Photos from England 3

Westminster Abbey - I didn't take a particularly good photo, but this is a striking memory.


All around Leicester Square are these plaques identifying the "colonies", their capitals, and the distance ceom London. Here is ours.


And here is the Leicester Square statue of Charlie Chaplin -- it was raining too hard to get a shot of the Shakespeare statue. There are a thousand parks and squares and a thousand statues -- on the way back in the cab, we passed by the statues of Sidney Herbert and Florence Nightengale, who reformed British health care after the Crimean War, so I regret not getting the chance to photograph these ones.


On the left is Andre Philippe, our amazing "ripperologist" guide for what turned out to be an amazing "Jack the Ripper Tour" -- I thought it would be sorta silly and it turned out to be absolutely fascinating because our guide has been studying the Ripper for 20 years. He is an historian who lived in the East End so that he could track down the descendents of the Ripper's victims and develop his theory about the man who was very likely the Ripper - Andre makes a compelling case and he is writing a book about it. If any Ripper book deserves to be published, it is his.

For my earlier posts, see Photos from England 1 and Photos from England 2

Andrew Coyne's abortion mischief

Today's Maclean's cover story is a longish argument by Andrew Coyne that we should toss abortion back into the legislative arena. Why? Apparently because it's time.

There is, in fact, something quintessentially, even touchingly, Canadian about Coyne's piece. There's presently a "legal void" with respect to abortion. Despite his impeccable conservative credentials, Coyne, it seems, is hungry for regulation. "When it comes to abortion, we are literally a lawless society," he says, invoking connotations of a Western town before the sheriff rides in.

For him, it's all about process. "This is not about abortion," he begins. "It's about democracy." How did we end up with no abortion law? An accident of history! It wasn't meant to be this way. No other country has no abortion law. We've got to do something! Now!

I'm not trying to caricature Coyne's arguments with all those exclamation marks, but there does seem to be a kind of quiet panic in his words. Abortion is unfinished business. The current Order of Canada controversy proves just that. Time to put our shoulders to the wheel and put abortion back in the Criminal Code. Or, at least, settle that matter democratically.

Abortion is not currently lawful, he says, merely not illegal. In my layman's mind, I assumed that anything not forbidden was permitted. In Singapore, chewing gum is against the law. In Canada, we have no law respecting gum-chewing. Is it lawful to chew gum in Canada, or just not illegal? Enough. I have no idea what point Coyne is trying to make here, other than making an appeal for a legal regime that would hold reproductive freedom in its toils, sorting out lawful abortion from unlawful abortion. You can have an abortion You can't. It's the law.

How does he attempt to make this case? He uses two general approaches. First, as noted, he claims that there was a failure of process two decades ago. Secondly, he argues in effect that there is a split amongst Canadians that can only be healed by dragging the issue back into the legal realm.

On the alleged failure of democratic process, he takes us back to the January 1988 Supreme Court decision that struck down Canada's abortion law. Did the SCC establish a constitutional right to abortion? No. But, as Coyne concedes, "it's difficult...to say what the Court wanted with any precision." It was a 5-2 decision, with four separate judgements. Clearly, though (he insists), they expected some new Charter-compliant law would replace the restrictive Section 251 of the Criminal Code that they struck down.

The SCC might have held that door open, but, as it turned out, no one wanted to walk through it. The Mulroney government of the day first tried a "pick one" approach, putting on the floor of the House of Commons a three-part motion that offered a selection of pro-choice, "pro-life" and compromise positions. Surprise, surprise there was no majority support for any of the positions. In a classic example of strange bedfellows, in fact, pro-choice and "pro-life" MPs voted against the compromise. But neither faction had enough support to get its own way.

A few months later, the government put its compromise position before the House. It would allow early-stage abortion if a doctor agreed, but restrict access later on in the pregnancy. The proposal didn't fly. Then, the following year, a watered-down version of the previous law, C-43, was put before the House. It passed by the slimmest of margins--140-131--and went to the Senate, where it ultimately failed, on a tied vote.

Coyne finds all of this undemocratic, which I find passing strange. The issue had been hassled about in the House of Commons three times since the old law had been struck down. On the third attempt, a new measure barely passed. The Senate blocked it, a Senate that had just previously been stuffed with Conservative appointments to ensure passage of Mulroney's Free Trade Agreement. But the Senate, unelected, undemocratic, a vestige of another day and age, does not have authority over the House of Commons.

Nothing prevented the Commons from reintroducing the measure. Nothing prevented the Prime Minister from making the same observation that Coyne makes in his article; namely that the acting Speaker of the Senate, who had abstained, was entitled to vote but (Coyne says) didn't realize it. Nothing prevented lobbying behind the scenes to get support from some of the 23 Senators who didn't vote. But the Mulroney government simply saw the writing on the wall, and decided to pursue the matter no further.

