In the eyes of Justice McLachlan and her co-ideologues on the nominating committee, “controversy” is a variable absolute:

McGill ethicist refused OC because she was ‘too controversial’

[...]

The Order’s receptiveness to new, taboo-breaking social mores was evident well before the Morgentaler appointment. The Order last year approved the candidacy of Brent Hawkes, a Toronto cleric who performed Canada’s first same-sex marriage. Also last year, the Order appointed writer Jane Vance Rule, lauding her specifically for “populating her novels with homosexual as well as heterosexual characters.” And when it honoured Jean Chrétien, the Order put a curious emphasis on his support for same-sex unions.

Few people, even critics of gay rights, made a fuss. I think most Canadians thought the Order was making an effort to reflect a significant current of public opinion. It’s hard to be against broad-mindedness.

Now, however, it suddenly turns out that the Order is not so broad-minded after all. It has refused admission to Margaret Somerville, the McGill University ethicist who is a leading critic of the social views that the Order welcomes.

And what does Ontario’s favourite Catholic schoolboy made good have to say about this? Don’t wait for the translation, Mr. McGuinty!

The socialist economist John Galbraith, in his 1967 book “The New Industrial State“, argued that large American corporation, such as General Motors, are essentially immune from market forces because they can use advertising to create additional demand. Nobody should ever confuse leftist economics with reality, as we have seen GM’s market share drop precipitiously, but that hasn’t stopped platitudes raining down on him.

Similar events could be unfolding in the political arena, where Obama is poised to raise $500 million. Since this fund raising projection was published on June 19, 2008, the events have unfolded which seem to indicated that Democrats are playing with Galbraith’s playbook. Eleanour Clift describes this 50-state strategy as follows:

Let’s do the math. If Obama holds all the Kerry states, he’s at 252. Add Iowa for 259. Add a win in Virginia or North Carolina, “and it’s game, set, match,” says Plouffe. Or add Colorado and New Mexico, Republican states where Obama now leads, to reach 270. The campaign last week put up a biographical ad in 18 states, including Alaska and Montana, historically Republican states. It looked like Obama was just trying to taunt McCain, lure him into spending money in states where he shouldn’t. But Plouffe insists “there’s not a head fake in the bunch.” Alaska’s octogenarian Sen. Ted Stephens, under investigation for corruption and the sponsor of the infamous “bridge to nowhere,” is in a tight race for reelection. Montana, which Bill Clinton won in ‘92, has a Democratic governor and senator.

And Plouffe is just getting started. There’s Georgia, a state that hasn’t gone Democratic since 1976, but the presence of former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, who’s running for a third party—Libertarian—could drain 2 to 4 percent from McCain and put the state within reach for Obama. “Indiana is another place where I would ask you to reorder your thinking,” Plouffe said with clinical certainty, adding it to his list of states “behaving” more Democratic. “Our goal is to adjust the electorate more to our liking,” he said, explaining how registering a record number of African-Americans and young people under 40 could swell Democratic turnout and swing Republican-leaning states to Obama.

It looks as if Clift is expecting Obama to win 50 states in the upcoming Presidential election with the help of advertising strategy as described by Galbraith. Your correspondent is certainly glad that this will leave 7 states for McCain and the election won’t be a disaster for him, like 1984 was for Mondale, who only carried one state and the District of Columbia.

From NRO:

So, the recent news out of the Obama camp is that they’re planning a huge rally with thousands of people in a stadium, want to create a mandatory youth corps for national service, and are thinking about a big dramatic speech in Berlin.

It’s like they’re trying to sell copies of Jonah’s book or something.

Perhaps it is the something.

A new study reports that consuming tofu increases the risk of dementia:

The researchers found high tofu consumption - at least once a day - was associated with worse memory, particularly among the over-68s.

So much for that old bromide about those who can’t remember the sixties.

FromPhysicsworld.com

Apr 20, 2007

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

“Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra “hidden variables”. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).”

What is it about mind that appears to be central to the constitution of reality? This is the question raised by modern findings of physicists in repeatable experiments (provided you have atom smashers). Measurement, which is an act of consciousness, collapses superposed states (simultaneously dead and alive) into definite states. Open the box and Schroedinger’s cat is either dead or alive. Before you made the observation, it was both. Observation collapses the possibilities. What was a philosphical debate between Einstein (realist) and Niels Bohr (there is only measurement) in the 1920s and 1930s has now been put to the test in increasingly clever experiments which prove that realism is not a sustainable position.

