Doctor Day and the facts

The National Review of Medicine administers the truthiness smackdown:

Dr Brian Day is wont to make dramatic, unsupportable statements about Canadian healthcare - such as his assertion we placed 30th in the world in a WHO study, a statistic that has been widely discredited. And then, in this publication, he claimed we're "fighting it out for last place" with the US among developed countries.
Fortunately few Canadians are likely to believe that the owner of the largest private hospital in the country is a disinterested party. Dr Day would like to bring two-tier medicine to Canada, with one service for the rich who can afford to pay — and qualify — for private insurance, another for the rest of us.

It goes on from there and doesn't get a lot better for Dr Day's grasp of the realities of patient care.

A relevant quote

A line to remember in the coming weeks and months:

”It’s not the responsibility of the Official Opposition to support the entire program of the government. Two-thirds of Canadians did not vote for this government. The Liberal party can’t expect to walk in and simply propose its own program that only one-third of Canadians supported and expect that everybody’s going to vote for it.”
Stephen Harper - Oct. 5, 2004.

As go the provinces?

In light of the elections in Newfoundland and Ontario, Harper should be re-thinking the wisdom of provoking the opposition with an impossible to swallow throne speech.

Danny Williams is a classic Red Tory and is vocally, unambiguously opposed to Harper's dark blue Tories making Newfoundland unfriendly territory for Harper. McGuinty's win in Ontario can't be considered a good sign for the federal Conservatives there and even in Alberta the Conservatives are showing some wear and tear.

A campaign in Quebec that hammered away at the unpopular Afghanistan mission and the even more unpopular Conservative environmental record could quite easily either hold them to their current seat count or even reduce it, and a national campaign could be the very thing Dion needs to re-invigorate the palsied Liberal brand.

Bottom line: No matter what he does, Harper can't make substantial, sustained improvements in the Conservative poll numbers - if he was ever going to be in majority territory, he would be by now. The stark central problem for the Conservatives is that Canada isn't a conservative country.

A campaign without well-timed RCMP announcements or the sponsorship scandal fresh in everyone's mind could as easily deliver a healthy Liberal Minority as a Conservative one. The Conservatives didn't win the last election, the Liberals lost it and enough voters may have decided to take them out of the penalty box to send the Conservatives back to the opposition benches.

If Dion plays attendance tricks to sustain the government over the throne speech it would be gutless and unprincipled, and he could also be outsmarting himself.

Liberal travails aside, it's Harper who should be nervous about facing the voters.

The Wisdom of the Crowds and MMP

I've been watching the MMP debate in Ontario with interest. I've held off on commenting because it's not my province. Of course a win for MMP in Ontario vastly increases the probability of the idea spreading and would in fact probably be a tipping point for the electoral reform movement nationwide.

So what the hell, here's a diverse decentralized opinion on the value of diverse decentralized opinions.

First, those who say the results of the MMP referendum are more important than the provincial election are quite right. The sideshow of John Tory shooting himself in the foot has been entertaining, but a distraction that insured 'I don't think an election is the time to discuss serious issues.' was the prevailing opinion, yet again.

MMP however, has the potential to radically transform Canadian society, for the better.

In The Wisdom of Crowds theory of James Michael Surowiecki, he argues that there are rules of statistical probability that make the right kind of crowd more accurate at estimation and even better at decision making than elite expert opinion, but that it relies for it's effectiveness on diversity of opinion.

Here's a good post about why democracy should be the most effective application of the wisdom of the crowds and so often isn't.

I submit that the MMP system would harness the three rules of effective crowds, Diversity, Independance and Decentralization more effectively than does the current system.

For the same reason that the arguably greater propensity to deliver minority governments is in fact an argument in its favor. The greater diversity of opinion involved in the aggregation process, the greater likelihood of the most effective solutions being found. MMP would produce a sample that would more accurately reflect the diversity of opinion of the whole.

This is a math argument not an ideology one.

The big parties oppose MMP because they see in it the end of the unfettered power of unchallengeable majorities. It would indeed mean the end of such governments, but their end is near regardless. Federally the default has passed from virtually one-party rule to minority governments as far as the eye can see. Provincial legislatures will increasingly begin to reflect this and MMP would let them take the lead.

This in itself, would be an excellent application of crowd-sourcing the process of finding the best way to navigate this new world.

UPDATE: Well that's a shame.

The Stalker Right

If you are an American family and you speak out for health care for kids, right wing bloggers will drive-by your home, sniff around your work place and do price checks of your kitchen appliances in order to accuse you of making too much money to deserve help getting health care for your kids.

No, really.

Nicaragua: 'Pro-Life' law kills 82 women and counting

Those who only remember the Sandinistas as the secular leftist guerrillas of the 80's will be disappointed to learn that they've formed common cause with the most repressive and reactionary forces in Nicaragua. President Ortega made alliances with far right politicians to escape charges of raping his step-daughter and he made alliances with the Catholic church by banning abortion even in cases of rape. Or incest.

