It's also like banging your head against a brick wall, over and over again

Watching Ottawa city council talk about transit planning is like watching an eternal game of ping-pong.

• Expand the O-Train!
• Cancel the contract!
• Build a tunnel!
• Don't build a tunnel!
• Assess possibilities!
• Reject the assessment!
• Buses!
• Trains!
• Cars!

So I'm hard-pressed to put much faith in yet another proposal to improve the transit system in Ottawa.

There's no question the transit system needs improvement, especially in the downtown core. And I'm as big a supporter of transit as anybody. I ride the bus, even when OC Transpo's bizarre scheduling and inability to cope with inclement weather* makes it really annoying to do so. I love the O-Train, and wish it went somewhere useful so I could actually ride it.

But I'm getting awfully cynical about transit plans that seem to get scrapped almost as soon as they're proposed. And hearing Alex Cullen on the radio this morning saying Siemans should just hold off on their lawsuit, because hey, maybe there'll be a new contract soon... forgive me, but if Siemans buys that line, they're way more naive than your average moneymaking corporation.

* due, I understand, to the age of the buses and their state of repair

National Day of the Obesity Panic

Today is National Child Day, and UNICEF Canada has released an appropriately-timed report.

And among the many ways we as a country are failing our children (the most vulnerable), they list obesity rates. Canada has too many fat kids, according to UNICEF.

And, you know, when the same report goes on to say that life expectancy is increasing and that infant mortality is decreasing (albeit not as quickly here as elsewhere), I have a hard time being overly concerned about fat kids. And it saddens me that UNICEF Canada felt they had to include obesity rates. Because it's far too easy for people to focus on the fat kid problem and ignore the real problems: the many kids who live in poverty, seven years after we were supposed to have eliminated child poverty (remember that?); the kids in isolated communities or on reserves who don't have access to the resources and the health care that they need; the kids who really need our help.

Childhood obesity -- hell, obesity in general -- is an aesthetic panic. It's not some dire end-of-the-world problem that we need to throw resources at. There are plenty of resources being directed towards making affluent people of all ages skinnier.

How's about we throw some resources at the child poverty thing instead? Or the issue of kids with untreated mental illnesses? How's that for an idea?

Children raping children

I can imagine few things as horrifying and disturbing as this story, in which an 11-year-old girl accuses three boys, aged eight and nine, of rape.

It's disturbing on so many levels. They're so young, all of them. It's hard to conceive of children that age being the perpetrators of a rape. At that age, how can they even imagine it? Who's sexualized those boys to the extent that they would even think to link sex and violence like this? How can we possibly consider charging eight and nine-year-olds as adults for something like this? Why can't we find whoever hurt them or whoever taught them that this was a thing to do, and charge them instead?

But I think what disturbs me most is to read that the boys' defense -- at least as portrayed in this story -- is that the sexual activity was consensual. How is it possible that an 11-year-old girl could consent to sex? How have we gotten to this state, as a society, that we take a case like this, and think "well, she just didn't want to get in trouble with her parents, so she made up the part about the rock"?

Some days, I just want to give up on our society altogether.

Complicit in Evil

I'm so angry that I can hardly write a coherent sentence. In the name of public safety, Canada will no longer seek clemency for its citizens who are sentenced to death.

This is appalling. Canada has outlawed the death penalty, and rightly so. Killing a human being is barbaric, no matter what they may have done. Ronald Smith is no threat to anyone's public safety when he's sitting in a jail cell -- hell, I'm not even saying we should be bringing him back to a Canadian jail cell. But taking steps to prevent his execution is something Canada must try to do if it is to maintain any moral high ground where capital punishment is concerned.

I hate that this is now my country's position. It makes me complicit in the deaths of Canadian citizens. I am so angry that political considerations have left this government in power long enough to make this policy change.

Yes, Tories in the House, Ronald Smith is a murderer. I'm not denying that. But if we allow him to die without trying to prevent it, we too are murderers.

This is not just a political decision to help us suck up to the Americans. This is a moral decision, and it is breaking my heart, and it is breaking the moral fibre of my country. How proud can I be to be a Canadian when we are willing to stand by and let our citizens die, contingent only on a politcal evaluation of a country's "rule of law"?

More blogging on this

From the "good grief" files

Of all the stupid things to study. (scroll down to the last item)

I'm so glad that we now know that breastfeeding doesn't contribute to saggy breasts! Now we can berate women for not living up to the beauty ideal without worrying about whether or not they lived up to the breeding motherhood bit of patriarchal expectations.

I suppose it's important for plastic surgeons to know their target demographics.