No.

It should be like at airports, everything gets checked, even your body gets checked.

This was the opinion of a Greyhound passenger in the wake of yesterday's gruesome murder aboard a bus in Manitoba. She's not alone, but she is wrong.

First, let's understand the rationale for airport security: airplanes aren't like any other mode of transportation. If somebody gains control of an airplane, either by force or by threat thereof, everybody aboard that airplane is completely at the highjacker's mercy. Moreover, there is zero chance of any useful intervention from law enforcement personnel while the situation is ongoing. The highjacker can exact concessions, or, if his goal is less personnel, he can just kill everyone aboard (and plenty more besides, as we saw a few years ago). Hence airport security.

But even here, I have a sense that we might have gone too far. I'm emphatically no expert on airport security, but for me the apparent lesson of September 11 wasn't that we should tighten it a whole bunch, but that we probably couldn't prevent a really determined group of people from highjacking an airplane by force (remember, these were boxcutters, and if they could do it with those they could probably do it with something that we haven't even thought of yet). Ultimately, we take a risk when we get on airplanes, and that risk can't be eliminated. Fortunately, it's already pretty negligible.

Same goes for buses, only more so. Buses, by most measures, are already pretty safe: there are plenty of people around, and there's nowhere for a would-be assailant to escape. Essentially, the only person who would pull something like that is somebody with no particular regard for self-preservation. Unfortunately, as we saw, there are such people. Fortunately, that risk too - the risk of being murdered by a stranger aboard a passenger bus - would be so negligible as to be laughable under other circumstances. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's about the same as the risk of being murdered in a crowded shopping mall, or walking down a busy street, or in any number of other situations to which we expose ourselves daily. It seems likely that if this guy didn't do this on a bus he would have done so elsewhere at some point.

There's been a lot of examination of the merits of curtailing our liberty in the interests of protecting ourselves against an organized threat. The wise realize, to use a cliche, that if we sacrifice our liberties for the sake of protecting ourselves from terrorists, those terrorists have won. The same isn't true when it comes to protecting ourselves from random isolated threats like the one that took the life of that Greyhound passenger - there are no winners there - but the same principles apply. Fear exists for a solid evolutionary reason, and we're often wise to heed it. But there's a point at which a rational fear (hey, there's a bear on the trail, so we probably shouldn't keep following it) crosses the line into hysteria, when the fear ad the actions it inspires (or prevents) is a greater threat to our well-being than is its target. The notion that bus passengers should have to go through metal detectors, assuming the necessary cost in time and money to do so, is well past that line.

In other words, Part I

Today we introduce "In other words", a new feature at NoM that will probably only occur this once. In it, taking wordings used in various published media and find less ridiculous ways of putting them. It's possible, but not certain, that it was inspired by a colleague of mine who suggested that Metric's song "Patriarch on a Vespa" should be retitled "My Dad Rides a Scooter".

In any event, today's edition looks at a sentence written by the Calgary Herald's Renata D'Aliesio, in this article: "Stelmach is the first premier from the Edmonton area since Don Getty." While that's true, wouldn't a better wording have been "Ralph Klein wasn't from the Edmonton area"?

Questions to which I'm unlikely to get any useful answers from my readership, Part 1

A friend has given me twelve tracks to convince him that Neil Young is the greatest artist in popular music. He has other friends he has challenged to do the same with David Bowie and the Beatles. Their tasks aren't easy either, but, with all due respect, I think mine is the hardest. Neil Young has been incredibly prolific over his career - we're talking about a guy who has released more than thirty solo studio albums (the exact number depends on how you count), eight live albums, and about a half dozen albums as a member of other bands...and whose allegedly impending release of material from his archives is still eagerly anticipated because there's so much that he's recorded without releasing.

Put it another way: forget something as crude as evaluating his body of work and picking the best twelve songs, there are at least six albums that need to be represented by at least one song just by virtue of the strength of the whole album, and that doesn't include mandatory songs from otherwise unremarkable albums - think Like a Hurricane, Rocking in the Free World, and Cortez the Killer (yes, I'm calling On the Beach "otherwise unremarkable" - live with it). And hey, didn't he do some relatively notable stuff with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash & Young too? How am I supposed to find room for that?

And it's not just the prolificness, it's also the diversity: Young has dabbled in so many genres that any attempt to represent the best of his career in twelve songs is going to be hamstrung by the need to pick them from each category. There's the famous Electric Neil/Acoustic Neil dichotomy of course (you can count me as being slightly in the Acoustic Neil camp, but I'm sort of a weenie), but things are actually more nuanced than that. For example, I think there needs to be at least one ragged electric track with stupid and repetitive lyrics (Welfare Mothers, Fuckin' Up, Dirty Old Man, etc.), one surreal look back at characters from the new world's founding (Pocahontas, Cortez the Killer, Like an Inca, etc.), one protest song (Ohio, Campaigner, almost anything from Living with War, etc.), one song about artistic integrity (This Note's for You, Prisoners of Rock and Roll, Restless Consumer, etc.), one towering electric epic (okay, this one's easy now that Ordinary People has finally been released), and, if we really want a representative cross-section, one track that even the most forgiving Young fan can't get all the way through without cringing in embarrassment on Young's behalf (America the Beautiful, Old King, the entire Trans album, etc.). And hey, shouldn't his collaboration with Pearl Jam get some play?

In summary, Neil Young is clearly a better artist than Bowie or the Beatles. But I think I've got the hardest task all the same.

If there are any other Neil Young fans out there, some advice would be appreciated.

A test for the construtionalists

Guys like Antonin Scalia have a reputation as being very small-c conservative and capital-R Republican. Their defenders, at least one of whom frequents my comments section (there's a clue that narrows it down to, um, one person) claim that this is a mischaracterization, and that Scalia merely favours a textual approach to statutory interpretation that happens to often align with Republican positions (since the Republicans are, on balance, the more likely of the two major parties to be stuck in the eighteenth century).

This seems like a good litmus test.

(To be clear, I don't personally know the first damned thing about American constitutional law, so I'm just taking this professor's interpretation at face value. I suspect there are also plenty of legal experts arguing the opposite side, although it's interesting that the one quoted in the article seems to take a decidedly unoriginalist approach.)

Things that occur to me while reading newspaper letter sections

Has there ever been a war in which Canadian troops were fighting for anything even vaguely resembling Canadian citizens' right to vote? Because you can be damned sure that this argument - that not voting dishonours the memory of our fallen soldiers who fought for our democratic rights - will get trotted out any time voter turnout does. Canadians have fought some just wars - World War II was an eminently just war fought for a mixture of just and unjust reasons, and I happen to cautiously file Afghanistan under the "just" heading as well - and some unjust ones, but were there any in which our right to vote was even indirectly threatened? Hell, you can make the argument that the War of 1812 was essentially a war in which Canadians fought against the right to vote, though I don't suppose that was a primary motivator.

Eternal springage

Item: Jack Layton anticipates NDP "breakthrough" in Alberta, led by Ray Martin's candidacy in Edmonton-East.

Yeah, I'd say it's more or less inevitable.