timeimmortal

From the Steyn

BREAKING NEWS: There’s a rumor going around that the three pretend judges of the British Columbia “human rights” Tribunal will announce their verdict today at 12 noon Pacific

I’ll be following this.

Update: Buzzkill. All indicators now point to “no verdict being handed down today.”

I just don’t see a way that the doctors can come out of this story and not look like complete douchebags, even if they do make a valid point about the relative availability of treatment for scoliosis on different sides of the Rocky Mountains.

A 12-year-old child with epilepsy, cerebral palsy and a spinal deformity has been advised by orthopedic surgeons at B.C. Children’s Hospital to look for a doctor in Alberta or elsewhere in Canada after her parents spent months drawing public attention to long waits for non-emergency surgery.

Dr. Doug Cochrane, the hospital’s vice-president of medicine, acknowledged the doctors took a highly unusual action, but said it was justified on the grounds they felt they could not establish a proper working relationship with the parents.

The girl, Carly Lamont, is one of 150 B.C. children on a waiting list for spinal surgery to correct the curvature caused by a condition called scoliosis. Only two doctors in B.C. do such surgery on children, while there are four in Alberta.

Given that scoliosis runs in my family, this story is kind of relevant to my interests. And for whatever reason, it just makes my blood boil. Okay, I get that the parents haven’t exactly been fully co-operative, but they were drawing attention to a real problem that exists in the Canadian system: wait times are pathetic.

And I realize that the doctors have every right to recommend treatment be sought in another province, especially if the wait times are liable to be lower elsewhere, but there’s still no getting around the fact that they come out of this looking vindictive.

At the end of Revelations, the mid-season cliffhanger of Battlestar Galactica’s fourth and final season, the Colonial fleet and their renegade Cylon allies find and land on a planet that all involved believe to be Earth, the legendary home of the 13th Tribe of Kobol.

The planet itself appears blue from space, but is quickly discovered to be a nuclear wasteland, devoid of life and marked only by decimated buildings and burnt-out ruins. The immediate conclusion that the producers of the show likely wanted us to jump to was that yes, this was Earth, and that the 13th colony had somehow destroyed itself. As a lesson in human concupiscence, that wouldn’t be a bad ending in and of itself, but there are a few questions left unanswered if one simply assumes that one can take the show at face value as to the identity of this ruined planet.

First off, there’s the issue of how vague and masked the shots of the planet from orbit are. I mentioned this before, but I just found a handy comparison image (as well as a reasonable theory about who the final Cylon might just be) on another blog that tells the tale better than before:

Now, there’s been a fair bit of argument that the ruins themselves tell the tale. In particular, a number of people have made the association between the ruined bridge seen at the end of Revelations and the Brooklyn Bridge. Personally, I’m not convinced; this show has been marked by repeated examples that what the characters think they see is not necessarily what is (e.g. Starbuck’s seeing a gas giant that was thought to be Jupiter, but turned out not to be, or her seeing a comet that turned out to be the damaged rebel basestar). I certainly think that the ending scene was composed so as to make us think of New York, but I won’t say for certain whether that’s what was being depicted.

At the end of the third season, the CGI was unambiguous: Earth was easily recognized, and the shape of the North American continent was distinct. As the comparison photos above tell, in this discovery of Earth there is nothing about the planet itself which obviously suggests that it is Earth. No continents are visible, and much of the world is dark. Ron Moore et. al. are far too “tricksy” (apologies to Smeagol) for this to be a mere coincidence, or simple artistic license. There is some meaning to the sudden lack of clarity.

There is also the matter of pretty much every main character, including Laura Roslin (supposedly the “dying leader” who will not live to see the proper end of the journey of humanity across the stars), being on the surface of the planet. Unless the producers are setting us up for some kind of “actually, it was this dead character all along” sort of letdown, it seems that a second objection to the probability that this devastated planet is actually Earth must be raised¹.