Physicists have come to the conclusion that the assumption of realism, that there is an objective reality independent of measurement, is not sustainable. Einstein was wrong, and Niels Bohr was right. There is only measurement. Physicists have been testing this proposition in many subtle ways for decades. One by one the assumptions of locality (that apparently separate things cannot actually be united in simultaneous faster-than-light ways) and realism (that there is an objective reality behind the measurements) have had to be abandoned. 

The second implication of this weirdness is for the biologists, and the materialists, such as Dawkins, constantly railing against the possibility of God. I keep wondering whether these fellows have actually read a book about the philosophical implications of quantum physics. I am not saying that modern findings in quantum physics prove the existence of God. Not at all. I am saying that modern findings in physics disprove the existence of matter as independent of mind. One can only wish that, before we are all hauled into the materialist Star Chambers to confess our thought-crimes against Dawkins Thought, we shall at least be granted the right to point out to them that they have an exceedingly compromized view of material reality. Indeed, matter is just not what it used to be.

The vast deserts of our ignorance!

Are we in the Matrix?

I know how I feel about Dr. Henry Morgentaler getting the Order of Canada. I do not know whether I am justified in my feeling.

Morgentaler is a hideous man. His doctrines are appalling. His view that the the primacy of the woman over her fetus is so absolute, it cannot be right. There is no balance in his view. Freedom to choose is the freedom under all circumstances to be able to abort a future child, no matter at what stage of pregnancy. And if you object to that view, you will be accused of believing that women are not and should not be absolutely sovereign over all decisions of reproduction. I am guilty as charged.

Society, in some form, in some way, has an interest in its own survival, and consequently in the reproductivity of its women. This has always been the foundation of our laws controlling access to abortion. Consequently I do not consider that women are absolutely sovereign in their reproductivity. They have the preponderant interest, to be sure, but not absolute freeedom of choice. Call me a compromizing weasel on this issue, and I will agree with you. Most of us are all compromizing weasels on the subject of killing the unborn. I do not think even the freedom-to-choose crowd contemplate killing the unborn with equanimity, they just want to shut off their consciences. We would be very convinced of our own rectitude if we were not compromizers, or persuaded of absolute doctrines on the matter, as many are.

I can understanding killing the guilty for capital crimes, but not for parking tickets. Likewise killing the unborn for our convenience, that is a harsh doctrine. Yet we live by it. We put into practice our beliefs in this matter all the time. And the same people who uphold the euphemistic “freedom to choose” are most often the people who are repelled by capital punishment. Go figure.

But back to Morgentaler. There is something deeply wrong about the man which defies my powers of description, and possibly my understanding. I see him as the Nazis’ last poisoned gift to mankind. Somehow the Nazi vision of evil was so pure and absolute (kill all the Jews, because they are the source of evil) that its doctrines have perversely, weirdly infected the doctor, who did time in Auschwitz. I cannot imagine the stress of being in a hell created by a political ideology that declares that you are the emanation of Satan, but Auschwitz would come close. I hope never to undergo a similar process of degradation, enslavement, starvation and hideous, unremembered death at the hands of demons who hate you and wish to see you and your kind exterminated, as one would a wasps’ nest under the cottage deck which has just stung your baby. His absorption of some of the absolutism of their doctrines, and its weird refraction as an evangelist of aborting human fetuses, is an imaginative stretch on my part, but I prefer to situate the cause of evil outside of Morgentaler himself. In this I may be too generous towards him. He may be authentically and originally evil, without assistance from the Nazis.

Whatever he thought he was doing for the cause of women, he has so far exceeded that goal that he has become a menace to our survival. He is not the right sort of person to be honoured in this way by the Order of Canada. The selection committee has lost its moral bearings if they could not see that they have honoured the exponent of quite evil and disgusting doctrines, which are far in excess of the immediate cause, questionable as it is, of access to abortions.

I was dismayed but not really surprised to read in the July 2 Ottawa Citizen that mezzo-soprano Julie Nesrallah will host CBC Radio Two’s only program devoted solely to classical music come September, the 10am - 3pm weekday slot of an as-yet unnamed show.

Not that I have anything against Ms Nesrallah, she is a talented singer with a charming onstage manner. It was the dismissal in the article of very talented current classical show hosts like Tom Allen and Eric Friesen by Programming Director Chris Boyce with inane statements like “she really knows this stuff” and “the conversation she will be having about it will be really intelligent conversation.”

