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I suppose Studio 60 just didn't have it, did it? It was never as good as The West Wing.

One of my last blog entries from May 28th a year ago, just before I stopped writing here, reported on Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list by hitting his 715th home run.

Today Barry Bonds tied Hank Aaron with number 755. Back then I also wrote that after number 756, that would probably be it for our lifetime in seeing the massive Major League Baseball Home Run records broken. After all, we have seen Roger Maris's record of 61 home runs fall in the last decade, and we may see Henry Aaron's mark fall tomorrow.

But then, earlier today, Alex Rodriguez became the youngest player ever to hit his 500th, beating Jimmie Foxx to the mark by 330 days. A-Rod is only playing in his 14th major league season, which means that he could surpass Barry Bonds in the long run.

It's going to be fun to wait and see.

"There's always been a conflict between art and commerce. And now I'm telling you that art is getting its ass kicked."

When Air Force One banked away from us and into the blue beyond last May, I lamented the loss of The West Wing, which, for seven long years, kept our hopes alive that with decent leadership government really could be a place where good people do great things.

But Aaron Sorkin--the mind behind The West Wing--and friends are back, and where the West Wing offered an alternate view of government, their hot new series is taking aim at the cowardice that has become the television media.

While those of you in the great U.S. of A. have to wait until tomorrow for the premiere of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, we in Canada were treated to it tonight on CTV.

After a sketch called "Crazy Christians" is cut at the last minute by the suits, the director of a top TV comedy show blows his stack on camera one night. Now Jordan McDeere, the young, new president of the National Broadcasting System (Amanda Peet, good for her for snagging this role!) has to move quickly to save the network from a media disaster. She decides to hire a dangerous but brilliant writer-director team to run the show and bring integrity and humour back. The catch is that Matt Albie and Danny Tripp were fired from Studio 60 just four years ago by the network's CEO, Jordan's new boss.

So here come Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford into what promises to be utter chaos.

Check out the show; it's the top of my list this fall. Mondays at 10:00 p.m. on NBC, and in Canada you can get it a night earlier: Sundays on CTV at 10.

Salon.com has a War Room blog entry that takes the mickey out of CNN senior national correspondent John Roberts, and then Wolf Blitzer. It is about how sanctions didn't stop Iraq from having weapons of mass destruction.

Wait a minute, what did I say?

2006 has been a year of many goodbyes so far. The West Wing, Will & Grace, and more. Today on Today is Katie Couric's last day, and I made sure to clear my schedule to watch her. You see, 15 years ago I tuned in on her first day, a stand-in role when Deborah Norville was on holiday. Cutey Katie was such a hit so quickly that Deborah ended up on permanent vacation.

So I am about to catch the second showing of Today on a west coast station. If you didn't see the show, don't worry. Entertainment Weekly has blogged it.

Tomorrow I may come back and make some comments on Meredith Vieira's first day. [Note: I just learned that Meredith doesn't start until after the summer hiatus. I'm an idiot.]

Barry Bonds today surpassed Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list.

He hit number 715 off Byung-Hyun Kim of the Colorado Rockies.

Let's put aside the controversies for one day and celebrate a great sports moment. Regardless of steroids, here is a magnificant achievement. Only #756 will top it, and that will probably be it for our lifetime.

I feel particularly bad about including something about American Idol on my blog, mainly because I have never watched the show and have tired of reality TV in general. But Dean Baker of Beat the Press has an interesting analysis of the Idol voting mechanism.

Dean explains why it is that the votes are always so close on the show. He observes that the phone lines are often jammed, and that there are therefore far more people trying to vote than those who actually get through to record their choice. He shows how this means that each contestant will almost always receive very similar final numbers.

Remember, on American Idol, you dial a different telephone number to vote for each candidate, you don't choose from a ballot when you get connected. It turns out that this makes all the difference.

If there are two phone numbers, one for Catherine and one for Taylor, they will each have the same amount of line capacity. This means that if the total capacity for each phone number is one million callers over a one hour period, then only about 1-million votes will be recorded for each contestant. But if there are 2-million people out there trying to vote for Taylor and 10-million for Catherine, then Catherine's 8-million extra supporters will mean nothing in the final vote tally. Catherine's millions of voters who can't get through will not have their votes counted and the numbers will come out very much the same.

Of course, there will always be some difference in the vote count, because some people will take milliseconds longer than others to actually record their vote. But this is mainly because of technical reasons that are out of their control. So if Taylor wins, it might not be because he was more popular, but just because the etheric milliseconds went his way.

