Remember, "under God" was not originally in the text of the Pledge; it was added by virtue of an act of the Congress and the signature of the President, amidst a welter of federal novelties designed to curry favour with God. These bodies are similarly free to change the flag if they wish, and frankly I probably shouldn't be giving them the idea.¹

If the new flag were adopted--and the Pledge perhaps changed to read "I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the shape in its canton"--we would soon find the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty arguing passionately for public-school students' right to start the day with the new oath, unless of course they happen to be godless little creeps who don't love their country. We would also find Jim Lindgren saying that the establishment clause "obviously" does nothing to outlaw the deliberate congressional crossbreeding of church symbols with state ones. (As far as I can tell, Lindgren's logic would require him, as an atheist, to be entirely comfortable with the imaginary new flag if it were adopted in accord with the usual democratic procedures.)

¹Though it's not exactly an original one.

[UPDATE, September 18: Matt Barr runs the gauntlet, raising good points ("The hypothetical moves from vague invocations of God to Jesus..."), vastly overreaching itself at times (the elimination of prayer from public schools "creates a generation of recyclin', global warming hatin', self esteemin' kids"), and raising an entirely separate point of interest in mentioning the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln is supposed to have said that the nation would have a new birth of freedom "under God." Awkwardly enough, Lincoln is known to have stuck very closely to written texts in his speeches, and guess which little phrase is completely missing from the surviving manuscripts of the speech. Barr should probably have stuck to the unambivalently religious Second Inaugural.]

Over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan has some interesting thoughts about our bush-league energy crisis. Depending on how elastic you believe gasoline prices to be, a cut in gas taxes might end up flowing partly or even totally into the pockets of producers rather than customers. That's hardly the most desirable outcome. But imposing price controls is definitely the wrong thing to do, as it would create shortages and allocate the available gas inefficiently. This leads us, Caplan notes, to the "Cynic's Argument for Gas Tax Cuts":

In an energy crisis, politicians propose all kinds of crazy policies: anti-gouging enforcement, price controls, rationing, you name it. It's a beautiful illustration of what Yes, Minister calls "Politicians' Logic": "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."

Bottom line: No one is going to listen to the politician who says "Do nothing." Under the circumstances, I can't think of a single politically viable policy that would be better than cutting the gas tax. Maybe it would mildly reduce the price of gas. But even if supply is so inelastic that 100% of the tax cut goes to suppliers, it is easy to overlook a big social benefit: Tax cuts have a good chance of politically crowding out price controls and worse.

(I couldn't pass up a chance to make the joke at Harper's expense, but I should point out that there appears to be plenty of elasticity in the price of gas. This won't surprise anyone except the Peak Oil maniacs, who constantly cite our energy wastefulness as proof that we are extremely dependent on the current supply of petroleum. They little realize that those same examples, viewed in another light, merely show how much room is left for people to nip in their expenditures on huge vehicles and frequent trips.)

The NHL's new CBA may be forcing a lot of the league's old-timers into retirement, but there's at least one out-of-work sports veteran who just made the Canadiens roster unexpectedly.

In this morning's National Post I dissect eBay's purchase of Skype.

The wind brings word that the Associated Press is creating a "younger audience service" called ASAP, a multimedia newswire experiment for what is universally known as The Prized 18-34 Demographic. (Praise God: the marketers of the world will still consider me viable for another seven months and 18 days.) The announcement follows the inauguration of Al Gore's Ritalin TV and, of course, Canada's own short-attention-span newspaper, Dose. (Suggested motto: "Like a full five-course meal in a pill, only instead of food, it's news.")

Honestly I don't know what to make of it all. The conservative in me (nestled gently into the curve of my spleen) wants to stumble into the street, clad in the rags of a Hebrew prophet, and start raving about the demise of the Word. The journalist simply mourns, for if Dose is the future of printed news, it just might all be over (by which I mean, basically, my life). I've had perfectly literate people confess to me, quietly, that they like Dose; I want to like it, and I see some things it does right, but the French vintner probably feels the same way about those homogenous California wines that are fermented according to remorseless chemical formulas and sold for 10% of his production costs. The 22-year-olds producing Dose are, with the exception of the graphic artists, earning half a living but denying themselves the hope of establishing an individual voice. No one's blaming them, but they're accepting a future in which their role is to wind readers up to speed just enough so that they can follow along with The Daily Show. Current TV, which speaks to a demographic slice in the disjointed argot of a Social Studies class, isn't even as useful as that; it seems more like the venue or outlet for some kind of tedious exercise in generational solidarity. The network's web page is, right now, advertising "a look back at the terrible devastation of Hurricane Katrina set to Jars of Clay's 'Flood'." Damn, I guess the offspring of MTV really can turn anything into a music video.

But if all McLuhan preached was true--if we are living in the global village, and lurching towards a post-alphabetic Dionysian society--then complaint is fruitless. And Hurricane Katrina, if nothing else, confirmed the existence of the global village. As if some button had been jabbed at the summit of a high cloud-bound mountain, the television news business, on the second day or so after the storm, finally accepted the psychological verities of its existence. It would no longer do for the on-camera personalities to serve as staid non-participatory conveyors of unfiltered information from one distinct part of the world to another; what became important was the stance, the display of sympathy, membership in the village. I have yet to hear any American but Michael Kinsley express the slightest misgiving about the new, cynically "angry" on-air reporter; the splutterings of Anderson Cooper and the sneers of Soledad O'Brien were met with absolutely universal approval. That these reactions were "justified" has nothing to do with the fact that, in context, they represent sheer savagery. I have a list of about fifty people I would love to sit down in front of a DVD of Broadcast News. Would they even know it was a comedy? Would they think William Hurt's character was the "hero"?