On the other hand, there is the matter that Felix Gaeta did match the various constellations when the fleet first arrived into orbit of this ruined planet. Initially, I remarked that “it would be very nearly impossible to find another point in the galaxy in which all those stars appeared to align in just that way.” However, in making that statement, I forgot to take three things into account, which I was reminded of when I read this article at The Science of Battlestar Galactica:

1. How accurate were the images of the constellations that Gaeta was working from?
2. How many of the constellations were visible to Gaeta when he made his checks (e.g. were any of them occluded by the planet or the system’s Sun)?
3. Is it actually impossible that the stars might not line up in more or less the same manner from some other point?

The answer to the third question has actually already been given to us in a subtle way by BSG’s producers: the constellation Orion appears, more or less properly configured, in the episode The Ties that Bind, in the backdrop of the ambush on the rebel basestars by the pro-Raider-lobotomy Cylon faction. Surely the Cylons would have noticed whether or not there was a habitable world in reasonably close proximity to the location of said fracas?

Of course, one constellation lining up could just be a coincidence — in theory, so long as the Cylons were on a more or less straight-line path between Earth and the approximate middle of Orion’s shape, the alignment of the stars would remain the same — one would expect to see the constellation get “larger” in one’s view, perhaps, and one might also reasonably expect to note changes in the apparent brightness of the various stars themselves. The shape of the constellation, though, would be essentially unchanged.

That by no means implies that the shape of eleven other constellations visible from Earth would likewise remain constant. This illustration demonstrates how different Orion would look to us were we viewing it from a position situated roughly 90 degrees counter-clockwise from Earth’s present location.

However, the distances we are talking about in such a hypothetical situation are immense; were we fairly close to Earth, would the constellations look drastically different, or would they appear somewhat similar?

It turns out that “similar” is the correct answer (and it further turns out that this brings us to the second question):

If Gaeta was checking the position of the zodiacal constellations with a sketch made from the Temple of Athena data, he’s out of luck. As seen from Alpha Centauri, those constellations would be virtually identical to those seen from Earth, the chief difference being that Castor and Pollux, the Heads of the Gemini Twins, don’t quite line up with their bodies. If Gaeta had incomplete data, or if the constellation Gemini was not visible for some reason (being occulted by Alpha Centauri, for example), he’d be absolutely correct in reporting that all “visible” constellations are a match, even though the fleet would be in the wrong place.

In the same way, the fleet could have arrived at Tai Ceti or Epsilon Eridani, two other type G sunlike stars in our local neighborhood. The zodiacal constellations as seen from those systems would be more distorted, especially around the cancer-Leo and Aries-Taurus regions. But again, if Gaeta’s data are sketchy and the local star is blocking out the appropriate regions of the zodiac, the rest of the constellations should pass muster.

This issue of distorted constellations leads us back to the first question. The data set Gaeta would be working from would be some manner of representation of the constellations seen by those few who entered into the Tomb of Athena and saw the holographic projection therein. As far as we, the viewer, know, nobody took any kind of recording of the images displayed therein, and it is reasonable to assume that any reproduction of the positions of the stars would be hand-drawn sketches made while the memory of what was seen was reasonably fresh. That’s all well and good, but it is by no means an assurance of accuracy.

Lt. Gaeta, when checking to see whether the fleet had jumped to the right spot, said that the visible constellations are a match. But a match with what set of data? Lee said that they had “projected a course to the signal” and that it would probably take some revising. That tells me the Colonial beacon signal did not include a 3-d starmap. Is Gaeta checking the constellations with what the jump calculations predicted the resulting constellations should look like? That would only prove that they jumped to where they expected to jump — it wouldn’t prove that they had jumped to Earth.

