the Walnut Diary

The morning chuckle today: accused mastermind of the Robocalls Scandal Michael Sona was apparently vacationing in Aruba at the time his co-workers accuse him of confessing his plot to them.

It’s hard to argue with travel records, but who cares if he wasn’t there at the time the offense was committed? This is Toryland, where if the facts don’t fit, change them until they do.

If Justin Trudeau’s speaking to students about marijuana legalization last week wasn’t nefarious enough, change them to elementary school kids. Right, Peter MacKay, Minister of Truth?

SUN news is all abuzz about Justin Trudeau’s evening speech to a group of highbrow women in Toronto last week where he uttered a heretical statement about admiring China.

I first ran into the “admire China” meme in 1979 in grad school. The dean of the Queen’s Faculty of Education had spent a month in China and showed us his photographs in one class. As an educator he was deeply impressed by the rows and rows of young men and women out for morning calisthenics. He told us that the average height of a male recruit into the army was then 6′, evidence of the vast improvement in nutrition China had achieved in a single generation.

We were somewhat taken aback by Dean Ready’s attitude, but eventually we came to realize that the Chinese have worked very, very hard, first to feed their people, and then to grow their economy.

This is what a visitor sees on a trip to China.

Justin’s comment suited his sophisticated audience (likely former grad students all) but it played a bit too well to the Sun News camera. David Akin extracted a measure of revenge for JT’s drubbing of their Great Conservative Hope last spring in the celebrity boxing match — the media event which came as close to humiliating Ezra Levant as anything ever has, and launched Trudeau’s run to 24 Sussex.

This week some cartoonist will likely cast Trudeau as the Road Runner with Akin or Levant as Wiley E. Coyote in a scenario where it looks as if the anvil is at last about to fall on JT’s head…

He wasn’t lying to fool his supporters but to implicate them in the deception, to force them to put loyalty ahead of truth.

You know the one nice thing about this whole imbroglio? Mike Duffy was able to walk into the Senate today and unload upon his opponents without the need to watch out for snipers or a sudden vacation in Syria. How would he have fared in the other countries in the Americas?

I may occasionally paint the Harper crew as a biker gang or fascist wannabes, but in this case of extreme provocation they have not yet resorted to assassination or rendition. There is still hope.

The inner workings of the Conservative regime are gradually coming into view as the pond of public trust is drained. What the media are showing us is the opposite of what the propaganda has led us to believe: instead of an honest, accountable government in the interests of taxpayers, we see a gaggle of scavengers picking at the bones of the Canadian State, and turning on each other without scruple.

In this context it is little wonder that the large military acquisitions contracts have fallen apart: these guys don’t have a vision beyond their own immediate wants. We’re seeing what Michael Ignatieff termed a “biker gang government” in operation as the Senate scandal unfolds.

If the comments posted in online newspaper articles on the subject are any indicator, Canadians still care about the greater good, human rights, and due process of justice. We are disappointed that Stephen Harper has emerged as a charmless, self-centred despot, and are rapidly concluding that the truth is not in him.

Amid this hubbub all Justin Trudeau has to do to appear statesmanlike is stand still in a corridor and directly answer a few questions from reporters. And that’s what he does.

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Dalton McGuinty had the grace to resign when his credibility tanked. Will Stephen Harper?

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This is too good not to pass along (with proper references to its source).

Rod

I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit Canada.com journalist Michael Woods with the idea to track down the NYT article. http://o.canada.com/2013/09/22/new-york-times-criticizes-harper-governments-alleged-muzzling-of-scientists/

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The New York Times Sunday Review

Editorial | Notebook

Silencing Scientists

By: Verlyn Klinkenborg

Published: September 21, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/silencing-scientists.html?_r=0

Over the last few years, the government of Canada — led by Stephen Harper — has made it harder and harder for publicly financed scientists to communicate with the public and with other scientists.

It began badly enough in 2008 when scientists working for Environment Canada, the federal agency, were told to refer all queries to departmental communications officers. Now the government is doing all it can to monitor and restrict the flow of scientific information, especially concerning research into climate change, fisheries and anything to do with the Alberta tar sands — source of the diluted bitumen that would flow through the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Journalists find themselves unable to reach government scientists; the scientists themselves have organized public protests.

There was trouble of this kind here in the George W. Bush years, when scientists were asked to toe the party line on climate policy and endangered species. But nothing came close to what is being done in Canada.

Science is the gathering of hypotheses and the endless testing of them. It involves checking and double-checking, self-criticism and a willingness to overturn even fundamental assumptions if they prove to be wrong. But none of this can happen without open communication among scientists. This is more than an attack on academic freedom. It is an attempt to guarantee public ignorance.

It is also designed to make sure that nothing gets in the way of the northern resource rush — the feverish effort to mine the earth and the ocean with little regard for environmental consequences. The Harper policy seems designed to make sure that the tar sands project proceeds quietly, with no surprises, no bad news, no alarms from government scientists. To all the other kinds of pollution the tar sands will yield, we must now add another: the degradation of vital streams of research and information.

As a retired secondary school teacher and vice principal, while I detest marijuana for the damaging effect it has on the learning of young people, I support legalizing it with one important caveat: take strong steps to keep the stuff away from kids under the age of 18.

In particular I would suggest that the type of electronic surveillance which has proven effective at rounding up child pornography rings should be directed toward the use of cell phones in secondary schools.

The grade 12 drug dealer sitting in the back of an English class will be a lot less likely to take orders by text from grade nine kids if Signals Intelligence has made a copy of his morning text traffic available to the local police before his lunch-hour delivery time.

Kids, especially boys with ADHD, are badly damaged by early cannabis use. I have seen too many bright kids ruined by the drug to have any use for it in or around the school yard.

If we treat marijuana dealers who sell to kids as the child molesters they are, let the rest of society pay their taxes and buy their grass at the LCBO.

UPDATE:

I fell into a discussion online in which a guy challenged me to put up proof that grass is bad for kids with ADHD. So I’ll add a few links here as I find them.

Rod

http://www.okanaganclinicaltrials.com/public/column.php?category=Addiction&title=Marijuana+use+and+psychiatric+illness

http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/cannabis-use-and-abuse

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_1-7-2013-11-49-21

These were the first three Google listed.