Now I am really angry.

This morning I wrote about a story from the New York Post that indicated Iran had passed a law reminiscent of Nazi Germany that would force religious minorities to wear special clothing.

The story was from an Iranian columnist called Amir Taheri, and ran in Canada's National Post yesterday. It appears to have been picked up and then commented on in the New York Post, where I saw it.

Now the paper is running a denial from the Iranian embassy in Canada that such a law was ever passed.

I am angry because this morning after I read the story I told friends who will worry about this all the way to their overseas destination. They are travelling today and probably won't learn the truth until tomorrow or Monday.

I am angry at the paper. How could the National Post allow such a provocative story to make it into their pages? Don't they have any oversight? Don't they hire editors?

For anyone who was wondering if the National Post is a real newspaper or not, my experience today would indicate the negative.

But rest assured, Canada does have a real newspaper. It is called The Globe and Mail, and they have real journalistic coverage of this story that actually subscribes to the principles of balance and checking your sources. In the story, the only Jewish member of the Iranian parliament denies that such a law was introduced.

Hollywood's most attractive 50-year-old is out of a job.

The Associated Press is reporting that ABC has cancelled "Commander-in-Chief."

In this week's issue of the New York Tims Book Review, Pete Hamill dissects a new book by David Remnick, a collection of his articles from The New Yorker.

At the top of this blog, you will notice that I have left myself a licence to use this space for "excerpts." And here is one from Vladimir Nabokov, many of whose works have been made available in English by Remnick.

"In art as in science there is no delight without the detail. . . . All 'general ideas' (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers shortcuts from one area of ignorance to another."

Sylvester is the newest addition to our family. He is a mini Daschund whom Jenni and Michael found at an animal rescue centre in the Bay area.

From the first, Sylvester made himself right at home. He has his own sweater for when he gets the shivers and likes to look people in the eye. He is very friendly.

There was a comment today on Slashdot that summarizes in clear language the big, contemporary issues around copyright law. It is from a discussion about the Recording Industry Association of America shutting down another peer-to-peer file sharing group.

Read it here.

Some weeks ago I posted a commentary on net neutrality (Verizon bellyaching about Google's "free lunch"), a group of issues that have to do with how much control your Internet Service Provider should have over the content that you choose to access on the Internet.

Today, a committee of the US House of Representatives voted down an amendment that would give the Federal Communications Commission the right to enforce principles of net neutrality on the big telecommunications and cable companies that own the fiber-optic and co-axial pipes on which the Internet is built.

This is bad news. If that previous posting interested you, then you might like to have a look at the following:

On Salon today, Andrew Leonard comments on the net neutrality issue.

And for a more comprehensive analysis of the problem, have a read of Farhad Manjoo's excellent Salon article about net neutrality from a couple of weeks ago.

And this is simply genius.

Cool Tools: World Time Clock

Economist's View has posted the following 60 Minutes transcript from Sunday night. Enjoy.

60 Minutes: Bush, Cheney, Rice Told Iraq Had No WMD Program Before War

New Economist today references an appreciative portrait of John Stuart Mill, the father of modern liberalism, in Prospect Magazine, a British current affairs and culture periodical. Mill grew up as a child prodigy in the heart of rational utilitarianism--his father was Jeremy Bentham's closest disciple and Bentham was Mill's godfather. Utilitarianism promoted "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," and by the age of 15, he was already an accomplished logician and political economist. When, at 20, he underwent a mental crisis, the result was his gradual rejection of the caustic utilitarian philosophy and an increasing concern with human freedom. His most famous work, On Liberty, is one of the most influential philosophical statements on free speech and the importance of each individual's independent search for truth: "He who lets the world . . . choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties."

In May is the 200th anniversary of John Stuart Mill's birth. If you are not familiar with Mill, Richard Reeves's Portrait offers a highly readable introduction, if in a somewhat glorifying tone, to the main thrusts of Mill's life and work, including his optimistic view of human nature and his championship of free speech, women's suffrage and freedom for Ireland. And if you already know him, get ready for a refreshing reacquaintance with the thought of one of the nineteenth century's most compassionate and influential thinkers.

I have discovered a new blog by Dean Baker, an economist who co-directs the Center for Economic Policy and Research, and who formerly edited a periodical that analyzed the way financial numbers were reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In his blog, Beat the Press, Dean writes about the context of financial numbers and provides insightful yet readable contextual analysis of financial issues. You see, it is one thing to report a financial number in a news story, it is quite another to put it in an accurate context that conveys the proper, precise meaning of the number in the real world. Dean Baker analyzes the context to demystify these numbers for the general reader.

