Administrative: Captcha's Enabled

Due to a particularly irritating amount of comment bot spam recently, I have enabled 'captcha's on comments.

Hopefully this is only a temporary measure until the various spam lists this blog appears to be on expire.

That's Terrorism?

According to the wingnuts over at No Apologies, the mere threat of the GLBT community demonstrating against an anti-gay series of seminars is "terrorism".

No, I'm afraid that's just abusing the term. Stalking people and murdering them so that others will be intimidated out of legal practices like women's health care services, that's arguably terrorism of a sort. Anybody else remember Dr. Tiller's murder this year? Or Operation Rescue's various campaigns against abortion providers?

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Look at the screaming, whining and bellyaching that comes out from the religious right wing whether it's about gay rights, marriage or abortion - the demonstrations are amazing, and when someone chooses to confront them using their own tactics it suddenly gets labelled "terrorism". There's a word for this - hypocrisy.

As for Mr. Lizotte, the man leading these sessions, he seems to be a francophone version of the usual anti-gay speakers. I would put even odds that I could find the same assertions that Mr. Lizotte makes on any of the usual anti-gay websites - with about as much real data to back them up.

The PC's No Longer Represent Albertans

One only need look at this weekend's leadership review for Ed Stelmach.

Mr. Stelmach received a vote of confidence from 77.4 per cent of PC delegates eligible to cast ballots during a mandatory leadership review. The result of the secret-ballot vote was announced to the cheers of more than 1,000 people on Saturday night at the close of the party’s annual party convention in Red Deer.

Considering that less than half that number in the general population would vote for Stelmach, I'd say that 77% suggests that the PC party has officially lost touch with Alberta voters.

Stelmach is easily the weakest Premier this province has seen since Don Getty and by far the most out of touch with Albertans as a whole. (a neat trick, given how awful Getty was) That the party delegates chose to give him such a high approval rating says more about the party's sense of entitlement than anything else.

A premier who has bungled every major policy decision moment since the last election should be in deep trouble with the party apparatus. Instead, they give him a resounding vote of approval - as if the anointed one could not possibly make a mistake.

And Alberta Was Surprised By The Turnout?

So ... the Alberta Government was "surprised" by the high turnout for H1N1 vaccination.

Then there's stories like this in the news. Normally we don't hear about multiple people dying of flu infections in one week ... much less people in the prime of life:

At least three of the four had "risk factors," Predy said, adding he could not release further details because of privacy concerns.

Predy said 70 patients across Alberta are in intensive care with H1N1.

About 26% of those hospitalized are children under nine years old.

The median age is 30, according to officials.

Not only will parents be scared for their children, but they should be worried for themselves too.

While the news stories don't help the public see this as "perfectly normal", or make them patient about waiting for vaccination. Anything that attacks people this quickly and kills those that we would ordinarily have thought to be at low risk is going to provoke a visceral reaction.

Any government that is surprised by this kind of response is seriously out of touch with reality.

Harper Attempts To Politicize The Civil Service

If you haven't heard about this, it's because it's another one of Dear Leader's lovely little partisan games - the kind of shenanigan that Harper doesn't want us to know about.

The Accelerated Economist Training Program invites highly educated people to develop careers in the federal public service, starting at a senior level.
...
But this year, for the first time, candidates need to provide more than a list of qualifications and good marks. They also must to write 1,000 words on the federal government's last budget, promoted widely as the Economic Action Plan.

This is so blatantly political it's ridiculous. I'd put pretty good money down on a wager that says this little turd of a question came down from the political side of things in Ottawa.

No doubt, Harper would dearly love to put a bunch of Reformatories into convenient ranks of the bureaucracy so that the Con$ could undermine another government.

If this question was really about evaluating someone's analytical abilities, there are a hundred other essay questions that could be asked, none of which imply to the candidate that they need to toadie to the fantasies of the current government.

More Dog Whistles From Harper's Back Benches

I said it when Harper was first elected, and I continue to stand by the claim that he is letting his back bench run amok with bills and other activities designed to play to the social conservative base deliberately.

He doesn't expect to have many of those bills get very far, and if he has to, he'll kill them off if he thinks that there will be a political cost to it (e.g. Bill 484 - for example) But ... because he can 'let his caucus vote "freely"' on these matters, Harper allows his caucus to keep their "social/religious conservative credentials" by voting for these bills.