Mr. Boyce appears not to know anything about classical music or ever listen to Radio Two’s current programming; if he did, he would be aware that it is not possible to have more intelligent and knowledgeable conversation about classical music than we currently get from the two broadcasters mentioned above - and they are charming and entertaining to boot. But neither one has been offered the prize. Instead it has gone to someone with no broadcast experience of any kind. What could the reason be?

What does Julie Nesrallah represent? The same thing our charming GG represents, and who was chosen for the same reasons. Yes, you guessed it - the new multicultural face of Canada. Ms Nesrallah is female, off-white and of non-European ancestry. The CBC poohbahs must imagine that she will naturally attract all those “new” Canadians who currently listen to ethnic radio or CDs from their country of origin, because she will reflect them. Well, no, she will not turn them into new listeners of Radio Two - the reason they don’t listen to CBC is because they prefer to hear music they are used to and commentary in a language they speak fluently.

And she is a star! So doubtless she will also attract all those people who have never listened to classical music because it is presented by some dull broadcaster they never heard of. But here’s a flash for the geniuses at CBC Programming like Chris Boyce - people who don’t already enjoy classical music have never heard of Julie Nesrallah either, and they couldn’t care less.

The formerly small but loyal audience for Radio Two is about to vanish into a black hole as a result of the new “vision” for the station, which is really just the political agenda, or politically correct agenda, of the little band of tired left-liberals who now run the CBC. All Radio Two will “reflect” is their view of Canada as they think it should be, not as it really is. And we “old” Canadians who love classical music will tune in to BBC and NPR classical on the Internet, or join the “new” Canadians and just listen to our CDs.

The Dark Lord has sent out us this fascinating assemblage of facts and analysis pertaining to energy consumption, global warming, and related matters. It is written by Prof. David MacKay of the physics department of Cambridge University.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf

It is a book, freely available on the Internet, called “Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air”.  No one should be discussing energy policy without reference to it.

Of course he uses too many equations and he is something of a green, but that should only increase your respect for his factual inquiry.

Today’s Drudge Report headline states “SHOCK CLAIM: NO ICE AT NORTH POLE THIS SUMMER“. This is illustrated with the following photograph of sunset at the North Pole.

This photograph is a well known fake, but then, this is quite appropriate in this case.

There are mornings when you feel the judiciaryneed to be taken out and given a sensitivity course, not in the sensitivity to every whiner group, no, but to an idea of what judges should never tamper with.

A little humility about the extent of their competence, about the extent to which they can never substitute their opinions for those of others. I know it goes against the entire thrust of legal training since the Constitution Act of 1982, but that is the point. Leonard Cohen predicted “there won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure any more” in his song, The Future, and he foretold the truth. What he could not tell was the role of the judiciary in politicizing the length of every yardstick.

I cite two recent examples of judicial overreach: the Quebec judge who overruled the father of a 12 year old, who was grounded, and the Manitoba judge who overuled the medical opinion that a man was brain dead, and in the process caused three physicians to resign from the Grace Hospital.

In the Quebec case, the father had grounded the daughter for disobedience about going on the Internet.

“Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday [June 20th] that denying the girl permission to go on the school trip was an excessive punishment. The girl’s lawyer, Lucie Fortin, said, “She’s becoming a big girl” and described the school trip as “a unique event in her life”, the Globe and Mail reported. In arguing the case, Fortin cited Sections 159 and 604 of the Quebec Civil Code, which allow minors in some circumstances to initiate court proceedings relating to the exercise of parental authority. Section 159 is used in “extreme circumstances”, such as cases of parental negligence.

“The father’s lawyer, Kim Beaudoin said that her client is “stunned by this situation. He feels like he’s lost his daughter”. He is appealing the court’s decision.”

Bravo! Judge Tessier, you are in line for a spanking from the Appeal Court.

On the Manitoba situation, the Post asks the right questions:

“Beyond judges acting with urgency, there is the unresolved question of whether court compulsion of health care workers is just. At the moment, the highest value in medical bioethics is individual autonomy and consequent respect for individual decision-making. That value was brought into doubt when the Manitoba judge questioned the physicians’ medical expertise and, at the same time, required that they continue to exercise it in violation of their professional and personal ethics. Should physicians and other health care professionals be required to choose between hurting a patient by ineffective medical treatment, and a possible jail sentence for being in contempt of court?”