As far as the weblogs go, there are elements in them both of rationalist rebellion against image-politics and of the mere dance-drum of the global village. There are a couple hundred of you who run sites that are genuine records of the adventuring human mind; I read them with real love. There are hundreds more--it is not necessary to name names--whose every utterance could be translated as "It's OK: everything you already know is right", stated over and over and over. In the end I don't need to visit these sites even if I happen to "agree" with them. They are effectively empty, and any similarity between their verbal forms and the content of my own imagination is, as they say in the movies, strictly coincidental.

From CNN's Richard Quest early Tuesday:

"After the 1953 floods we said 'never again,' but that's an absolute statement of course, so we had to translate that into an acceptable level of safety," he said. In Holland that meant raising the flood probability to one in 10,000 years -- by comparison the New Orleans standard was one in 250 years.

Silly Dutchmen, deliberately raising the probability of flooding in their country! What are they smoking over there, eh?

As I write these words, the Eastman Kodak Co. is still in danger of being wiped out by the advent of the digital camera, despite having embraced the technology and taken over certain digital-imaging market niches altogether. No doubt there are a few unhappy shareholders who are still wondering who came up with the damn thing. Who else but... Eastman Kodak? (þ: Ingram)

During the NHL offseason, Darryl Sutter, coach and GM of the Calgary Flames, took a fairly tough line on defence prospect Dion Phaneuf, saying that the 2003 draftee was going to have to "earn his place on the team." I've been hoping--pleading with the shade of Lord Stanley--that Sutter meant it, and that he might delay Phaneuf's arrival in the NHL. If all went well, I thought, the Flames might even actively screw with Phaneuf the way Ottawa did with Jason Spezza. But head coaches say a lot of things they don't mean in order to establish the principle that no job is 100% safe. A CP wire story pegged to the end of the Flames' rookie camp is full of quotes from within the Flames organization, and all suggest that Phaneuf is going to start the season in the big league. Damn and, also, blast.

Anybody who's seen Phaneuf knows he is ready for the NHL; in fact, he's pretty well ready to be a tail-end Team Canada selection, though maybe only at one of those awkwardly-timed World Championship tournaments guys stay home for. It would actually be touching to see another Edmonton-area star product enter the league just as our very greatest player is leaving. But these Edmonton hockey players keep turning up in the wrong goddamned colours.

Phun Phaneuf phact: did you know that the surname "Phaneuf" is an indigenous French-Canadian corruption of "Farnsworth"? (Warning: this page with more information contains annoying embedded music.)

That's the name of a statistical algorithm Bill James invented back in the '70s. It's a method of estimating the chance an individual player has of reaching a certain quantitative goal: 500 home runs, 3,000 hits--it can be anything you like. I don't know what empirical foundations the Toy has, if any; it's mostly a way of expressing and summarizing knowledge one already has, i.e., "Dontrelle Willis is quite likely to win 15-20 games a year for most of the next 12 seasons." That said, when you look at old copies of the Baseball Abstract, it is eerie how well the Toy's overall performance shapes up.¹

I was curious what the Toy would disclose if I asked it "Which current pitchers have established some genuine chance of getting 300 wins?" I hadn't intended to post the results, but if you spend four hours on something silly you almost feel like you have to FTP it up to the site, so here they are with their current win totals, ages, and estimated chances.

                   W  Age    %
Dontrelle Willis  44   23  18.9%
Mark Buehrle      84   26  13.7%
Tom Glavine      272   39  11.3%     
Roy Oswalt        80   28   9.7%
Mark Mulder       96   28   9.6%
Bartolo Colon    137   32   7.9%
Carlos Zambrano   47   24   7.0%
Pedro Martinez   196   33   6.5%
Jon Garland       63   25   6.2%
Johan Santana     56   26   5.8%
Randy Johnson    260   42   2.7%
Jake Peavy        45   24   2.5%
C.C. Sabathia     67   25   1.6%

The sum of the probabilities in the column is 1.03, which suggests that ("on average"--or, if you like, in the mean of all possible worlds) only one active player will eventually get 300 wins. It is sometimes suggested that the era of the 300-win pitcher is ending, and the foregoing table sort of supports that, though we've seen Clemens and Maddux reach the plateau fairly recently. I don't know what advantages they had that this generation of pitchers lacks. A complicated question that demands close attention in coming years is how the altered playoff structure will affect lifetime win totals for pitchers. It is becoming common for contending teams to be asked whether they will switch to four-man rotations down the stretch, and a few have done so. But while a six-division MLB with wild-card slots puts more teams in contention overall, it can reduce the pressure on hyper-elite teams who might otherwise be facing a fight for playoff life down to the wire. For many 300-game winners of the past, a long spell spent in the rotation of such a team has been a key to amassing crucial win-fat seasons.

What do I think about the table? One way to think about it is to imagine oneself as a bettor presented with these estimates as odds. Would you take 9-to-1 odds on Tom Glavine reaching 300 wins? He's healthy right now, but he's close to falling off the cliff for good, and he'd need two good years with solid run and bullpen support. (For $8M the Mets will certainly keep running him out there for as long as possible next season.) 11% seems a tad optimistic. The smart money would be on a young, intelligent, athletic power pitcher, especially since strikeout rates don't figure as a variable in the Favorite Toy model. Dontrelle fits the criteria as well as anyone, but there's probably an argument to be had about the effect of the high leg kick. Vida Blue and Juan Marichal would have been considered mortal locks for 300 when young, but both of them came apart too early. I guess I'd put my chips on Johan Santana, who should be able to win with his change-up through 2023. Check back then to see how that guess looks.

¹Technical note: The algorithm generates no falsifiable predictions for individuals, of course, since it only outputs probabilities. (Paging Dr. Popper... Dr. Popper to the epistemology desk...) But if you run the Toy for all active players as above, you can sum the positive probabilities to get a rough point estimate of the number of current players who will pass Goal x, and on that basis the output of the Toy did pretty well in the early '80s. N.B. for potential reproducers: using different figures for the "age" variable will alter the probabilistic estimates a bit; in the software I just subtracted the player's birth year from 2005. (Win totals were also adjusted to account for the three weeks or so left in 2005.)

