The Propaganda Machine Gears Up

In response to Denis Coderre's unapproved trip to Afghanistan, we find that Harper has mobilized his troops and sent ministers Oda and Bernier to Afghanistan to do damage control:

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier contradicted all publicly available assessments of security in southern Afghanistan Sunday with a bold claim that insurgent attacks have decreased in Kandahar, leaving the province more secure for humanitarian work.

"The territory is more secure now today, here in Kandahar than it was a year ago," Mr. Bernier said. "Look just a year ago what happened, there were many attacks, and the attacks have diminished."

Okay, so a newly minted Foreign Affairs minister comes out and says something that blatantly contradicts the available evidence and analysis.

Meanwhile, more thoughtful analysis of the situation done by the UN tells us:

"The security situation in Afghanistan is assessed by most analysts as having deteriorated at a constant rate through 2007," said a paper by the UN Department of Safety and Security in August. That report showed violent incidents increased almost 25 per cent this year, although the authors noted that the figure may be conservative.

... and, just to make the point even more glaring:

Kandahar was among only three provinces listed in the United Nations report as places where the security situation has fallen into its worst category — "Extreme Risk/Hostile Environment" — across most of the province. This rating causes less accessibility to UN programs, the report notes.

These statistics fit with those collected by other analysts. The respected security firm Vigilant Strategic Services Afghanistan found that Kandahar suffered more anti-government attacks than any other province, in a tally of incidents from the beginning of the year to Sept. 30.

So...not only is Kandahar - where Canadian troops are working - descending into the pit of chaos, we also note that Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs is contradicting every serious analysis of the situation.

Who are you going to believe - a minister who was obviously sent over to minimize whatever damage Coderre might do to Harper's lying BS on Afghanistan, or the world's analysts who seem to be amazingly unified in their analysis of the situation.

Let's Get This Straight ...

Creationism is mythology, not science. It's not even bad science. A few clowns like Michael Behe have tried to dress up creationism as "science" by calling it "Intelligent Design".

There is no "debate" to be had around the scientific validity of creationism - and never will be. The weight of evidence that supports evolution theory is simply overwhelming, no matter what "doubts" creationists may put forward.

Apparently, the Winnipeg Sun's Joseph Quesnel thinks that the appearance of "Creation Museums" and other attempts to legitimize creationism as a form of "legitimate science" are a sign of a debate we should be having.

Quesnel complains:

When Liberal Party strategist Warren Kinsella presented his purple dinosaur on a television program to mock Day, he was upholding a strong prejudice against evangelical Christians permeating our society.

Should it be any surprise Christians who hold fast to the biblical account of creation are treated this way?

Witness the case of Stephen Meyer, a proponent of intelligent design in the United States. Meyer wrote a peer-reviewed academic article in a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution about his ideas and almost lost his career. This is a scientist who is not a young earth creationist and yet he faced blacklisting by a prominent scientific organization.

Hold on a second here, Quesnel. If you put forth a paper that claimed that PI was in fact a whole number, would you not fully expect to be laughed out of the journals you submitted it to? I'm sorry to say, but it is not "prejudice" for a peer review journal to trash what is obviously monumental junk science.

The claim that science should "accommodate" religion is a bad joke at best. If your religion leads you to believe that the earth is flat, or the moon made of cheese, that's just fine - but don't ask science (and scientists) to validate your beliefs when the evidence says otherwise.

In many respects, science is not "hostile" to theism so much as it disregards theistic notions (it is "atheistic" in the very classical sense of the term - science simply doesn't regard theism as relevant). If various people wish to create "Creation Museums", that's fine - just don't ask the rest of us to take them seriously.

Western Standard: Good Riddance

Via Buckdog, we learn that Ezra LeRant's Western Standard is now defunct - or at least its print edition is.

I imagine that Ezra will keep the on-line version in some capacity - at least the discussion forum/blog sections.

Given the narrow, hard-line politics of Ezra's publication, I'm glad to see the "free market" he so idolized swatting his publication down. It reinforces my long-held belief that even in Western Canada, the extreme right wing conservatism is not by any means the majority view.

So, What ARE The Con$ Hiding?

After months of stonewalling on the part of the Ministry of Truth Defense, Denis Coderre has shelled out from his own budget to pay for a trip to Afghanistan to see what's going on over there.

"I'm the official critic. I'm the critic of the Official Opposition of Her Majesty. It's important for me to do my job," he told CBC News.

Coderre said he will meet with aid groups and hopes to speak to Canadian military officers.

If Canada's oh-so-accountable Con$ervative government are truly being up front with Canadians, why do we find this response coming from Mackay?:

"Mr. Coderre is engaged, in my view, in a dangerous and elaborate stunt, a publicity stunt on his part," MacKay said, arguing that troops in Afghanistan could be put in unnecessary danger if Coderre were kidnapped and they had to try to save him.

"It's irresponsible. It puts people at risk. It puts soldiers at risk."

