Time Immortal

File this under “you can lead a horse to water…”

I think the good Reader can agree that Europe has evolved, in recent decades, very liberal sexual morés, and that European governments spend a lot of time and money promoting safe sex, birth control, and all the rest. I’m sure that sex-ed in European schools is probably quite comprehensive, much more so than in North America.

And what has been the result? Are European teens and young-ish adults more sexually responsible than their North American counterparts?

Apparently not: “[a] third of 16 to 35-year-old men and 23% of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex.”

Almost half of participants in Vienna, Austria had drunk alcoholand had sex by the time they were 16 compared with 36% in Venice, Italy, 37% in Palma, Spain and 30% in Liverpool.

…

Those who had been drunk in the past four weeks were more likely to have had five or more partners, sex without a condom and to have regretted sex after drink or drugs in the past 12 months.

Cannabis, Cocaine or ecstasy use was linked to similar consequences.

Study leader Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool said: “Millions of young Europeans now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted.

“Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.”

Chickens do indeed come home to roost; it was predicted, many years ago and many times since then, that comprehensive, birth control-focused sex education would increase the promiscuity and sexual irresponsibility of society.. Of course, only easily ignored conservative commentators were doing the predicting. Now that the evidence is showing that those predictions are being borne out, perhaps we can begin to re-think the damage we are doing to our children, and to ourselves?

The Auditor General has just delivered her report on how Canada is dealing with a variety of issues before it, including (perhaps most importantly) how the government is handling the issue of over 60,000 people who have immigrated here illegally.

That is also the most alarming of the statistics contained within the report:

The Canada Border Services Agency must improve how it tracks individuals ordered to leave the country. Last fall, the agency had no idea of the whereabouts of 41,000 individuals ordered out of Canada for being in the country illegally.

What I would like to know is: where are the majority of these people from? What countries did they immigrate here from? What are their criminal histories, if any? Do they have any affiliation with known terrorist groups?

And, of course: how the heck did we lose track of a group of people the size of the population of West Vancouver? Oh…wait…

Anyhow, here are some other interesting tidbits from the report:

- Children living on First Nations reserves are eight times more likely to seek the aid of child welfare services than children living off reserves. Last year, there were 8,300 on-reserve children using family service programs — about five per cent of all children in reserves.

- National Defence should improve how it sends supplies to troops in Afghanistan. The department has trouble keeping track of supplies being used in the war and maintaining some key equipment because of spare-part shortages, making it increasingly difficult to support the mission.

- Canadians pay too much for passports. The consular fee — about $25 of the $87 cost of an adult passport — is disproportionate to the cost of consular services being provided and should be adjusted.

- Health Canada has been charging too little for medicinal marijuana.

A 2007 report shows that the department underestimated the cost of administering and regulating the program, and the fee to consumers did not recover the full costs of the program.

- The Public Health Agency, created following the 2003 SARS outbreak, has trouble keeping track of the spread of infectious diseases due to gaps in its information-sharing agreements with the provinces and territories.

Kind of depressing, isn’t it?

Ezra Levant chronicles the tale of an Ontario restaraunteur who has been hauled before the Ontario HRC because he forbade a patron of his eatery from smoking a joint whilst on the premises.

Light up a cigarette in an Ontario restaurant, and you’re breaking the law. Light up a marijuana joint, and the restaurateur is breaking the law if he tries to stop you. Here’s an excerpt:

Kindos has already spent nearly $20,000 of his own cash, and estimates he could spend upwards of $150,000 more fighting an Ontario human rights commission complaint launched by Steve Gibson, who is licensed to smoke marijuana by the feds to manage the chronic pain of a neck injury that has kept him out of work since 1989.

Fighting the case, which will be heard by the province’s Human Rights Tribunal in May, could send Kindos’ business into bankruptcy and is playing hell with his health, he said.

“If this thing goes to the tribunal, that’s it, we’re done. Our restaurant is done,” he said. “We’ve already been told we can’t win.

Even allowing for the fact that Mr. Gibson smokes marijuana for medicinal reasons, one cannot escape the fact that, in addition to the known link between pot smoking and psychological disorders, pot is as much as five times more carcinogenic than cigarettes. Ontario, in the interest of public health, has banned cigarette smoking within businesses — by law. Should it not be every bit as illegal, then, to light up a joint within those same businesses? Should not any person who does so be subject to fines? Especially when reasonable alternative methods of marijuana consumption exist to persons who, for whatever reason, have need of it?

Even Canada’s own Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, said common sense and reason are paramount in this issue to effectively balance everyone’s rights.

“I don’t see people with insulin bringing their syringes out in the middle of restaurants and giving themselves injections,” Emery, who is facing a 10-year jail sentence at the U.S.’s behest for selling marijuana seeds, said from his home in B.C., noting that since Gibson was drinking alcohol at the time of the Burlington incident in 2005, he could have ingested the cannabis via an alcoholic tincture that would have been just as effective and more discreet.

The human rights commisssions seem, at times, to exist solely for the benefit of those who think only of themselves — for people, in other words, who feel that every other consideration is secondary to their slightest whim or desire.

Mark Steyn comments thusly:

As with last week’s shakedown of a cosmetic surgeon who declined to perform a labiaplasty for a transsexual dissatisfied with her new parts, the eventual verdict is largely irrelevant: The process is the punishment. It seems almost certain that this restaurateur will lose his business. The trick is not to attract the attentions of the “human rights” enforcers. But, even if you’re not a notorious hatemonger like me, in an age when Canadian “human rights” have dwindled down to the human right to a labiaplasty even when the guy says he wouldn’t know what he was doing, and the human right to smoke pot in some other fellow’s restaurant, trying to avoid catching the eye of this racket is harder than it looks.

Too alarmingly true.

So yesterday, I was reading through the student newspaper at my University, "The Gateway". I don’t know why I read it, really…the writing is sometimes decent, but often inane and vulgar. I don’t agree with almost everything that is put into print, and the comics mostly suck, with the occasional pair of exceptions.

If you want to learn more about the paper, you can visit their website. I’ve said enough, and would like to discontinue my recollection of it.

Anyhow, while reading said paper yesterday, I came accross an article by one of their editorialists, Tim Peppin. I don’t know much about him, but he seems to have a major grudge against Religion, spirituality, and…well…all the really good stuff in life, with the possible exception of marijuanaand women who don’t care about their virginity. Okay, so he’s not atypical of many people in this regard…that’s fine. But his latest article wasn’t about that sort of stuff, but rather about how science is essentially the arbiter of truth - nothing is true if it cannot be scientifically quantified and proven, and those who claim otherwise are ignorant and bitter that their ‘faulty’ experiences of the metaphysical realm are not matters of scientific fact.

Well…okay, if that’s what floats his boat. You can read the article here, if you like. I won’t re-print it, mostly because I don’t want to taint my website with it (and there is also the matter of copyright infringement). The Gateway’s website is implemented in PHP, so that link should be valid tomorrow as well as months from now.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d share my response to this article, which I emailed today to The Gateway. I believe that, with the occasional rare exception, people can print whatever slanderous, offensive sort of crap it catches their fancy to write.

I just reserve the right to respond and call them on it when they do.