Or even the health of the mother.

82 women have died because of hospital refusals to treat women with ectopic pregnancies or other obstetric conditions that might require terminating a pregnancy. Doctors are scared even though the law theoretically has medical exceptions.

As in North America, the Pro Life movement angrily denies that there is ever a need for therapeutic abortion.

This is the stark ultimate truth of the 'Pro-Life' movement all over the world: Getting their way is all that matters no matter how many women have to die in bloody agony. Because their ideology denies the existence of these women. Medically necessary abortions don't exist.

Therefore presumably these 82 women don't exist, or at least, never did.

Like María de Jesús González, who was refused treatment despite the fact that her ectopic pregnancy could end only in agonizing death. And did.

And the same people denying the legitimacy of therapeutic abortion would still be doing so with ten times as many victims.

The next huge Republican scandal

Allegations against Republicans and Democrats in Alabama, but the US Attorney, wife of a Karl Rove crony chooses to exclusively target the Democratic Governor. She resists attempts to take her off the case until she's told outright to do so - but her recusal papers can't be found and she's still fighting any attempt to see over 500 pages of files about the case.

This is both a new and egregiously grotesque story of abuse of power while also being a continuation of the ongoing scandal of the Bush White House's politicization of the Justice Department. The Alabama media has been almost disgustingly sycophantic to the US Attorney's office but the national media has now taken notice of what's happening.

Time Magazine has just done a piece on the story. This will be the US political news cycle this coming week, and probably the next as well.

Iran in the sights

Despite all the evidence that there is overwhelmingly more support for Sunni insurgents by Saudi Arabia then of Shia insurgents by Iran, the administration continues to agitate for support for widening their Middle East disaster to Iran.

Now much like what happened in the buildup to the Iraq war, the US intelligence community is poised to release three different reports, apparently designed to undercut the administration's case for war and slow the drumbeats.

The drumbeats have gotten loud enough to force the administration to issue denials that they intend to launch attacks, of course they said they were relying on diplomacy when the Iraq invasion was already a foregone conclusion.

Sunday Linkblast - October 7

• Start your engines?
  One big bluff or are we really going to the polls this winter?
  
  
• Burma is a complicated mess
  Margolis recommends caution.
  
  
• The warnings about Blackwater were ignored
  The state department didn't want to hear any bad news about their private army.
  
  
• Glimmer of hope?
  Policy sanity on the middle east being considered?
  
  
• Evangelicals VS GOP
  The culture war turns inward?
  
  
• We do not torture
  Of course we get to define what torture is.

Found my Daemon

I love the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. It's probably one of the best young adult fantasy series of the last twenty years, and yes I'm putting it up against Harry Potter. In terms of sheer literary power and quality of writing I give the edge to Dark Materials.

The first book The Golden Compass is about to become a movie and so far looks pretty good. One good thing about the huge success of the Lord of the Rings films, the Potter movies and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may be the message to film-makers that following the books as closely as possible is the avenue to artistic and commercial success.

The His Dark Materials trilogy is in many ways the anti-Narnia. While Narnia was very strongly a Christian allegory - despite C.S. Lewis's denials - the world of His Dark Materials is very definitely not. There are enough cogent critiques of the organized religion mentality in this series to put it on the top of your average fanatic's bonfire list.

In the world of The Golden Compass, human souls are externally projected in the form of daemons, animal spirits almost always the opposite gender from their human with strong personalities of their own. At the film site for The Golden Compass you can do a quick personality test and get a daemon of your own. Here's where to get yours:

George Bush: The fine line between mere villainy and cartoonish super-villainy

George Bush protects the defenseless health insurance lobby from the ravening hordes by vetoing the expansion of health care for millions of poor sick kids. This one calls for this classic painting by Alex Ross:

Let me get out my dancing shoes

Spotted at Red Tory

Calgary Municipal Election: Limping to the finish line edition

There's been a lot of hot air, a lot of money collected and spent - and earmarked for purposes other than the election? Apparently.

We have a popular mayoral incumbent in Dave Bronconnier who engaged in a noisy war of words with the increasingly unpopular provincial government which it is widely agreed he won. He also won the last election by a huge margin but some polls have suggested the margin may be thinner this time.

Alnoor Kassam, the leading contender for his job, appearing out of nowhere with a million dollar war chest, has faced an increasing public awareness of some noisy skeletons rattling in his closet. Ambiguous and conflicting stories of fraud and bribery in Kenya are one thing - less ambiguous is his status as one of the predatory landlords making life in Calgary so hellish for renters. Kassam increased the rent at one of his properties by almost 300% - almost $2000 for one tenant.

Yes, he gave the tenants three months rent free when the story of the initial increases made the news, but he didn't retract the increases and really, do you think he would have been so generous if he hadn't been running for mayor when the story broke?

The other contenders are a mix of oddness and earnestness, from a university student who suggested it was run for office or spoil his ballot or not vote at all, to a 'serious' candidate who with the huge strains on Calgary's infrastructure has as his main transportation suggestion the hugely expensive proposal to turn the downtown portion of the c-train into a subway.