The latest entry in Harper's efforts to keep his base happy emerges in the form of MP Brad Trost's petition to defund Planned Parenthood.

A petition calling for a stop to federal funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has been launched by Saskatoon-Humboldt MP Brad Trost.

Trost presented the petition to the House of Commons Monday. IPPF is funded through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and, according to Trost's petition, "promotes the establishment of abortion as an international human right and lobbies aggressively to impose permissive abortion laws on developing nations."

Most people won't pay attention to this little turd of a petition - they rationally understand that IPPF does some real good in the world. The so-called "pro-life" crowd on the other hand thinks that anything to do with contraception and birth control is pure evil. It's not as if Trost hasn't opened his yap before - inevitably to groups like Lifesite, and conveniently closed-mouth towards mainstream media.

There's nothing hidden about Harper's agenda - you just have to know what to look for.

Mr Liepert, You Got Some s'Plainin To Do

Just what kind of monumental cock-up does it take for for a bunch of overpaid athletes to jump the queues for flu shots?

First of all this bunch of morons in Edmonton come up with a half-baked plan for rolling out H1N1 vaccine, and now we find out that rather than giving preferential treatment to medical and emergency personnel, the government was giving preferential treatment to the Calgary Flames?

Mr. Liepert, you give preferential treatment to that bunch and then bitch about those who stood in line for multiple hours to get a flu shot? Give me a break.

This puts Alberta squarely in the same place as both B.C. and Ontario where preferential access has been given to private clinics that charge a small fortune for people to have the dubious privilege of being their patients.

Someone remind me again what's so #%!##$@! great about privatizing health care? (Which I suspect strongly is precisely Mr. Liepert's goal - make things so awful that overpriced US-style insurance programs look good - so he can sell Alberta off to the private health insurance companies that have been lining the PC's pockets for so long)

Why "My Genes Made Me Do It" Misses The Point

One of NARTH's favourite writers is a fellow by the name of Dr. Neil Whitehead. He has published a book entitled My Genes Made Me Do It which attempts to dispel the notion that there are genetic factors at play in the existence of homosexuality.

Not unlike Michael Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box", one doesn't need to be a specialist in the domain to recognize the logical errors in the arguments presented - no matter how hard the authors attempt to substantiate their position with diagrams, and serious looking statistical analysis.

In many ways, Dr. Whitehead falls into precisely the same trap that Behe did - he's so convinced of the rightness of his argument that he cannot see or recognize the glaring holes in his interpretation of the data.

Consider the following assertion in Chapter 1:

The implications of “many genes” for homosexuality would reflect what happened with the mice, or fruitflies: the typical genetic pattern would be a gradual change in the family over about 30 generations from heterosexuality through bisexuality toward homosexuality - a few percent with each generation. Similarly,homosexuality would only slowly disappear in the descendants (if any) of a homosexual person. Any other proposed mechanism is highly speculative and runs against the known evidence.

The flaws in this argument are many. First of all, it makes the incorrect assumption that evolution would have to progress through bisexual variations to arrive at a homosexual variation. There is absolutely no reason to suspect that this is the case at all, in fact the evidence overall could easily be read as implying that heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality occur naturally and concurrently. This claim implies a determinism that in fact evolutionary theory does not actually reflect.

Similarly, Whitehead asserts that in such a scenario, homosexuality should die out, and yet it clearly does not. Therefore, argues Whitehead, homosexuality could not possibly be rooted in genetics. Again, this makes the false supposition that evolution is deterministic, and further that because a homosexual is less likely to pass their genes on to offspring, that it should die out - more of the "evolution is deterministic" line of thinking. However, it fails to take into account that there may be other reasons why the patterns that result in homosexuality persisting through many generations.

Further, even though we have sequenced the human genome, we should not be so naive as to believe that we have anywhere near a complete understanding of how the genetic attributes we can now describe respond to the surprisingly complex organic chemistry that fills our bodies and makes us tick. We have but begun to explore those very questions.

I'll skip ahead to Chapter 3 for now. Chapter 3 is where the author's bias and agenda is clearly stated:

We all tend to take our heterosexuality for granted as if it just happens. But it seems to develop slowly and steadily and to consolidate over about two decades - through clearly defined and documented stages. Psychologists are in broad agreement about the general stages of heterosexual development and unanimous about one thing: heterosexual orientation is not genetically determined.