Coderre said he wouldn't have to travel on his own if the government made it easier for MPs like him to visit Afghanistan.

Frankly, after the BushCo-like photo-op riddled visits of this government's ministers to Afghanistan, I think I'll be quite looking forward to hearing what Coderre finds and reports when he returns. The tight leash that Harper has placed on the stories coming back from Afghanistan smacks of propaganda and political interference.

You Reap What You Sow...

Apparently, Richard took his war with blogger "Canadian Cynic" to the press:

Richard Evans, who is running in Ward 4, said an anonymous blogger has been defaming him on his website and posting his address, phone number and the names of his wife and two children.

Now, I'll let Cynic's own commentary speak to the issues of the accusations being tossed about. Frankly, I tend to be of the opinion that both parties are acting childish.

BUT - CC is not putting himself forward to sit on Calgary's City Council, either. Richard Evans is.

Voters in Calgary's Ward 4 have a question to ask themselves when they put their "X" on a ballot in a little less than two weeks' time: "Will we be represented effectively by this man?". Will "effective" representation come from a man whose conduct is childish, immature or even in amazingly bad taste, such as taunting victims of sexual assault?

Whether Evans stands much of a chance against Bob Hawkesworth is open to debate. Frankly, I'll be looking for someone who has a little more maturity in their conduct - and a little less tendency to devolve into taunting when he disagrees with someone. Politics is the art of compromise, and the behaviour shown by Evans to date shows us someone who "wins" arguments by belittlement. Not exactly promising.

There Goes That Program...

If the Con$ remain in power, look for the Vancouver Insite safe injection site to be shut down - in spite of significant evidence of success in the first innovative approach to street drugs that Canada has seen in decades.

Why do I say this? Simple, PMSH's own commentary yesterday when announcing the Gnu Government's "Vewy Own Wah On Drugs":

The government this week extended funding to that program but only for six months so it can be further studied.

"I remain a skeptic that you can tell people that we won't stop the drug trade, we won't get you off drugs, we won't even send messages to discourage drug use but somehow we will keep you addicted but reduce the harm just the same," Mr. Harper said of the Insite program. "If you remain a drug addict, I don't care how much harm you reduce, you are going to have a short and miserable life."

The blinding ignorance of those statements of Harper's is amazing - ranging from the obvious loathing and fear he holds for poverty (and those caught in the cycles it produces) to his obvious ideological choice to ignore the following from Insite itself:

But Thomas Kerr, a professor in the University of British Columbia's Department of Medicine who has studied Insite and its effect on the prevention of the spread of HIV-AIDS, said Mr. Harper is ignoring the facts.

"The government continues to misrepresent the science around harm reduction. In the case of Insite we have shown that there has been a 33-per-cent increase in the rate of entry into detox programs," Dr. Kerr said. "In no way is the facility perpetuating addiction. In fact, it's helping people quit drug use."

... and from the people who work on the front lines every day trying to help people whose lives are disrupted by drugs, disease and poverty:

Leon Mar of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network said education programs, such as the one proposed by the government, have previously proved ineffective. Health Canada's own review of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program implemented widely across Canada, he said, has shown that the program does not prevent or delay drug use.

Success doesn't matter to Stephen Harper - it's all about ideology for the man - and he doesn't give a damn who he steps on in his relentless drive to turn Canada into George Bush's America.

What PMSH rolled out yesterday is such a transparent copy of the "war on drugs" approach of "gettin' tough" it's not even funny. The ineffectiveness of mandatory sentences and harsher laws in handling drug problems is clear - one only has to look at the United States to see the evidence - where drugs continue to be a major problem, even though more and more people are incarcerated for ever-longer periods of time - for simple possession.

Like most Neo-Con social policy, the "get tough" line only works in a limited sense. Most people get the message early enough in life that the consequences of using drugs like heroin or cocaine are understood to be undesirable. A few don't, or wind up in situations so desperate that drugs become the only way they can "escape" - even for a few hours. Until we learn, as a society, how to deal with those problems, illicit narcotics will remain a fact of life. Where enforcement is concerned, our job is to make sure we are going after the scum who profit from drugs. Not so much the street dealers, but the organizations that manufacture and distribute the materials.

Simply slamming more people into rehab and prison isn't going to work. Nor is denying the documented successes of programs like Vancouver's InSite.

Egmont Starts To Get Interesting

I've commented in the past about Craig Chandler's efforts to "take over" the Calgary Egmont riding by dominating the local PC party organization.

Yesterday, we learned that Cathie Williams will pursue the Alberta Liberal nomination in Egmont.

Even with long-time MLA Denis Herard, I have always felt that Egmont was a relatively vulnerable seat for the PCs to hold. Herard was a "nice guy", but largely acted as a bench warmer for Ralph Klein - his performance as an MLA was lackluster at best.

With Herard stepping down, and hard-liners like Chandler (whose politics are far right of the traditional ground the PC's have occupied), a moderate candidate makes a lot of sense.