Though I do not hold with a general legalized right of physicians to kill patients, they make decisions which result in the cessation of artificial support for life, nearly every day in some cases. They pull the plugs, and the equipment moves on the next person requiring care. If collectively they do this every day, should we not legalize it? Permit me some moral ambiguity here. Doctors make medical decisions, and medically you are meat, a physical being, not a spiritual one. When that meat is no longer self-sustaining, you have entered the domain of medical decision-making.  They have other people whose lives could be sustained by the attention and equipment they are spending on your parent’s comatose body. Whenever a judge deals with these matters as if it there were a right to be kept alive, they forget the costs imposed on everyone else whose fathers and mothers lie dying for the want of attention going to your parent’s soon-to-be corpse. Life may be sacred, but not to physciansin their medical capacity. They deal in death, and deathis the natural outcome of life. We have no right to the indefinite avoidance of our appointment with our Maker, particularly if that avoidance is medically useless, and a burden on the still-living in need of care.

Judges need to restrict the tendency to extend rights where rights can have no bearing, and state decision-making where the state has no comeptence.

The judiciary reminds me of a scene in Amadeus, where Mozart is infuriated that he has to submit samples of his work to a committee of Italians to get the job of music teacher to the Emperor’s niece.

VON STRACK
Mozart, you are not the only composer in Vienna.

MOZART
No, but I’m the best.

VON STRACK
A little modesty would suit you better.

A judiciary filled, at the very best,  with Salieris, Quantzes, and Telemanns, and many thinking themselves Mozarts, whose judgments are cutting-edge advances of human rights. Spare us!

I would rather be governed by 100 people chosen randomly from the telephone book than by the Canadian judiciary. I mean it. Or by the semi-random group of people assembled in the House of Commons. Hey! Parliamentary supremacy. What a concept!

 And I write this as Mozart’s finale to the Symphony #41, the Jupiter, is playing. I know the difference between talent and pretention, and so do most Canadians.

When I find the National Post getting soft I turn to the Financial Post for the really conservative market-oriented view. Its castigations of the global warming con job have been a source of amusement and great comfort. By contrast, its views on telecommunications have been economically illiterate.

The Financial Post’s  (or its lead editorialist Terence Corcoran’s) view of telecommunications has been: we have enough competition now to deregulate. Two competitors in the general area, cable and telephone, are enough, and three is a sufficient cause to leave the market alone. No attention needs to be paid to the market conditions in a particular place; it is sufficient that competitors exist in the same urban area, regardless of whether your building is served by one or two carriers. Mandated sharing of facilities, where the big incumbents must share facilities with ISPs, is just “telecom trotskyism”, in the glorious invective of Terrence Corcoran.

Thus it was with interest I read “Abolish the Canadian rail monopoly” by François Tougas in today’s Financial Post. Tougas is a senior lawyer at Lang Michener and an adjunct professor of competition policy at the UBC Faculty of Law - not a likely candidate for Trotskyism.

Tougas says:
“The best way to regulate a natural monopoly is to introduce competition by allowing others (a “guest” railway, in this case) to access the track infrastructure of the incumbent (the “host” railway) to vie for the business. Modern economies already do this with other network industries like telecom, cable and electricity and gas distribution.”

But where barriers to entry are “tremendously high”, says Tougas, railways are able to carry on free from competition. Where you cannot build a rival rail-line, the existing regulatory remedies available to captive shippers are insufficient. There is no market. Tougas recommends “running rights” - the right to pass your traffic over the lines of another railroad, using someone else’s railcars, and paying them a regulated rate for the privilege. Otherwise there occurs an unjust transfer of wealth from industries to carriers.

There is no difference in principle between “running rights” in the railway case and “access to underlying facilities” in telecommunications. Why then does the Financial Post rail at Professor Michael Geist (and by extension, all the companies which benefit from sharing of underlying facilities, such as MTS-Allstream) as Trotskyites, and Professor Tougas gets a free pass?

Are ideas made acceptable by their content, or by their provenance? Is what is good for natural resource producers in Flin Flon bad for businesses in Markham and Pierrefonds? Should the telephone companies and other carriers take a part of the profits of all electronic transactions, because they can? But railroads should not? One is tempted to think that the reason why different positions are taken by the Financial Post on the identical issue is that we can visualize railroads; we do not really have a precise mental image of networks.

For a further treatment of Terence Corcoran’s sadly mistaken views on intellectual property, see the comment by the economist Joseph Potvin on digital rights management.

Muammar “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution” al-Gaddafi, gives a ringing endorsement to Obama’s presidential bid.

“There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama.

All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency….

We are still hoping that this black man will take pride in his African and Islamic identity, and in his faith, and that [he will know] that he has rights in America, and that he will change America from evil to good, and that America will establish relations that will serve it well with other peoples, especially the Arabs.”