The Better Calgary Campaign liked Alnoor Kassam's platform but had serious reservations about his past and his judgment and are reluctantly endorsing Bronconnier.

Hit the Calgary label to see all my civic election posts.

Supertheory of Supereverything

Once again Gogol Bordello,

and this one's going out to my favorite Gypsy blogger Chironboy.

The Conservative Cackle

Paul Krugman on the movement conservatives and their...unique...sense of humour:

...if you’re poor or you’re sick or you don’t have health insurance, remember this: these people think your problems are funny.

They aren't as blatant about it here in Canada, but I'm sure my readers can all think of examples of conservative commentators making light of suffering or getting a chuckle out of homelessness and poverty. I can think of a half dozen examples off the top of my head. But of course anyone who snickers at the travails of Conrad Black is engaging in vicious class war attacks.

Question

Here's a joke: What do you call an eight-year-old Iraqi kid with no arms, surviving family members, or unblackened skin below his waist? I don't know. I was shouting at the TV and I didn't catch his name. Don't worry if you don't get it. We'll no doubt be telling it again in another dozen years or so. And still not getting it.

-So begins Alan Moore's Rolling Commentary, an essay originally published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)
and recently re-printed in Yuggoth Cultures.

In this furious but rigorously precise run-down of the historical interaction between the Western and Islamic worlds, Moore lays out the thuggery, deception and slaughter that has been the two cultures preferred means of conversing with each other. Its as good a run down of the whole sorry mess as you'll find anywhere and only months after the 'shock and awe' Moore predicts the pinned down insurgency war of years and decades the 'serious' thinkers among western policy makers insisted couldn't happen.

He also wrote a Swamp Thing comic back in the mid-eighties that featured an evil corporation made up of damned souls who had escaped from the bowels of Hell called, wait for it, Blackwater.

Appropo of nothing:

The rest of Yuggoth Cultures is some previously under-collected short works by Moore, some interviews and some visual adaptations of Moore prose that was never intended to be so adapted, but fair warning: More than half the thick trade paperback volume is a competent but uninspired Lovecraft pastiche written by someone named Antony Johnston. Competent but uninspired work really doesn't belong between the same covers with the work of Mr Moore. It can only suffer by comparison.

Still worth getting the book though.

Dion should write to Charles Atlas...

...because Harper just kicked sand in his face.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

Daveberta has an excellent piece of elementary investigative journalism up at his place - the kind that 'real' journalists in Alberta hardly ever do - about the big money pros behind the organized efforts to convince Albertans that, all evidence to the contrary, we aren't really in a seller's market for fossil fuels right now.

"Oh no! Big energy companies with multi-billion dollar profit margins might actually have to pony up close to realistic royalty rates for the resources they are extracting! This will make them all fuck off to Venezuela!"

This is the level of respect these people have for your intelligence Albertans. To be fair, your voting patterns over the years have given them every reason to believe they are justified in their contempt.

In any other province...

...the sheer overwhelming profusion of one huge scandal after another would be government killers. Auditor General Fred Dunn's report has at least half a dozen examples of malfeasance that are - or at least should be - front page stories for months. On resource royalties alone Albertans have been cheated out of billions, something this government has known about for years and deliberately suppressed.

Calgary Grit has a rundown of the breathtaking scope of waste and abuse contained in Dunn's report - this makes the Fraser Report that Conservatives howled about with such vigor look like a catalog of responsible government practices.

Add in the EUB espionage that forced the supposedly impartial arms length board to back down on a power line that had already been gift-wrapped for industry. Don't forget the ongoing environmental devastation of Alberta's shrinking natural beauty. It can't be seen as much from the highways or campgrounds but it can be seen from space.

Hey Albertans are you getting at all tired of being pimped out by these comically corrupt tools yet?

Half the truth

EDMONTON -- The head of Alberta's energy regulator has scrapped a scandal-plagued application for a proposed power transmission line between Edmonton and Calgary in an attempt to restore public trust in the government agency.

"This [Alberta Energy and Utilities Board] decision is the equivalent of a mistrial," EUB chairman William Tilleman said in a statement released yesterday. "Mistakes have been made on this file, and I believe the only way to re-establish public confidence is to go back to square one on this process."

More precisely, Mr Tilleman, it's the equivalent of a mistrial due to prosecutorial misconduct. Generally speaking when that happens independent investigations are launched, careers are ended and people sometimes go to jail.

Plus, the phrase 'mistakes were made' is the ultimate in passive aggressive blame evasion. Borderline - arguably over the borderline - criminal acts were committed by specific people and a specific agency under the authority of a specific government Minister named Mel Knight. They weren't acts of God appearing out of a clear blue sky. There are doors these actions can be laid at and haven't been, yet.

Saying 'Okay,we screwed up, forget the whole thing and can we stop talking about it now?' is nowhere near enough and this isn't going away.