Or is he comparing the visible constellations with the constellations they saw in the planetarium show back at the Temple of Athena on Kobol? It’s hardly likely — the display in the temple focused on the twelve constellations of our Zodiac. Lee spotted the Lagoon Nebula, and his father backed him up by calling it “M8” — but did we see either of them record those constellations? (If it was a shared hallucination, was it even possible to have recorded the constellations? ) And if they did record the constellations, to what level of precision did they do so? I think it’s much more likely that the pilots come out of the planetarium and, at best, drew the stick figures from memory. And if that’s that happened, then Gaeta’s comparison data are going to be literally sketchy.

To this point in the series, we’ve seen or heard of over a dozen human-habitable worlds: the Twelve Colonies, New Caprica, the algae planet, Kobol, and now this newly-discovered ruined world. That’s a fairly substantial chunk of real estate that the humans have discovered simply by jumping from place to place.

In the original series, there was an instance of an Earth-like planet being found, and for which several hints were dropped suggesting that it might be Earth. That planet was Terra, home of two warring factions that nearly wiped each other out in a nuclear confrontation. Indeed, they were saved only by Galactica’s timely arrival.

It’s possible, then, that in this iteration of BSG, Galactica has arrived too late, and has discovered a wiped-out Terra. But perhaps, in the ruins somewhere, will be found the final pointers toward Earth. This would certainly be a good reason for the show’s producers to make the planet so ambiguous when viewed from orbit as in Revelations — an unfamiliar continental form would give things away far too quickly².

At any rate, we know this show must go on from here³, and a big part of where it goes come 2009 is likely going to be caught up in the exact identity of this ruined world that the Colonials and Cylons have now come to. There’s plenty of good reason, based both in fact and in the idea of dramatic, message-driven storytelling, to think that the planet that was found was, in fact, Earth. But there’s also plenty of room for doubt. This season especially, BSG’s writers have pulled off one act of sleight-of-hand after another, and it’s entirely possible that they’re doing it to us again.

In fact, I think it’s probably likely.

Notes — mind the spoilers:

1. Admittedly, in the case that this planet is actually Earth, and the “promised land” which the dying leader shall not see is another planet (e.g. Terra or its equivalent), this objection is pretty much null and void.

2. Edward James Olmos asserted that there would be a dark end to the series, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this blogger’s counter-theory regarding Earth/Terra: perhaps this really is Earth, and the Fleet moves on to find the Thirteenth Tribe on Terra (or some analogous world).

3. Scenes for the final episodes of the series were shot in and around Kamloops, British Columbia, and involved lots of physically fit extras with crop-cut hair or dreadlocks. Scenes were also evidently shot in the city of Kamloops proper, which would imply that the series ends on some manner of inhabited world. Whether this is the Colonials realizing that they are the 13th tribe — itself perhaps a product of the twelve tribes united into one — and accepting that it is their bitter fate to be the ones to re-settle the Earth, or whether this is the Colonials finding their bretheren on another planet is yet to be seen.

Also, it should be noted that other scenes of the series finale were shot at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, in the area that had previously been used for the Riverwalk district on Caprica. The scenes apparently involved Laura Roslin. This would suggest either a return to Caprica (now that would be dark!) by the remnants of the Fleet, or perhaps various persistent visions/hallucinations on the part of some of the characters (William Adama, perhaps, pining for Roslin?).

Then too, perhaps my theory that BSG is an eschatological tale for our time will pan out, and the closing scenes of the series will be like those in Roslin and Emily’s dreams in the episode Faith. Certainly, there is a religious metaphor (and possibly more than just a metaphor — one would not be surprised to see humanity come into a confrontation with the divine in this show) at work within the plot of the series, and it has more or less been confirmed that God is an active, present force within the BSG universe.

More than a few people have suggested that there is a “creation myth” element to the series, and while many of these appeal to the significance of Hera Agathon, I think they miss something. Assuming I am wrong — that is, assuming that Karl Agathon — Helo — is not the final Cylon, and assuming that Hera is the humano-Cylon child who is exclusively significant (in keeping with everything we’ve seen on the series to date), then in her and Nicholas Tyrol there is not to be found a parallel in Adam and Eve.

