Climategate (Hide the Decline)

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link.

Groovy golf and spirit of the game

Much tearing of clothes and pulling out of hair on the PGA tour over the new groove ruling that came into effect this year.

Although the use of the old, grandfathered Ping wedges are completely legal to use, due to the old lawsuit won by Ping, there have been accusations that players using them are cheating and if not cheating then certainly not playing by “the spirit of the game”.

This is very important to the mythology of golf. Players call penalties on themselves if they break the rules of the game, even though no-one else has seen the infraction. Sometimes even if they are not entirely positive they actually committed an infraction. Which is a wonderful thing about the game of golf.

However, just who makes the decision as to where the boundaries lie in the spirit of the game?

The Ping Eye2 clubs are legal. It’s an anomaly because of the ruling that came out of the old lawsuit, but they are, nevertheless, legal. So to call anyone using them a cheater is not only a stretch, I would think that it bordered on libel.

Spirit of the game? A lot of players think that the long putter should not be allowed and is not in the spirit of the game. But they are legal, because they have never been declared illegal by the governing bodies of the game of golf.

What about when a bunch of fans rolled away the boulder so Tiger Woods could play his next shot unimpeded? It wasn’t illegal, even though the rules were changed after the fact to make that kind of assist illegal in the future. Woods knew the rules and used them to his advantage. But was it in the spirit of the game? I would be inclined to say that it wasn’t by a long shot, but I didn’t hear much wailing about it at the time. Lots of discussion, but the word ‘cheater’ never aired nor do I recall hearing much about ’spirit’ either.

Frankly, I think it’s a tempest in a teapot. A few guys will try them and who knows, maybe it will give them a psychological advantage. But I wonder how much technical advantage an old Ping Eye2 club will give anyone. Probably very little to none.

Of course if someone really needs to own an Eye2, I just happen to have a set I could sell if the price was right. There may be an upside to this after all.

The aftermath of the late night wars

I am somewhat puzzled by the fact that Jay Leno has apparently turned out to be the villain in NBC’s debacle over the Tonight Show.

It seems to me that the only villain here is the NBC decision makers and I suspect they’re less villain than incompetent.

How did this all play out?

1. Five years ago Leno’s contract comes due with NBC at the same time that Conan O’Brien is making noises about leaving the Late Night Show and taking his act somewhere else. NBC doesn’t want to lose O’Brien and see him go to another network, so they promise him the Tonight Show in 5 years if he stays where he is. O’Brien agrees.

2. The NBC execs tell Leno that they will give him a 5 year contract and at the end of the contract – even though his show is currently number one in late night – he has to leave the Tonight Show and let O’Brien take over that time slot. They apparently think that by the end of the 5 years, Leno’s rating will have slipped away.

3. Leno agrees, and at the end of his 5 year contract – even though he is still holding the Tonight Show in its #1 spot – Leno steps down and turns the show over to O’Brien. Leno actually steps away before his contract is over.

4. Leno asks to be released from his contact with NBC but NBC decides now that it doesn’t want to lose him either, knowing that he will probably be picked up by another network and become a competitor to their existing shows.

5. NBC then asks Leno to step into the prime time 10 PM time slot and do his show there. Leno accepts, even though he must know it is a risky move to try and put a talk show in that time slot. But NBC says they have done the research and besides, it is far cheaper for them to run than a drama or a sitcom. The affiliates aren’t happy, but NBC thinks it will work.

In hindsight, there are people second guessing Leno’s decision to accept this show. They seem to feel that he should have refused the offer from NBC. But why would he? NBC wouldn’t release him from his contract, have offered him the challenge of trying to make his show work in prime time, enabled him to keep his staff employed and have ensured him that their research says that the concept will work. Why would he feel compelled to turn that down?

6. Now seven months down the road, Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show is down on the rating scale, having lost Leno’s #1 position. Leno hasn’t captured a big enough market at 10 PM – even though the show is making a profit for the network -  and the affiliates are about to rebel. Now NBC has another problem. Forced to cancel Leno’s show or lose affiliates, they have the option of dumping Leno and keeping O’Brien, who doesn’t have the ratings they want. But NBC, true to its corporate self, wants to have it both ways. They want to find some way to keep both men rather than lose one of them -either one – to some competitor. So they come up with their next brilliant idea.