That strikes me as Parliamentary democracy in action, warts and all. The government spent an enormous amount of time and energy getting the matter debated, and rising again after each failure to have another go at it. Public lobbying was at a peak. The Canadian Medical Association, various powerful women's groups and much of the general public weighed in on the pro-choice side. What Henry Morgentaler recently called the "usual suspects" put their own considerable resources behind the anti-choice lobby. The result, after all that, was that insufficient consensus existed to have any law at all.

The case for passing a law, it seems to me, should be that a broad public consensus exists that such a law is required. One doesn't pass a law simply for the sake of having a law. But in this case, no one formulation of an abortion law had anything but minority support. If it's democracy that Coyne wants to invoke, the conclusion here is obvious.

But not, it seems, to Coyne. He moves on to discuss why we apparently need to revisit the notion of criminalizing abortion. He acknowledges that public and political opinion has shifted since 1988 in the direction of choice, but dismisses this as based upon "convenient myth." He expresses outrage that the pro-choice forces are sufficiently in the ascendancy to cow even the Harper Conservatives, and that "pro-life" campus groups are being "banned," by which he appears to mean, if Carleton University is any indication, that some of them are being refused subsidies from students' associations. (The Carleton University Students' Association eventually provided that subsidy, after the "pro-life" club in question amended its charter to conform to the CUSA human rights policy.)

Again, this is all democracy in action, rough-and-tumble, not always very nice, but democratic nonetheless. Dissent isn't being squelched, as Coyne insists--it's simply being out-argued and out-lobbied.

Bringing up polls from a few years ago merely underlines this undeniable fact. Public opinion has shifted towards choice--and it continues to shift. Coyne notes, with barely concealed annoyance, that last month's Angus Reid poll showed that nearly half of Canadians--49%--believe that abortion should be legal under any circumstances, and another 47% under certain circumstances. That may fall short, as he insists, of a "national consensus in favour of unrestricted abortion," but it falls even shorter of a national consensus for a restrictive abortion law.

If only Canadians knew, Coyne says, that other countries had abortion laws, even liberal European nations. That would surely affect our public opinion polls. That would make us want legal restrictions on abortion. The legislative regimes of France, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Italy would have a pronounced effect upon us, if only someone would tell us ignorant Canadians what they were. Quick! Toss that man another straw!

At this point, one can see Coyne's argument collapsing. We're alone, he says. Are all those other countries extreme? Are two-thirds of our own public extreme? (That "two-thirds" remark is journalistic legerdemain, and not a very skillful example of it, given that he has just finished conceding that nearly half of Canadians want no legal restrictions on abortion at all.)

All of these other countries have their own histories, and their abortion laws have their own etiologies. As cosmopolitan as Canadians are, I don't think too many people would be bothered to learn that our European cousins have different laws than we do.

But Coyne isn't finished. If we were to pass a law, he says, things wouldn't change that much anyway. If we had a 20-week gestational limit, for example, only one percent of current abortions would be affected. And the national abortion rate is falling. Perhaps, he says--after all this spilled ink--"there are other factors, other ways, than the criminal law" to deal with abortion. If only he had stopped there.

But, confronting the inexorable logic of his own argument, Coyne retreats. He concludes that a law is indeed wanted, and that pro-choicers should support one, because it would "restore the issue to the realm of democratic debate, without which no genuine consensus is possible." I don't think that Coyne is necessarily arguing here for putting the legal cart before the consensual horse, although his words could be read that way. I believe that he is suggesting that he wants a law to be introduced, debated, fashioned by compromise, and passed.

Otherwise, he says, there is no room for compromise or negotiation. In the US, Roe v. Wade made compromise impossible, he says, and abortion a "winner-take-all game of lawyers." It's much the same here in Canada, he states. But with respect to the latter, where are those lawyers? The legal issues (other than access in places like PEI) are settled. In the US, states keep enacting new, restrictive legislation. Some of it gets struck down and some of it has been allowed to stand by the US Supreme Court. It's more a winner-take-all game of politicians. And women suffer as a result.

Indeed, perhaps the most striking thing about Coyne's article is the near-absence of any reference to the rights of women, and the consequences they have historically endured when those rights are denied or restricted. And his next point--that a law would "open the way to assinging a fetus some rights in Canadian law"--leads him into dangerous waters indeed. He gives the example of a glue-sniffing pregnant woman, whom the authorities could not apprehend and prevent from continuing her practice.

