It’s been a while since I did a blog carnival, but at request I submitted my piece on the point of continuing with Does God Exist debates, to the last Carnival of the Godless that was posted a week ago at No Forbidding Questions. Go check it out for lots of great, godless links.
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Leading by example
A huge kudos out to Alberta Liberal leader David Swann for this gem that all federal MPs should pay attention to:
As a commitment to the issue of financial accountability I will be posting the monthly statement of expenses for my constituency – Calgary Mountainview – in the coming weeks. This information will be available directly on my website for constituents and all Albertans to review.
The provincial Auditor General in Alberta has the ability to see MP expense reports, so I’m not sure if this is already a little better than the federal situation, but nevertheless, honest politicians are hard to come by these days.
That answers my question
Apparently it’s Chevron, not BP, that has been seeping oil from a Burnaby refinery into the Burrard Inlet for the past month without really telling anyone.
And I guess its not really clear what the Conservatives really think about offshore drilling. I think Prentice wants to sound like moratoriums exist (at least in the Arctic) but doesn’t really want to rule out any drilling once the fuss over a little spilt oil subsides.
When will BP ruin BCs coastlines?
By the time you finish reading this post, well over 5500 litres of oil will have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil continues to pour out of a busted well and the slick continues to grow and has already hit land in some parts of Florida. Meanwhile, closer to home, the question that seems to be off of the provincial radar is when will our offshore wells be built so they can threaten our fragile habitats?
It has been over a month since an explosion rocked British Petroleum’s (BP) Deepwater Horizons oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast left eleven people missing and presumed dead and well over 790,000 litres of oil has gushed into the sea. There has been little success at stopping the flow so far.
It seems hard to tell if any remorse is being felt by the heads of BP for a disaster that is shaping up to be worse than the Exxon Valdez spill in the North Pacific years ago. Perhaps their biggest fear is either the public relations hit or that they will not be able to profit off this spilt oil.
Just a week prior to the last provincial election in 2009, Premier Gordon Campbell signalled that a provincial Liberal government would continue to lobby for an end to the offshore drilling moratorium that inhibits BC from building wells at sea. This position was in line with the Liberal’s 2001 commitment to have an offshore drilling industry in BC by 2010.
Days later he squeaked by with a slim majority government. It was soon leaked that the provincial deficit would be much larger than promised and that BC, along with Ontario, would be implementing an HST. It should not be a surprise then that after dropping twenty points in the polls that Campbell would not want to broach the subject of offshore oil wells.
Yet with the recent tragedy in the Gulf, it is more pertinent than ever to find out what our far-too-secretive government is up to. While the typically oil-friendly federal Conservative environment minister Jim Prentice has backed off from any new offshore projects and has reaffirmed moratoriums on drilling off BC’s shorelines.
Darrell Dexter, the newly-elected NDP premier of Nova Scotia, was quick to pledge his continuing support to offshore moratoriums in his province and even Barack Obama has gotten behind a temporary slow-down. Obviously no leader would want to publicly come out as pro-drilling right now, so I guess Campbell’s silence on the issue speaks as much to the issue as a press conference would. There is currently no sign that Campbell plans to back down on offshore drilling.
As a non-renewable resource, it is quite clear that at some point in the future we will run out of oil. And while there is still a lot of it underground, the remaining supplies are in increasingly difficult regions to access. Whether it is in the Alberta tar sands, under politically unstable regimes, or deep under the Arctic ice sheets, there are many political and environmental issues that must be addressed if we want to responsible drill for this oil. And while a leak off BCs coast may be containable, imagine the damage that could be done were a disaster to befall an arctic well, with hundreds of thousands of litres of oil covering the undersides of the ices sheets.
Of course, I personally would love to see the end of the oil age in my life time, the fact of the matter is that this laptop I am typing on, the synthetic portions of my clothes, and countless other products use barrels and barrels of oil, let alone the amount that we use for energy. A lot of work has been done on alternative energies, and there is a huge need for more investment, but until those industries are positioned to meet the demands, we will either have to continue drilling for oil, or massively cut out consumption.
I believe that it is possible to extract oil from the tar sands and deep underwater both safely and with as little environmental damage as possible, however, if our leaders fail to discuss if they are even interested in such activities, how are we to trust them to ensure the proper regulatory regimes are in place when corporations do begin to stick their pipes in the ground?
Book Review: The Armageddon Factor
Sorry for the delay in posting this review, I was hoping to have this piece published in The Peak’s Arts section but they choose to go with a 2,000 word piece about a museum’s shoe exhibit instead, but that’s a whole different rant.
