Attentive Contrarian readers will have noticed the new "Report a Tpyo" link at the top of each post: Copy editing has never been Contrarian's long suit. Countless fine editors — Doug MacKay, Alexander Farrell, Jo-Anne MacDonald, Jack Thomas, Bill Turpin, Stacey Pineau, Penny Body, Doug McGee, and other too numerous — have saved my sorry bacon from embarrassment again and again. Now it's your turn. Often written in haste, Contrarian relies on crowd-sourcing for error correction. Mike Targett, Contrarian's techno-fixer and geopolitics scout, added the Report a Tpyo link to ease this process. Clicking the link brings up a pre-addressed email you...

20 December, 2009

Ben Goldacre, a physician who hosts the Bad Science website and writes the UK Guardian's Bad Science has produced a witty compendium of the year in dodgy scientific research in the UK and elsewhere. Moneyquote: A £6m Home Office drugs education study was published with no results, because it was so flawed it couldn’t produce any, we saw MPs being foolish about cervical screening and moon magic, and then when they didn’t like the scientific evidence they got from Professor David Nutt, they sacked him. If politicians want us to take them seriously on the evidence for global warming, they have...

20 December, 2009

The UK Guardian, a trailblazer in the quest for newspaper survival in a digital era, has an Advent calendar of its best datablog entries for 2009: Hat tip: Cheryl Cook....

18 December, 2009

Contrarian reader Cliff White writes: What a wonderful letter: short, succinct, to the point, and balanced. I've personally found this whole affair very disturbing.  Although the media in general have been very good in following it and keeping it on the front burner, they have also, at times, let what seems to me the main issues slide out of focus. The issue is not whether there was proof that Canadian detainees were tortured. Anyone with a scintilla  of sense knew torture by Afghan forces was common place and it you'd have to be a complete fool to suggest that, for some reason, only...

11 December, 2009

Ten days ago, we speculated on the embarrassment Globe and Mail journalists must feel over columnist Christie Blatchford's obsequiousness to the Harper government, as displayed in her columns attacking diplomat Richard Colvin. Paul Wells of Maclean's has an interesting and detailed follow-up in his Inkless Wells blog. Moneyquote: In 20 years in journalism I have never seen anything resembling the systematic and sustained repudiation to which Christie Blatchford, the Globe and Mail’s marquee columnist, is being subjected by her own newspaper. There is room in any good paper for disagreements among colleagues, and frankly there should, for a long time now,...

11 December, 2009

Contrarian reader and tech fixer Mike Targett points out that Guardian columnist George Monbiot, whose blistering denunciation of Canada's climate change policies appeared here yesterday, was in Toronto to take part in a Munk Debate Tuesday. One of a series sponsored by Aurea Foundation, the debate considered this proposition: "Be it resolved: climate change is mankind's defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response." Monbiot and Elizabeth May took the affirmative; Bjørn Lomborg and Lord Nigel Lawson the negative. Audience polls taken before and after the debate showed the con side to be slightly more persuasive. My reading is that Lomborg and Lawson...

03 December, 2009

Several Globe and Mail reporters who looked looked at the leaked Colvin emails that fueled Christie Blatchford's recent philippics against the diplomat came up with a very different picture. To begin, here's Paul Koring: The Harper government has blacked out large sections of relevant files handed over to the independent inquiry probing allegations of transfer to torture of detainees in Afghanistan, despite the fact that its investigators have the highest levels of national security clearance. The heavily redacted documents...

01 December, 2009

In a follow-up to her screed against diplomat Richard Colvin, Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford resorts to a full-blown bucket defence. According to Blatchford: There is no evidence Afghan security forces abused prisoners Canada turned over to them: "This is not akin to officials knowing that Afghans were being tortured." Everyone knew Afghan security forces abused prisoners Canada turned over to them: "[It's] obvious that Afghanistan is a brutal country where cruelty, hardship and physical violence are a way of life. No one with a lick of sense would expect that Afghan prisoners would live in comfort or ease." Colvin never actually...

01 December, 2009

In the PMO War Room, columnist Christie Blatchford must have seemed an inspired choice. She can turn a purple phrase with the best of them. She stands foursquare for troops, widows, and orphans. She's against plummies, toffs, and pointyheads. She's long on guts and glory, short on assay. She has an ego as big as the Ritz, and fragile as a Gruyère Soufflé. To receive a document drop on a Matter of National Importance would be sweet validation. So the Harper Government—someone in the Harper Government—got the brilliant idea of handing Blatchford a trove of Richard Colvin's long-sought emails from Kandahar,...

29 November, 2009

If the largest news service in the United States still feels the need to run musty sidebars about the distaff side of state functions, then we can't be too surprised when it makes a boo-boo this cringe-inducing: First lady wears Naeem Khan gown to state dinner By SAMANTHA CRITCHELL (AP) – 4 days ago First lady Michelle Obama chose to wear a gleaming silver-sequined, flesh-colored gown Tuesday night to the first state dinner held by her husband's administration. She was tending to her hostess duties in a strapless silhouette with the beads forming an abstract floral pattern that was custom-made by Naeem Khan. Er,...

29 November, 2009
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