The problem with limit-cases like this is the appeal to raw emotion. Certainly, one feels, something should be done to prevent damage to what eventually will become a citizen. His or her future quality of life will doubtless be adversely affected by the woman's addiction. But from a public policy standpoint, where would state intervention end? In various US jurisdictions, as documented in Susan Faludy's Backlash, women have been apprehended for being seen in a bar, for not eating sufficiently nutritious food, and for attempting to leave their place of residence (allegedly to obtain an abortion). I think it's up to the recriminalizers to tell us if and where a line can be drawn before we rush pell-mell into a legal fetal-rights regime.

"Would an abortion debate be so scary?" Coyne concludes with this rhetorical question. One wonders where he's been since 1998: the abortion debate continues, occasionally flaring up, rarely with new arguments presented, but grinding on, and on, and on. Indeed, the debate is what prompted Coyne to write his article in the first place. What he means, however, is a debate focussed upon the notion of a new abortion law. Maybe, he concedes, we'll collectively talk ourselves out of it. But we'll have decided the matter ourselves, rather than having it all happen by accident and a Senate vote.

As already noted, though, it wasn't blind circumstance that brought us to our current situation. The Supreme Court struck down a damaging, humiliating, restrictive criminal law. Parliament, after three stout goes, decided to let the matter rest, although they could have pursued it further. Nearly half of all Canadians today don't want any legal restrictions on abortion. This doesn't sound, to me, like a favourable climate for making abortion a criminal matter once again.

Coyne, not to put too fine a point upon it, is making social mischief with his suggestion. Women's rights, in 2008, cannot be subjected once again to Criminal Code restrictions. If Coyne thinks the country is divided on the abortion issue now--and it assuredly is--he hasn't seen anything like the division that would be created by introducing new abortion legislation. He wants us to have the discussion all over again, but he doesn't seem to realize that a national debate may be only tenuously connected to the political processes that would ultimately decide the question.

Most Canadians thought abortion should be a matter to be decided by a woman and her doctor years before Section 251 was struck down, but the politicians didn't make a move until the Supreme Court forced them to. And then they were unable to come to a conclusion. There is no guarantee that they would now, or, that if they did, their decision would accord with the wishes of the majority of Canadians. If ever there was a case of rolling the dice, it would be on this issue.

Besides which, since when should rights be put to a vote? In 2008, women deserve better than that. In fact we all deserve better than that. Coyne wants to open a Pandora's box and let its contents loose on the population. The social and public policy consequences could be catastrophic, but for him, at least ostensibly, the debate is everything.

Introduce new criminal abortion legislation for the sake of a national discussion? Let's not, Andrew--and say, we did. Three times, over the period 1988-1991, to be exact. Gamble yet again on a woman's right to choose?

No dice.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg)

The world is officially nuts - Part 2

You'll recall, of course, the illumination of BC Ferries security pamphlet, which is a verbatim adoption of the US Homeland Security policy of spying on your neighbour and turning her/him in for engaging in typical tourist behaviour.

Before I go on, and believe me we're going to go beyond BC Ferries, let me point out that BC Ferries is not a "cross the river" operation. It is a provincially-owned corporation (no matter what Gordon Campbell may think) that operates some of the largest ships in the Canadian merchant fleet. With ships exceeding 21,000 tons and an annual passenger complement of over 21.6 million passengers, BC Ferries is a mammoth Canadian shipping company.

What you need to know, whether you hail from British Columbia or not, is that your Nickle is helping to pay the way for BC Ferries. The British Columbia ferry system is a part of the Trans-Canada Highway and it receives federal funding to maintain that link to Vancouver Island. And that security pamphlet they published? Yeah. They got federal money for that too. You may be from Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes or the Prairies, but you helped pay for that pamphlet.

I digress.

Things could be worse. In fact, they could be much worse. A different Canadian company has attracted the attention of the US Department of Homeland Security and not what most would consider to be in a good way.

This is from the Washington Times: (Yes, it's a Bush administration cheerleader. Which should tell you something.) Emphasis mine.

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc. website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers (video also shown below).

This bracelet would:

• Take the place of an airline boarding pass

• Contain personal information about the traveler

• Be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage

• Shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes

The Electronic ID Bracelet, as it’s referred to, would be worn by every traveler “until they disembark the flight at their destination.” Yes, you read that correctly. Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if the passenger got out of line.

Clearly the Electronic ID Bracelet is a euphemism for the EMD Safety Bracelet, or at least it has a nefarious hidden ability (thus the term ID Bracelet is ambiguous at best). EMD stands for Electro-Musclar Disruption. Again, according to the promotional video, the bracelet can completely immobilize the wearer for several minutes.

