willy be frantic's blog

Well, maybe you are and maybe you're not. If I say you are, anonymously or not, I would, and should, expect some backlash. So, myself, I tend not to defame anyone a great deal. I have called some a scum-sucking pencil-necked waste of skin ..., never in print, but occasionally in pixels. I have never got in trouble for it, but the day may come.

It has come for a blogger who defamed Liskula Cohen. Cohen is a model. An anonymous blogger posted a screed about her in a blog hosted by Google. The Supreme Court of the State of New York has ruled ( H/T to Scribd ) that Google has to turn over what it has, that identifies the blogger, to Cohen.

Hows that make you feel ??

Defame

Verb

1. Charge falsely or with malicious intent; attack the good name and reputation of someone

 

Slander

Noun

Hey, who says I can't be right twice in a row. 

I have come across two science related stories. One about climate change, the other about teaching evolution. 

First climate change. The New York Times has an article about physicist Freeman Dyson. 

.... he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

.... “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment. 

The article runs eight pages and gets to be a biography of the man's life. Dyson is brilliant and a contemporary of Einstein, Oppenheimer and Fermi. The gist of the Times article is that Dyson thinks that the effects of climate change are something we can live with, we can fix it easily, if we have too and we have other, more pressing things to worry about. 

The Times does us a dis-service by not noticing the lack of logic in Dyson's arguments. 

That's an old saying that I'm going to take for a spin. My angle on it is that our news media does, at best, a poor job of serving the needs of the public. At worst they are just filling the pages with dreck. The newspapers are what I consider the best way to get complete information out to the public. Magazines can do a different job because they aren't under the daily pressure to put a product on the newsstands. For shear column inches a newspaper, in the course of a week, can and sometimes does, devote more to a story than a magazine ever would.

This isn't a journal suggesting action, or pumping a party. It's a rumination of the centrepiece of the Liberal platform - the Green Shift.

Dion says it it can be summarized in 6 words - “cut income taxes, shift to pollution.”.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken

If I were in Dion's shoes I wouldn't be so naive as to tell the truth. His 6 word summary of Green Shift is the truth. The Green Party's plan is similar to Dion's. A carbon tax is in place in Denmark and in B.C. Opinions vary on how effectivly the Denmark and other European schemes work. The Green Shift is not perfect but it's more honest than the Con plan ( details and cost projections for which have yet to be released - surprised ?? )

.... " a non-renewable commodity that's killing our planet " do we not understand ??

Burning fossil fuel contributes to greenhouse gases that are causing climate change. I am not interested in any debate on that statement. Somehow we have to burn less fossil fuel. Stéphane Dion and the Liberals say a carbon tax is part of the answer. Okay, not the kind of policy that will win you votes, but it is doing something. My rudimentary understanding of it is a tax on all fuels ( except gasoline ) at the wholesale level. If a commodity costs more, people will use less. Many other blogs are addressing this issue and I not going to expound further on the carbon tax.

What is the alternative to burning fossil fuel ? We can't function as a 21st century world without doing the tasks we currently do with fossil fuels.

Your opinion please.

Story here. Shorter version. 18 year old with some younger buddies, while drinking, hatches the idea to order a pizza and then rob the deliver guy. Caught, tried and convicted the 18 year old, with no previous criminal record, gets a 18 month conditional sentence ( first 6 months under house arreest ) and 50 hours community service. I'm ok with that, it's maybe even a little too light.

The part I would like your opinion on is one other condition of his sentence.
"he must ... provide a sample of his DNA for the national databank."

Just what is the NATIONAL DNA DATA BANK, you ask. Federal legislation established it, and expanded on it and it is now being advocated to include people arrested, but not yet convicted, of a crime. This is being advocated by Toronto's Police Chief.

I wrote a journal awhile ago on blood donation and the exclusion of gay men from donating. Today I received a survey from Canadian Blood Services. It was an anonymous survey sent to 40,000 blood donors in Canada. Lots of questions. Everything from how I feel about the time it takes to donate blood to how friendly, professional and knowledgeable the clinic staff is to do I feel my privacy is being respected.

Here are two question ( verbatim ) that relate to the ideas I raised in my previous journal. ( And no I don't have enough ego to think that Canadian Blood Services commissioned a survey because of some journal written in some blog - For one thing there hasn't been enough time between the writing of the journal and the survey coming out. ;-)

#27 -Do you think that deciding who should or should not donate blood should be based on ....