Chessbase.com has a brief survival report from New Orleans chess author and personality Jude Acers. It occurred to Acers to tap open his water heater when he ran low on potables, which is perhaps worth making a mental note of for one's own emergency preparations (but should not substitute for the advance storage of clean drinking water). He also confirms reports of gunfire aimed at military helicopters.

In just his second year as a National League starter, Clemens is actually batting .222; in 54 at-bats he has 10 singles, two doubles, and three RBIs as well as three walks. This may not sound impressive, but it makes him one of the top ten offensive threats amongst NL pitchers, who are hitting just .148 as a group in 2005. And it is pretty good form for a guy who spent 19 years in the DH league, essentially never coming to the plate at all.

(Seamheads looking to break the Cy Young "tie" between Clemens and Chris Carpenter take note: Carpenter is batting .029. I'm not certain a pitcher's hitting should count towards Cy Young voting, but in a world where NL starters still come to the plate two or three times a night unless they got shelled anyway, it's the most under-mentioned aspect of the game.)

I've been ducking Katrina coverage this week after saturating myself in it (didn't want to say "swimming" or "drowning") for the week before. I gather from the squealing at Hit & Run that some people are proclaiming the occasion to be a pretty sharp blow to laissez-faire, libertarianism, minarchism, anarcho-capitalism, classical liberalism, or whatever you want to call the general idea of less bloated, less intrusive, less grasping, less powerful government.

So let's just recap briefly, shall we? We've got a million or so human beings living in a low-lying area created in the first place by government engineers. The local government of New Orleans, apprised of an approaching storm, summarily orders everybody out of the city about 36 hours too late without lifting a finger to provide the means to do so. At the last minute it occurs to somebody to herd those left behind into a large government-built structure, the Superdome; no supplies are on hand for its inhabitants, and the structure itself is rendered--according to the government's assessment--permanently useless. Even though the storm misses the city, government-built levees fail in unforeseen and catastrophic ways. Many of the New Orleans cops opportunistically quit their jobs, many more simply fail to show up for work, others take the lead in looting supplies from storm-stricken neighbourhoods, and just a few have the notable good grace to shoot themselves in the head. The federal government announces that assistance is on its way, sometime; local and state authorities--who have the clear-cut burden of "first response" under federal guidelines nobody seems to have read--beg for the feds to hurry up while (a) engaging in bureaucratic pissing-matches behind the scenes and (b) making life difficult for the private agencies who are beating the feds to the scene. Eventually the federal government shows up with the National Guard, and to the uniform indignation and surprise of those who have been screaming for it, the Guard turns out to have a troubling tendency to point weapons in the general direction of civilians and reporters. I'm not real clear on who starts doing what around mid-week, but the various hydra-heads of government start developing amusing hobbies; confiscating guns from civilians, demanding that photographers stop documenting the aftermath of America's worst natural disaster in a century, enforcing this demand by seizing cameras at gunpoint, shutting down low-power broadcasting stations in shelters, and stealing supplies from relief agencies and private citizens. In the wake of all this, there is probably no single provision of the U.S. Constitution left untrampled, the Posse Comitatus Act appears destined for a necktie party, and the 49% of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.

It's been said that Hurricane Katrina has confirmed pretty much everybody in his pre-existing political beliefs. I can't say the record gives me any reason to change mine. But if I can't have a libertarian paradise where state power defers to social power, or use recent events to urge others to the wisdom of such a state of affairs, I'm willing to propose a second-best for America: replace the three branches of republican government with permanent joint rule by Wal-Mart and the Salvation Army. Go on, tell me you could honestly do worse.

I've been preoccupied lately by a particular observation related to the somewhat technical column I wrote last week for the National Post:

As an economist, [Thomas Courchene] knows that labour mobility is important to the overall economic efficiency of the country. People should be passively encouraged to move from places where their labour is less productive to places where it's worth more. But he's worried that Alberta's revenues from oil and gas will be ploughed into lavish social services, making it profitable for workers to flee genuine jobs in Saskatchewan (and other provinces) in order to go on the dole in Edmonton.

However, the popular perception in Alberta -- right or wrong -- is that labour mobility is still very far from being what his profession calls "utility-maximizing." Fort McMurray's tarsands need every hand that can grip a wrench, yet rapid wage increases aren't attracting enough help. Even the recipients of these increases are complaining about the "labour shortage" that is sweetening their paycheques but emptying their shops.

Consider a hypothetical Worker 'D' who is already ensconced in Fort McMurray's tarpatch. D, like most of us, has some theoretical point at which his personal wealth will grow large enough that he prefers to either go do something less difficult or to simply retire. The necessary amount of personal wealth is different for everyone--in the novel Heat one of William Goldman's characters calls it "fuck-you money"--but if D is a member of the baby-boom generation (as, statistically, he is likely to be) he may already have considerable pre-existing savings from a lifetime's work. Moreover, if he owns real estate in Fort McMurray, he possesses a huge asset whose value has been growing at 20% a year, pushing him closer to the exit.

A side effect of wage increases designed to attract new workers is to contribute faster to D's walk-away fund. At a particular, narrowly regarded time and place--and Fort McMurray in 2005 might be one such, though I don't really know--wage increases might drive more workers out of the available workforce than it drags in. To represent this graphically, we would expect on first principles that increasing wages would always (and only) grow the available (and capable) workforce, creating a smooth, constantly rising curve.