7. NBC comes to Leno and tells him that they are thinking about giving him a half hour show at 11:35 PM and moving O’Brien and the Tonight Show back to 12:05 AM.

If Leno made a mistake anywhere in this process, it was here. He should have picked up the phone, called O’Brien and said, “what the hell’s going on here? Are you OK with this”? But he didn’t. He says he asked if Conan was alright with this and the network said that he would be, and he left it at that. A lot of his own problems might have been alleviated if he had just made that call.

Conan’s reply to NBC was, in effect, stick it in your ear and it all went further downhill from there.

8. NBC drops Conan O’Brien from the Tonight Show and asks Jay Leno to step back in and Leno accepts. Now Conan is the martyr and Jay is the villain.

But if NBC had confidence in O’Brien, they would have capitulated at that point, left him in the 11:35 slot and started negotiations with Leno to release him from his contract. The network had the option at that point of who they wanted to keep and who they wanted to let go. They made the decision that, rightly or wrongly, Leno was the one they needed to keep.

So should Leno have turned down their offer to return to the Tonight Show? A lot of people seem to think that he should have. By why would he? This was now a business decision, both on NBC’s and Leno’s part.

Leno gets to return as the host of the highly desirable Tonight Show franchise and he gets to keep his long time staff employed. Should he have walked away from the offer in some kind of high moral dudgeon? He could have done that, especially with how he had been jerked around by the network brass, being moved from his job while he was leading the field in the ratings and then being put into a high risk time slot with only 4 months, as it turned out, to make the show work.

But I think that Leno recognized that there was no logic in doing that. He would have put his staff on the unemployment rolls and for what? Would NBC have kept Conan anyway? Maybe and maybe not. Or would the Tonight Show franchise have simply crashed and burned? I think he made the only decision that made sense for him.

The question now will be whether he can return the show to its former glory. NBC has done him no favours by giving him back the chair. If he takes it back to #1 he will be a hero, but if he can’t bring the ratings back up he will be chewed up and spit out by the critics – which in this case is a good chunk of the North American viewing public. He has a major job ahead of him and I am sure that he knows that all too well.

But for all of those noble people out there who think that Leno should have gotten on his high horse and ridden off into the twilight, is that what you would do if you were offered your dream job at the miserable sum of $30 million a year?

Yeah, sure. Get a life.

Your everyday home defence flashlight

This is incredible. Just spotted it over at Dave Petzal’s Gun Nut blog.

They would ban that one in Canada before you had time to turn the flashlight on.

Me and my racist truck

Politics anywhere can be nasty, but the US style seems to be exceptionally intolerant these days.

Scott Brown, the newly elected Republican Senator from Massachusetts, was recently called a racist by MSNBC commentator, Keith Olbermann, although I’m not sure why. I think it was just a given because he was a Republican and had the audacity to win Teddy Kennedy’s old seat.

However Howard Fineman, a senior editor with Newsweek, came up with the definitive way to spot a racist.

….. Mr. Fineman, a frequent MSNBC political analyst, said Mr. Brown’s truck could have been part of a racist code to Massachusetts voters.

Mr. Olbermann proposed Mr. Brown’s win was part of racist backlash against the black President Obama on his Tuesday evening program. Gamely, Mr. Fineman offered some supporting evidence.

“In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told Mr. Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”

Does this mean I have to sell my truck?

Maybe there was something to that “Pact With the Devil” stuff?

I  made some disparaging remarks about Pat Robertson and his public comments on the disaster in Haiti, but Colby Cosh notes in his MacLean’s column:

…. I suppose one might point out that even the wicked Pat Robertson is entitled to just treatment at the hands of his critics. In talking about the “curse” he believes Haiti lies under, Robertson was referring to a genuine event in the annals of that country’s revolutionary struggle—the 1791 Voodoo prayer for liberty in the Bois Caïman. As some liberal and perhaps even “secularist” observers have pointed out, this aspect of Haitian history is something of a legitimate problem for traditional Haitian Christians. It might even be a problem for a sincere Catholic who took the trouble to inquire into it!

