Welcome to this bout for the superheavyweight ridiculousness championship of the world.
In this corner we have the Canadian minister of state for science & technology, Gary Goodyear (who obviously missed his true calling: cartoon race car driver), who refuses to say whether he believes in evolution:
Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said he was flabbergasted that the minister would invoke his religion when asked about evolution.
“The traditions of science and the reliance on testable and provable knowledge has served us well for several hundred years and have been the basis for most of our advancement. It is inconceivable that a government would have a minister of science that rejects the basis of scientific discovery and traditions,” he said.
Mr. Goodyear’s evasive answers on evolution are unlikely to reassure the scientists who are skeptical about him, and they bolster the notion that there is a divide between the minister and the research community.
“You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms,” the Pope told reporters aboard his plane to Yaounde, Cameroon. “On the contrary, it increases the problem.”
While health workers — including some priests and nuns working with people with AIDS — advocate the use of condoms to curb the spread of disease during sex, the Catholic church promotes fidelity within marriage, chastity and abstinence.
More than 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to estimates from the United Nations. Since the 1980s, roughly 25 million people have died from AIDS.
Come out, touch gloves. Let’s have a clean fight. Against reality.
George W. Bush can expect a cordial welcome tomorrow inside a Calgary convention hall as the wildly unpopular former U.S. president gives his first public address since leaving office, but outside, a gauntlet of protesters don’t plan to be the least bit polite.
Local activists have been ramping up their anti-Bush efforts in advance of the $4,000 per table invite-only event titled a “Conservation [sic] with George W. Bush.” The media is banned from hearing Mr. Bush talk about “eight momentous years in the Oval Office” and “the challenges facing the world in the 21st century.”
Politics aside, this strikes me as odd. A former president he may be, and an interesting public figure to be sure, but how can anyone possibly consider it a worthwhile use of $4,000 to listen to George Bush talk? You’re better off paying for Lindsay Lohan to speak: she’s about as insightful, her entourage takes up a few less hotel rooms and she brings her own DJ.
Reading these words from a sitting American president is almost enough to restore my faith in…well, in American presidents.
“Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry,” Mr. Obama said. “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”
Contrast that with George W. Bush’s words in 2001:
In recent weeks, we learned that scientists have created human embryos in test tubes solely to experiment on them. This is deeply troubling and a warning sign that should prompt all of us to think through these issues very carefully.
Embryonic stem cell research is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards. The initial stem cell researcher was at first reluctant to begin his research, fearing it might be used for human cloning. Scientists have already cloned a sheep. Researchers are telling us the next step could be to clone human beings to create individual designer stem cells, essentially to grow another you, to be available in case you need another heart or lung or liver.
I strongly oppose human cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience.
I’m not sure I could find a better example of progressive vs. conservative.
Just when I really start to like Halifax again, it goes and does something goofy like reject the Atheist Bus ads. (Full disclosure: I donated to the Atheist Bus campaign in Canada.)
A ‘Without God’ ad has proven too controversial for Halifax transit.
Humanist Canada wanted to place ads on Metro Transit buses with the slogan, “You can be good without God.”
But officials with the transit authority deemed that too controversial.
“We’re a public transit system first, and then we sell advertising,” Lori Patterson, spokewoman for Metro Transit, told CBC News on Monday.
“So, if anytime we feel there’s a message that could be controversial and upsetting to people, we don’t necessarily sell the ads.”
First of all, that reasoning is absurd. Virtually every ad could be offensive to someone. If one gives Ms. Patterson the benefit of the doubt and assumes she means “upsetting to the majority of people,” it becomes hard to reconcile the fact that they’ve granted ad space to the anti-abortion organization Birthright, as reported on the Atheist Bus website.
Second, not only is the actual message less inflammatory than the “There’s probably no god…” ads to run in Toronto, it’s completely benign! How can you possibly argue with the statement “You can be good without God.”, let alone find it upsetting? Can, people, can. The ads don’t say you will be better without god, they just state the fact that people who don’t believe in gods are capable of being good.
I’m confident this response — which seems much more like a knee-jerk than a reasoned reaction — is so baseless and silly that, despite how conservative Nova Scotia can be sometimes, will ultimately be reversed. I’m also hopeful that Vancouver will avoid embarrassing themselves in this way.
So far the best response to the ads I’ve heard about is what the United Church of Canada is planning: ads that say “There probably is a God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Hurrah! Instead of trying to silence a contrary argument, they made their own counter-ad, and with a sly wink as well. Well played, UCC. (More full disclosure: I was raised United, and while I’ve been an atheist for many years, my parents remain very active in their church.)
Toronto Hydro’s problems with “stray voltage” mounted over the weekend with reports that another five individuals and three dogs had received shocks but had not been injured after stepping on the city’s aging metal handwells.