It is amazing to think of the old man putting down his tools for good (give or take the occasional John Deere with a knock in the engine) after four decades as a heavy-duty mechanic. Nobody ever earned retirement more, or was better-disposed by his nature to enjoy it; tinkering, putzing about, hunting, camping, and farm work will keep him exactly as occupied as he cares to be, and no more. He has been restored, in moving back to our family seat³ in northwest Saskatchewan, to the country of childhood friends and familiar faces. For the last ten or fifteen years he was a model of conventional "economic man". With his work attracting more money than ever before, he responded to the incentives, putting in seven-day weeks and 12-hour days over the corvine protests of my mother and, no doubt, over the increasing complaints from his own joints. As his wealth grew to the point of secure, modest lifelong comfort, the incentives changed. The temptation to quit caught up and passed the benefits of an increasing income almost on one specifiable day, and he gave notice with an impressive lack of regret or fanfare. You could put him in a textbook. Though, Lord, don't try getting him to read one.

¹It's "quasi" because over time, the workforce level can be made "infinitely" high in principle--though ultimately it would reach some sort of asymptote once you had the entire population of the world on the payroll.

²N.B.: Each local minimum created by the "retirement effect" must also be paired with a region higher up the curve where the gain in workforce from offering new dollars becomes unexpectedly steep, blorps upward a little, because of returning retirees. At some truly insane and lavish wage level--make it ten thousand dollars an hour, or whatever--the retirees must be lured back into the workforce no matter how comfortable they are in retirement.

³Some fun for the non-quantitative: here's a relevant page of data from the 1911 Canadian census, detailing the Coshes' arrival. The cell marked "Man" next to my great-grandmother's and great-uncle's names doesn't refer to Manitoba. Many of the names in the left-hand column are still found in that part of Saskatchewan, on the periphery of the original Cosh farm. I'll award a ColbyCosh.com No-Prize to the first reader who can decode William Cosh Sr.'s scribble-obscured, slightly misspelled "Employment other than at chief occupation or trade, if any" (Column 18). Actual members of the family are not eligible for said No-Prize.

[UPDATE, 10:01 am: Devin McCullen receives the gong for being the first to figure out that gramps was a blacksmith.]

[UPDATE, 11:30 am: Here comes the science! UBC economist Kevin Milligan sends a link with the right name for what I was trying to describe: the "backward-bending supply of labour curve." Cornell mathematician John Thacker does the same and adds these notes.

Overtime pay is one way that companies can deal with a backward-bending labor supply curve. By offering a higher wage at only a high amount of hours worked, the company can increase the substitution effect at high amount of labor offered while decreasing the income effect associated with such a high marginal wage rate. The net effect, with a well-chosen overtime pay scheme, can be to cause workers to work more hours than they would under any flat wage rate.

Pay raises for seniority work on a similar principle, though as you noted they only work so far. Once someone has more in the bank, you have to offer them more money in order to get them to work as much.

If the problem is with getting additional bodies working rather than the number of hours performed by those already working, things like bonuses for new workers or subsidized training and the like can be another way to coax reluctant workers into working without causing the income effect to make those already working work less.]

Katrina-ism 5.0--dead-tree Katrina-ism: I'm in today's "Issues & Ideas" section of the National Post with a column about the sudden mysterious popularity of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It appears that Hurricane Katrina is going to become the most expensive natural disaster (in nominal dollars) of all time, passing the existing title-holder--the Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. The quake that wiped out the city of Kobe was, like Katrina, a foreseeable blow to a vulnerable city; at a rough guess, the death toll from Katrina will end up in the neighbourhood of the Kobe figure of 6,433. Many have observed that New Orleans' destruction was accompanied by considerably worse social disorder than that which followed the Hanshin event--let's face it; it's a lot to expect that Americans facing calamity will conduct themselves like the Japanese--but the hostility being flung at every level of government over Katrina mimics the precedent closely.

Some may be wondering how long it took for the Port of Kobe to recover from its annihilation. The short answer is that 11 years later, it hasn't happened yet. At the time of the disaster Kobe was Asia's largest port by shipped volume and the world's second largest overall. Today, even though no expense was spared in its reconstruction, it ranks #43 in the world. Yokohoma has taken over the domestic trade, and Singapore much of Asia's. It is presumably pretty easy for the civic rivals of a wiped-out port town to collect windfall profits in the short term and eventually reinvest them in throughput upgrades and price-cutting measures.

In other depressing news, it appears that the Louisiana Superdome will be torn down. Supposedly it's because of hurricane damage--and if you believe that the engineers have had the free time to conduct the analysis behind such a decision, I've got some real estate in the French Quarter to sell you. The New Orleans Saints had already convinced every relevant interest group that the facility was obsolete after a mere thirty years of life (which, as far as I'm concerned, should lead to a few architects being executed publicly on the fifty-yard line, but there you go: they don't build 'em like they did at Epidaurus anymore). In light of that, the dome makes an easy sacrifice to wholly understandable fears that it would become a haunted monument to the city's most terrible and least dignified moments. There is nothing else Governor Blanco can do, but she might as well come clean about the rationale. A whole nation will cheer, quietly, when the wrecking ball hits.

Last week humour site SomethingAwful.com tried to raise funds for Red Cross efforts in the Gulf using PayPal. The fund drive ended up getting caught in a bureaucratic nightmare; when the site's donor account swelled to $30,000 in just nine hours, PayPal freaked out and shut it down pending an "investigation" of SA's bona fides. SA owner Richard Kyanka, enraged at "Paypal's outlook... that every single one of their customers is a liar, a cheat, and a thief," is now bitching about how the company isn't covered by federal banking rules and needs to be regulated more closely. But the truth is that SA's Paypal problems are largely due to hysterical regulators, specifically including those in... drum roll please... Louisiana. Radley Balko has the background:

The first shots came from the media, which were skeptical of the new economy after the NASDAQ bust and agitated at having been duped into hyping so many failed dot-coms. Industry publications hinted that the IPO was PayPal’s way of shopping for a savior, while one Silicon Valley lawyer wrote in the California legal publication The Recorder that PayPal was an ideal money laundering mechanism for “drug dealers and domestic terrorists,” despite the successful anti-fraud devices concocted by Levchin’s tech team. ...[Later,] New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer cited PayPal for posting a user agreement that “wasn’t clear enough.” He also subpoenaed all documents pertaining to PayPal’s use in online gaming sites, suggesting the company was in violation of New York gambling laws. Spitzer’s investigation was followed by a U.S. Justice Department determination that PayPal’s use by gaming sites was a violation of the USA PATRIOT Act.