So there is a historical perspective to Robertson’s comments.

Although it doesn’t make the remarks any less stupid – unless of course you are someone who literally believes in a devil that signs compacts with people. Personally,  I’d need to see the paperwork.

Haiti disaster and the ugly side of free speech

It would be reasonable to think that with the horrific tragedy that the recent earthquake has imposed on Haiti, the destruction of the infrastructure and the incredible death toll, that personal agendas and partisan politics would be put aside – at least temporarily. That apparently is too much to ask.

First we have the incredibly – what’s the word? Stupid!. The incredibly stupid man of the cloth Pat Robertson talking about how the earthquake in Haiti is part of the evil that has been bestowed upon them because they made a pact with the devil to rid the country of the French away back in 1804.

If they made a pact, it was poorly written, as the French came back and extorted 150 million francs out of the country in order to recognize the country’s independence and be repaid for the loss of profits from the slave trade.

A pact with the devil? Didn’t Haiti’s slave population take the matter in their own hands and revolt? What in hell did the devil do? (in or out of hell).

What particularly bothers me about Robertson’s comments is that he obviously has a following that will listen and nod and say, ‘amen to that brother’.

Then Rush Limbaugh weighs in.

It’s all so petty and mean.

I have always enjoyed listening to Limbaugh when I am traveling in the U.S. I have found his commentary interesting and a lot of it amusing, although you had to keep in mind where where he stood on the political landscape. (Although it seems nowadays on radio or TV that you have to check out everyone’s personal biases and agendas before you settle in to listen).

But Limbaugh’s rants over Haiti and the U.S. aid to the country are just small and mean. I recognize that he personally has deep doubts and fears about Obama and his policies, but the U.S. would be sending help to Haiti whether it was Bush or any other president who has sat in the Oval Office. That’s what you do when your neighbour suffers a catastrophe.

I suppose, the same as for Pat Robertson, there are those who eat this crap up, but I suspect hope there are many Limbaugh supporters who are wincing when they hear this drivel.

Surely Limbaugh can find some real issues on which to vent rather than punching holes in his credibility by ranting on about some deep and dark motive he believes is driving his country’s aid program to the poor and damaged country of Haiti.

Are the Olympics over yet?

The other day, one of the media news stories was how some residents of Vancouver actually live on “Olympic” Street (or Avenue). Must have been a very, very, slow news day.

Let’s rev up the excitement!

Airport regulations, gun bans and dog bans

I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw, and a chapter titled Troublemakers (What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Crime) resonated with some of my thoughts in previous postings.

Gladwell writes about troublemakers and how the powers-that-be deal with perceived threats to the public.

Specifically he relates an incident in Ottawa, where three uncontrolled pit bulls attacked a young child and in the following media uproar, the provincial legislature chose as their solution to prevent further attacks, a ban on the ownership of the pit bull breed.

But Gladwell  points out that the danger of dog attacks isn’t confined to one breed and that at different times other breeds have been considered and demonized as ‘dangerous’ dogs. Notably German shepherds and Dobermans, but also Rottweilers and others.

He also notes that a dog’s behaviour is directly related to how it is raised and how it is treated.

Where once German shepherds and Dobermans were valued as guard dogs and socialized as such, now it is pit bulls that fill that position. They have increasingly been associated with the ownership by outlaw bikers, marijuana grow operators and various other misfits and anti-social individuals.

But what really interested me was Gladwell’s analysis of the Ottawa attack, the dog owner’s previous history and the eventual political solution.