Today, he reports on the real size of the Chinese economy. He explains that even though the press regularly reports that China's economy will surpass the United States' in the next several decades, the actual size of the Chinese economy is regularly underestimated.

In the press, most economies are measured by a process of taking the nation's GDP in its own currency, and then converting it to a standard such as the American dollar. However, economies are properly compared according to "purchasing power parity," which means that if the same product is produced or service delivered in two different countries, the value of it is considered the same. So, he explains, a haircut in Guangzhou is priced the same, for analysis purposes, as the same haircut in New York, even though on the street one costs far less than the other. If you think about it, this makes sense, because why should a New York barber's standard haircut be considered inherently more valuable than another stylist's, who makes the same number of snips somewhere else?

The implication of this simple issue of financial context is profound. Instead of the common ranking of China's GDP as the fourth-largest economy (just below Germany's), Baker demonstrates how it is actually the second-largest, having just surpassed Japan. Furthermore, he estimates that China will surpass the United States much sooner than is popularly imagined: as early as 2015. This change in the interpretation of a single number in context has serious geopolitical ramifications, especially for how the Unites States perceives the rise of a Chinese power more rapidly than expected, and its accompanying political response.

Many thanks to New Economist for reporting on the existence of Beat the Press.

News outlets are reporting today on a new Greenpeace study that says the death toll from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 is much higher than previously believed.

See the BBC's story here.

Grammatical standards are an essential part of consistent written communications. If you think this is a dry subject for a blog, then go and have some unexpected fun with The Economist's Style Guide.

Good style guides are written by good writers, and some good writers are also hilarious. Here is just a taste from a letter to the editor which is included in the Syntax section of the guide:

SIR—At times just one sentence in The Economist can give us hours of enjoyment, such as “Yet German diplomats in Belgrade failed to persuade their government that it was wrong to think that the threat of international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia would itself deter Serbia” (August 15th 1992).

During my many years as a reader of your newspaper, I have distilled two lessons about the use of our language. Firstly, it is usually easier to write a double negative than it is to interpret it. Secondly, unless the description of an event which is considered to be not without consequence includes a double or higher-order negative, then it cannot be disproven that the writer has neglected to eliminate other interpretations of the event which are not satisfactory in light of other possibly not unrelated events which might not have occurred at all.

For these reasons, I have not neglected your timely reminder that I ought not to let my subscription lapse. It certainly cannot be said that I am an unhappy reader.

—WILLARD DUNNING

My friend has commented on how liberal my blog comments are, and I suppose that's true, but not because my considered views are liberal. I use this blog as a serengeti for my subconscious, somewhere my mind can roam and where I can write in a pre-cognitive fashion. What you get here is unedited reaction, and very few news sources offer as much material for reaction as the very liberal New York Times.

Saturday's edition is an excellent example. Just to prove that comical irony is safe and prospering in our world, how about two stories from the Times today?

Wal-Mart is ending the sale of firearms in one third of its stores. Is it because of public pressure? Have they found themselves in Michael Moore's sights? No, not at all. Believe it or not, the guns are disappearing from the shelves because of a lack of demand! The American public's desire for guns appears to be waning, and Wal-Mart will replace the guns with additional sporting equipment on which they can make money.

The gem of the story, though, is the response of the gun lobby that has to be one of the most ridiculously stupid things I have ever heard supposedly intelligent people say. From the article: "The National Rifle Association said it was concerned people in rural areas, where Wal-Mart might be the only purveyor, may no longer have access to guns."

Likewise, the front page Saturday ran a story about ExxonMobil, which has now surpassed GE as the most valuable company in the world. Andrew Leonard, in his blog at Salon, has been on the tail of Exxon for some time. They have recently been discounting the peak oil argument; last month they published an advertorial to that effect on the Times op-ed page. As Leonard advises: "When Exxon tells us to relax, Armageddon is undoubtedly right around the corner." "For years," he writes, "Exxon has been the single largest corporate donor to a rogue's gallery of conservative think tanks that make a living pretending that global warming is no big thing."

Exxon's CEO for the last twelve of those years was Lee R. Raymond. Having just retired, he has been the ringleader in Exxon's corporate drive to pile up the money while promoting the destruction of the planet. It is unknown whether or not Exxon has been moving its financial relationships to higher ground, or to what extent the company has investigated the dampness their greenbacks will shortly be exposed to in the vaults of Manhattan's banks. What we do know is his reward for all this.