What some clown from Sarnia Ontario is proposing, and some donkey in the US government thinks is really cool, is that you, an airline passenger, will agree to wear a bracelet that has the complete details of your travel and personal history, can geographically locate you anywhere and can do to you what a police-fired electroshock weapon does. In short, take you down, inject muscular disruption and, (even though it doesn't exist), give you a case of Excited Delirium. If you die, that's what you died from. If you live, it was for the good of all.

The terrorists lose and, so, by the way, do you.

If this gets past the few sane heads left in government, what somebody is proposing is that every airline passenger, having given up everything about their life including the lifespan of the vibrator batteries, is going to voluntarily wear the probes of a fucking electroshock weapon on their arms.

The Last Man in Europe (Orwell's 1984), didn't go that far. Even Star Trek didn't venture there beyond the fact that it might have happened on an alien world.

And if you think this is going, you know, nowhere, take a look at this.

These goofballs are serious! They really believe that your freedom is worth absolutely nothing. Security if everything.

This little reassurance means zip.

The bracelets remain inactive until a hijacking situation has been identified. At such time a designated crew member will activate the bracelets making them capable of delivering the punitive measure - but only to those that need to be restrained. We believe that all passengers will welcome deliverance from a hijacking, as will the families, carriers, insurance providers etc. The F-16 on the wing-tip is not to reassure the passengers during a hijacking, but rather to shoot them down. Besides activation using the grid screen, the steward / stewardess will have a laser activator that can activate any bracelet as needed by simply pointing the laser at the bracelet - that laser dot only needs to be within 10 inches of the bracelet to activate it.

I have a hot flash for you sweetheart. In about six minutes some 12-year old will break into the software you've developed and "drive stun" every passenger on an airplane halfway between Vancouver and New York. Won't that be a fucking laugh?!

You know what's scary? Brother Stockwell, dinosaur walker extraordinare, is unable to resist this kind of shit.

Let's face it. If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.... right?

Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty.
Benjamin Franklin

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

Corporate greed: exposed by simple math

Bell Mobility and Telus are pressing ahead with their plans to charge 15¢ per incoming text message for their pay-per-use cellphone customers.

The following is why schools should do a better job of teaching basic math skills.

First, Bell and Telus:

The companies say the phenomenal growth in popularity of text messaging - to 45.3 million daily today from 369,000 per day in 2002 - has increased costs on their networks to keep up with the demand.

So much for increased demand driving the price of a commodity down. But let's press on:

[W]ireless technology expert Ken Chase said he doesn't accept the rationale from Bell and Telus that the volume of text messages places great demands on the networks. The consultant with the Toronto-based firm Heavy Computing said that while 45.3 million text messages sent daily sounds like a lot, the amount of space this takes up on a network and related costs to a telecom company are minuscule.

A text message sent via mobile phone can be no more than 160 characters, and each character is about a byte. If 45 million text messages are sent throughout Canada every day and each message is about 100 characters, this totals 4.5 gigabytes. This amounts to about the same amount of gigabytes required to download two or three high-resolution movies from the Internet.

And in comparison to the cost of transmitting a voice call on cellphones, text messaging chews up far less space on a network. "For most cellphones, a voice call is five kilobytes a second to get an average quality call. That's the equivalent to 50 or 100 text messages," said Chase.

Chase pointed to a recent study by University of Leicester space scientist Nigel Bannister as a useful reference to show the proposed 15 cent fee is "absolutely ridiculous."

Bannister compared the cost of sending a text message with the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. He calculated that if companies charged customers 10 cents per text message, that would translate into a cost of about $734 per megabyte, about 4.4 times higher than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs (of $166 per megabyte)."

"Hubble is by no means a cheap mission, but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical," Bannister concluded in his study.

The telecom companies have customers over the proverbial barrel: their contracts allow them to change terms at will, including adding new charges. If a customer wants to break its contract as a result, stiff penalties are imposed. Sweet.

Meanwhile, Industry Minister Jim Prentice is getting a tad fluttery about all this, as well he might. He's even suggesting the possibility of (gulp) regulation. A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality, so goes the right-wing cliché. Looks like it just could be the other way around.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg)

McCain's position on free speech

Librarians: the new terrorists?

(H/t Antonia Zerbisias)

UPDATE: (July 10) Reader RFC points out at Dawg's place that Obama is not that open to First Amendment rights either. Why are the candidates afraid of signs?

The world is officially nuts - part 1

This is from a pamphlet I picked up over the weekend as I headed off for yet another of my unscheduled trips.

Getting Involved

Everyone can assist by reporting suspicious activities to any (company) employee. Such activities include:

Unusual recording or monitoring activities, including the use of cameras, note taking, drawing diagrams, annotating on maps or using binoculars or other vision-enhancing devices; Unusual or heightened interest in restricted or prohibited areas; ....