...Just hours before PayPal was set to go public, the state of Louisiana ordered it to terminate all business in that state, asserting that the company had failed to obtain a “money transfer license,” which many states require from anyone in the businesses of cashing checks, transmitting money, or exchanging currency. New York threatened a similar order. The Louisiana decree was issued under the pretense of “protecting consumers,” though terminating service in that state would have left all of Louisiana’s PayPal-using auctioneers in the lurch.

If there were more alternative online financial institutions--if there was so much as one other company we could, practically speaking, switch away from Paypal to--Paypal would undoubtedly be better-managed. (Why didn't Something Awful use some American bank's efficient, simple online donation system to raise money for Katrina? The question answers itself.) The basic lesson of Paypal's history is that any new financial service is doomed in the contemporary U.S.; Paypal half-survived the predations of legal showmen like Eliot Spitzer only because the existing banking business was a little late in organizing opposition to it.

Don Martin has an excellent piece in today's Post--in many ways, the piece I've been waiting for--about the steady emigration from Newfoundland to Alberta. It's truly a modern gold rush, the kind of thing you don't expect to see happening in the 21st century; a whole nation is arguably being transplanted to the other side of a continent. The 21st-century twist is that it's being transplanted intact, with retail inventories, broadcasting, education, and culture all adapting to the norms of the invader. By 2020 there should be a distinct Newfoundland-flavoured "McMurray accent" emerging from the school playgrounds up there. (Not kidding, not exaggerating.)

I sympathize with the Newfie diehards back home who have to deal with the breakup of families and the depopulation of 300-year-old communities; Martin's piece is, at times, heartrending. But no one points out the irony that Newfoundland exists as a quasi-national entity in the first place because a whole bunch of Irishmen got on their bikes and followed a resource boom.

[UPDATE, 8:13 am: This passage from the piece seemed puzzling and even slightly outrageous to me at first:

Economic development office secretary Mary Greene calls the economic breakup of her family with its one dozen siblings "a great sadness." The most recent to leave was her ailing father, who sought to take advantage of Alberta's superior health system and the recuperation care offered by his relocated children.

"We basically had to find the greatest concentration of family members to look after him and that was in Alberta," Ms. Greene shrugs. "As much as he'll say he'd love to come back here to smell the ocean, he's content and has so many offspring out there he's got an entourage to care for him."

There is no seething resentment against Alberta's energy bonanza here. "My family would love to be back home, but you have to go where the opportunities lie," Ms. Greene says. "But I think Newfoundlanders must wonder when they're going to see the same benefits Alberta enjoys from the oil industry."

This is the time of year when I traditionally check in with a Canadian football vignette, which is always popular with Americans who think our three-down football is an adorable national affectation on the order of our weird raised vowels or the Ookpik. To be honest, I haven't had much stomach to write about football. My Eskimos, the league's perennial Evil Empire, were 6-3 going into the Labour Day Classic against Calgary (4-5). As a fan it is hard to be disappointed or upset about this. But I'm not going to lie to you. This Eskimo team is a hard team to love, the hardest I've ever seen.

The head coach is no better than his predecessor at managing the clock or the score. The scouting staff can't find a running back--come home, Lawrence Phillips! All is forgiven!--and there's no indication that the offensive line could open lanes even if the young Bo Jackson turned up at City Hall with his bones new-covered in flesh. Civic idol Ricky Ray came back from the Jets' taxi squad to start at QB, and while he is leading the league in passing, he has also acquired frustrating tendencies to chuck into double coverage and fumble the ball twice a night. (The o-line bears some responsibility for the bad passing decisions, but the dropsy appears to be strictly individual.) As far as the standings go, all this is nicely covered for by two all-Canadian receivers (Jason Tucker and Mookie Mitchell) and by the league's most professional-looking and vicious defence. And defence, as they say, wins football games. But what the proverb-spouting old-timers don't tell you is that the defence can't pour touchdowns into the end zone to finish off an opponent who's on the ropes. If you try to win that way, you're going to spend entire lifetimes protecting thin leads.

In general, these Eskimos strike me as a gutless collection of overconfident pure talent; they believe, and correctly, that they can stroll to 12-6 in this league while spending more time working on sack dances than game films. I don't have any choice but to cheer for them, yet I harbour a secret loathing, and I can't even imagine how much I'd despise them if I were from one of those places where they take in Eskimo-hatred with their breakfast crumpet.

All that said, this year's Labour Day joust did not disappoint one bit; however much I detach emotionally from the Eskies, I'm always going to love watching Calgary blow up. Yesterday the Esks built a 25-1 lead and (of course) let the Stampeders back in; with about two minutes left the score was 25-17, and Calgary QB Henry Burris had marched the bad guys to the Eskimo 3. There followed an amusing show of general incompetence that is typical of the quality of modern CFL football.

On first-and-goal, Burris shovels left to Joffrey Reynolds, who finds himself in world-class trouble before he can take a step. Big cornerback Davis Sanchez has had the play figured out for about an hour, and is bearing down on Reynolds like a Peterbilt with its brake lines cut. Reynolds panics and basically lights out for his own end zone: Sanchez crushes him at the 15-yard line. "Loss of 12" is not what you want to hear over the stadium loudspeaker when you're trying to make up an eight-point deficit from the goal line.

Burris follows with two incomplete passes, but the gods smile; on third-and-15, Eskimo defensive back Donny Brady is flagged for pass interference. There had been no receivers within five yards of Brady, so I assume he must have decked somebody at the line of scrimmage; the CBC's silent amateur camera coverage was unenlightening, but as an Esk fan I'm pretty confident Brady actually did something dumb. Given first-and-goal on the 1, Burris keeps the ball himself and makes it 25-23 with about a minute left.

