timeimmortal

Ezra Levant has been doing some research, and has noted that there seem to be quite a lot of parallels between modern Canadian human rights commissions and their medieval counterparts. Not surprisingly, the most striking parallels concern the original Star Chamber from around 1632.

For example:

I was fascinated to learn that, among its other victims, entire juries were tried in the Star Chamber if they didn’t render the politically appropriate verdict.

But the most striking analogy was a Star Chamber order of 1632, which is a template for the show trial of Maclean’s magazine of 2008.

According to Wikipedia, 1632 is when the Star Chamber:

…banned all “news books” because of complaints from Spanish and Austrian diplomats that coverage of the Thirty Years’ War in England was unfair. As a result, newsbooks pertaining to this matter were often printed in Amsterdam and then smuggled into the country, until the ban was lifted six years later.

So foreign trouble-makers who objected to free speech and who insisted on politically correct versions of current events managed to censor the news. Plus ca change.

But wait, it gets better:

I have found a legal precedent that the BCHRT can use to convict [comedian Guy Earle] even if his jokes were funny. Especially if his jokes were funny!

I spent some time today reading a book I found on Google Books. (It’s an amazing resources; not only has Google scanned countless books, included old and rare books, but they’ve made those books text-searchable.) I was reading a book called The Star Chamber, published in 1880, that contained hundreds of decisions of that court. It also has a very interesting preface, that describes that court’s descent from a well-intentioned idea — a court big and tough enough to take on law-breaking bishops and sherriffs who would be impervious to justice of regular courts — into a corrupt political tool used to destroy the kings enemies, and confiscate their wealth.

The book has a readable summary of hundreds of cases. In it, I read a footnote about someone fined “severlie”, not for telling an offensive joke — but for laughing at it.

I couldn’t find the case of the illegal laugher, but I found a reference to it in a defamation judgment in another old book of Star Chamber cases. It starts on page 149, and the reference to the laugher is on page 152…

It’s nice to know that Canadian justice has caught up with the rest of the world and adopted 17th century standards of jurisprudence.

An eight-year old boy is at the center of a human rights complaint after “failing to invite” two of his classmates to a birthday party.

An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.

The boy’s school says he has violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.

The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

The boy’s father has lodged a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman.

He says the two children were left out because one did not invite his son to his own party and he had fallen out with the other one.

You know, I don’t think I ever invited more than six or eight people from my class to any of my birthday parties, ever. Who knew that for all that time, I was committing a series of hate crimes?

This is perhaps a new height in absurdity on the part of those who would force politically correct conformity on the rest of us; the teacher, in particular, was way out of line. Okay, so it might be a bit petty not to invite someone to your party for bad reasons, and yes, “tit for tat” thinking is a human failing. But equally, nobody has a right to come to this kid’s party — as the host of the party, he (and his parents) are the ones who have the right to limit the number of guests. Or at least, they should be the ones who have that right.

I mean, what’s next. Will a Norwegian schoolchild be obligated to invite the class bully to a birthday party, so as not to violate the poor old meany’s rights?

Of course, as absurd as this development is, I think the revelation that one can get marks for writing “F**k off” on an exam in England is perhaps even more absurd.

The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: “It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for — like conveying some meaning and some spelling.”

And just think — the student got 7.5% on the test for such an answer — he’d have got 11% if he’d remembered to punctuate properly (e.g. put an exclamation mark at the end of the expletive).

Lord help ‘em.

Seriously.

If Muslim passengers can circumvent security protocols because sniffer dogs are “unclean” and body scanners are the theological equivalent of a strip search, then I think the transit authority in London, England should have every right to refuse service to Muslim passengers, and to any passengers that wish to be exempted from security checks.

It’s only reasonable, after all.

Of course, the better solution would be for someone at some level of the British government to summon up the courage to tell the people making complaints against the scanners and dogs that if they are not at home with the practices and means of Britain, they are of course welcome to leave, rather than attempting to force their minority view onto the national character.

But who in Britain has the guts to say that anymore?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

A teenager in Bristol, England has died from the complications related to a chemical abortion.

The reason she chose to abort? She didn’t want to strain her relationship with her boyfriend, who evidently was not keen at all on being a father.