The Christians are coming!
In The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, Marci McDonald attempts to raise the awareness of our own growing Christian Right. She purports to show how they have quickly and subtly gained an alarming amount of influence in the government.
In the first chapter, McDonald outlines Stephen Harper’s personally religious history, a topic that is not spoken of very much by Harper of the media. Harper became a born-again after moving to Calgary and joining Preston Manning’s Reform Party movement. However, Harper, unlike Manning and much of the Reform Party, was more comfortable keeping his faith and politics mostly separate. McDonald notes that it was only later when, as leader of the new Conservative Party, Harper attempted to reach out to the evangelical communities.
But it was still hard for McDonald to measure the level of influence the Christian Right has had under Harper’s consecutive minority governments. There have been few socially conservative policy changes, and of those most have disappointed the very factions McDonald seeks to expose. Harper has repeatedly turned away from the abortion debate and upon winning his first minority government in 2006 he quickly allowed for his promised free vote on same-sex marriage – a vote that was actually earlier than many evangelicals had wanted, since it provided them less time to mount a defence. Similarly, by breaking his fixed-election date law in 2008, Harper killed several of his caucus’ private members bills, including an unborn victims bill that was called the “first winnable abortion bill” in years.
However, McDonald does point out that perhaps Harper’s greatest success has been in his “incremental” changes, evidenced by his countless appointments of partisans and born-agains to all levels of courts, the senate and the civil service. Within the Prime Minister’s Office, Harper counts many evangelical leaders, including the former leader of Focus on the Family Canada, Darrell Reid.
Similarly, Harper has been able to make many changes by the mere stroke of a pen. In recent months Harper has cut funds to Status of Women Canada and KAIROS, a social justice charity that apparently represented the wrong-type of Christians for this government (like McDonald has been told she is). He has sent tens of millions of stimulus dollars to Bible Colleges and after he cut funding to abortions for overseas aid, a crowd of 15,000 pro-lifers rallied on the steps of the House of Commons.
McDonald also briefly discusses the so-called “Christian Left,” which included Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare. She points out how both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton have reached out to various faith communities through acts like the revival of the NDP Faith and Social Justice committee. Contrary to some interpretations, it does not seem to me that McDonald is against these, or even Harper’s, attempts to dialogue with people of faith in principle, but merely that she hopes that such activity is acknowledged publicly.
The Armageddon Factor is an enlightening read, regardless of your personal views, but unfortunately the book strays from neutrality enough that it reads as a bit more than just a who’s who of the Christian Right. My initial hope was that it could have been more like the documentary film Jesus Camp, which, for the most part, just lets the subjects speak for themselves.
Either way, the book does shed light on much of what has been going on in the dark. No democracy is served by secrecy and backroom lobbying. At the very least, this book will hopefully force Canadians to decide what kind of country we want this to be, because if we do not, there are those who have a scripturally-inspired version of what they think it should be.
Why the debate matters
It comes up frequently enough, aren’t the same old religious debates just tired and boring? Since most of the “New Atheist” arguments were developed in the Enlightenment to counter medieval Christian theology, it is easy to depict the debate as repetitive. And I have to somewhat agree, the answers to questions about God, creation and morality seem to be well established by modern science and philosophy. So the question that remains is: Why do hundreds of people routinely turn up to existence of God debates?
One answer lays in these are called the “big questions” for a reason. And while some may have determined their personal answers, they are still worth continual questioning and reconsidering. As many of the religious so frequently claim, our immortal souls may hang in the balance.
But for each of us who are willing to reconsider our personal answers, there are still many more that have already decided theirs and are ready to murder those who claim different answers. Others are not so absolute in their convictions, but are still so righteous that they believe that they have the justification to force their views on others.
The first example is a recent incident involving an 11-year old girl in a New Mexico public school who tripped, scraped her nose and loosened two teeth. Her teacher, a pinnacle of regressive bigotry, decided that her parents did not need to hear about this incident, nor did the girl need to see the school nurse. It was because of the teacher’s religious objections to the fact that this girl had two mothers that something so reprehensible to occur. This persecution is further evidenced by the fact that after the girl had submitted an assignment earlier in the semester, that described her parent’s summer wedding, the teacher called it disgusting and tore it apart in front of her.
In another case, Swedish artist Lars Vilks has received death threats for drawing Mohammed’s head on body of a dog. He was recently head-butted by extremists while giving a talk at Uppsala University. This happened for the sake of a crude, poorly-drawn sketch.
