Goldberg is a perplexing figure, a former member of the IDF, quick to call anti-semitism against anyone who balks at his lockstep advocacy of troubling Israeli policies. He caused a stir recently with an Atlantic cover story speculating about an impending Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Many regarded the article as thinly disguised tub-thumping for such an attack (see here and here), while others demurred. In the end, the Atlantic held an extensive, online print debate about the issue — which may turn out to be the most important of the decade.

Turns out Castro was reading, and two weeks ago, Goldberg got a phone call from Jorge Bolanos, head of the US State Department’s Cuban Interest Section.

“I have a message for you from Fidel,” Bolanos said. “He has read your Atlantic article about Iran and Israel. He invites you to Havana on Sunday to discuss the article.”

Goldberg and Castro, who is clearly worried about the prospect of war in the Middle East, chatted for three days, and while he might not be my choice for an interlocutor, he was Fidel’s, and the results are fascinating.

This week, Craigslist, the online classified ad service,  shuttered the erotic services sections of its US websites, replacing them with a black banner reading, “Censored.” Canadian Press reports that the RCMP want Craigslist’s Canadian section to follow suit, and block access to its adult services section.

If the Mounties get their way, the main result will be more suffering by vulnerable women. Some prostitutes will be forced back onto the streets; more will be deprived of a way to screen potential clients in their dicey occupation. The one thing that won’t stop is prostitution.

I can’t put this better than a recent post by Jacob Sullum at Reason.com:

Armed with nothing but sternly worded letters, indignant press releases, and a seemingly inexhaustible store of self-righteousness, [Connecticut Attorney General and US Senatorial candidate Richard] Blumenthal played a key role in pressuring Craigslist to shut down its “adult services” section, which he called a “blatant Internet brothel.”…

Although fighting prostitution is not part of Blumenthal’s portfolio as attorney general, it is part of his campaign for the U.S. Senate, in which he portrays himself as a crusader who is unafraid to challenge “the biggest special interests.” With an estimated $122 million in revenue this year, Craigslist is not all that big, but it dominates the online classified ad business and runs one of the country’s most popular websites.

Conflating prostitution with slavery and child rape, Blumenthal accused Craigslist of profiting from horrendous crimes. “We recognize that craigslist may lose the considerable revenue generated by the Adult Services ads” if it closes the section, Blumenthal and 16 other state attorneys general wrote in an August 24 letter to the company. “No amount of money, however, can justify the scourge of illegal prostitution, and the suffering of the women and children who will continue to be victimized, in the market and trafficking provided by craigslist.”

Blumenthal ignores both the law’s role in fostering coercion and violence by driving the business underground and the protection that services like Craigslist can provide by allowing prostitutes to screen customers and avoid walking the streets. But to fully appreciate the audacity of his charge that money blinded Craigslist to the suffering of sex slaves, note that the company started charging for adult service ads in 2008 at the behest of law enforcement officials. The idea was that fees would thin the section, while requiring a credit card and a valid phone number would deter criminal activity.

Craigslist also hired dozens of lawyers to screen ads for compliance with the company’s terms of use, which prohibit “offer or solicitation of illegal prostitution.” Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster reportsthat “more than 700,000 ads were rejected by those attorneys in the year following implementation of manual screening” in May 2009, while Village Voice Media’s Backpage.com (where the ads are far more explicit) saw a big increase in business….

As an “interactive computer service,” Craigslist had no obligation to screen ads; under federal law, posters are exclusively responsible for such content. By taking precautions that were bound to be less than completely effective, the company invited further demands from bullying busybodies like Blumenthal, who deemed last week’s capitulation merely a “step in the right direction.”

Hat tip: Daily Dish. Image: 142 Hollis St. South of Salter, by Donald Cameron MacKay, 1929, via the Dalhousie University archives. Disclosure: Many years ago, I worked on a college newspaper with Blumenthal. Funny, I don’t recall him being such a horse’s ass back then.

Tanya Davis

Sandbar Music of Charlottetown, PEI, has released a soundtrack MP3 of  the hit YouTube video, How To Be Alone.

Tanya Davis wrote and performed the poetry and music at the heart of the piece; Andrea Dorfman directed the film, which had been viewed just over 600 times when featured here July 30. (Find a partial account of its viral progress toward the current 1.4 million hits here.)

It’s plain that, aside from one crankypants Globe and Mail reviewer, lots of people want to hear music and poetry like Davis’s, and see moving pictures like Dorfman’s. The traditional distribution paradigm had little use for such artists, but in the Internet age, they — and we — have a chance to encounter one another. Once we were lonely, but now we have the long tail.

Sandbar Music, “the little music company that could,” is an interesting outfit that’s trying to nudge that process along, giving artists like Davis a way to —forgive the phrase — monetize their work.

Andrea Dorfman

You can download the How To Be Alone MP3 for just 99¢, and I urge you to do so. As Davis points out, “That’s less than a dollar.”

If you’re near Sydney on November 4, you can view the video on the big screen at the annual Cape Breton Island Film Series benefit for L’Arche Cape Breton. I urge you to do that, too. It will show with the feature film Babies, followed by a musical party and Lebanese buffet. We hope Dorfman and perhaps even Davis will be on hand.

You can sample and buy lots of several indie artists’ music on the Sandbar site, including a newly completed album by Davis.

Late in July, Google searches began filtering out any results for the website bestofyoutube.com, an aggregator of videos from the Google-owned video site.

