Terahertz

PHD Comics latest comic repeats my recent observations and complaints with regards to the skyrocketing tuition at the University of Alberta. While this graph is for the US average, it aligns very closely with any of Brendan Taylor’s analysis of Canadian universities.

I don’t care how you see Rahim Jaffer’s $500 fee for speeding, drunk driving and cocaine possession (actually he got off scotch-free on the last two), but hoping that a large enough Facebook group can overturn the results of our justice system is asking for trouble.

We live under the rule of law, as soon as that rule can be overturned by majority (or sizable minority) opinion, minorities lose their protection, and our basis as a free democracy is threatened.

A few quick stories of note recently:

• A whooping cough outbreak is occurring in the BC West Kootenay region because woo-woo parents think vaccines are evil and now their children are at risk of dying. And some people ask what’s the harm in letting people believe in alternative medicine.
• Speaking of unfounded woo, NDP MP Denise Savoie has claimed that evil “toxins” are to blame for NDP Leader Jack Layton’s recently diagnosed prostate cancer. Throw out the fact she doesn’t state what specific toxins cause cancer and implies all chemicals are evil. Perhaps cancer is more frequent now because we’re living longer and are better at detecting it.
• Further to the Jack Layton story, it’s commendable to see everyone setting aside partisanship to wish him the best for a speedy recovery.
• The BC Civil Liberties Association is rightly backing the right of University of Victoria’s Your Protecting Youth pro-life student group. While I disagree with the groups stance, they do have a right to exist and organize and pushing them aside is the wrong thing to do. If the group crosses the lines of civil discourse and propagates falsehoods, then there may be a case for disbanding them, but the same ought to apply to any and all campus groups.
• The Kamloops Atheists report that the local “Daily News” paper refused to publish any atheist material in their religion page since “the rest of the paper was for atheist material.” They subsequently didn’t publish the request article anywhere in the paper. Further they note that the Kamloops Christian School is teaching Biblical Creationism with equal time to the “theory” of evolution.
• Finally, to end on a positive note, the Centre for Inquiry Vancouver has just hired Radio Freethinker co-host Ethan Clow as their new Executive Director, making him the third paid CFI employee in Canada. I look forward to see continued success for CFI and wish Ethan the best of luck. Further to that, I’ve accepted a position as CFI Canada’s Campus Outreach Director, and hope to continue the success of the dozens of student groups across the country.

A neocon tool who uses SFUs student newspaper, The Peak, to spout his views alerted me (and the 5 other readers of the Peak) that populist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is blaming the Haitian earthquake on a secret US weapon test before they turn the weapon on Iran.

Not feeling like I can trust Van Maren’s fact-checking ability, I ran a source check to see how many news articles “chavez earthquake” returns. A mere 700 if you were wondering. And most of those are because Chavez is a president of a nearby country.

But what about “chavez earthquake weapon”? Now you only get 70 hits, with such great sources as “World Press Review,” “NowPublic,” and FOXNews.

Ah, FOXNews, what a reputable source. They of course jump on the chance to blast a socialist leader as a crazy wackaloon and state the following:

The United States apparently possesses an "earthquake weapon" that set off the catastrophic quake in Haiti and killed 200,000 innocents. Don’t believe it’s true? Just ask Hugo Chavez. [emphasis theirs]

They claim the story originated on “the Venezuelan strongman’s state mouthpiece ViVe TV” (does that make FOXNews the Republican party’s mouthpiece?) but was taken down recently. They try linking to the Google cached pages which aren’t all too damning.

The only other source for this story seems to be a YouTube channel called “RussiaToday” which has this video:

This is supposedly the YouTube arm of the Russian state run RT TV station. They quote Spanish Newspaper ABC, and you can find the translated article here. It quotes the Venezuelan TV station as well.

These claims fly on the heels of the substantiated reports that Chavez claimed that the US was “taking [military] advantage of the tragedy” and moving to occupy Haiti.

Here’s the facts:

• Chavez distrusts the USA and claimed they were invading Haiti
• FOXNews is not known for portraying Chavez (or any other socialists) in a positive light
• Someone (either ViVe TV or RT or FOXNews) published a story claiming the Haitian earthquake was caused by a secret US weapon test
• That story no longer exists (or never did) as a primary source
• People will believe most of the crap they read if it fits their agenda

Could Chavez had said crazy things? Probably. While I am more of a socialist than the average North American, I’m not going to march behind everything a socialist leader says (as blindly following generally ends badly), and I don’t think the USA is trying to invade Haiti (it makes no strategic sense, do they need more sweatshops in Haiti?).

But at the same time, FOXNews isn’t the bastion of unbiased press, hell there’s a whole freakin’ Wikipedia Page on FOXNews Controversies.

So perhaps this is one of those mystical reporting times when the truth actually does lie somewhere in the middle, with Chavez a bit crazy, and FOXNews a bit loose with their journalistic integrity.

ETS: The everyday way to save money – shiver and get fair increases.

Note: at $2.75 per ride, Edmonton Transit is now more expensive than a 1-zone pass in Vancouver.

I placed fourth in Round 1 of the Religion and Philosophy section of the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards. Thanks to everyone who voted but the work is not done yet, as now begins Round 2.

I came in fourth of five qualifiers, and have taken a look at the competition.

I’m the only atheist on the list (Armchair Antichrist didn’t make it through), but Benedicton Blogs On and Pulpit and Politics are both liberal Christians who I likely have a reasonable amount of shared ground with. Benedicton writes exposés at Religious Right Alert and has frequently criticized Stephen Harper’s theocons. Meanwhile, P&P is written by former NDP MP Dennis Gruending.