So, you probably think I found that in some US location, right?

Wrong.

Try BC Ferries.

It is right out of the brochure rack on the Queen of Oak Bay, (where they proudly serve coffee roasted by an American company), and is a BC Ferries produced handout describing company security procedures.

Can you imagine reporting someone on a BC Ferry for using a camera? Ohhh Nooees! That tourist is taking a picture of the Pacific Biological Station! And there are all kinds of people at the computer work stations using their laptops. One person is NOT playing a game! He's drawing (Oh save us from the terraists!) a graph!!! And oh yes, Mr. Chief Mate, you know that chart of the various ferry routes that you have up in the passenger area? Well, brace yourself. I actually saw somebody looking at it! And there are a bunch of people on the upper deck speaking a foreign language using binoculars!! (They were watching a pair of terraist eagles).

And you know the announcement telling people to familiarize themselves with the location of lifesaving equipment? Well, I actually saw two people who adhered to that request and were studying the Lifesaving Equipment Plan. We all know what they're up to, don't we? Un huh! They're planning their escape after they blow us all up.

Unfortunately I can't give you a link to this particular brochure since there is nary a word of it anywhere on BC Ferries website. I can tell you where to get one though: Any BC Ferry or BC Ferries terminal.

If you think it stops there, wait until you read the second part of this later today.

Fewer than one million attend Rideau Hall protest

In fact, about four hundred (and I checked the estimate with two police officers on the scene). Grassroots? Only in a drought. A small, badly organized protest drew a bus or two from Toronto, Guelph and Brampton, but the message was plain, even to the protesters. "I thought there'd be more people here," a Catholic high school teacher said to a friend.

The glory days of thousands of "pro-life" protesters on Parliament Hill, or forming human chains on the streets of Ottawa, are well and truly over. This time a small knot of people listened to one or two speeches and a bagpiper, and was asked by the MC, well before the first hour of the protest was done, to "mingle," because it was planned to "go on until 2 o'clock."

Here are a couple of other photos:













Some young university males, here to tell women what's best for them.

















A referendum? Er, no we don't. Whatever gave you that idea?

In breaking news, one more person has returned his snowflake, through his wife. Mr. Gilbert Finn, 87, is apparently "unavailable to speak to the media." And a nun is "mulling" whether she should do the same. Still a few flakes less than a ball, folks.

As I said--the war's over.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg.)

More Harper purging

The Harper regime claims another victim. Luc Pomerleau (declaration of interest: I know him and have worked with him in the past), a scientist at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, has been fired and formally blacklisted for passing on information to his union that was on a CFIA server and accessible to all of its employees.

The information was indeed sensitive: it signaled the intentions of the Harper government to deregulate food inspection, allowing companies to, in effect, be self-regulating, inspecting their own products. Obviously the union--the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada--has a stake in this. And Luc Pomerleau was a union steward at PIPSC. But so does every Canadian citizen who buys and eats food.

This information, in the form of a letter from the Treasury Board secretary to the President of the CFIA, was not kept confidential as per regulations. As noted, it was scanned onto a server and hence made available to literally thousands of people. While there was a small "confidential" stamp on the first page, the ensuing pages were not stamped: genuinely confidential documents are marked on each page.

Moreover, the fact that Pomerleau was immediately identified as the person who transmitted the information to PIPSC indicates that there was no attempt, either on his part or on that of his union, to cover up his actions. The media have not yet made anything of this, but it strikes me as salient. It goes to Pomerleau's state of mind: whether he knew he was doing something seriously against regulations.

The gross overreaction by CFIA may well indicate something other than a difference of opinion about the status of the document in question. Its existence could indeed be a serious embarrassment to the government in the run-up to an election. Canadians like to know that what they're eating is safe to eat, and they trust--perhaps naively--that the government will ensure their safety in this respect.

After the Linda Keen affair, and the bizarre actions of the government with respect to Elections Canada, I no longer can bring myself to believe that our federal public service is free from direct political interference from on high. Here, admittedly, I am speculating: I knew the President of CFIA back in the day as well. Carole Swan is an ambitious sort, unlikely to want to be Keened into the ranks. Safer by far to throw another sacrificial victim on the fire.

The firing and blacklisting are being challenged by PIPSC. Godspeed, say I. Who, after all, was acting in the interests of ordinary Canadians here--Pomerleau the whistle-blower, or the Harper government? But for public employees these days, it seems, no good deed goes unpunished.


(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg)

Bummer, eh, "pro-lifers?"

Two-thirds of Canadians support the Order of Canada award to Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

So far, three snowflakes have been turned in, two from dead people.