Just horrible, isn’t it? Two lives lost so as to appease a boy so selfish, he’d gladly put his penis inside someone but wouldn’t dare accept one possible outcome of doing so.

Gastric bypasses. Stomach stapling, as I gather the procedure is also known — a last-ditch treatment for obesity, to stave off a heart attack or stroke.

Being married to a nurse, I occasionally get to hear about this kind of procedure, and I gather that it really is intended to be last-ditch. The long-term survival prospects aren’t exactly stellar, nor are the odds of the surgery really doing all that much to help a person*. It does, I gather, occasionally work as intended, but not often.

Still, as more and more people in society are becoming obese, such procedures are expected to be commonplace. Britain has seen a 41% rise in the number of bypasses done in the last year, at an average cost of 7,000 pounds per operation.

It’s on the rise here in Canada too, although I don’t know by what percentage.

The problem is: surgeries like this are, more often than not, like rearranging deck chairs on…well, you know which ship, O Reader. Treatment is one thing, but a problem like obesity has more and deeper causes that are, frankly, not always addressed, nor always rectified:

I worry that not enough is being done to make sure people don’t gain the weight back. See, a lot of people think the surgery is a miracle cure. It’s not. I have talked to dozens of people who have had it done, only to go back to their old habits and gain all the weight back. This is not a good use of public money. I realize that obesity is a serious issue (my fat ass reminds me of that every day!), but I would rather see the price of green peppers go down before I would want to see so much being spent on a cosmetic surgery that may not solve the long-term problem. Progressives are always on about “root causes”, and this is one area where I agree with them. You cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery. A person has to be in the right headspace in order to lose weight. Sometimes it takes a health scare. Sometimes it’s a nasty comment from a trusted loved-one. Sometimes it is a positive, like wanting to be more fertile and start a family.

But like going into detox for that last time, you need to have hit your bottom (no fat pun intended) before you can lose the weight. The NHS is spending a lot of money on the symptom, not the disease.

This is something Grace and I talk about every once in a while. The plain fact is, a lot of people who go in for this and other forms of surgery related to complications from obesity do not change their own lifestyles, which are the real cause of the problem in the wake of the surgery. If a person’s liver fails because the last time they didn’t eat at McDonald’s was sometime in the 90s, they expect a new one. And when they get a new one, they finish the post-surgical healing time and go right back to the Big Macs.

(Basically, it’s the culture entitlement at work again, with the usual lack of understanding that rights are tempered and accompanied by responsibilities. People have the inalienable right to eat at McDonald’s, and when something fails in their own body they demand, as though they are owed, corrective treatment. God forbid it cross their minds to amend their own destructive habits to prevent a re-occurrence of the failure!)

To be fair, some people do transform their lifestyles, and they deserve to be commended for that; this is especially true from within a Christian understanding of the world, since we should rejoice every time someone turns his or her life around, in same way that God rejoices over every sinner who repents.

But I agree with my wife when she observes that responsive treatments like this are, ultimately, a losing battle. As long as people in places like Canada and England know that the government will foot the bill when their body craps out, there’s no real incentive for them to change…especially when that same government mandates and enforces a human rights regime that basically encourages people to feel entitled to…well, everything.

What ultimately needs to happen, and this is hinted at in the excerpt above (i.e. “green peppers”), is that health care services need to focus more on preventative medicine, instead of just on responsive medicine. Surgery is all well and good, but we could do more and better to fight obesity if we focused on responding to people at risk of becoming obese, and getting them to change their lifestyles accordingly. Yes, programmes of this nature would still have quite a cost associated with them, but in the long term they would probably save quite a lot of dollars if they were, in fact, succecssful to any meaningful degree.

A person really “cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery,” and our health care systems need to be able to address this reality. At present, as I understand it, patients in for bypass surgery do receive counselling, and (correct me if I’m wrong, O Reader) have to have demonstrated the ability to lose a certain quantity of weight on their own prior to undergoing the surgery itself. That said, somewhere along the line that person did begin down a path that led them to become obese, and one gets the sense that more could have been done for them earlier on to perhaps prevent them ever becoming so morbidly overweight as to require drastic surgery in the first place.

The elephant in the room is a pair of questions: what could be done, and how do we get people to take it seriously. And this brings us back to our culture of entitlement, because while such a thing persists it may well be nigh-impossible to put in place programmes that work to prevent morbid obesity by way of counselling, teaching, and exercise.