The utility received six calls on Saturday and one yesterday to a hot line it set up to report such incidents. Sean Borden reported that in the summer he and his dog, Mocha, both got a jolt after stepping over a handwell in the east end, just around the corner from where last week a pupil at Regent Park/Duke of York Junior Public School was zapped, but uninjured.
Gives a whole new meaning to “Electric Avenue,” don’t you think?
A final thought on yesterday’s topic, Bush’s legacy: as the clarity of distance seeps into the memory of the Bush43 years, it will be curious to observe the phases through which his reputation will pass. My prediction is as follows:
He’ll fade from the limelight by the spring, and generally avoid interviews from all but the most sympathetic questioners. After about a year information will begin appearing in books and magazine articles about how one or two high-ranking members of Bush’s administration — my money’s on Rumsfeld or Ashcroft, unless Cheney dies, making him the prime candidate — were pure evil, bent on starting wars, desecrating the constitution, etc. After these stories have had time to make the talk show and book trip rounds, opinions will begin to appear portraying Bush as a well-intentioned everyman fighting valiantly to keep the country intact in the face of these unreasonable forces, but powerless to stop them and, thus, to prevent the various disasters we today attribute to him and his administration…Iraq, the economy, the Katrina debacle, and so on.
The American public will be asked to forgive him, to label him some sort of put-upon Johnny Lunchpail hero who fought the good fight, a Willy Loman of the White House, truly a guy you’d want to have a beer with. The Republican party will need their everyman hero back in time to help campaign in 2012, so after a year of laying low while his reputation is healed through gentle reverse-swiftboating, he’ll make a triumphant appearance on the 2012 campaign trail and his resurrection will be complete.
That, or he’ll clear brush in Texas for the next twenty-five years like a good little cowpoke. Whichever.
Sanderson, a defenceman with the Whitby Dunlops, died early yesterday in Hamilton General Hospital. He had been in a coma and on life support since his head struck the ice during a fight in a AAA senior league game Dec. 12 in Brantford.
I’d held back on posting until the shock of the death had passed and the debate turned, as it naturally would, to whether fighting would be banned. I’ve been waiting, but the debate has not come. The lone discussion I’ve heard so far is whether the rules governing the tightness of helmet chin straps (which might have held Sanderson’s helmet on when he fell to the ice) should be more strictly enforced. This seems akin to enforcing seat belt laws for street racers, rather than trying to stop street racing itself.
Anyone calling for an end to fighting in hockey is met with ridicule (even Serge Savard), even deemed unpatriotic or lacking understanding of the game. Horseshit. Fighting proponents quote some circular argument about ‘the unwritten code’ of hockey, that fighters are there to ‘take care’ of a guy who breaks the rules, and respect each other, presumably as they punch one another in the face. Meanwhile referees, old hockey guys themselves, give out penalties for some infractions but look the other way for others if they think a team’s fighter will take care of things, thus perpetuating this myth of fighters being necessary for the game. This mutually supportive argument spins itself in a spiral, but in the face of logic eventually defaults to the tired plea that “it’s always been this way”, surely the silliest rule for why anything should continue.
The other argument, say fight fans, is that without fighting hockey won’t be entertaining. This is an easy one to dispel, as anyone who’s watched even a few minutes of a World Junior game, or any international tournament, can see.
It’s a difficult position to justify that hockey alone is the one league that requires fighting, or at the very least does not punish it (beyond a meaningless 5-minute penalty). In every other major sport, fighting is strongly discouraged (not tacitly allowed) and results in automatic suspensions. The only other sport where fighting is part of some kind of protective ‘code’ is baseball, surely the pussiest of the major sports. Football, on the other hand — which by any measure is as tough, smash-mouth and brutal as hockey, and almost certainly more so — does not allow fighting.
Staying with the NFL for a moment, imagine the absurdity of a scene where an offensive linesman, unhappy at the fact that his quarterback was tackled (clean though it might have been) grabs the opposing player by the jersey, rips off his helmet and starts punching him in the face. The other player starts punching back. No teammates try to break them up, and linesman (understandably) wait until they tire themselves out before interfering. The referee, knowing a teammate would come to the defense of the downed quarterback because of the unwritten code of football, doesn’t bother throwing the penalty flag. He knows these guys just need to let off a little steam. He also knows that if he doesn’t let these guys duke it out at midfield like this, that the other nasty penalties like clipping or face-masking will just happen more often. So goes the common wisdom, without much evidence to back it up.
Back to reality, and to hockey: there’s simply no logical argument for allowing fighting in the NHL, but as long as troglodytes like Don Cherry advocate for it, it’ll be around. If Gary Bettman wants to leave a legacy of actually improving the game, he should ban fighting and watch the rest of the world take his sport more seriously. So long as players in the world’s premier hockey league are allowed to beat each other bloody in the middle of the ice, and then do it again the following night (or even minutes later!), precious few outside of Canada will associate the game with skill, grit or speed. They’ll associate it with thuggish brutality.
