University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver has launched a lawsuit
against the National Post, Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, and
Kevin Libin. It's about time.
The National Post columnists stated the Weaver is a
"corrupt scientist". They claimed that he fabricated stories about a
break-in into his office.
Weaver did no such thing. His office was indeed broken into, and
there is a police report to prove it. However, Weaver never made any
accusation with regard to who was responsible for it.
Why, then, did it say in the National Post, not once but
on four different occasions, by three different authors, Corcoran,
Foster, and Libin, that Weaver had accused the fossil fuel industry of
being responsible for the break-in?
Because the National Post prints lies, that's why. The editors
and management of the National Post know that Terence Corcoran is
a liar, but they keep him on the payroll, and don't fact-check his
stories.
Yesterday’s British parliamentary election provided yet another
breath-taking example of how an antiquated winner-take-all voting system
distorts election results.
With 626 of the 650 seats declared (8am, May 7), the Conservatives
won about 47% of the seats with just 36% of the votes. Labour received
an equivalent windfall of undeserved seats: 40% of the seats with just
29% of the votes.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats won only 8% of the seats, despite
winning about 23% of the votes. As Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg
said, it is “abundantly clear the electoral system is broken.”
“As ludicrous as Britain’s election results are, they are no worse than
what we experience in Canada,” said Bronwen Bruch, President of Fair
Vote Canada, a multi-partisan citizens’ campaign for voting system
reform in Canada. "The big difference is that Britain may well move
forward on electoral reform, since both Labour and the Liberal
Democrats, who together represent a majority of voters, are prepared to
scrap the discredited first-past-the-post system. The Liberal Democrats
are expected to demand action on proportional representation.”
...
This “religion-racism paradox,” as University of Southern California
social psychologist Wendy Wood explains it, is deeply embedded in
organized religion which, by its very nature, encourages people to
accept one fundamental belief system as superior to all others. The
required value judgment creates a kind of us-versus-them conflict, in
which members of a religious group develop ethnocentric attitudes toward
anyone perceived as different. The study, “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic
Review of Religious Racism,” appeared in the journal Personality
and Social Psychology Review.
“Religion creates a very strong sense of a moral right and wrong
within the group,” says Wood. “When you do that, members of the group
will be more likely to derogate anyone who is not part of it.” And
because religion in America is practiced largely along segregated lines
(just 12 percent of U.S. congregations report even a moderate level of
diversity, one study shows) that derogation, and the sense of
superiority that drives such diminishment of others, can extend beyond
religious differences to race, class and ethnicity.
"There is now more psychedelic research taking place in the world
than at any time in the last 40 years," said Rick Doblin, executive
director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,
which funds some of the work. "We're at the end of the beginning of the
renaissance."
He said that more than 1,200 people attended a conference in
California last weekend on psychedelic science.
But doing the research is not easy, Doblin and others say, with
government funders still leery and drug companies not interested in the
compounds they can't patent. That pretty much leaves private donors.
"There's still a lot of resistance to it," said David Nichols, a
Purdue University professor of medicinal chemistry and president of the
Heffter Institute, which is supporting the NYU study. "The whole hippie
thing in the 60s" and media coverage at the time "has kind of left a bad
taste in the mouth of the public at large.
A
ONE-WOMAN mission to prove breasts don’t cause earthquakes has
swollen into a shirt-straining global movement preparing for the
inaugural “Boobquake”. Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi angered
womens’ groups around the world on Monday when he claimed that
promiscuous women were responsible for literally making the earth move.
“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt
their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently)
increases earthquakes,” Sedighi said…
Jennifer McCreight is determined to prove him wrong. Since
launching the “Boobquake”
Facebook page two days ago, she has enlisted more than 20,000 women
promising to show as much cleavage as possible on Monday, April 26. If
the world doesn’t then disappear into an apocalyptic fiery chasm, then
Sedighi will have no option but to admit he was wrong. “On Monday, April
26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own,” Ms McCreight
wrote. “Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I
encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed
supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your
preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies
combined, we should surely produce an earthquake.
...
What are
people supposed to think if someone says "I have got
an answer, we have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the
illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are
a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and
the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be
beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it
will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world
power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don't
think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the
Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who
will sweep the next election."
"I have
never seen anything like this in my lifetime," Chomsky added.
"I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed.
There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was
hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it
anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil
rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt
a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now.
The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration
and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is
going off into self-destructive fantasies."
...
The centre said Tuesday that there have been 10 confirmed and four
suspected cases of measles in the past two weeks.
Eight of those
cases stem from a single household, while two others are believed to
have come from out-of-country visitors in February or early March.
Dr.
Monika Naus, the centre's immunization director, said the risk remains
low for the general public because most B.C. children receive the
measles vaccine between their first and second birthdays.
None of
the people who caught the disease had had the two doses of vaccine
required for full protection and many weren't immunized because of
philosophical objections.
“Most years, we see no cases of measles
in B.C. because our vaccination rates are high,” Naus said in a written
statement.
“Whether it's measles, mumps, rubella, or a host of other
vaccine-preventable diseases for which we have vaccines, the best thing
anyone can do is to make sure that their vaccinations are up to date,”
she said.
“Two doses of measles vaccine are 99 per cent effective
against the disease. Those are pretty good odds.”
In the summer of
2008, about 200 cases of mumps were recorded in B.C.’s Fraser Valley.
Health officials said at the time the illness began with a religious
group that shunned immunization.
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