Calgary's offence assembles in the huddle to discuss the two-point convert, but CFL weirdness strikes again. Canadian fans, you see, have never mastered the trick of deafening the visiting team's offence and keeping quiet when their team has the ball. And Burris's touchdown has induced a frenzy at sold-out McMahon Stadium. As Burris throws up his hands helplessly, defenders on the Calgary sideline are seen gesticulating at the crowd to quiet down.¹ It has no effect, and Calgary, unable to communicate and settle on a game-deciding play, has to take a time-count violation. The ball is marched back to the 10-yard line.

The final drama is stranger still. Burris drops back, looking for an open man in the end zone. The Eskimos stunt with both ends, freeing DT Cedric Scott to bust through the Calgary line and hunt for the mobile Burris in an open field. Scott, at 6'5" and 281 pounds, is not exactly the guy you would choose to send on this mission. (And as a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, he's had a lot on his mind this week.) Moreover, Burris hasn't been sacked all day. But with the play starting from the 10, the Eskimos can afford to flood the end zone with pass coverage. As the Calgary QB scrambles right and searches in vain for an uncovered receiver--one second, two seconds, three--Scott catches up with him from behind, halfway to the sideline, and drops him to the McMahon turf. One botched onside kickoff later, the Eskimos have officially survived another colon-churning Labour Day, moving to a dominant 26-16-1 in the annals of the big game.

¹[UPDATE, 12:06 pm: This morning's Sun papers make out that, on the two-point convert, there was also a personnel problem; none of the Stampeders knew exactly who was supposed to be out there for the play. And the same damn thing apparently happened last week, complete with crippling time-count penalty. Profound thanks go out to cast-off Eskimos head coach Tom Higgins, now running the Stamps, for handing us Monday's victory on a plate.]

This MLB.com article may help casual baseball fans understand what a singular, wonderful figure Ichiro is. In 2005, with his team many fathoms below the surface of the playoff chase, the Japanese genius broke out a tactic that the players around him had never seen or imagined; that his manager only knew about because Ichiro had discussed it with him in spring training; that his baserunning coach apparently didn't know about ("In theory, it sounds great"); and that I have never seen executed or heard of a historical precedent for.

Am I the only Canadian who's been watching hockey for 30 years and didn't know what the "A" stitched on a vice-captain's uniform stood for? It's "alternate", not "assistant". Go figure.

Soccer fans were treated to one of the single most moving spectacles in sport before Saturday's England-Wales World Cup qualifier as the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff resounded to 50,000 or so Welshmen spontaneously singing "Men of Harlech". And I do mean singing. The magnificent effect was rather ruined shortly thereafter, when the same crowd booed the hell out of an excellent tenor rendition of "God Save the Queen". Maybe it's too much to expect Wales not to abuse the national pride of its next-door neighbours, but it's the last country in the world you would expect to torture a lone (Welsh) singer doing his best in an acoustic environment that's nightmarish anyhow. The practice of pre-game anthems is obviously just untenable on that side of the Atlantic, and it's increasingly a source of ill-feeling here, too.

I have a persistent fantasy of organizing ear-blasting soccer-style singing by the Oilers fans at the Coliseum. How hard do you think this would be? I figure you'd have to get about a thousand very loud people on-side and organize it both inside and outside the stadium. Even with pre-trained plants, it would be a tough sell to Canadians. (The Edmonton Eskimos have been trying to teach fans the old Esks fight song for years now, with only modest success. But that's making the task as hard as humanly possible. The song's tonal difficulties make it nearly impossible for a crowd to sing--after hearing it dozens of times I can still never remember what key the current line is supposed to end in--and suggest that it was written either by a European avant-gardist or a drunk.) Any hockey city that developed the ability to deafen an opponent or rally the troops with the sonic arsenal of an English soccer fan would have an instant and powerful morale advantage. But the only tune most NHL fans can chant together is the chorus to "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)".

England's slender one-nil victory over a side with one star (the defiantly patriotic Ryan Giggs) isn't likely to frighten the trousers off of any of its finals opponents. Certainly not the Americans, who may have silenced widespread doubts about their FIFA no. 6 ranking on Saturday by thumping Mexico 2-0 in Columbus, Ohio. After the game--I repeat: after the game--Mexico's coach, Ricardo Lavolpe, was quoted as saying "The U.S. is a small team. They play like my sister, my aunt and my grandmother." The Mexican side he coaches has now been shut out seven consecutive times on U.S. soil; I realize things are different in Latin countries, but if I were a national selector, I'd be out for the blood, head, and entrails of any coach who badmouthed a team he couldn't beat on the road.

A last note: I warned fans repeatedly during the NHL lockout that while a salary cap might make the league more secure in the short term, it would also threaten our long-term front-row access to a monopoly of world hockey talent. This effect has, frankly, been less visible in the off-season than I would have expected--but the cases of Ilya Kovalchuk and Pavel Datsyuk appear to be at least worth watching from this perspective. And I have a new question: if the Detroit Red Wings can't afford to sign someone like Datsyuk, isn't it possible that the second-best outcome for them is to make sure he does go back to Europe? The Wings have a lot of revenue they cannot give Datsyuk under the salary cap. But what's to stop them from making a disguised informal deal with his agent that tops up his European contract and keeps him away from the other 29 NHL clubs? You could hand over the money under the table, or disguise the bargain as a "sponsorship" arrangement. ("The Detroit Red Wings proudly present Moscow Dynamo hockey!") Cash, like water, will find its own level: I would be shocked to learn that Detroit is not looking for ways to improve its relative standing in the league without incurring expenditures that count toward the cap. Discuss.