In the last twelve years, Raymond has received $144,573 in compensation. Every single day. His total compensation since 1993 was $686-million!

Now this is even crazier than the NRA. To put this in perspective, we would have been only slightly more stupid had we given Hitler a pension and a nice winter house near Jericho. In two hundred years people are going to look back in utter disbelief at what complete imbeciles we all were.

At the very least, please, please do a manual spell-check on your last will and testament.

If you would like to deepen your appreciation of this absurdity, you can find the Exxon salary article here, and Andrew Leonard's assessment of Exxon here in Salon's How the World Works.

The Wal-Mart announcement is a reprint from an Associated Press story.

As prosecutors in Virginia try to raise the tragedy factor in their trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, I would like to pause a moment and consider whether or not the man should be executed. Many news reports of the trial relate how Moussaoui seems pleased with every piece of evidence against him, particularly the violent ones: he smiled all the way through the tapes of the planes hitting the towers and today displayed the same attitude when listening to the cockpit recordings of United 93.

Although most Americans probably want the death penalty for him, maybe we should look just a tiny, unsophisticated sliver deeper into this situation.

First of all, this man trained and prepared mentally to be a glorious suicide bomber. He committed himself long ago to this course of action and it became the driving passion of his life. Then he ruined everything for himself by screwing up and getting caught. Nothing could have been worse for him than not being able to carry out his wishes and die for the cause.

But then, lucky for him, a simplistic American public opinion and some shortsighted, inept prosecutors have been pleading his cause for him by doing everything they can to give him his martyrdom on a silver platter. This guy must be delighted!

Why not show just a little intelligence, wise up to his wishes, and just put him in prison to stymie his plans to be a glorious martyr? The last thing he and his Al-Qaeda colleagues want is for his life to be spared by the mercy of the American people, and to live out 50 years in a merciful, cushy prison.

That would be the very worst punishment Zacarias Moussaoui could ever imagine.

During this fortnight of my oblivion, the following earth-shaking events have captured the conscience of mankind.

Andrew Card resigned as White House Chief of Staff and was replaced by his Mini-Me in a typical Bush non-attempt to respond positively to advice.

Israel elected Ehud Olmert to make another attempt at peace and thereby brought down upon him the impending curse on Israeli peacemakers. Have you noticed that the moment an Israeli Prime Minister takes sincere, successful action toward peace, they are struck down by some otherworldly occurrence of fate? Rabin shakes hands on the White House lawn and is assassinated. Peres, the one Israeli leader who you can trust to always be fair loses his party. Barak jumps with gusto on the peace train and is hammered in the next election. Sharon puts behind him a lifetime of warmongering to hand over Gaza and now he's in a coma after a freak stroke. In case you didn't know, Ehud Olmert is starring in the new Superman movie coming out this May.

Everybody is still fumbling with Iran even as Bush fails again, this time with his team messing up on the Moussaoui case. This week in Salon, Sidney Blumenthal has a great article comparing Bush's and Hoover's similar responses to criticism. You see, until our friend George came along, Herbert Hoover was considered the biggest presidential foul-up in the past hundred years. You will notice that this sounds eerily familiar: in June 1930 he announced that, "The Depression is over," and then proceeded to veto public works and unemployment insurance. It says it all when the current American president is given the nod over Hoover's Depression denial as the most blind and rigid chief executive for a century.

Teri Hatcher is going out with Ryan Seacrest, not George Clooney as the tabloids at Oscartime supposed. You know you're on the B-list when you score a major actress and everybody thinks George did it.

Joey seems to have disappeared again after one new episode and Brad, Angelina, Jen, Nick and Jessica are, oh, who cares.

Coming up tomorrow, Sharon Stone returns as Catherine Tramell in a much-anticipated sequel that will either mark her comeback at 40-something or the formal end of her career.

In their final attempt to stave off eradication from the popular consciousness, the gay cowboys release their DVD next Tuesday, a month less a day after their party really ended.

Oil is up, CNN has upped their home page to 1024x768, and the pandemic hasn't struck yet.

Now that I have been unconscionably flippant about the worst criminal act and human tragedy of the second millennium, let's return to the issue in all its severity.