But we do not need to look to the American South to see such prejudice. Right here in Vancouver a popular music teacher at Little Flower Academy, a partially-public funded Catholic school, was denied maternity leave and essentially fired due to the fact that when she went home she was greeted by her loving wife.
So the real reason that it is worth debating these “dead horse” issues is that they continue to fuel religious fundamentalists who want to reshape our progressive society into a God-fearing theocracy. Dawkins’ recent success has more to do with his willingness to expose religion as a detrimental sacred cow than the originality of his arguments.
This negative effect is most obvious in the recent scandals in the Catholic Church. While pedophiles can gain access to children through a variety of means, such as sports teams or elementary schools, most organizations stand up for the victims and make efforts to prosecute the perpetrators for their heinous crimes. However, it takes an organization that believes it has divine providence, like the Catholic Church, to systematically shuffle pedophiles between congregations, swear victims to secrecy, deny the charges, and finally blame the victims for crimes of their priests.
Religion far too often creates a structure that favours blind devotion to doctrine and authoritarians. The hope for humanists is to demonstrate that a positive and fulfilling life can be lead without the need for uncritical adherence to scriptures. When people stop thinking, they have a great capacity for evil.
Draw Mohammed tomorrow
The rule seems to be that all protests these days form on Facebook from someone’s random idea. There was prorogation, then boobquake and now “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
Each has its merits and deserved criticisms, but each is also responsible for getting thousands of people thinking about something they hadn’t previously considered.
Tomorrow’s Draw Mohammed Day may have started out as a response to the threats against the creators of South Park for (almost) depicting the claimed prophet in a bear suit, but it is now a defence of free speech and a collective resistance to the bullying of Islamic fundamentalists.
Such bullying can be seen in the murder of Theo Van Gogh or the fatwa’s against Salman Rushdie or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The latest example is the rallies that has caused Pakistan to block Facebook until the end of the month so their apparently overly sensitive Muslim population won’t have to be subject to seeing pictures of their prophet (that is if they go to the effort to look for them).
So tomorrow isn’t about being offensive or racist or derogatory, but rather standing together for our rights because they can’t kill all of us.
Here’s a sample of my artistic skills and the Mohammed I will be drawing:
O-|-<
The Peak – Has Bill Nye sold out?
My article in the Peak that was published last Monday is finally online. My credit is missing right now, but hopefully it gets added…
This article is in response to Brian Dunning’s 22 April piece “Bill Nye selling out to the man?”
The question being asked right now by many self-professed skeptics is: Has Bill Nye sold out? This comes after news arose that acclaimed science educator, Bill Nye, has endorsed a new water-based cleaning product called ActiveIon.
The invention claims to ionize ordinary tap water, which allows it to stick to dirt particles better than ordinary water. After a simple spray, dirt and grime can be wiped away leaving no more streaks than spraying with normal water. The company heavily touts their product’s environmentally-conscience credentials since it uses no chemicals.
Their new spokesperson is Bill Nye, who gained fame in the 1990s from his TV series, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Later, he starred in the single season of the show The Eyes of Nye, where he critically examined claims surrounding topics ranging from nuclear energy to pseudoscience to the evolution of sex. He is also a fellow of the committee for skeptical inquiry, which represents many skeptics.
Meanwhile, many skeptics have long been unconvinced by purveyors of products similar to ActiveIon’s cleaner, especially when one considers that it sells for over $150 per (refillable) bottle. Snake-oil salesmen for years have been claiming that ionized water can be used to do everything from increasing your energy to defeating cancer. So, it is unsurprising that many skeptics would take great exception to Nye’s ostensible turn to the dark side.
On SkepticBlog, Brian Dunning claims that Nye may be down on his luck and potentially took the sponsorship to bring in some much needed cash. In the comments, others suggest he may have been tricked into buying into this product for its green credentials.
Yet, only a small number of skeptics on the site actually propose that the product ought to be tested before it, and Nye, get tossed into the dustbin of credulity. One would think that the proper skeptical response to such a moderate claim would be to actually look for some evidence.
So what testable claims are being made here and what evidence is there to back them up?
From the ActiveIon website, they claim to electrically charge the water before running it through an “ion exchange membrane,” which creates “an oxygen-rich mixture of positive and negative nanobubbles.” Finally, the ionized water is attracted to dirt particles, which are then easily wiped away.
