The 911 trial held flying in the sky!

The discussions of where the trial should take place are absurd. Demanding a military trial is equally absurd. What a circus. As much as the black-robbed professional arguerers may pretend otherwise, these issues are nothing more profound than arguing over what flavor of ice cream is the best in the world.

I have an idea. The 911 terrorist trial should be held in the Space Shuttle while orbiting the planet. That would be the most fair waste of tax-payers’ money!

Why are the Inuit complaining?

The National Inuit Leader should be more clear by stating exactly what the Inuit — as portrayed by herself and her organization — want from the rest of Canadians. Instead, Mary Simon offers this clueless plea:

La leader nationale des Inuits, Mary Simon, a souligné vendredi la contradiction dans un texte mis en ligne sur un blogue. “Nous nous demandons pourquoi, si ces solutions sont abordables et “à la portée de n’importe quel pays du G8″, la situation en terre inuite demeure la même encore aujourd’hui”, a-t-elle fait savoir.

Sorry, Mary, but if you do not know what your own people need, how the hell do you expect politicians in Ottawa to know??

Let me get this straight. The Inuit live in the coldest part of the country, places that have winter and subzero temperatures eleven months of the year and we are supposed to be surprized that their children have high mortality rates and greater incidences of respiratory illnesses. Duh.

Selon une étude rendue publique la veille du discours de M. Harper à Davos, la mortalité infantile chez les Inuits est quatre fois supérieure à la moyenne nationale. Les enfants inuits présentent aussi des taux de maladies respiratoires parmi les plus élevés de la planète.

Next lesson: people who live at the equator have dark skin!

As far as I am concerned, the Inuit are damn lucky. [That is not to say they have always been lucky. I know they have been abused and treated like animals in the past. ] Today, they can move to Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver if they wanted. Expecting to live in the Arctic while enjoying the comforts of modern civilization is just not reasonable and my money should not pay for it.

My guess is that Mary Simon is like every other good Canadian — she is afraid of being honest. She is afraid to bluntly say they want more money.

Doctors Abusing Patients

This story is horrific.  This is rape.

Imagine that you are undergoing a fairly routine surgery – say, removal of uterine fibroids or hysterectomy. During or right after the procedure, while you are still under anesthesia, a group of medical students parades into the operating room and they perform gynecological exams (unrelated to the surgery) without your knowledge.

Do you consider this okay, or an outrageous violation of your rights?

Regardless of your feelings, you should be aware that this is standard procedure in many Canadian teaching hospitals.

Medical students routinely practice doing internal pelvic examinations while surgery patients are unconscious, and without getting specific consent, at least in Canada.

Guidelines in the United States and Britain say specific consent is required but, by contrast, Canadian guidelines state that pelvic examination by trainees is “implicit.”

…
She [Dr. Sara Wainberg] polled her fellow students and found 72 per cent had also done exams on unconscious patients, without consent, confirming that it is routine.

Read the whole thing.  There’s a lot to unpack regarding this practice.  The mentality behind this is insulting, illiberal and dehumanizing.  There is no justification for penetrating women (or men) without their consent.  It does not matter what letters follow your name; it does not matter that the word, “Dr.”, precedes your name; it does not matter that she is unconscious; it does not matter what other things she has consented to; you are not allowed to violate her.  The same rules that apply to the alley way apply to the operating room.

Further thoughts can be found here.

The collapse of tired old Monetarism in Davos

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is an interesting spectacle to behold. Fifty years from now, economic historians will lump these discussions in with Gorbachev’s futile attempts to keep the Soviet Union alive. Nicolas Sarkozy is a complete buffoon:

Sarkozy called for new accounting rules and tighter limits on executive pay, adding that the risks are too great if “we do not change the regulation of our banking system and the rules for accounting and prudential oversight.”

Great! The solution to our economic woes is more accounting trickery! Wonderful!
All we have to do is reshuffle figures from one column to the other. Furthermore, this comes with the admission that governments and regulators — the very people who are telling us they have the solution now — have been endorsing the wrong accounting tricks which are at fault for the collapse of the money markets.

Blaming the free market is a canard — a most dishonest and stupid canard because there never was a free market in money.

