The Heretic

Heresy - a challenge to established dogma.  
Heretic - someone who commits heresy.

I am the mad heretic.  When I stop to think about it, I realize that's really a redundant phrase.  After all, sanity is defined in terms of normal behaviour.  And heresy is the challenging of norms.  So madness and heresy, if not the same thing, are close relatives at least.  Whatever.

The key thing isn't the madness part.  The world is full of mad people.  I could make a case to have almost everyone I've ever met certified.  People think of themselves as conventional, logical, rational, staid.  But the vast majority have behaviors that are erratic, irrational or just plain bizarre.  Let's face it, most of us are stark raving bonkers, at least a good bit of the time.

No, the key thing is the heresy bit.  And the most important part of the heresy bit is what I'm heretical about.  I'm not challenging the  existence of an omniscient, omnipotent creator or the elevation of personal attractiveness to the point where we're willing to cover ourselves with toxic chemicals to achieve it or even the supremacy of crunchy peanut butter over smooth.  Don't get me wrong - I could easily challenge those deeply cherished cultural icons and many more.

My heresy strikes to the roots of all other heresies.  I challenge (insert drum roll here) money and the role it plays in the world.  Contrary to claims made in an ancient book translated from an obsolete dialect of a foreign language, the love of money is not the root of all evil.  But it is handily beating out whatever is in second place.  The whole money-jobs-economy-banking system-jobs-fianancial security-wealth schtick is one giant fraud perpetrated to keep the wealthy elite elite and wealthy while the rest of us waste our youth, vitality and creativity in the pointless drudgery of the workplace.  Yet with remarkably little variance, politicians of all stripes promote and follow mostly identical policies that result in us choosing between conformance (and a lifetime of indentured slavery and indebtedness) or irrelevance.

There are better ways to spend our lives - more on that next blog.

Health Care Horrors

A few days ago, I was strolling through my neighborhood, half listening to the radio station through my MP3 earbuds. My attention was caught by a news item on the Obama-care debate. Tea partiers were demonstrating against the health care plan.

"This is Canadian-style health care. We can't afford it. America has the best health care system in the world!!".

"Really?" I thought to myself. "How much of that is true?". It turns out that none of it is.

Canadian-Style Healthcare
Canadians have what it called a "single-payer" system. That means that while most of the doctors work for themselves, the government negotiates rates and pays the bills. Under Obama-care, the health insurance providers that make the US system so expensive will still be there. The only difference is that the rules are being changed to ensure that most people will have insurance.

We Can't Afford It
Measured in per capita spending, the USA already has the most expensive health care system in the world. Will Obamacare make it worse? That depends on who you ask. But whatever the extra cost is, it will still be dwarfed by the gargantuan amount the US spends on the military. It's a matter of priorities. Do you want to spend money on a capacity for killing people or do you want to spend money to help people stay alive and healthy?

America Has the Best Health Care System in the World
By what measure? The USA has a a worse infant mortality rate than Cuba, an average life expectancy lower than other OECD countries and millions with no health care coverage. That doesn't sound like the best system in the world to me.

Will Obamacare make things worse? I'm not sure how it could.

Olympic Dreams

Is it just me or is there a lot of cynicism around the Vancouver Olympics? It's not just the hundreds of protestors that show up at every turn or even the polls that show almost everyone agrees that the "Olympics are planned to benefit the elite members of society". To me the cynicism is a mirror reflection of the almost hysterical hype heard from politcians and radio talk show hosts. There seems to be a desire to paint people who don't want to celebrate the Olympics as curmudgeonly. Heck, even Stephen Harper is exhorting us all to be loud and proud about our Canadian-ness. This from a guy who once called Canada "a second-rate socialist country".