I'll be at the Governor-General's residence tomorrow. But the war's over. Time for the so-called "pro-lifers" to campaign for sex ed and contraception if they want to reduce the abortion rate. More useful than writing squibs for the National Post any day.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg.)

Bits 'n' bites

Eunuchs make good tax collectors.

Is Hell freezing over? Satan signs with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Paypal, the conservative's friend.

Nazis scribbling swastikas on their kids and sending them off to school? The usual suspects are down with that.

Chess champ wallops his opponent.

A few snowflakes short of a flurry: one child-abusing priest, a dead judge and a pre-saint.

US Presidential Campaign 2008: Obama the Marxist. Obama's Islamist links. Obama the terrorist. Obama the AntiChrist.

(Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg.)

The legacy of Dubya

This probably never crossed your dessert plate, but here it is anyway. A few of you will remember George W Bush deciding that Southern Methodist University would be the site of his Presidential Library. (It would presumably include works other than The Pet Goat.)

The George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation today announced that SMU in Dallas has been chosen as the site of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, consisting of a library, museum and institute.

President Bush said in a letter to SMU President R. Gerald Turner: “I look forward to the day when both the general public and scholars come and explore the important and challenging issues our nation has faced during my presidency—from economic and homeland security to fighting terrorism and promoting freedom and democracy.”

Meeting Feb. 22 in Dallas, the SMU Board of Trustees unanimously approved an agreement with the Foundation to locate the Center at SMU.

“It’s a great honor for SMU to be chosen as the site of this tremendous resource for historical research, dialogue and public programs,” said SMU President Turner. “At SMU, these resources will benefit from proximity to our strong academic programs, a tradition of open dialogue, experience hosting world leaders and a central location in a global American city. We thank President Bush for entrusting this important long-term resource to our community, and for the opportunity for SMU to serve the nation in this special way.”

That's so... touching, in a Bush kind of way.
However, Bush just doesn't have the traction and he may end up situating his "library" in Uncle Fred's ice cream truck if he doesn't watch it. Apparently, SMU has another body that is none too happy with Dubya and his performance over the last eight years.

At the United Methodist General Conference Meeting in Fort Worth, TX, an overwhelming majority of the membership (844-20) rejected the idea of siting the Bush Library on the grounds of a Methodist university (SMU).

In other words, just to be clear about this: the President of the United States was just told in no uncertain terms by the legal body of his own supposed church that he can’t put his library where he wants to put it.

Oopsie!

This rolls the project back further than Square One. The Bushies, by trying to use their political clout in Texas to sidestep the national UMC membership in effect and if for no other reason, pissed them off. The General Conference has the power to reject the project, and they just have.

Jeez, George. Ain't democracy and payback a real bitch?

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

IDiocy's defenders

I guess a fellow who thinks that homosexuality is a disease to be cured can believe just about anything, but I was a little taken aback, I must admit, to see Rabbi Reuven Bulka's endorsement in today's Ottawa Citizen of Ben Stein's junk-science exploit, Expelled. After all, my own alma mater gave Bulka an honorary degree a while back, based on what the President at the time called his "outstanding career as a community leader and scholar."

I'll leave the scientific debunking of that mockumentary--not to mention the producers' on-going mendacity, hypocrisy, historical revisionism and plain sleaze--to others more qualified. But I'm interested in some of the other issues that Bulka raises.

To begin with, he's no slouch at confronting Mike Godwin head-on. The first several paragraphs of his piece are about Nazi atrocities: eugenics, forced sterilizations, mass murder of the "unfit," and so on. He argues that, yes indeed, it can happen here:"[E]very now and then some issue arises, and shades of the past appear menacingly on the horizon, with a loud message, a simple message: Do not go there."

And for the good Rabbi, Ben Stein is here to hoist the warning flag.

This "well done documentary," Bulka informs us, is the tale of "scientists expelled from their universities for looking positively on the notion of intelligent design." Oh, no. The horror!

Will we get sequels? Say, about "scientists" expelled from geography departments for teaching students that the earth is flat, or from medical faculties for claiming that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, or about "historians" booted from history departments for using The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a textbook and claiming the Holocaust didn't happen? The possibilities for new instances of conspirazoid persecution mania, not to mention the promotion of bogus theories under the umbrella of free expression, are simply endless for intrepid film-makers like Ben Stein. And as Bulka himself demonstrates, there's always a credulous audience out there, if not a large one.

So, what does Intelligent Design have to do with Nazi atrocities? you might be tempted to ask. Isn't it obvious? Well, if not, let Bulka explain.