I really wonder what the hell is going on in the mind of Stephen Harper. For the first time in history, Canadians have a Prime Minister whose background in economics arguably — specifically promoting free-markets — stands out from all others. Confused conservatives who yearn for their own peculiar brand of small government actually have an intelligent reason to suspect that their man may deliver. Sadly, any consistency in economic theory is falling apart before our very eyes. Most people have been fed so much KeynesianoMonetarist nonsense that they can not see it. The central command in the market for money is collapsing just like central command in any other market tends to collapse.

For a Prime Minister who has worked hard in the past to promote free markets, it must be bizarre to have to utter the following pap:

To be succinct, the real test of the G-20 going forward, is that it develops and sustains among its members a sense of shared responsibility towards the global economy.

For while the market’s awesome power to generate and widely distribute wealth is self-evident, we also know markets need governance. For the new global economy, the G-20 is what we have.

Spoken like a true command economy central planner! Way to go, Harper! Karl Marx would be proud!

Years Later, DND is Concerned About Torture

Sure, it’s a little late, but General Walt Natynczyk wants to know what happened to the report on the torture by Afghan personnel of a detainee we handed over to them (and whom our soldiers then rescued from his torturers).  From CTV.ca:

The Canadian military has ordered a formal investigation into how a critical report on the beating of an Afghan prisoner remained buried at National Defence headquarters.

In June 2006 soldiers captured a suspected Taliban fighter and handed him over to local police, who then beat him to the point where the Canadians had to intervene.

A report on the incident, which undermines Conservative government claims that no prisoners handed over to Afghans faced abuse, was apparently uncovered only in December.

Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walt Natynczyk ordered an investigation, which is headed by Rear-Admiral Paul Maddison, commander of Joint Task Force Atlantic.

Natynczyk’s deputy, Vice-Admiral Denis Rouleau, says the probe will look at the incident itself, why soldiers took the actions they did and how it was reported.

The report of the investigation is due March 1 and is to be made public shortly after.

Diplomat Richard Colvin testified before a special House of Commons committee in November that he repeatedly warned federal officials in 2006 and 2007 that prisoners faced the possibility of torture in Afghan jails.

This is good news, a little late, but good news nonetheless.  Will this help end the contention that no one was tortured, or that the torture was nothing more than just being beaten by a shoe.

I have more thoughts on the matter here, but I’d like to ask why it’s so controversial to suggest that we shouldn’t be complicit in torture when, apparently, our troops on the ground think we shouldn’t be involved in torture?

Who Are You? Why, A Sex Offender Of Course!

Apparently, some residents of Miami aren’t totally on board with the idea of Pete Townshend (of The Who) performing at the Super Bowl:

The homes and schools close to Dolphins Stadium are receiving “sex offender advisory” postcards this week warning residents to watch out for The Who’s Pete Townshend, who’ll be performing at halftime of Super Bowl XLIV.

…

Townshend, 63, was arrested in England in a 2003 roundup of alleged pedophiles accused of cruising online sites for photos of child sex. Townshend said he was just doing research for a book at the time. He wasn’t convicted of anything but was placed on that country’s list of sexual offenders for five years.

For more on the controversy, look below or click

Several South Florida child-abuse activist organizations last month asked the National Football League to bar the British guitarist from the halftime stage, which he’ll also share with the classic-rock group’s original frontman, Roger Daltrey. The anti-pedophile crusaders also asked immigration authorities to stop Townshend from entering the USA, citing “moral turpitude.” And they lobbied tire maker Bridgestone from sponsoring the show.

So far, only the NFL responded, saying it would not ban Townshend — whose big tunes with The Who include guitar-heavy Who Are You? and Pinball Wizard — because he was never convicted of a crime.

I’ve raged against sex offender lists in the before.  This situation is a little different, a little more comical, but it’s still rather absurd.

Though I guess, just to be safe, I should make the following disclaimer: Please, children of south Florida, do not accept a ride on Mr. Townshend’s Magic Bus!

(H/T: @Radley Balko)

From Trek to Tech: PADD, meet iPad

Now, for those of you with an interest in Technology, Apple has now broken their silence after a leak and much speculation as to what their new tech product is going to be: iPad!