Jayden Clairoux was attacked by Jada, a pit-bull terrier, and her two pit-bull–bullmastiff puppies, Agua and Akasha. The dogs were owned by a twenty-one-year-old man named Shridev Café, who worked in construction and did odd jobs. Five weeks before the Clairoux attack, Café’s three dogs got loose and attacked a sixteen-year-old boy and his four-year-old half brother while they were ice skating. The boys beat back the animals with a snow shovel and escaped into a neighbor’s house. Café was fined, and he moved the dogs to his seventeen-year-old girlfriend’s house. This was not the first time that he ran into trouble last year; a few months later, he was charged with domestic assault, and, in another incident, involving a street brawl, with aggravated assault. “Shridev has personal issues,” Cheryl Smith, a canine-behavior specialist who consulted on the case, says. “He’s certainly not a very mature person.” Agua and Akasha were now about seven months old. The court order in the wake of the first attack required that they be muzzled when they were outside the home and kept in an enclosed yard. But Café did not muzzle them, because, he said later, he couldn’t afford muzzles, and apparently no one from the city ever came by to force him to comply. A few times, he talked about taking his dogs to obedience classes, but never did. The subject of neutering them also came up—particularly Agua, the male—but neutering cost a hundred dollars, which he evidently thought was too much money, and when the city temporarily confiscated his animals after the first attack it did not neuter them, either, because Ottawa does not have a policy of preëmptively neutering dogs that bite people.

On the day of the second attack, according to some accounts, a visitor came by the house of Café’s girlfriend, and the dogs got wound up. They were put outside, where the snowbanks were high enough so that the back-yard fence could be readily jumped. Jayden Clairoux stopped and stared at the dogs, saying, “Puppies, puppies.” His mother called out to his father. His father came running, which is the kind of thing that will rile up an aggressive dog. The dogs jumped the fence, and Agua took Jayden’s head in his mouth and started to shake. It was a textbook dog-biting case: unneutered, ill-trained, charged-up dogs, with a history of aggression and an irresponsible owner, somehow get loose, and set upon a small child. The dogs had already passed through the animal bureaucracy of Ottawa, and the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization—a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners. But that would have required someone to track down Shridev Café, and check to see whether he had bought muzzles, and someone to send the dogs to be neutered after the first attack, and an animal-control law that insured that those whose dogs attack small children forfeit their right to have a dog. It would have required, that is, a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed.

Which is exactly what the Ontario provincial government did: banned the breed.

So while I rant on about the stupidity of the ongoing airport security upgrades, which do nothing to improve security, but everything to inconvenience the traveling public, and Canada’s vindictive firearms legislation that does nothing to address crime and/or violence, but seems to be all about restricting and penalizing the law-abiding, it appears that the problem is the inability of those who run our lives to address the real issues with real solutions.

Christie Clark, who is an ex-provincial politician in British Columbia and who currently has a radio talk show out of Vancouver, made an on-air remark recently, saying that politicians don’t need to actually do something, but they need to look as though they are doing something.

That has been a long-time belief of mine, but it was surprising to hear an ex-politician make the statement.

Of course, anyone who has dealt with the upper levels of the bureaucracy in any level of government eventually comes to terms with the realization that their function is to arrange meetings and then more meetings, but never actually come to a final conclusion, unless it fits their own agenda or comes down the chain of command from their particular political minister. Who also  makes few decisions unless they are approved or initiated from a higher power – nominally the Prime Minister’s office federally, or the Premier’s office provincially.

All of which would make it a fair statement to say that most individuals or groups that are looking for serious input on issues are spinning their wheels if they are spending most of their time trying to convince bureaucrats or even a minister – most of whom are more concerned with photo-ops, rather than issues – of the value of their position.

In any event, Gladwell’s analysis (read the whole article) explains much of the reason for many of the stupid laws we have on the books.

Remember: It’s not what you do, it’s what you look like you’re doing.

Damn, we’re in good hands.

Proroguing Parliament

The media seems to have its collective shirttail in a knot over PM Steven Harper proroguing parliament until after the Olympics. Parliament will reconvene with a Throne Speech on March 3rd.

From some of the commentators’ bleating, you would think that democracy has been destroyed and the world as we know it has come to an end.

The Globe and Mail calls it a clever travesty. But can a travesty be clever? If it is a travesty, wouldn’t it be damaging? Apparently not: It is a clever travesty. This needs to be further  puzzled upon.

My take is that it is a good move, for two reasons.

1. All kinds of groups are going to use the Olympic time period as a venue to get their individual causes recognized in the international media and will do their best to try and embarrass both the B.C. provincial and the federal governments. It will be far better if parliament is not in house at the time to assist in the feeding frenzy.

2. Then there is the thought that if the politicians aren’t in Ottawa it limits the amount of damage they can do. Keep them at home where their constituents can keep an eye on them.

I’m just saying….