Most of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany were labour camps attached to German industry, such as production sites for building materials like bricks, gravel, steel, armaments and other war products such as shoes made by the Bata shoe factory. Many evolved into extermination camps. By 1944, there were 385 concentration and extermination camps in total under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Cracow in Poland, was initially a prisoner of war camp for Russian prisoners of the Eastern Front. But Himmler was an intelligent man, and he soon realized that his concentration of cheap, captive labour would be attractive to IG Farben, the third largest company in the world, and he arranged with them to build a factory to take advantage of it. It was never completed and instead the camp turned into the largest extermination camp of the war, with 1,250,000 deaths.

Only a few camps were founded purely as extermination sites for the Jews of Europe. They were:

Sobibor (Poland) 200,000 killed
Treblinka (Poland) 750,000 killed
Belzec (Poland) 550,000 killed, and
Kulmhof (Wartheland, now Poland) 150,000 killed.

The most infamous of the remaining camps were Dachau (near Munich), Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen (in Oranienburg, a brickmaking centre near Berlin), Mauthausen (near Linz, Austria), Majdanek (near Lublin, Poland), Buchenwald (near Weimar), Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme (near Hamburg), Ravensbruck, and Lichtenburg (a women's camp between Bayreuth and Weimar).

My grandfather was in one of the British Army divisions that liberated Belsen.

For those whose families never actually suffered in the camps, the real horror of the Nazi crimes is that most of the people who committed them were just ordinary Joes doing their ordinary jobs. And if Joe next door is capable of such consummate evil, then maybe any of us are. In her famous articles in the New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt revealed that Eichmann was not a flamboyant mass murderer as everyone wanted to believe, nor the demonic monster of everyone's imagination: he was a bland functionary whose life consisted of pushing paper and carrying out the administrative drudgery of an ordinary bureaucracy. The primary difference is that his employer was in the business of exterminating people and he had no problem doing his job. She called it "the banality of evil."

Another author has written of the men who designed and built Auschwitz that none of them were born to be mass murderers: "They inched their way to iniquity."

Given that this week saw the death of one mass murderer, here is an off-colour joke about another.

[Warning: This will probably be offensive to several million people, so read on at your own risk.]

One day Adolf Hitler wanted to know when he was going to die, and so he called one of his German soothsayers to ask the question. The gentleman came and said, "Oh, Herr Führer, if you really want to know that, you need to ask the world's greatest soothsayer." "Who is that?" asked Hitler. "His name is Moshe Shalom, and he is in Auschwitz, but he is going to be executed tomorrow." So Hitler says, "Alright, send him here today, and if he gives me a good answer I will spare his life." And so Moshe Shalom arrives in Berlin and is brought in front of the Führer, and the question is asked. "Herr Führer," says Moshe Shalom, "I can see that you are going to die on a Jewish holiday." "I see," says the Führer, "but which day will that be?" And Moshe Shalom says, "Herr Führer, any day that you die will be a Jewish holiday."

If anyone would like an apology, please ask and I will be more than happy to provide one.

Ex-Serbian Leader Slobodan Milosevic Dies -- The Washington Post

Paan, a mouthful of aromatic spices wrapped in a betelnut pepper leaf, is chewed after dinner on the Indian subcontinent. Each paan is popularly given a number to indicate its potency: a fifty paan is stronger than a twenty. Tobacco is sometimes added, and they say that a paan with a high enough number will kill you.

It became clear this weekend that President Musharraf has been chewing too much paan after his feeble plea for a civil nuclear cooperation deal for Pakistan, just like the one President Bush struck with India the day before.

Let's see: India is the world's largest democracy, English-speaking, stable, a major source of skilled graduate students for an America with tanking math and science scores, and an innovative, high-tech economy that will check China's rise. Pakistan is an Islamic nation of 140 million people, in other words an ant next to an elephant, where from his corner store in Islamabad, Dr. A. Q. Khan spent the last twenty years selling nuclear bomb-making equipment and blueprints to North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

Mr. Musharraf runs a military dictatorship that is so shaky that he has to appease his populace by making hopeless pleas like this one simply to maintain political support. Once the inevitable happens and the radicals oust him, Pakistan will become the first terrorist supporting government to own its very own nuclear weapons.

Even though Bush's deal will likely start a new Asian arms race, and in spite of the obvious source of Daily Show commentary here, doesn't it sound safer to share nuclear technology with a billion people who all believe in reincarnation?

You can see the article in the New York Times here: Bush Rules Out a Nuclear Deal With Pakistanis. Of course, you have to pay for their archives, so here is a .pdf of the article for when the link inevitably expires.