In a way, the prevalence of gastric bypass surgery, and obesity as well, is just one more testament to the way in which our rights-obsessed, responsibility-free, post-Christian society is ultimately destroying itself.

It might be entirely predictable of me to point out that modern atheism bears a goodly deal of the blame for this self-destructive trend in society, as surely as it bears the blame for other such trends (e.g. demographics). But I observe that I’m not the only one who thinks so…and the sane Hitchens brother has quite the thing to say about another trend with the same root causes.

I did mention Atheism at the beginning. For that is at the root of all this. Once people don’t acknowledge any moral authority outside themselves, they can choose which rules to take seriously and which not to entirely according to their own feelings at any time. They will generally do this on the basis of what suits them. It begins with little things, and moves on to the great. We are now at the stage where it is moving on quite fast.

One of the key features of atheism is that atheists themselves are unable to grasp this point. We’re just as good as religious people, they respond, if not better. Maybe so. Religious people who understand their creeds know perfectly well that they’re no better than anyone else. That’s not the issue. What is?.

It is this. What do you really mean by ‘good’? Why (for example) is fidelity better than adultery, patience better than impatience? Watch people who are nice to you in the office, as they drive, in a hurry, in frantic traffic, and you may see another side of them. ‘Road rage’, where we are unrestrained by fears about how we will look to those we live and work with, is an interesting measure of what we are really like. Cars are a powerful moral lie-detector.

The connection might not seem immediately intuitive, but it is there, and it has a great deal to do with both individual liberty and the distinctions drawn between what are considered private matters, and what are considered public matters.

What we eat, most people would agree, is a private matter. What, where, and how fast we drive can be similarly classified, but in the case of a car it is easier to observe that what can at first be viewed as a private matter can very rapidly become a public matter, if in fact we drive too fast or too recklessly. What we eat can similarly become a public matter, if we are reckless about it as well. This is perhaps not as true in places like America, given that one pays for one’s health care there, but it certainly is true in places like Canada and England, where the government generally foots the bill. Obesity — which, psychological considerations aside, arises out of too much consumption — and the expensive surgical treatments for it are an example of how the private issue of what we eat becomes a public issue; basically: we have eaten too much, and are now a burden on the public purse.

Drugs? Take them. Sex? Have it now and to hell with the consequences. Abortion’s easy now. Manners? Who cares. Patience? What’s that? Parents? Ignore them as soon as you can, and especially once you’ve got to university thanks to their money and effort. Teachers? What do they know? Rules? They’re for other people. Religion? It’s a wicked fraud designed to keep us down. This belief is itself a moral code, but one which is entirely based on the desires of the person involved — and which is destined to cause growing problems as more and more unfettered egos bump into each other.

The same attitude could probably be observed, I suspect, in response to the above suggestion that medicine become more preventative in nature — this is the illustration of the elephant, so to speak. For as surely as our society believes that rosaries should be kept far away from ovaries, we believe every bit as much that nobody is allowed to tell us to put the cheeseburger down in favour of a green vegetable…even if that is exactly what we need to do.

It might seem strange for a “freespeecher” to be thinking in this manner, but let us come back to what was said above, O Reader. Let us look again at the issue of where the private exercise of rights becomes a public issue. With freedom of speech, that line ostensibly exists at the exact point where the articulation of an idea or viewpoint becomes incitement to violence. We have laws against that sort of thing (and rightly so).

Where does that line exist regarding the issue of what we eat? Does it exist at all? Should it exist, if it currently does not? How might we effect such a thing in real life? One possible answer is that receiving treatment is contingent upon meeting a set of criteria both pre- and post-surgery, although what the penalty would be for breaking such an agreement post-surgery would be, I do now know (a gastric bypass can’t really be undone, after all). The idea of a user-pay system for obesity treatments is a tempting thought, but given that even in the U.S. obesity is on the rise, the effectiveness of that idea is called into question. Denial of treatment to those who did not seek counselling earlier on in their obesity is a possibility, although that raises other issues.

Social upheaval would probably achieve the best results, but it would be rather unrealistic to expect such a thing to occur.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I remember still the article that moved irregular correspondent Nicholas to first comment on the site here — it centered on a young girl from Ireland who was seeking the right to obtain an abortion in England. Apparently, her unborn baby had been diagnosed with a rare genetic condition that would not allow it to survive more than a few days once born.

