September 30, 2007

What does overweight look like?

There are some truly fascinating things on the Internet. Kate Harding of Shapely Prose is putting together a photostream of people in various BMI categories -- "underweight", "normal", "overweight", "obese", etc. It's really quite incredible.

(I recommend watching it as a slideshow with the info turned on)

September 26, 2007

Warren Jeffs found guilty

This verdict is good to see. This is what needs to be done about this kind of so-called fundamentalist Mormon sects. This is what we should be doing to Winston Blackmore in Bountiful. It's the sexual assault and coercion that's the problem, not the polygamy itself (note that the rape Jeffs was convicted of abetting was within a monogamous "marriage".

I have huge admiration for the courage of this young woman, who was willing to come forward and testify against the man who controlled so much of her life. We shouldn't expect this kind of extraordinary courage, but we should really give credit where it's due. Because there wouldn't have been either a charge or a conviction without this young woman's courage.

Interestingly enough, the husband is now being charged as well. It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. I wonder why he wasn't the focus of the case in the first place?

September 21, 2007

Denial

What's depressing about this news story is not that the mother thinks her son is innocent of sexual assault. We all tend to assume that the people we know and love are innocent, unless we have irrefutable proof otherwise. It's a natural human instint to think the best of the people in our inner circle. So it doesn't bother me that the mother is coming up with reasons why her son must, surely, be innocent.

What's depressing is that this is an actual news story. We don't generally get news stories about all the relatives of the accused insisting that the accused is innocent. Oh sure, they'll often get a line or two in stories about particularly dramatic murders. But for what other crime can you imagine a news story about how the mother of the defendant is sure the crime never happened?

This kind of thing only happens in sexual assault cases. And that's depressing.

It's also pretty depressing that the victim's religion is considered an important fact. I suppose it's supposed to make the crime seem worse, somehow. Because sexually assaulting a "regular" girl... well, that's just normal behaviour. But when it's a girl who's been marked as unavailable... that's just heinous.

September 19, 2007

Religion, the HPV vaccine, and the squick factor

The Catholic school boards' fretting about the HPV vaccine might seem to suggest some of the perils associated with publically-funded religious schools. The vaccine's a sensible public-health measure, right? Religion's interfering with the public good. That's a bad thing.

Except people see this vaccine as being about teenagers having sex.

It's not, of course. Or at least, not entirely. The whole point of the vaccine is that, for it to be effective, you have to be vaccinated before you're exposed to the virus -- ideally, before you're having sex. So a girl vaccinated at 13 or whatever will be protected when she's 18 or so and getting involved in her first sexual relationship. Or when she's married at 25. Or whenever she becomes sexually active. But people have an incredibly strong squick factor when it comes to my daughter having sex, and I think it kind of short-circuits the logic centers. I seriously doubt any girl who wasn't going to have sex is suddenly going to run out and become promiscuous just 'cause she's protected from cervical cancer. Let me assure you that cervical cancer is the last thing on the mind of any girl contemplating her first sexual relationship. It's not going to be a deciding factor. I'm not sure why that's so hard to get.

So I don't think anyone's associating the Catholic boards' jitters with John Tory opening the religious-schools can of worms. Which is a shame, because they should. If a religiously-run school can impede one public health measure, what about others? We're bound to have Jehovah's Witnesses schools receiving public funds while preventing kids from being vaccinated for all kinds of things. And that's just the first example that came to mind.

Full disclosure: I went to a catholic school. And as you can probably tell, the indoctrination didn't stick. Heck, it didn't stick at the time. We used to joke about being the school with the highest birth rate in the city.

But just because I don't think it's always effective doesn't mean I think publically-funded religious education should be accepted. School should be about school. Religion should be separate. And I know that it's not, now. Lots of schools, especially in smaller towns, are de facto protestant. That's not good either. Nor do we need to avoid mentioning religion -- we just need to avoid endorsing it.

Church and State, right? It shouldn't be so hard.

September 18, 2007

On byelections

I'm taking bets as to whether the results of yesterday's byelections in Quebec make a fall/winter general election more or less likely.

My money's on more likely... the Liberals don't much want one, now, but the Tories can engineer their own defeat if they really want to. So I suppose it depends just how empowered they're feeling.

Thoughts?

September 12, 2007

Building a better bomb

So it seems Russia's got "the dad of all bombs" ('cause it's way, way bigger and more impressive than the American "mother of all bombs", and let's not even go there, okay?).

Didn't we (you know, the human race) establish that arms races are a bad thing? And isn't the cold war over? Why are Russia and the 'States still in this endless competition about who can kill the other more?

Oh sure, there's that hilarious insistence that

the new bomb would allow the military to "protect the nation's security and confront international terrorism in any situation and any region."
Whatever. Terrorism isn't a country. It isn't a big huge target that you can just blow up. Terrorism is not something that can be defeated by ever-bigger bombs or ever-fewer personal liberties. Or at least it wasn't until "terrorism" became a catchword for "something scary that we use to justify military and police spending".

My favourite bit in the article, though, is this:
Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment, he added.

There just aren't enough sarcastic comments in the world to respond to that one.