Finally, I submit that fighting should be banned if only to prevent pathetic displays like this from ever again occurring:
Last week, flying home from Halifax, I read an excellent piece of journalism in Vanity Fair (which, truth be told, I picked up mainly to ogle Tina Fey). I must admit a certain lack of awareness of my surroundings when reading it, though: a jet in mid-flight is not the place to read a story about a catastrophic plane crash. Not because I’m superstitious, but because each page had the words ‘Air Crash’ in bold letters at the top, and that’s the kind of shit that makes other passengers jumpy. Anyway, the article is called “The Devil At 37,000 Feet” and I highly recommend you visit Vanity Fair to read the entire thing.
The core of the article was the time line of minor mistakes and small missteps that compounded until eventually a private jet collided with a passenger 737 over Brazil; the former managed to land safely, but the latter plummeted to the ground, killing all aboard. The story was tragic and frustrating, but it was also incredibly informative because of how author William Langewiesche told it, and revealed a key secondary theme: the accuracy of two arrows.
As it happened, these two flights were aimed directly at each other. The private jet should have been a thousand feet below the 737, but for a multitude of reasons it was not, and so they were on the same path. The problem was that they were on precisely the same path. At that altitude jets fly themselves, and with jets as new as these they flew at exactly 37,000 feet, exactly in the middle of flight corridors, with precision only an autopilot (working with high-tech GPS and altimeters) could achieve. As Langewiesche described it:
“Until recently, head-on airplanes mistakenly assigned the same altitude and route by Air Traffic Control would almost certainly have passed some distance apart, due to the navigation slop inherent in their systems. But this is no longer true. The problem for the [private jet] was that the [737] coming at them on the same assigned flight path had equipment that was every bit as precise.”
In the past, even if two pilots tried to hit each other it would be almost impossible, due to the hugeness of the sky. Langewiesche relates this here:
“In the United States a controller doing simulation research once mentioned to me the difficulty of directing two airplanes into each other even if you try. I answered that I was not surprised. Even the largest airplanes are small, and the starting point of collision avoidance has traditionally been a reality known as the theory of ‘the big sky.'”
And so, the systems designed to make flights safer (as they almost invariably do) in this case remove the possibility for luck to play a part in avoiding a collision.
At the end of the article Langewiesche explains this to some Caiapo Indians — on whose Amazonian land the plane crashed — using arrows as the analogy:
I asked the Caiapós to consider that in all the sky above the forest only these two airplanes had been in flight. It was as if in a space the size of the Caiapó village—no, all the way out to the road—you had shot two arrows in opposing directions, and they had collided. What were the odds? In the past it never would have happened. Even if you had assigned them identical flight paths, the arrows would have passed some distance apart because of the inherent inaccuracies of flight. But now better feathers have been invented, and have become required equipment for the high-speed designs. As a result, the new arrows are extraordinarily accurate, which allows more of them to be shot around, but with increasing reliance on tightly coupled systems of control. The sky is just as big as it ever was, but the margin for error has shrunk. And when the systems fail? That is what happened over the Caiapós’ land. The paradox was precision. Mistakes were made, the Devil played, and two arrows touched nose to nose.
Again, I strongly encourage you to read the full article. Don’t worry, it won’t make you scared to fly…though it may give you pause before booking any flight that crosses Brazilian airspace. The website also contains an interview with Langewiesche, and downloadable audio files of both planes’ cockpit recordings.
It would seem that Canada’s opposition parties — the three largest left and centre-left parties: the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois — are about to merge. Agreements have been reached as to who should lead the party and hold cabinet positions, and a missive has been dispatched to the Governor General.
Back in October, following the federal election, I joked that the left wing parties should unite, but didn’t think they’d actually try it. Indeed, I don’t think they would have, but for the strategic error Stephen Harper made recently to change campaign finance rules and take away the $1.75 earned by political parties for each vote they gained. That move, coupled with other intended policies and an empty set of solutions for the current economic situation, would inevitably have brought about a major move by the opposition. Normally this would have taken the form of voting down the budget and spurring another election. Instead, the opposition is uniting and hoping to avoid an election. This would win them great gratitude from the public, who would rather juggle rattlesnakes than vote again this year.
Not surprisingly, though, many are upset about this, and the debate is well underway. Witness the nearly 1300 comments on the Globe and Mail’s article posted just 24 hours ago (which Mathew Ingram dissects) or the nearly 3500 on the CBC article. Unfortunately, because of my schedule, I’ve had little time to absorb any of this. Pity; I suspect we’re witnessing one of the more interesting events in Canadian politics in my lifetime.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 