Such things make for heated discussions, and there is no way to deny that such issues are, to say the least, charged. At the same time, though, one issue that doesn’t always make its way into the discussion (thus rendering such discussions “less than accurate”) is the issue of how often doctors, and other medical professionals, make mistakes — how often, basically, is a diagnosis made incorrectly?

Grace and I recently declined an elective diagnostic procedure concerning her pregnancy. The name of the procedure eludes me at the moment, but basically it’s a passive test for indicators that might point to our baby having certain genetic conditions, e.g. . The problem with the test, though, is that its false positive rate is absurdly high — 50% or so, if I remember the literature correctly. Hardly a…reliable indicator, and yet I would guess that more than a few babies have ended up being aborted in Edmonton on the sole basis of that single positive outcome.

Now, obviously, the condition that the young Irish girl’s baby was diagnosed with is more severe than Down’s. But does the reader remember what I said above? Yes, the diagnosis was grave…but one wonders if the question was ever asked concerning whether the diagnosis was accurate.

When Leeann Phelan was told her unborn baby had an incurable brain abnormality, she faced an agonising decision.

Doctors said he would be stillborn or severely disabled and advised her to have an abortion.

But Miss Phelan and her partner Stephen Crane stoutly refused and carried on with the pregnancy.

Now at six months old, tests have proven that little Jayden was wrongly diagnosed and is a fit and healthy little boy.

Due to pregnancy complications he had to be induced 13 weeks early, and bravely fought for life.

At 23 weeks, he was one week short of the current abortion limit of 24 weeks, which was set with the received medical wisdom that babies born that premature do not survive.

If there’s one thing that holds true in regard to children, and then especially infants, it is that they often seem — through no direct intent of their own other than the normal will of all human beings to live, thrive, and be loved — intent on spitting in the face of received wisdom and the knowledge of their elders. Little Jayden Phelan not only emerged from the womb in defiance of a diagnosis that mandated a grim fate for him, but he did so at a point in his development that most doctors say affords the infant no real chance of survival…and he lived.

The kid has spirit, to say the least. And his story makes one wonder: it is obvious that many babies have been aborted because doctors told the mother that their child had any of a host of abnormalities or defects. How many of those diagnosis were incorrect? How many babies died needlessly?

Phelan and Crane deserve more than a little bit of praise, methinks, for bravely sticking it out in the face of received medical wisdom, and for choosing the life of their child over their personal convenience. It is hard to bring a disabled child into the world, harder still to face the prospect that one’s child might be dead at the moment of its birth…and it takes real courage to face such things.

Such courage is often in short supply these days, and it is good that Phelan and Crane not only had it, but had it to spare, and passed it on to their son.

…give or take a few months. At least, that’s what this whacked-out eco-nut greenhouse calculator tells me.

And as far as I can tell, the reason for this is because I:

1. took two long-distance trips last year (England and the honeymoon in Greece),
2. don’t really compost,
3. enjoy eating meat just a little more than average, and
4. tend to spend the relatively few dollars I bring in every month on normal, day-to-day things rather than throwing good money after bad with supposedly “ethical” investments or by buying ethanol-blended gasoline

Good gravy. On pretty much every other metric on the test, I’m at or below average, but the above is apparently enough to make me such a big producer of carbon that it would have been…er…more ideal had someone found a way to off me back when I was in the third grade.

I have to agree with RightGirl on this one: scratch an environmentalist, and you’ll soon find someone who is more than a little nihilistic where the continued existence of the human race is concerned.

Time for another panoramic. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that I took quite a lot of panoramic images in Vancouver — while I don’t think I took as many as I did while in England, I wonder if the overall frequency, relative to the duration of the trip, was higher?

Anyhow, the picture:

This is a small harbour along Westwater Drive near Richmond, British Columbia. It’s on the road that more or less connects the area near Finn Slough with Steveston, a harbour community south of Richmond, and apparently the home to more than a few interesting shops.

Anyhow, Grace’s parents stopped the van so that both Grace’s sister and I could take some pictures of the harbour (it is a good view, even if it is a bit cloudy), and for whatever reason I decided to take yet another panoramic image set.