First, we are told, Darwin was "arrogant" for calling his book "The Origin of Species," because he didn't explain how life began. It's clearly the height of arrogance to publish a book on a specific topic (speciation), and fail to address unrelated topics, like the origin of life itself, or the body-mind problem, or auto mechanics.

Darwin thus disposed of for his failure of character, Bulka moves on to Stein's denunciation of the alleged "religion" of "scientism," which, if it existed, would certainly be worthy of trenchant criticism. Religion should be left to the religious, be they believers, scatalogical pastors or scholarly rabbis. But hold on a minute: Bulka wants us to inject religion right into the heart of science:

You are left wondering why seemingly intelligent people have zero tolerance for intelligent design. It's not as if intelligent design is any less scientific than the gaping hole in how life began that Darwinists greet with an "I do not know" shrug.

Wha...Whoa! Where to start? Comparing ID to a "gaping hole" is promising enough, but let's not accuse Darwinists of shrugging. Darwinists don't do shrugging. A few paragraphs of Richard Dawkins or P.Z. Myers should disabuse anyone of that notion. What scientists don't know is precisely what they zealously investigate. They are extremely interested in such questions, but insist on things like evidence, testable propositions, falsifiability and the like.

But in any case the ID folks don't spend much time themselves on the origins of life--there's always the Bible for that sort of thing. Instead, they run around claiming that specific features of life today--an eye, a flagellum--couldn't have evolved randomly. (Oh, no)?

Rabbi Bulka himself doesn't have a problem with evolutionary theory. He just wants equal time for the quacks. There's a serious problem with the official Darwinists, however. According to Bulka, Stein "skillfully shows how Darwinism moves people to reject religion," he says (although somehow it didn't work that way on Darwin himself). "In a Darwinist system" (whatever the heck that is), "...we are bereft of values. And the scientists seemingly want it that way. If nothing is sacred, anything goes -- there are no restrictions."

Well, no. No one except a person raised by wolves is without values. Every society has values: they don't derive from science, but from the social processes of which society consists. But this sort of thing worries religious folks, who are foundationalists by definition. If God did not exist, Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov said (and Bulka here repeats), everything is permitted. Except that it isn't: we wouldn't have a society, but a short-lived free for all. The notion of a society without values is just as meaningless as Quine's round square cupola.

Stalin and Hitler killed tens of millions "in the absence of any values." Well, once again, no. One could argue, certainly, that they were the wrong values, but values they clearly had. They both wrote books of an incessantly moralizing character. Neither were what one might call scientists. And, as Bulka concedes, religion is not free from "taint" in this respect in any case.

But he proceeds (and at this point I begin to wonder about his alleged scholarly abilities):

As bad as religion may be, the argument can be made that absent religion, things would be worse. Mr. Stein drives this point home incessantly, as he juxtaposes scientific tyranny with Nazi imagery. A valueless society enslaved by scientism desacrilizes life. And Mr. Stein is not oblivious to the scientism of eugenics as it impacted then, with the implicit warning that it could happen again.

"[J]uxtaposes scientific tyranny with Nazi imagery," eh? Is Bulka really not able to tell the difference between argument and a crude propaganda technique? Apparently not. So if, for example, I were to "juxtapose" pictures of Ben Stein with candid shots of howler monkeys, I trust the rabbi will agree that this is a sufficiently cogent response to Expelled.

Our values are intact, they do change and develop over time, they are susceptible to all sorts of influences, and they are continually contested. Rabbi Bulka is a part of that very process. So are we all. We alone are responsible, as social participants, for what we value, and how, and how much. That realization is almost vertiginous, and frightening indeed for those who need sky-dwellers to set the rules. But those of us who do not still manage to hold values of our own, and hold off the Nazi hordes. Not to mention the scientific illiteracy of Ben Stein and Reuven Bulka.


(H/t BigCityLib for the Whatcott reference. The Godly do worship in odd ways, sometimes.)

Never forget: Chretien stands against Harper and Day, March 2003

17 March 2003:



This is a shameless crib from Impolitical, but to me this is such an important part of our historical record that it deserves to be passed on as widely as possible as quickly as possible.

I talk almost every day to Americans who are in anguish over what has happened in Iraq and in their own country since that shameful, dishonest war and occupation began, and I don't feel all that innocent about many of the crimes that have been committed by most Western nations in the name of the fantastical war on terror.

But I do feel lucky that once we had an old fox as prime minister who had at least half a memory of what serious foreign relations should look like. I feel lucky that Stephen Harper was not prime minister in the spring of 2003. Had he been, we would be mired in Iraq right now, and Maher Arar would still be in Syria, if indeed he were still alive.

Salute to sparqui at Bread and Roses for the tip.

Cross-posted to POGGE.