Jonathan Gewirtz of ChicagoBoyz has absolutely nailed one of my pet peeves with American newspaper websites. It's not restricted merely to jerkwater newspapers, either. Most famous offender: the Star-Tribune. The Star-Tribune of where, you ask? Minneapolis, Minnesota, but please keep that secret to yourself. With the Star-Telegram, the main clue to where you are geographically is in the title bar of your browser window--not exactly the first place the eye settles. PE.com makes a vague mention of "Inland Southern California" in tiny type, and fails almost completely to mention the newspaper it exists to advertise (the Riverside Press-Enterprise). The Providence Journal has a pioneering website that baffled millions trying to decode "Projo.com" before they scattered around a few small-type references to Rhode Island.

Then again, maybe these newspapers don't want to attract non-local readers. Such readers eat bandwidth, but most are unlikely to patronize the local businesses that are a newspaper's (and especially a small newspaper's) bread and butter. (þ: Beck)

I've seen a lot of responses to Hurricane Katrina, but Sports Illustrated's Michael Silver must be the first guy to have watched the week's events and concluded that New Orleans is such a well-run city that the Super Bowl should be held there every year until the end of time.

And that's not even the crazy part! Silver acknowledges that the Superdome will never be a suitable locale for football again; he wants the Super Bowl to be played every year, in New Orleans, in a brand-new and specifically "state-of-the-art" stadium. (The cost recently paid to merely upgrade an existing stadium, Chicago's Soldier Field, to the "state of the art": $567 million.) Silver suggests that the new facility should be built at the expense of the NFL. All in all, I'm kinda surprised he didn't suggest taking out a loan from the leprechauns in his underwear.

There has been considerable media attention to the predicament of Antoine "Fats" Domino, the 77-year old rock-and-roll legend who waited out Katrina in his native New Orleans. Fats was reported alive on Thursday after a day of uncertainty; the Washington Post reports Saturday that he's now in Baton Rouge, staying in an apartment belonging to LSU's starting quarterback.

Is it too early to start compiling a list of other notable Americans whose fates might be of interest? The official website of the Rebirth Brass Band is keeping track of some of the city's resident jazz, soul, and funk musicians.

N.O. songwriting legend Allen Toussaint, originally missing, has turned up alive in New York.
Author Poppy Z. Brite is safe inside the city, 12 pounds lighter and worrying about her abandoned cats.
David Duke was out of town, and is now making predictable hay about "white genocide" at the hands of black mobs.
The whereabouts of Big Star's Alex Chilton are apparently unknown, and he was thought to have stayed in the city during the storm. [UPDATE, September 6: Add Chilton to the survivor list.]
The members of the Neville family are all safe, as the Marsalises. Marsales? Marsalises.
NPR poet-in-residence Andrei Codrescu is alive and filing dispatches about the demise of his city.
Better Than Ezra--remember them?--were on tour and have started organizing benefits.
The Food Network has officially announced that Emeril Lagasse is alive.
This St. Pete Times page rounds up a few NOLA celebrities. Jazz composer Terence Blanchard evacuated to Atlanta Sunday morning, and Dr. John, perhaps the archetypal New Orleans figure, was on tour in Minneapolis. Rapper Master P is said to have dispatched helicopters to New Orleans to search for some of his relatives. Better late than never, one supposes.
Mr. Bill creator Walter Williams hails from New Orleans. The "Hurricane Sluggo" video on his site may seem tasteless, but Williams was actually trying to call attention to the city's geographic situation years ago.
I'd be interested in news of Humberto Fontova, the Cuban-American paleoconservative author who lives in New Orleans. I haven't seen any so far, and he may be the one living human being least likely to comply with a "mandatory evacuation" order. I'm also a little curious about comics editor and occult expert Cat Yronwode. Mises.org reports that libertarian economist and controversialist Walter Block, who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans, is safe and dry. Feel free to send along additions to this list, relevant links, or (this would be best) the URL of a more comprehensive accounting.

On 9/11, and in the days afterward, the New York police indelibly stamped their nickname--the "Finest"--on the pages of history. It appears that the New Orleans Police Department, in its most difficult hour, has also confirmed the truth of its traditional nickname: "North America's Sleaziest Bastards." Reports of New Orleans cops turning in their badges, and of others participating in pre-emptive looting (not just mere "commandeering" of necessities), have been widespread over the last few days. Blogger Michael Barnett, who has remained in the city, reports that police successfully cleared out looters near the 858-apartment Iberville Housing Development, but came under gunfire from the neighbourhood when they began to "shop" in leisurely fashion for themselves. (After they fled, the tragedy of the commons took over in double-quick time.)

According to Barnett, "Over 30 officers have quit over the last three days" in just one police district: "Out of 160 officers... maybe 55 or 60 are working." Again the comparison with the NYPD comes to the mind unbidden: those who read the recently-released transcripts of 9/11 telephone and radio traffic know how dispatchers phoned off-duty New York officers at home, only to be told again and again by terrified wives and family members that "Lt. So-and-So is already on his way in." The slow reaction of the federal authorities to the disaster can probably be attributed, in part, to a perfectly natural but mistaken assumption that New Orleans itself thought New Orleans was worth saving, and would take initial steps to do so.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that "civilian looters" have been helping people in places authority was unable to reach until today. And does anybody want to tell me all about how this guy should be shot dead on the grounds of "broken windows" theory? (I'm a convinced believer in the "broken windows" idea myself, but not so much that I think it applies underwater.)

...BoingBoing.net, ordinarily one of my favourite websites and one that does a lot of good, too. Within the last 24 hours or so, BoingBoing has posted a number-mangling paragraph on the economic effects of Katrina that confuses the U.S. balance of trade with the U.S. gross domestic product; slandered PayPal and then backtracked; used the occasion to praise Cuban social values Walter Duranty-fashion; and joined in the opportunistic trashing of a four-star charity that Pat Robertson happens to have ties to. Maybe you guys should just stick to posting the latest kewl pixx from Burning Man.