This endorsement preceded endorsements from Kim Jong-Il and Fidel Castro.

A 2.5 acre island of Forvik, which is formally known as Forewick Holm and is part of the Shetland Islands in the North Sea, has declared independence on June 21st, 2008. Mr. Stuart Hill, the sole-resident of the island, has posted the declaration on his website and states that he wants the territory to be a crown dependency like the Channel Islands, with an economy in which “There will be no income tax, VAT (value added tax), council tax, corporation tax, or any of the other taxes instituted by the British government”.

The basis of the independence is the historical fact noted in the aforementioned declaration, viz. “the only powers granted to King James III of Scotland in 1469, when he accepted these islands as security in the matter of payment of a marriage dowry, were those of trustee. His Majesty was holding them in trust until they were redeemed by King Christian of Denmark and Norway or his successors. Part of his obligation was to preserve the existing language and laws.”

Those interested in obtaining citizenship to the islands can find more information here.

Those of us who follow the debate about global warming, as if it were a debate and not a settled dogma, track the following questions:

1) is it occurring?

2) How much is man engendering?

3) How important is it to solve, and how readily is it solved, relative to all other ecological/disease/development problems?

Roughly speaking, here is what my readings have told me.

1) The earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age, roughly 15,000 years ago (with an extensive break for a micro ice age they call the Younger Dryas from 12-10,000 years ago). Warming may be accelerating in recent centuries. Contrariwise, it has been much warmer in the distant past, and vastly colder in the distant past. We have not yet attained the height of the previous interglacial warming period, when freshwater ponds stood near the Arctic Ocean, which are now called pingoes.

If the recent (last million years) past is any guide, we are currently in the last few millennia before the onset of the next ice age. We have been through 18 ice ages the last million years, with gradually increasing extremes of cold occurring as the ice age has progressed. All of human history, from the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, has occurred in the latest interglacial.

More recently, global warming appears to have stopped as of the year 2000, but I don’t read too much into this one way or another, since any general trend in the earth’s climate less than a few hundred years long is generally of no enduring significance. Nevertheless, global warming and cooling can happen suddenly, so that we can be plunged back into an ice age in less than a decade. I cannot reconcile these two statements without recourse to longer explanations than you have time to read.

2) Not much. Having read as much geological history as I have, the claims of many scientists that we are tipping the world over into a heat death strike me as vastly implausible. I also notice that geologists, who are accustomed to dealing with a thousand years as the shortest possible time-span they reckon in, tend to have a distinctly different view of climate than climate scientists, who track weather over time, and deal, in essence, with air, not rock.

3) I side with Bjorn Lomborg that if we had a hundered major global problems to solve, such as malaria, clean drinking water, education for girls etc, global warming would be last on the list in terms of cost-effectiveness of solving. Cold kills more people than heat, every winter, year in, year out.

Now today’s sermon is about the meaning of science. The philosophy of science is that it is only provisionally true. It must frame propositions that can be disproved. If it cannot generate propositions that can be disproved, it is not science. Hence the Wolfgang Pauli insult than some things “are not even wrong” - cannot generate propositions whose truth can be measured against results.

It was intersting to read in the National Post yesterday (”Overheated Claims”) an article by Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, citing two US climate scientists, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, the following passage, quoted twice:

“It is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence must therefore come from other sources”

Would you please read that again and tell me where that confidence should come from? If observed changes over decades fail to track predictions, over decades, then where is our conficence in climate modelling to come from? The operations of the Holy Spirit?

As Pielke observes:
“The IPCC issues predictions for 20-30-year periods in the futiure, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capanbilities can never be measured against real world data.”

In short, if you read the words carefully, they are saying that climate predictions are not science, because not falsifiable. This is exactly the thrust of the scientific objection to Intelligent Design.

Hence you will understand my increasing belief that Climate Science has reached the stage of being voodoo for white people. Not just metaphorically, but now, as we cast aside the last links to falsifiability, to pure magical thinking.

Obama told a news conference today that “… I think there is an executive order out on Osama bin Laden’s head and if I’m president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive… What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he’s engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism,”

He might want to recall the troubles that bedeviled previous attempts to capture bin Laden, during the Clinton administration, with the help of the full force of the US law. On MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”, Michael Scheuer, a former CIA terrorism analyst shared the following:

“When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard.”

One hopes that a better tape has been manufactured and better seating is available since the last attempt.