This is a strange assertion, and one that seems to be quite at odds with the consensus statements from the APA on homosexuality:

What causes a person to have a particular sexual orientation?

There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

This is subtly different from what Whitehead states. Whitehead conveniently leaves out is that the research is inconclusive with respect to causality. The lack of concrete evidence either way should not be interpreted as negation of the idea that there are biological factors involved.

In Chapter 5 (no I'm not deliberately skipping even numbered chapters, but Chapters 2 and 4 really don't say anything significant), Whitehead takes a stab at trying to explain the gender and sexual orientation of Intersex people.

Ironically, his interpretation of Money et. al. falls into almost exactly the same error that Money himself made - namely he confuses gender identity with social gender.

Social gender is largely learned through experience. It builds on gender identity to some degree. If we didn't learn it through experiences, then by what purpose would the natural segregation of male and female children in school years serve? Further, if gender was purely socialization, then the outcome of Money's experiment involving John Reimer would have been dramatically different.

Money's work with John Reimer actually can be understood as validating the narrative of many transsexuals, who almost universally claim that they felt "like the opposite sex" from a very young age (often well before any sense of gender is supposed to be understood by the child) - and transsexuals move towards transition with a surprising degree of persistence - seemingly without swerving once they start to understand themselves.

Whitehead, however, goes on to argue that because many Intersex people choose to remain in the gender role that they were raised in, that gender identity, and correspondingly sexual identity are in fact primarily learned.

Unfortunately, Whitehead has made a serious error in his theoretical construct in making such an argument. Instead of expanding his interpretation to encompass the percentage of Intersex people who do choose to transition to a different gender role as adults, he effectively argues that their story is not relevant and discards that evidence.

There is a fundamental construct out of Mathematics that Whitehead has clearly ignored or misunderstood - namely that of completeness. Mathematical completeness has a strong definition, but the principle applies to scientific theory as well. A theory that fails to encompass the breadth of the available evidence is either in need of revision, or it suffers from logical inconsistencies, and this is where Whitehead's arguments begins to fall apart.

Whitehead wants his reader to be convinced that in the absence of concrete proof of biological causality that sexual identity and behaviour are therefore learned. If something can be learned, it can obviously be "unlearned" or changed, right?

Well ... perhaps that is the case - after all transsexuals learn the social aspects of their chosen gender, often in the face of having transitioned later in life.

However, that does not explain in the least their stated motives for choosing to transition (or, in the case of some, making the choice not to transition).

For much of the rest of his book, Whitehead spends his time expounding on how various lines of investigation have "not turned up any conclusive evidence" in building his argument that sexual orientation is primarily learned behaviour.

Right now, based on much of what Zoe Brain keeps digging up, I think the interesting work is not going on in the causality of sexual identity, but in understanding gender.

The more of this evidence that gets published, the more convinced I become that to assume that we must all try to be heterosexual is deeply flawed. In no other respect to we expect people to fit into absolute categories. Even handedness is mixed - few people are absolutely left or right handed. I'm strongly left-handed myself, but even there, I find that there are things that I do right handed. There's no absolutes in life, and it seems to me that where we are talking about sexual or gender identity, we should not be attempting to impose some kind of absolute models either.

I think that the notion of gender, and sexual identities as occurring along a spectrum of behaviour, as discussed in this essay series is a more reasonable notion than looking at it as if it is all learned, or all innate. It is far more likely that it is actually a mix of factors, and none of us should assume that there is an absolute of any sort at play.

Whitehead's book is essentially a piece of apologetics for the ex-gay lobby. It depends on the classic logical fallacy that the absence of conclusive evidence is equivalent to negation. This is no different than the classic "gaps in the fossil record" arguments against evolution theory - it fails to prove anything, and does not acknowledge that the evidence is gradually getting filled in. Further, because it requires us to discard information in order to hold together, Whitehead's work is clearly based on a weak foundation.

A Clear Lack of Planning

If you've been in Alberta for the past week, you will have no doubt heard about the disastrous fiasco that has been the H1N1 Vaccination Program.

As of this morning, the vaccination program has been suspended.

Let's see - we have a flu virus running around that in its most serious cases kills otherwise healthy people extremely quickly, the government at both the Federal and Provincial levels has been blitzing the media for weeks telling the public to get vaccinated, and the government opens "mass vaccination" clinics in the major centers. They expected what kind of turnout?