Despite the seemingly flagrant misuse of the prefix nano, a cursory literature search turns up nearly 2,000 articles describing nanobubbles in different forms. In one study at Penn State University, electrolyzed water was shown to create nanobubbles of ozone; the ozone is then able to sterilize food in a similar process to how chlorine in pools kills bacteria. These processes, like the ActiveIon sprayer, only result in ionized water for a short period of time, but it is potentially long enough to be used as a simple cleaning agent.
Several other studies also examine using electrolyzed water for cleaning during semiconductor processing. A few of the reports even show drastic improvements over traditional strong acid methods. This corroborates the claims by ActiveIon, which lists a study by the University of Massachusetts’ Lowell Toxic Use Reduction Institute Lab, that demonstrates its efficacy.
At first sight, this product seems to operate solely on pseudoscientific buzzwords and yet is being endorsed by an icon of the scientific method. However, with some digging, there appears to be less magic and some potentially legitimate evidence that the device may in fact work. It seems many of the self-professed skeptics are a bit more cynical than they would let on.
In this case, it seems more than reasonable to grant Bill Nye the benefit of the doubt in endorsing this product. Were the man to truly be in dire financial straits, he could very easily return to his work as a mechanical engineer. Despite the recession, his experience at NASA ought to count for something.
It is important for all skeptics out there to beware the temptations of cynicism. While this product likely is not all that it is cracked up to, few products are, it is at least supported by several related studies and independent confirmation. Being able to clean surfaces with water is not exactly an extraordinary claim, so treating it like a childish superstition is merely close-minded and arrogant.
Evil, evil, evil
It’s mothers day, but I guess that means that sometimes you have to sit in class bleeding if you have 2 mothers and a bigot for a teacher.
The story isn’t completely confirmed yet, but early reports seem to be that an 11-year-old in New Mexico tripped and cute her nose and loosened some teeth was denied access to the school nurse or a call home because her teacher thinks she should attend another school since she has married lesbian parents.
The Albuquerque Journal also reports that when the girl submitted an assignment about her summer vacation, where her parents got married, the teach ripped the page out and told her “this is gross, this is horrible, you need to write about something else.”
The family is rightfully filing a lawsuit for negligence and violations of her civil rights (this is a public school).
"We don’t send our kids to school in New Mexico to get hurt and to learn hatred and intolerance," Foster [the family’s attorney] said. He said his suit will aim to show a pattern of harassment.
Joyce Murray shills for Big Natura
I’m sorry Joyce Murray, you just lost any chance to get my vote to stop the Cons from taking Vancouver-Quadra.
Here’s her latest statement in the House of Commons, dissected:
Ms. Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, each year during the first week in May, the Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors leads a national awareness week in support of naturopathic medicine.
Naturopathic physicians are primary health care professionals with a minimum of seven years post-secondary education.
Nope. Only BC, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan actually license naturopathic doctors, everywhere else in Canada they can just go by ND with whatever training they feel like. It’s also worth noting that any number of years studying pseudo-scientific ideas does not make it any more legitimate. You can go to clown college, astrology school, or take UFO classes, but none of those qualify you to effectively treat diseases.
They practise naturopathic medicine, which is a distinct primary health care system that blends modern scientific knowledge with traditional and natural forms of medicine. The naturopathic philosophy is to stimulate the healing power of the body and treat the underlying cause of the disease.
From the first line in Wikipedia: “Medicine is the art and science of healing. It encompasses a range of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness.” The unique thing about naturopathy is that it blends real, evidence-based medicine, with pseudo-scientific ideas that have been debunked repeatedly. There is no reason to have a separate section of medicine where bogus treatments are included, except to rip people off. Apparently Ms. Murray supports a two-tier health system, only rather than at least getting cured for their money, people are being scammed by under-regulated snake-oil salesmen.
Each year during Naturopathic Medicine Week, naturopathic doctors hang up their lab coats and teach communities across Canada about naturopathic medicine, how naturopathic doctors can be valuable additions to health care teams and how they work with patients to identify the most effective solutions to individual health needs.
My biggest issue here is that even real doctors and scientists rarely wear lab-coats. This just paints a false picture that NDs are equivalent to real doctors. They’re not. If they were, they would be MDs and have completed real medical school.
Naturopathic Medicine Week is an excellent opportunity for all Canadians to learn more about achieving optimum health and I encourage Canadians to visit local naturopathic physicians in their communities.
I encourage you to stop shilling for Big Natura and stand up for evidence-based medicine. Our health care system is fragile enough as it is from years of Liberal and Conservative incremental cuts, it doesn’t need a woo-infestation to further discredit it.
For more debunking of Naturopathic Medicine Week, see the blog Skeptic North.