’t in mind.

Creating wealth one lawsuit at a time:

A Winnipeg cardboard factory worker has secured a deal with two reality show entrepreneurs.

Richard Abramowicz was a contestant on the Dragons’ Den show, where inventive sorts seek backing from established entrepreneurs.

Abramowicz tried to interest the panel in a line of fashion clothes he had developed under the brand name Yomama.

He asked for a $3-million investment.

There was interest, but not in the clothes.

Instead, two panellists liked the Yomama brand name, which Abramowicz has trademarked in Canada and the United States.

The name is already in use, but without Abramowicz’s permission.

“I guess it’s the old case scenario of the big guy [versus] little guy,” Abramowicz explained. “The big corporation and the little man that can’t fight them on his own.”

Millionaires Kevin O’Leary and Robert Herjavec said they would pursue trademark infringement lawsuits as partners with Abramowicz.

They offered him just $1 for a one-third share of his company, and a similar share of any compensation that flowed from successful court action.

Abramowicz took it.

He added that if the gambit pays off, he’ll put the money into his clothing line.

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I am a fat man perched on a rock, the soul God gave me is not much good for anything. Still, I raise my arms towards the sunlight, hold them there for a long moment. Claire leaps up and down, she cries and laughs, she makes whooping noises, embraces me, shakes her fists gleefully in the air.

I lower my arms with all the grace and dignity I can muster.

The whales begin to sing.

– Paul Quarrington, Whale Music

Writing in the National Post, Rex Murphy called Robertson an “obnoxious ignoramus” and described his mind as “an attic of obsolete and ugly demi-thoughts.” That’s one way of looking at it. Another possibility is that Pat Robertson said what he did because he’s one of the few people left who actually takes his religious beliefs seriously.

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“I know this sounds really lame, but I listen to a lot of music and it just sounds better.”

That’s New York sculptor Justen Ladda, explaining why he doesn’t heat his apartment.  Are you still using heat? Yuppie.  Cold is the new warm, dude.  Not only do you save money, but you can yank out your insulation to improve the acoustics in your living room. Besides, as Jake Dibeler, a 21-year-old performance artist living in an unheated warehouse in Baltimore with five roommates and two cats points out, a space heater is “a placebo at best”.

I wonder if they ever get together with the urban cavemen, and sit around on a concrete floor eating boar.

(thanks to the Handcaper)

Afghans paid more than $2.5 billion US in bribes between the fall of 2008 and the fall of 2009, or about one quarter the value of the country’s gross domestic product

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UPDATE: Good piece from mediaite, chock full o links, about the slippery slope the media are in in Haiti.

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Look, there’s Anderson Cooper carrying a kid with a bleeding head to safety! Dr. Gupta performs surgery! Say what you want about CNN, but they’re not content to just report the news.

UPDATE: Well, I guess it didn’t go so well

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I’m off to Edmonton tomorrow, where I’ll be speaking at this year’s  CUP conference. I’m excited for two main reasons: First, I’ve  never been to Alberta, except for a drive-through as an infant and a couple of afternoons spent at the Calgary and Edmonton airports. Second, one of the keynote speakers at the conference is Adrienne Arsenault, who I think is the best correspondent at the CBC, and one of the best journalists in the country, period.

Anyway, like most eastern bastards I have my own private Alberta, which is a mashup of the following favourites:

Politician: Peter Lougheed

Song, set in: Northern Wish, Rheostatics

Musicians: Nickleback. Ha! kidding. SNFU, I think, though I love kd lang’s version of Helpless.

Hockey team: Flames, obviously. It was impossible to like Gretzky and the Oilers when I was growing up.

Hockey player: I’d like to say the Sutter clan, but I have to go with Jarome Iginla.

Film: Is Kitchen Party set in Alberta? I can’t remember. If not, then this one, because of the cast.

Novel: The Trade, by Fred Stenson

Artist: Peter von Tiesenhausen, one of the most inspired, and inspiring, artists I have ever met.

Ok, it was one thing when last weekend’s NYT had a glowing story about Roger Martin’s innovative approach to business school at Rotman. But today, Martin has a column in the Daily Beast of all places, arguing that there’s really no way for politicians to keep Wall Street from giving itself the bonuses it wants.  Good things come in threes. What’s next, an appearance on the Colbert Report?

Philosophy professor Daniel Weinstock* was on Power and Politics this evening, talking with Evan Solomon about Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament. For the past couple of weeks Daniel has been working on a short article that he’s been circulating amongst Canadian political philosophers, constitutional lawyers, and poli sci profs, and which sort of went academically viral. It now has almost 200 signatures and more are coming in all the time.

The piece will appear in La Presse and the Ottawa Citizen tomorrow, along with a few other papers, but both the French and English versions of the piece, along with a list of signatories, can be found here. The list is pretty much a Who’s Who of the field, and it includes Ron Beiner, Sam Brennan, Joe Carens, Avigail Eisenberg, Simone Chambers, Mark Kingwell, Guy Laforest, Charles Taylor, Peter Russell, Reg Whitaker, Christine Tappolet, and (of course) dozens of others. Tom Flanagan is not on the list, but that’s no real surprise. Continue…

From a new NDP press release:

OTTAWA—New Democrats today challenged Stephen Harper to, as a bare minimum, place enforceable term-limits on the next round of Senate appointments, a long promised policy of the Conservative Party.

“Mr. Harper’s record on Senate reform is long on rhetoric, and short on action,” said New Democrat Democratic Reform Critic David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre). “Making new Senators agree to an enforceable term limit, as Mr. Harper has repeatedly promised, would be a modest step toward Senate reform.”

I have a column in the Citizen today arguing that if Harper is serious about Senate reform, the appointments process is the place to focus his attention. Except I don’t actually think that Harper cares about Senate reform one way or another; like abortion in the US, it is one of those useful issues that Conservatives in Canada use to keep their base on a low boil. They are always just about to do something about it, though they never seem to get there. Senate reform for Harper is a tactical device, not part of a serious strategic agenda.