Another speech-warrior meme bites the dust

You've heard this one before, haven't you? Until recently, no one stood a chance of defending successfully against a Section 13 complaint before a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. There's been a 100% conviction rate. Everyone dragged, hauled, or otherwise transported to these kangaroo courts, Inquisitions and Star Chambers can be assured that the upshot is never in doubt.

But now, the kangaroos are blinking. You'll see that b-word used a lot in this connection on the right side of the aisle. First, the CHRC dismissed the infamous complaint against Maclean's magazine. And then it dismissed another one, against Catholic Insight. The usual suspects, once they got over their initial disappointment, began to claim victory.

It reminds me of a hoary old joke. A man goes to a psychiatrist. He keeps snapping his fingers during the session. Finally the psychiatrist asks, "Why are you doing that?" The man replies, "To keep the elephants away." "But," says the shrink, "there aren't any elephants within miles of here!" "Works pretty well, eh?" says his patient.

The sound of speech-warrior finger-snapping is getting deafening these days. They're making the kangaroos blink. But it ain't so.

Between 2001 and May 9 of this year, there had been 70 Section 13 complaints lodged with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Yes, you read right. 24 of these were either under investigation or were awaiting the conciliation/hearing stage. Since then, the Maclean's and Catholic Insight complaints have been disposed of, leaving 22 unresolved complaints. That makes 48 resolved complaints. What happened to them?

Well, most of them, like the Maclean's and Catholic Insight ones, didn't make it as far as a Tribunal hearing. 26 have now found themselves in the "closed/dismissed/no further proceedings" category. 7 more have been successfully mediated. One was closed at the Tribunal stage. Another was dismissed by the Tribunal. Complaints in the remaining 13 cases were upheld by the Tribunal.

So, to sum up: 13 of the 48 cases that the Commission dealt with ended up with "convictions" (a term best reserved for criminal, not civil cases, but most speech-warriors either don't know the difference, or don't care). This tells me that the efficacy of the preliminary screening processes and mediation options is pretty good. Nearly three-quarters of the complaints were weeded out before the hearing stage. The wheat was well and truly separated from the chaff.

None of this, of course, will deter the speech-warriors from claiming a dubious political victory. After all, there aren't any elephants (or, for that matter, kangaroos) within miles of here. Keep snapping, guys. You could have taught Frank Sinatra a thing or two.

Potential Canadians

Randall Denley of the Ottawa Citizen has a few words to say about Morgentaler's Order of Canada today. So does David Warren, no doubt sending in his column from an undisclosed location. Denley fusses about the loss of "more than two million potential Canadians": Warren, about "three million aborted babies." (In the "pro-life" rhetorical sweepstakes, what's a million?)

I get a little intellectually twitchy when people talk about "potential Canadians." What is a "potential Canadian" (other than an immigrant or a would-be immigrant)? The 25% of pregnancies that end in miscarriage? Every sperm and every ovum, potentially together? The biochemicals that are transformed into sperm and ova? The elements that are the building blocks of those biochemicals?

When does life begin? A trick question. Sometime in the Archaean, I'd say, in an unbroken chain to the present.

But there's a companion argument, which everyone has heard countless times: "I'm glad I wasn't aborted!" Variations on this theme include "You just aborted Beethoven! Martin Luther King! Jesus Christ!" Or Hitler, Stalin and Robert Mugabe. Or (as Henry Morgentaler unwisely observed), a lot of common-or-garden criminals.

I don't want to get into the ontological status of possible worlds, but just let me note this: the self-same argument can be used about contraception, including the Vatican-approved rhythm method, and even abstinence, the form of birth control most favoured by George W. Bush. "If you hadn't made love that night, I would never have been born!" "If Beethoven's mother had waited for a non-fertile period in the ovulation cycle, think of all the music we would have lost!" Voilà! Conservative Popes and Presidents join ranks with the abortionists.

The moral conclusions here aren't even summed up in the "Every sperm is sacred" Monty Python song, because ova are presumably sacred as well, and when a sperm fertilizes any one ovum, it isn't fertilizing any other ovum, reducing an almost infinite number of potential pairings to one actual pairing. The only morally acceptable solution, if one follows the logic of the "I'm glad I wasn't aborted" crowd, would be to clone all of the sperm and ova in existence so that every conceivable (no pun intended) combination is realized. Oh, wait, what about identical twins? Triplets?

All that vast potential, unrealized. Which, I suppose, is the whole point: potential isn't actual. Potential isn't anything at all. Potential doesn't exist. Potential is only possibility: and as I'm suggesting, possibility is infinite.

Ezra Pound once famously speculated about what "America would be like if the Classics had a wide circulation." I wonder what Canada would be like if journalists knew a little basic philosophy?