There is, however, a parallel to be found in Joseph and Mary, in the Blessed Virgin and her carpenter husband.

Luanne writes in with some potentially concerning news, and a question.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/NEWS/RELEASES/2008/r080515.htm

Should conservative bloggers be concerned about the CRTC regulations review in Canada?

I think it’s possible that there is a concern in the proposed regulations changes at the CRTC, yes.

The news release notes that the intent of the review is thus:

“The Commission has a responsibility to ensure that the broadcasting system is in a position to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act, today as well as in the future,” said Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC. “New digital technologies and platforms are creating opportunities for the broadcast of professionally-produced Canadian content that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. Our intention is not to regulate new media, but rather to gain a better understanding of this environment and, if necessary, to propose measures that would support the continued achievement of the Broadcasting Act’s objectives.”

I’m less than inclined to trust any statement made by a bureaucrat, but I am especially leery of trusting one which begins “our intention is not to regulate…” Not that the CRTC would really need to take a hand in regulating or censoring Internet content in Canada, if the CHRC and its provincial equivalents are allowed to remain in operation and if they, say, convict Maclean’s either as an outcome of the British Columbia hearing or at a national level.

That said, were the CRTC of a mind to conform Canadian-generated Internet content to the stipulations of the Broadcast Act, the implications could be…severe, and then quite restrictive of freedom of expression. But all of that is still within the realm of possibility, and it’s equally possible that such a review as this will amount to nothing. Methinks it might do well to review the Broadcast Act itself and see what its various stipulations are, and then perhaps to do a little mental exercise to see if one can imagine how the Act might be applied to e.g. blogs.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I alluded, yesterday, to the possibility that a conviction of Maclean’s by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal could have sweeping, national implications — despite the fact that in theory, HRCs don’t recognize or rely on precedent, and despite the fact that the BCHRT has no jurisdiction outside of British Columbia.

Ezra Levant today gives an example of a ruling handed down by the Alberta Human Rights Commission that demonstrates what that effect could possibly look like. It’s…damning, really, as it demonstrates that an HRC has appointed to itself the power to, in effect, demand that a person renounce his beliefs (because let us be honest: if one is not free to articulate one’s beliefs, is one really free to hold them in the first place?).

A Christian pastor [Stephen Boissoin]has been given a lifetime ban against uttering anything “disparaging” about gays. Not against anything “hateful”, let alone something legally defined as “hate speech”. Just anything negative.

So a pastor cannot give a sermon.

[Rather,] he must give a false sermon; he is positively ordered to renounce his deeply held religious beliefs, and apologize to his tormentor for having those views.

And then that pastor is ordered to declare to his entire city that he has renounced his religious views, even though he has not.

That’s Alberta’s human rights commission. That’s the group where 15 bureaucrats are busily beavering away against me, because I published some Danish cartoons two years ago.

That’s the same “law” under which Maclean’s and Mark Steyn are charged.

I got into an argument once in which I made a crack about American ignorance of all things Canadian (the specific assertion I was responding to was my opponent’s implication that all of Canada experienced a two-month (8 week) stretch of the year in which the Sun did not rise). My opponent responded that I should be careful about making such cracks, in case the Yanks ever decided to invade hapless Canada.

I joked to him that he was presuming too much; specifically, I said, he presumed that I would view American invasion as a bad thing.

Would I? Especially in light of these rulings, I have to ask: would I?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

And the Maclean’s show trial winds down out in British Columbia.

This will be an interesting decision to watch. One one hand, Maclean’s lawyers note correctly that the BCHRT has no jurisdiction over anything outside of British Columbia, which ostensibly includes what Maclean’s can or cannot publish outside of British Columbia. As well, they are correct to note that the HRCs do not recognize the legal concept of precedent in considering opinions.

That said, there isn’t much doubt that a loss at this tribunal for Maclean’s will have sweeping, national ramifications. So the decision will, indeed, be interesting to watch.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!