Then we get Liepert blaming the general public for turning up for vaccination - amid stories of supply problems and other issues. If this is the kind of wonderful planning we can expect out of our new Health Superboard, it's no wonder that Albertans are skeptical of this government's ability to tie its own shoelaces, much less actually govern.

People are scared - with good reason. When this virus kills suddenly, can anyone blame parents for fearing for their children's health? When the week that vaccinations began, a thirteen year old hockey player in Ontario got sick and succumbed to this flu within 24 hours, one can only imagine that parents got worried - and rightly so.

While I give full marks to the staff working at those clinics for their efforts to keep things calm and orderly, the Alberta Government, and Alberta Health Services in particular, get a big fat goose egg for their planning and execution. Four clinics in the city of Calgary? Please. Winnipeg has 12 clinics for a population half that of Calgary.

Calgarians were standing in lineups for upwards of 5 hours, and then getting turned away. This is a complete fiasco - the governments made it plenty clear that we should get vaccinated, and then they tell us that we shouldn't get vaccinated? No. Wrong.

Liepert screwed this up monumentally - and he gets to wear the fallout. Don Braid explains how badly Liepert and Stelmach have bungled this rollout.

But even if supplies were ample, the public health officials were on the edge of a crisis they created. They simply didn't supply enough access points to meet the huge demand they completely failed to anticipate.

In hindsight, it's almost beyond belief that they only set up 10 clinics for two million people in Calgary and Edmonton.

B.C., by contrast, will have dozens of smaller clinics when H1N1 vaccination starts for the public (high-risk people are already getting shots). So B.C. looks smart by holding back vaccine. I'm not sure it should; people surely have a right to the vaccine as soon as it's available.

Trick Or Trout!

You know that the Vatican's lost their marbles when they start echoing the fundamentalist nutballs:

What millions around the world consider a harmless tradition bound by unconvincing costumes and mountains of teeth-rotting sweets is, according to the Catholic Church, riddled with a dark undercurrent of occultism and is "absolutely anti-Christian".

But the Church's hypocrisy gets even richer - as they descend into the depths of stupidity:

Earlier this week, the Catholic Church in Spain also condemned the growing popularity of Halloween, saying it threatened to overshadow the Christian festival of All Saints' Day.

We don't need to spend too much time reflecting on the fact that much of the modern Christian calendar is based on conveniently placing holy celebrations at times which conveniently coincided with various pagan counterparts ... in a deliberate effort to overshadow the pagan celebrations.

Coming from an organization that claims the Pope has some kind of ultimate holy conduit to God that the rest of us can never possibly hope to share in, it seem particularly ironic that they worry about "occultism" - as little could be more occult than claiming to be in direct communication with the supernatural.

Stelmach Needs To Take A Long Walk Off A Short Pier

What is it with Alberta's governments and their incessant idiotic approach to anything resembling human rights issues?

The most recent outrage comes in the form of collecting and analyzing all prisoner communications.

Superficially, one might think "what's so bad about that?", after all they're in prison which means they are convicted of something, right?

The proposed changes to Alberta's Corrections Act broaden what provincial prisons can monitor, allowing for any technology inmates might access in the future, such as video or computer communications. Databases will be created, and, given "reasonable grounds," prison directors can search what inmates have said or written.

Well - there's a bit of a problem here. Someone being held in a remand facility is not necessarily convicted of anything - they may be facing serious charges, but they have not yet been convicted of them. Last I checked, this violates the fundamental principle of our justice system - the presumption of innocence.

Second, it arguably violates a key tenet of Canada's Charter of Rights:

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

Please note the lack of exclusions in S. 8 and the surrounding areas regarding someone who has been incarcerated, so presumably S8. applies just as much behind bars as it does on the outside. Around the clock surveillance and recording of all communications arguably constitutes an unreasonable search.

I just love how the bureaucrats are going to invent their own rules for "reasonable grounds" to use this accumulated information. This isn't going to be written in law - it's going to be at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats. I just can't imagine how that could go wrong, can you?

But, this isn't just about what can happen to you behind bars. It's about what the Conservatives from Alberta actually understand about human and civil rights. To them, it's all conditional. Are you conforming to their ideal little worldview? If not, then you don't deserve to have any rights, and they think they can arbitrarily revoke your rights at their whim.

Alberta's doing it, and make no mistake about it, Harper would do the same and worse if ever granted a majority.