Now, I don’t try to hide my inner-nerd (which I love dearly btw), but I’m a huge Star Trek fan, and it never fails to amaze me how that single television series in all of it’s incarnations has inspired our technological development. When you think about some of the tools we take for granted today that was (at least partially) inspired by Star Trek, it sort of interesting to speculate where we can go in the future. Things like Cell Phones for example: Star Trek communicator (from the original series). The Internet: Federation Database accessible from any location hooked up to it (I could be stretching here, but you never know). And several other inspirations.

Now, we have the iPad, successor to the iPhone. In essence, it’s an answer to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s PADD or Personal Access Display Device. At the time, a very exciting idea allowing multiple functions to be combined into a mobile, hand held display that wasn’t so large as to be unwieldy but not too small to be difficult to see.

Seems we have it!

Gail Shea and the PETA Pie

You know, I understand that some people look upon the “cream pie” as a time-honoured tradition as a method of protest in politics. Maybe I’m not so traditional about this. I don’t like it.

Today, while Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea was delivering a speech to open the Aquatic Life Research Facility in Burlington, a PETA zealot who was sitting in the front row stood up and hit the Minister in the face with a “tofu cream pie”.

Call me squirrely, but I call that assault.

Of course, the crazy zealot was dragged away presumably shrieking about the slaughter of seals, as if that hasn’t already been beaten into the ground 12 times over.

Protesting over your cause-du-jour is one thing, but taking it to the level of assault is another. This “unidentified” woman should be charged and jailed for assaulting a public official.

And for the record, I don’t approve of the pieing of Jean Chretien either. Yeah I know, I hate the guy, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to see him assaulted.

______________________________________________________

Update: Revenge of the Curds courtesy of the National Post

Health Care, Education and Trade Offs

Recently, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry tweeted, in reference to the current U.S. debate about health care reform:

Btw, for what it’s worth: I would totally trade single payer for school vouchers. Each party’s big “21st century civil rights” cause, right?

This doesn’t really apply to Canada (with us already having “single payer” – an incredibly poor description of who actually pays), but I’m totally on board with what he’s saying.  As much as I’d like to remain all ideologically pure and never compromise my principles, that’s not the way politics works.

So, I’m with PEG.  I’d be willing to accept to some of the excesses of our current welfare state if we’d bring in some sort of robust school choice initiative.

Now, dear readers, what sort of trade offs would you be wiling to make?

You can follow PEG on twitter here.  You can follow me here.

Let Haitians resettle to Canada!

Score a couple of more points for the Libs and for the Dippers:

We urge the government to expand those efforts by widening which family members can apply and speeding up the unification of adopted orphans with their new families in Canada.

I think they are on the right track.

As far as I am concerned, we should let anybody come in to Canada. Jason Kenney is wrong:

“Massive resettlement is not a solution to natural disaster. The solution is reconstruction, and we’re focused and dedicated to that,” Mr. Kenney said.

Kenney said other stuff too. He said that the government of Haiti would not appreciate it if all Haitians were permitted entry into Canada. Who cares what the Haitian government appreciates?? I certainly do not. As far as I am concerned, massive resettlement is a solution to this natural disaster.

Lorrie Goldstein posted his preferences and bias this morning:

There needs to be a limit on Canadian compassion towards Haiti.
—SNIP—
We cannot solve every global catastrophe by throwing open our doors to the victims.

I do not see why not. The vast majority of Canadian land is empty. If all of the global warming nonsense turns out to be true, well, more of the barren Canadian land will become habitable at affordable rates and Canadians will solve every global catastrophe by throwing open the doors. We will not be able to afford not to do so.

Also, the choice to fund reconstruction assumes that the purpose behind all of this foreign aid is to actually help the lowly desparate foreigners and not the governments nor the government cronies. That is a huge assumption and I am not sure what the motives of people like Jason Kenney truly are. He may have other goals to serve with his policy-making tasks. Who knows?

The problem with throwing money at reconstruction is that the question of whether reconstruction is even possible — that is, to suit the inhabitants — is never honestly addressed. Further, any discussion of the cost compared to resettlement is stifled too. Some people in Haiti may actually want to leave. Thus, the money sent to reconstruct the earthquake-prone land may be better spent. It is not like Canada is such a horrible place to live.

As far as I am concerned, if a reconstruction of Haiti is physically possible, then Haitians should do it themselves. They can move to Canada, save up some coin and go back to their homeland to reconstrct whatever they want. That is how honest compassionate reconstruction should be done.

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