Maybe it's my fault. I mentioned polders in relation to New Orleans a while ago, and now at least one blogger of the left is denouncing the Bush administration for failing to adopt Dutch solutions to the problems of sustaining civilization below sea level. In general, it's almost certainly no mistake to look for Dutch expertise on this subject. (It's no mistake to look for Dutch expertise on any subject, up to and including sex toys and upholstery.) I have no doubt that the Louisiana and federal governments will be doing just that. But in how many different ways is the specific accusation stupid?

When it comes to New Orleans, the hanging judges of the media--including the weblog world--are currently fitting up pretty much everyone in the United States for a noose. Here's something for your bill of indictment, kids! The mayor's mandatory evacuation order for the city was issued on Sunday, and those of us on the outside are now getting belated answers to why so many people failed to follow it. Airline flights out of New Orleans had, of course, already ceased because of high surface winds. Amtrak wasn't running either: its excuse, again, is pretty good--its lines run directly through the levees that were then being frantically shored up. Non-car-owners in the city had pretty much one place left to go--but Greyhound had stopped bus service to and from New Orleans late Saturday, pleading "safety." That's more than 24 hours before the rain even started. You've all seen the photos of drivers leaving the city en masse on Sunday; conditions were clear--but apparently not clear enough for Greyhound.

This leaves FEMA director Michael Brown on pretty shaky ground when he suggests that "those who ignored the city's mandatory evacuation order bore some responsibility." How were non-drivers supposed to comply with the order--yogic flying? One visiting New York couple was almost frogmarched to the Superdome by authorities before deciding to hitchhike on Interstate 10. That's what nerds call a "non-scalable solution," particularly for families, older people, and, yes, blacks, who have enough trouble getting cab drivers to take money for a ride in normal times.

The Equalizer: Tom Courchene says that Alberta must voluntarily share its oil wealth or else Confederation will be destroyed. In today's National Post, I respond with a 750-word expansion of that "world's tiniest violin" gesture you do with your thumb and index finger.

Here's a question you might ask Dr. C even if you agree with the spirit of his idea. He believes Alberta should set aside petro royalties and hand them over to the Council of the Federation, a talk shop of provincial premiers, so that the money can be used to improve the condition of the "have-not" [and never-will] provinces. Why do we need the Council to do this for us? Alberta could establish and administer its own fund, to be distributed voluntarily by Alberta under made-in-Alberta formulae. Why is it necessary for us to have help in this enterprise? Are we too stupid to engage in competent philanthropy, or does Courchene just implicitly regard Alberta's oil money as the natural property of the whole federation ab initio?

I think the shrewdest response Ralph Klein could make to Courchene's idea is to announce the establishment of a $1.5 billion fund whose interest would be used to mitigate calamities or temporary economic emergencies elsewhere in Canada. And in the next sentence he should state that the fund will be endowed exactly 24 hours after the Conservative Party is elected to a majority government in Parliament. (It's not that the Conservatives are something Ralph Klein or Colby Cosh particularly care for, you understand--but if the Liberals are allowed to tweak equalization in openly unjust ways to buy Liberal votes in Atlantic Canada, why shouldn't something be done for the Opposition?)

The IRPP web page has the full text of Courchene's latest study. It makes exceedingly difficult reading, but is full of interesting observations, not all of which are Alberta-related.

[UUPDATE, 11:47 pm: Norman Spector writes:

Interesting piece... However, the objective of equalization is stated clearly in s. 36 [of the Constitution Act]--it’s there to support or criticize as a principle, but it's there.

Specifically (as Fr. Raymond de Souza also discusses in Thursday's Post) it says:

Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.

This stipulation is universally regarded as non-justiciable, and I think I could get most everyone to agree that it is just this side of incoherent. Spector is, nonetheless, right to bring it up.

It is hard for a policy critic to stand on this text unless there is some agreement, or existing general sense, that s. 36(2) truly represents the sole objective and limit of equalization. If no one shares the belief, then it might just as well be written on an outhouse wall as in the Constitution. Interprovincial equalization as currently designed is swallowing up Saskatchewan's petroleum and potash revenues; in one recent year, Saskatchewan lost about twice as much in equalization from an increase in oilpatch activity than it gained in royalties. These revenues aren't the product of "taxation"; if Saskatchewan's tax rates aren't changing significantly, there is no pretext within s. 36(2) for its resource revenues to be touched. But they were, and are. Courchene also points out in his paper that it is more expensive for some provinces to provide the same public services because they possess higher labour costs. If s. 36(2) were taken seriously, we would be transferring cash not on a dollar basis but on an hours-of-labour basis. (His suggestion, if I understood it correctly, was that Ontario might be a "have-not" right now under this form of accounting.)

Courchene could have raised another point: what is the right definition of "reasonably comparable levels of of public services?" As far as I know, equalization isn't adjusted for geography, yet the most basic services--transport and communications, health care, education, almost anything you could name--are going to be inherently more expensive per-capita in geographically larger jurisdictions. If it is only the level of public service available to the client of government that counts, perhaps tiny P.E.I., which could almost educate and medicate its citizenry in one building, should be sending cash to huge, mountainous B.C.? (And should provinces that have to provide "public services" to resource industries be rewarded with bonuses, or punished by being forced to pay for those services out of an "equalized" tax take?)

I don't think s. 36(2) can be treated rigorously, though I can't very well quarrel with the text of the Constitution as such. Under a strict definition of "reasonable", the clause would involve counterfactual questions of the same insane, destructive sort that justiciable pay equity involves--the kind that would destroy "reason" in order to save it. Under a very strict definition, 36(2) would considerably worsen the existing moral hazard of equalization, completely taking away "have-not" governments' incentives for not preying on their own tax bases. And then again, it could always be pleaded by "haves" that provincial revenues, in the long run, depend on policy choices made within individual provinces, and that the constitutionally correct amount of equalization is thus inherently near-nil. Insofar as s. 36(2) should be treated as having force, though, it would seem--no matter what interpretation you select--to rubbish Courchene's whole idea of dragging Alberta's direct resource revenues into equalization.]