Edit-wise, I matched exposures between the images (as usual) and did some basic editing to clean up chromatic aberration, digital noise, and other issues. I then exported each image as a TIFF file, and loaded the whole lot of them into Hugin.

Experience with other harbour panoramics has taught me that a lot of control points are necessary for images of this nature, so I went a little bit crazy in defining said points, but I think it worked out for the best. Hugin did its job well, and I have only found one notable misalignment in the image so far. And it’s a big image (nearly 11,000 pixels wide).

Once the panoramic had been rendered, I loaded it back into Lightroom and did a few additional edits, including saturation adjustments and some additional exposure tweaking. I also set the Clarity to -100, which gave the image a slightly diffuse, not-quite-misty feel that I like.

Islamist blogger Shaukat Khawja really, really doesn’t like Jews — so much so, in fact, that he would rather that Theodor Herzl’s proposal that all Jews convert (or be converted) to Christianity had gone through back in its day.

Got that? A radical Muslim so hates the Jews that he would rather they had all been converted into infidel Christians, instead of being allowed to remain Jews.

And why?

Speaks Shaukat:

The history of the world would have been so peacefully different if the propsed mass Baptism of European Jewry had gone through.

Because clearly, Jews are responsible for all the wars of the world, right?

How much more true would Shaukat’s statement be, I wonder, were it modified to allow for the possibility that Muhammad had been killed in a tribal skirmish just prior to his first “visitation” from whatever demonic entity decided to temporarily assume the identity of Gabriel?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Update - the Meltdown: I seem to have touched a nerve, as Shaukat has now done two things. He had begun by demonstrating the maturity I have come to expect from him now, on par with that of a twelve-year-old casting angry aspersions from atop a playground. But following that up, he says a couple of…well, to be honest, his statements are gems in their own right.

For example:

Without going into Biblical treatment of Jews, which quotes contempt coming from Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul - I wonder why Jews were expelled from almost every European country — England topping the list — expulsion of Jews for almost 350 years. Could it be interpreted as a sign of Christians’ love or hatred towards Jews - and for what reasons???

Poor grammar aside, it is interesting that Shaukat chose to mention Moses — the man who, arguably, was the instrument by which God established the foundations of Judaism — as an example of one who has only demonstrated “contempt” for Jews. I suppose a narrow reading of, for example, the Book of Exodus could lead one to think that, since Moses does spend quite a bit of time castigating the Hebrew people for their sinfulness.

But then, the Hebrew people did sinful things in the desert, not the least of which was to build a golden calf and worship it. Humanity as a whole regularly sins, and periodically needs to be corrected, sometimes harshly. Certainly, Jesus and St. Paul both give example of this, as did Moses in his day.

Following Shaukat’s odd statement, though, is a list of dates in history that supposedly demonstrate Christian persecution of Jews. And, to be fair, many of the dates he lists do in fact accurately mention instances of persecution of Jews by Christian religious authorities. Other dates he lists, however, do not belong on the list.
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The stretch of forest located immediately behind my grandparents’ house was evidently supposed to be turned, at one point, into another housing development. Quite a number of people in Qualicum Beach rallied to save the place, and it has since been turned into a forest preserve, with only a handful of walking trails winding their way through it. It’s really quite a tranquil place, and Grace and I made a point of exploring it fairly thoroughly on our second day on Vancouver Island.

This is just one of several spectacular views one could happen upon whilst walking through the forest. There is a small creek that winds through the area, which one can catch glimpses of from the walking paths at various high points. Views like this really, I think, lend an air of mystery and magic to the area, and in walking through places like this it is not hard to imagine Tolkein or Lewis walking through similar stretches of forest in England, emerging with their minds brimming with ideas concerning Middle Earth or Narnia.

Edit-wise, I applied the standard battery of presets to this image, but then re-thought the Clarity setting (+50) that usually accompanies the Punch preset, and instead set it to -50. The slight diffusion effect adds to the aforementioned mystery, I think. I also adjusted the green and yellow saturations quite a bit, and also the hues of each colour. Initially, the greenery had a very strong yellow tint, but Lightroom gives me the option to make my yellows more “greenish.”

It’s a little less effective than Photoshop’s colour replacement tool, but it’s also a little more predictable.