However, leading the pack is the newer (his archives only go back to October) “Bible Journey” which is an anti-homosexual and anti-choice Christian website:

Another controversial passage of the Bible is the above — the passage where the Lord condemns homosexuality (lying with a man as you would lie with a woman). Sex being for marriage, it would be inappropriate to assume that God wants churches to support the marriage of same-sex couples of some of those more "progressive" "Christian" demoninations have done.

Despite the controversy of Leviticus 18, it’s still quite clear what we are to make of it…take it at face value. [Source]

Finally, we have Anglican Samizdat filling the fifth spot in the finalists. AS seems to have taken a shining to the denialist wave surround the manufactured Climategate controversy, and attacks a progressive Christian charity run by the Anglican and United Churches of Canada. He even takes to putting attack quotes as “Fanmail” on his sidebar. My favourite is the irony of a regressive Evangelical Christian making Douglas Adams references, considering Adams was both a “radical atheist” and an environmentalist.

Round 2 voting is open, and for the Religion and Philosophy section, I recommend myself (I do need my ego stroked), Benedicton Blogs On and Pulpit & Politics. Let’s keep the anti-science/human rights blogs out of the medals.

As for the political category of the Awards, I was eliminated in round 29 of 49. Of the top 10 Political Blogs, my picks are Daveberta, CalgaryGrit, and Buckdog (in no particular order).

In trying to do my graduate quantum mechanics homework, I’ll Google a lot of obscure terms hoping to get insights. But something odd started happening this past week when the website experiencefestival.com (I’m not going to link to them, beware spyware if you visit it) started popping up on the first page of Google.

The search chiral dirac matrices returns experiencefestival.com as the 4th hit, with 7 or more sites within its domain. Most contain verbatim copies of Wikipedia entries.

I tried to search on this obscure website with an reasonable Google Page Rank of 5 (my own is 4). The only article I could find on it comes from the equally (or more so?) obscure “Hindu Website” that describes experiencefestival.com as “Pirates of the Internet.” Oddly enough the article is littered with scientology.org ads (is there a large Hindu to Scientology crossover?)

One more concern is that over 400 Wikipedia articles use experiencefestival.com as a reference. Not even expected articles, i.e. ones that deal with “Experience Festival,” but ones like Frank Zappa in popular culture, Basket toss and the band The Mars Volta. The person who added the reference to the latter page did added it with more mundane links to fill in references. I haven’t checked if the same user added each experiencefestival reference, but that might lead to something.

What’s really bad is that the Wikipedia reference for The Mars Volta article links to the experiencefestival.com site which in turn is just an “adaptation” of the Wikipedia entry. It’s a circular reference! (Note: I removed the ef reference from the Mars Volta, but you can see the old version here)

A WhoIs search of the domain reveals that the registrant lives in Stockholm, Sweden and gives religious and “enlightenment” labels for the site.

Hopefully this brings out some information on what this site is about. When I tried to visit their FAQ, Chrome popped up a phishing warning and AVG blocked a threat, so I’m very wary about searching around their main site on my personal computers.

It really looks like their ripping off Wikipedia content, getting references from Wikipedia to boost their page rank and then hoping to promote what? Spam and viruses? Enlightenment through coercion?

At least by posting this I can hopefully hear from others who are seeing this website pop up in their searches. My post on Foundation for a Better Life is still a top five on the Google search for the organization and gets a reasonable number of hits from curious searchers.

The [BC] government has warned that a prolonged HST protest could result in — shock and horrors — an NDP government.

Restaurants are pissed.

Restaurants like “McDonald’s, Tim Hortons, White Spot, {and] Cactus Club.”

They claim that the HST will cost their businesses $750 million and 10,000 ($8 minimum wage, the lowest in Canada) jobs.

Remind me why this is “good policy?”

Remember that it’s costing the federal government almost $6 billion that the Liberal and Tory dissenters are passing onto the shoulders of the provincial governments. Even the Bloc is going to push this on provinces where it has no sitting members (they should really abstain from this debate).

Finally, remember that this new tax raises no additional funds, as both provinces are implementing it as a “revenue neutral” tax. This means they drop corporate taxes and raise taxes to consumers.

Let the shock and horrors begin.

I was browsing twitter, came across a link to someone plugging their blog in the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards, and wouldn’t you know it but I’ve been nominated in the Politics and Religion & Philosophy categories.

So thanks to whoever appreciates my writing. It keeps me from doing school work and being a “productive” member of society.

Get over there, check out some great Canadian Blogs and vote for those you like.

I wrote a while back about “Wind Concerns Ontario,” the NIMBYist anti-wind turbine group run by ex-Ontario Liberal staffer John Laforet and their connection to the dubious pseudo-science of “wind turbine syndrome.”

Well, now they’ve upped their crap level by republishing an article straight from the climate change denialist (and creationist columnist for the Calgary Herald) Lorne Gunter.

Gunter comments on the recent “climategate” scandal of supposed “cooked data” and claims again that the world’s been cooling for years now. This is crap since the top 11 warmest years on record have been in the past 13. Never mind the fact the whole scandal is overblown and doesn’t actually discredit any real science that’s been done by countless climatologists working the world over.

So WCO: You’re not Progressive, you’re demonstrably anti-science, and you are setting this country back. It’s time to stop now.

Next thing you know we’ll see Laforet endorsing Harper and Prentice’s attempts to derail the Copenhagen talks. Perhaps he’ll even join the Blogging Tories since his denialism and anti-environmentalism will fit right in.

Now, countdown till the Defenders of the TruthTM return.

Update: My countdown lasted only an hour. Also, see this website for a great dissection of the so-called scandal (h/t Brian D.).