1 Mainly on scientific evidence only

2 Mainly on the concerns of people who receive blood transfusions

It's really not. Ok, sex is part of the story, but it is used to illustrate a larger story. I just didn't think it was right to put sex in the title in an attempt to lure people into this post ;-)

My paper is the Regina Leader-Post, part of the CanWest cabal. It ran a pair of stories ( one & two ), by the same author, in this Saturday's edition. The stories covered the bottom half a page. On the top half of the page was a large line drawing of a man looking decidedly distressed, holding a pencil. The pencil wasn't normal. It had a large curve downward to it.

I didn't connect the line drawing to the subject of my post until this evening when I started writing. Funny how the mind works.

...to donate blood.

For a number of reasons. I haven't lived for six months in England or France since 1980 ( vCJD risk ). I haven't given money or drugs for sex ( HIV risk ). I haven't had sex with someone I don't know the sexual history of - ie: hookers ( HIV risk ). I have not used a needle to inject drugs ( HIV risk ). I have never been to Chad or a number of other African nations ( HIV risk ). I have never had a job or a hobby where I handled or cared for monkeys ( God only knows what risk )

Oh yeah, and I haven't had sex with a man, even once, since 1977.

I know these things permit me to donate because I have donated for 30 plus years. That puts me in a group and a sub-group - the group is comprised of about half of the adult population of Canada that is not excluded from donating blood. The sub-group is the three percent of eligible people that do donate.

We recently had an election in Saskatchewan. The NDP incumbents fell and the Saskatchewan Party won a majority. The Sask Party is from the right side of the spectrum, pro-business and hopeful that everyone can find their bootstraps enough to use them.
Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan's natural governing party, the NDP, has been pretty labour friendly. Quebec is the only province that has been more labour friendly.

While campaigning the Sask. Party said labour legislation would be looked at in consultation with interested parties.

The Sask. Party's election platform didn't mention essential services legislation, but rather a pledge that a Sask. Party government would work with public-sector unions...

Today is Remembrance day. What does it mean to you ? - how do you honour the day ?

I haven't attended a Remembrance Day ceremony in more than thirty years. I watch it live on television - the local ceremony on cable and / or the national ceremony - most of the time. I always wear a poppy. At one time, for four years, I marched in the parade from the armories to the temporary cenotaph in the arena and stood for the ceremony. I went with all the other Cadets ( Army, Navy - I was an Air Cadet myself ). In the parade were regular forces from the base in my town and the reserves and of course the vets - Legion and Army, Navy, Air Force Vets. Dad was a vet and a Legion member. For a couple of years there were four of us in the parade - Dad, me and my two younger brothers, both Navy Cadets.

I never gave it much thought as to why I was there. It was just the thing that needed to be done. Dad always went from as far back as I can remember. As far as I know he marched for as long as he could and attended even after his stroke. He remembered, and I remember in large part because he did.

Things you already know about the Canadian Wheat Board. It is the sole seller of Western Canadian wheat. It makes an initial payment to farmers when they deliver their wheat to market. After all the wheat is sold for that crop year it makes the final payment. It sets its initial payment based on what it thinks the outlook for sales are before it is actually selling the wheat. If the market price moves up it can make an adjustment to the initial payment reflecting the higher market price.

However, both the initial payment and the adjustments have to be approved by the government of the day.
In 2002 the initial payment was set at $4.69 per bushel as of August 1st ( the start of the crop year ). An adjustment was made effective September 17 upping the payment by 87 cents.
That is a time frame of about 7 weeks. I do not know when, in that instance, the CWB would have made application to the Federal government to adjust the initial price.

"Unfortunately it is the majority of one race that is making up the major majority of the problems with drug abuse and the penitentiary occupation in Saskatchewan."

It wasn't me. But I did say something alarmingly close to that in my last journal here - Crime - by johnny-come-lately. It was about crime statistics and what I referred to as the 'elephant in the room (EITR) '. A report is out now that puts Saskatchewan at the top of the list for substance abuse problems.
This article from the Leader Post talks about differences in the use of alcohol.

There seems to be in Western Canada -- a different attitude towards drinking than there is say in the urban centres or larger centres in Eastern Canada. Somehow, binge drinking is a right of passage and that it is somehow OK [Graham Addley - Sask. Healthy Living Services Minister]

I made my promise to write a journal before I had read the link that Prole had put up in her post. It says most of what I thought I might be able to explain or clarify.
It even mentions the ' elephant in the room '. I am glad that it does because I didn't think I can talk about it without sounding racist. The truth is it is very difficult to talk about it without sounding racist. I do hold that individuals have the ultimate responsibility to address the circumstances they find themselves in. Society can help, but society cannot make you a better person. Your lot in life does not justify breaking the law.