I can understand why Google might have a problem with bestofyoutube, which, it could be argued, infringes Google’s intellectual property by poaching YouTube content. Mind you, it would be a brazen case for Google to make, given that YouTube itself contains petabytes of pirated content. Be that as it may, the proper remedy is to seek relief from the perceived offense through negotiations or in court.

The least-Googley solution is to skew the world’s knowledge database by misleading google searchers into thinking the offending website no longer exists.

In the past, Google has filtered search results for websites that try to game its search algorithm. That’s a different matter,  possibly justifiable as necessary to protect the integrity of the search process. Pretending a company Google doesn’t like doesn’t exist undermines the integrity of the search algorithm.

Earlier complaints about Google gaming its own search results in a self-serving manner here and here.

Contrarian has asked Google’s media department for a comment but, you know, they’re quite big and we’re quite small. Don’t hold your breath.

Hat tip: SBD

Blueberries and bakeapples will be accepted in lieu of flowers.

A relative of yours, Stan?

Hat tip: JP.

1.  How’s she goin?

and:

2.  What’s your father’s name?”

Most if not all news accounts of such accidents provide no information about the factors involved. From your account it is clear that  a) slowing down during bad conditions; b) having proper approved child safety restraints; and c) operating a vehicle with a good safety rating are the right ingredients for safe driving with a family.  This account is far more valuable to the world in general than a news report that simply says a head-on collision sent five to hospital with non life-threatening injuries and the driver of a second vehicle was killed.

I am a motorcyclist, and I read with great attention every account of accidents involving bikes.  Rarely if at all are details given as to circumstances. There may be a statement which says the accident is being investigated but the results are never made public. Such dry reportage has no value if circumstances are left to pure speculation. How can I or anyone else learn anything from that?

As an example, the inordinate number of fatal accidents along the Trans Canada near Antigonish in the last few weeks has left a general impression that all have been caused by impatient drivers trying to pass where they shouldn’t.  There have been no facts whatsoever presented to support that assumption, yet it persists. Elected officials are now demanding massive public expenditures to twin the highway. On what facts is that assumption based?

I am sure your deeply personal account will be read by many and give cause for serious thought about our own respective situations and hopefully remind us all that there is a story behind the story.

Thank you to the many readers who wrote messages of concern about Silas, Jenn, Maggie, Josh, and Jacob. We are all grateful. They are all on the mend.

The five occupants of this 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan — my son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren — survived a head-on collision on the TransCanada Highway Thursday evening. I offer the following details in hopes that other families will find it helpful to understand the factors that decisively improved their chances of survival.

Shortly before 5 p.m, August 26, my family was westbound on Route 105 in Lexington, Nova Scotia, just north of the Canso Causeway, when a severe rain squall hit the area. Daughter-in-law Jenn had just slowed down when an eastbound car apparently hydroplaned and spun across the centerline into their path.

Grandson Jacob, age 6, suffered a broken femur. The others — Jenn, my son Silas, Jacob’s twin brother Josh and sister Maggie, 8 — were badly bruised and badly shaken. Surgeons at the IWK-Grace Hospital in Halifax repaired Jacob’s leg Saturday. Doctors expect all to recover fully. We are grateful to them, and to the EMTs and volunteers who responded to the crash.

The driver and lone occupant of the other car, Marlene MacDonald of Port Hawkesbury and Washabuckt, died at the scene.

I offer my sincere sympathy to Ms. MacDonald’s daughters, grandchildren, and siblings. Events like this cause those affected to reflect on counterfactual alternatives; since Thursday, our family and friends have thought constantly of the MacDonald family’s suffering, and how easily it could have been ours. I am sorry for their loss.

Death and injuries in car crashes result not from a vehicle’s collision with another object but from what’s sometimes called the second collision — that of the occupants with the inside surfaces of the car. The second collision occurs a fraction of a second after the first.

Here are some of the factors that made the second collision survivable in my family’s case:

• Jenn reduced speed to reflect driving conditions, lessening the force of the subsequent impact.
• In response to legislation, insurance company pressures, and consumer demand, automobile manufacturers have made tremendous improvements in the crashworthiness of their cars over the last decade. Modern vehicles are better engineered to absorb and dissipate the force of sudden impacts while maintaining the integrity of the passenger compartment.
• Jenn and Silas drove a 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan equipped with front and side airbags. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety gives this model a “good” rating (its highest) for “frontal offset” and “side impact” test results. You can check the crashworthiness of your car here.
• All the occupants were secured with optimal, industry-recommended safety equipment: the adults with standard lap-and-shoulder belts; the eight-year-old with a child’s safety booster seat held in place by a  lap-and-shoulder belt; the six-year-olds by properly secured child safety seats appropriate to their size and weight.

The last point merits emphasis. For many families, child safety seats are expensive to purchase and tedious to install and use. After Thursday, the expense and inconvenience look pretty small to us, the benefits enormous.

Finally, a word of thanks to the numberless, nameless engineers, auto executives, safety advocates, insurance industry risk analysts, and legislators who helped my dear family survive.

Their survival is not a miracle. It is the result of considered steps by real people to improve highway safety.

What’s up with Queens County, Nova Scotia, and orange vehicles? Top to bottom: Ford Ranger 4×4, Charleston; Harley Davidson, White Point; Custom two-door, Liverpool.

Nyanza, 10 a.m., August 23, 2010.