I don't know. I don't have a huge problem with people who want to dedicate their lives to being 1/1000 of a second faster down the hill than everyone else. I don't even care that they get government subsidies for doing it. I just can't get that excited about it, though. I mean seriously. If there were no more Olympics, would we really be worse off for it? Some claim that the Olympics encourage young people to take up sports but is that really true? Or do elite sports really encourage people to sit on the couch with a beer and a bag of nacho chips? Karl Marx once called religion the "opiate of the masses". If he were alive today, I think he'd reserve that title for spectator sports.

I'm one of those who gets downright cynical when I read about the tactics employed by the IOC when it comes to trademark protection. I think that the time, money and attention devoted to hosting the games could have gone into more worthwhile pursuits, like homelessness or addiction. It seems to me like the Olympics are a huge gift to the hospitality industry.

So, call me a curmudgeon. But this Olympics, I'm going to be cheering for the protestors.

Be safe out there.

Google conspiracy theory

With 85% of the search engine market, Google has a dominant position on the Internet. It is in the enviable position of having its brand name become a verb - i.e. to "google" something. So, it's a bit disturbing to hear the claim that it's using its market domination to promote a certain ideological viewpoint.

Yet, that claim has been made. Google the term googlegate. (No, I didn't make that up.) Now enter the term googlegate in the Bing search engine. Did you notice the number of results returned? I got 29,700 in Google vs. a whopping 82.7 million in Bing. Do the same with climategate. My numbers show 1.7 million in Google vs. 63.8 million in Bing. Why the difference?

Well, according to many bloggers and most recently Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post, it's evidence that Google is manipulating the results to suppress contrary views on climate change. Hence the term googlegate, which, supposedly Google is also suppressing.

Now, it seems odd to me that a company with a market cap of $183 billion would risk its credibility to suppress a few conspiracy theories. So I did a bit of testing myself. On a hunch, I tried schoolhouse. Google returned 4.2 million results. Bing returned 1.2 billion results. Bingo (excuse the pun). I tried springgate. No, I don't know what a springgate is either but Bing found an astounding 72 million results. Google found just 47,500. Finally runtime returned 605 million results in Bing compared to 37 million in Google. Maybe there's no conspiracy at all. Maybe the two search engines just work differently.

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone but it pays to be careful. Things can seem plausible at first until you look behind the curtain.

The Global Warming Debate - A Test for Homo Sapiens

By now, just about everyone in the blog universe has written something on Climate Change. Believer, skeptic, denier; whatever camp you fit into, you're probably getting pretty tired of the debate itself. Kyoto was a partial success that turned into a failure. Copenhagen was a circus that not only failed to achieve results but actually added 46 thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide. (Compare that with the republic of Chad where 11 million people contributed less than 400 thousand tonnes of CO2 in the entire year of 2006).

I've tried to follow the debate and all I've gotten is confused. Hockey sticks, ice cores, ice sheets shrinking (or are they expanding), temperature charts, the medieval warm period - after a while it all becomes a blur of claims and counter-claims. And don't get me started on the personal attacks. The scientists who support the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming know that they must do so to keep the government research funding going. And of course those who don't are a bunch of industry shills and right-wing economists. So, it's understandable that people tune out the whole debate.

Understandable, yes, but not desireable. At some future point, scientists and historians are going to look back on this debate and pronounce one group right, or at least more right than the other. To me, though, it hardly matters whether AGW turns out to be hype generated by alarmist scientists or a prudent warning ignored by economists and industry-backed hacks. What really matters is the quality of public debate. And that hasn't been pretty.

What's undeniable but not widely discussed is that our species is capable of doing things that have marked impacts on the biosphere. Our ability to affect the carrying capacity of the planet increases with each technological advance, with each economic expansion and with each new birth. We have been running into planetary limits (such as global fish stocks) for decades but it's been confined to the economic margins so far. Limiting CO2 is the first time we've had to deal with a planetary limit that would seriously affect economic growth. The viability of our species will ultimately depend on whether we are capable of dealing with these limits in a way that avoids armed conflict. Because even if CO2 proves not to be the serious hazard that many believe, there will be something else.