A Voice for Freedom

I've been accused recently of "disingenuous" reporting about the election. Well, my blog is a bit slanted toward my own point of view, true - who'd have expected otherwise? - but I don't think accusations of outright dishonesty are at all fair...and here's the proof thereof.

The following are direct quotes from Jim Dinning and Ted Morton's websites, http://www.jimdinning.ca/v3/where-jim-stands/jim-on-the-issues.htm and http://www.tedmorton.ca/default.asp?id=66&menuID=66 respectively (note: for some reason, links aren't working on this post; sorry).

Dinning	Morton
Education
Give Alberta’s children the best possible start. Get the first ten years of life right so that our children are ready for their future. Build on the success of our education system, respecting teachers for the important work they do, working with teachers and school boards and parents to make sure our schools continue to be among the best in the world. Develop the most highly skilled workforce in North America. Make Alberta’s colleges, universities and technical institutes among the world’s best.	Address long term planning and capital needs for school districts. Maximize school choice for parents and students. Expand high school credits for music, dance, sports. Develop “magnet” scholarship programs for post-secondary institutions.
Democratization
A comprehensive and transparent lobbyist registry. Fixed dates for Throne speeches and budgets. Extending the minimum number of days the Legislature sits each year and committing to two sessions each year. Introducing the opportunity for more open debates in the Legislative Assembly.	Create a lobbyist registry. Establish fixed election dates and term limits. Embrace citizen initiative and referendums. Strengthen the powers of the Auditor-General.
Confederation
Nothing.	Guide and manage Alberta’s full growth potential with our own pension plan and police force and made-in-Alberta immigration priorities. Defend non-renewable resource revenues from federal raids. Place curbs on harmful judicial activism.
Healthcare
Increase resources to prevention, healthy living and wellness. These could include a ‘Participaction’-like campaign and greater education, support and information for children, families and young people. Albertans want quality health care and quicker access, all within the publicly-funded system. Alberta hasn’t exhausted all the opportunities for innovation within the publicly funded health system.	Supplement existing universal system with private insurance. Reduce wait times; allow private clinics to deliver some services. Ensure Emergency Room accountability.

A new medical study has come out which says that violent video games activate the fight-or-flight response, resulting in "increased activity in the areas of emotional arousal and decreased activity in the areas of control and focus".

Wow. Doing something actually has an effect on your brain. Go figure.

Nobody seems to be saying what state the kids were in before the study began, but they were most likely at rest (or, to put it another way, bored out of their skulls sitting in a waiting room). I'd be interested to see a comparison between kids who have just spent an hour playing video games and kids who have just spent an hour skateboarding or playing football; I'll be those activities alter mental states as well. Then again, there are two problems with that theory: one, there aren't enough alarmist idiots out there who care about such things for a study to be conceived, and two, nobody's invented a portable MRI machine you can strap to a kid's head while they go out skateboarding.

Another interesting thing that came out of this study was that the group of kids who played "Need for Speed" (for the benefit of older readers, that's a racing game) actually showed an increase in concentration. I should think so; thundering down the Autobahn at two hundred miles an hour in hot pursuit of Nuvolari while trying to avoid obstacles does require a fair bit of concentration.

I wonder how long it'll be before someone tries to outlaw any activity that causes alteration in brain activity. Well, at least we'll still be able to watch reality TV.

The results from the first ballot of the PC leadership race were:


Jim Dinning: 29,470 votes
Ted Morton: 25,614
Ed Stelmach: 14,967
Lyle Oberg: 11,638
Dave Hancock: 7595
Mark Norris: 6789
Victor Doerkson: 873
Gary McPherson: 744


This places Dinning, Morton, and Stelmach on the second ballet, to take place this saturday. I know nothing about Stelmach, but it seems he isn't a serious threat to the top two anyway. Dinning and Morton taking first and second places is not unexpected. Disappointing (that Morton wasn't first), but not unexpected.

I don't understand at all how anyone can be voting for Dinning. People, the man has no platform! He uses phrases like "fostering integration, innovation and investment" and "give Alberta’s children the best possible start", but among all that fluff, there's not actually a plan for 80% of his goals.

Dinning talks about accountability, but all his platform includes is things like "introducing the opportunity for more open debates in the Legislative Assembly". Morton has promised to give the Auditor-General more power to examine the government. That is accountability.

Dinning says somewhere in a paragraph that "It’s critical that they [the people] have an opportunity to be engaged in the process and to feel confident that those they send to the Legislature are representing their best interests." But look at his platform points, and there's nothing there about this. Morton has promised to introduce more referendums.

Dinning's stance on policing is filled up by supporting things that have already been done and using phrases like "get tough on crime", while Morton has stated specifically that he plans to set up a provincial police force that will serve the needs of Alberta before the will of the Feds.

Dinning plans to "make Alberta’s colleges, universities and technical institutes among the world’s best" and set "bold targets for increasing the number of students who finish high school". What that means is anyone's guess. Morton, on the other hand, promises to "maximize school choice for parents and students", "develop 'magnet' scholarship programs for post-secondary institutions", and "expand high school credits for music, dance, sports".

The man my father has humorously nicknamed "Dim Jim" is running on a platform that's lost all its planks. He has pulled ahead purely on the "change nothing" vote, and that is exactly what he will do. He is the quintessential Canadian politican, running purely based on a platform of being less scary than the other guys. I'd like to think we were better than that in Alberta. Are we?

I've just found out that the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership's first ballot is this saturday. As far as I can tell, there's no provision for absentee ballots, so I'll be unable to vote. So all my Albertan friends, please get out there and vote for Ted Morton!

The latest poll showed Morton and Oberg tied at 17%, with Dinning at 16%, "among Tory party members who plan to vote in the election". Political analyst Jason Fekete said yesterday that Morton and Dinning were in a "statistical dead heat" (without mentioning Oberg).

This is an extraordinarily close race, and every vote counts - and a vote for Morton is a vote for Albertan values and interests. Morton plans, among other things, to establish fixed election dates and term limits, strengthen the office of the Auditor-General, "defend non-renewable resource revenues from federal raids" (his words), allow the establishment of private health insurance and private clinics to supplement the public system, and work to maintain and improve Alberta's already high-standard education system. If you want to read more about why this man deserves your vote, check out ABFreedom's recent post on the subject, which includes a lengthy piece written by Link Byfield, or have a look at Morton's website.

I've been voting for Morton since the MLA primaries in 2004. He is the one person who could even make me consider supporting the Tories over the Separation Party. Jim Dinning is a moderate and, on some issues (such as healthcare), a devout traditionalist, and that is not what Alberta needs right now.

So vote Alberta...vote Morton!

Stephen Harper had the following to say in response to a recent call from the BQ to accept Quebec's status as a "nation":

"Our position is clear. Do the Québécois form a nation within Canada? The answer is yes. Do the Québécois form an independent nation? The answer is no and the answer will always be no."

I never thought I would find myself so completely and utterly disappointed in Harper. First of all, this is complete doubletalk; the only time a nation exists within a nation is in such cases as Tibet existing within China or Czechoslovakia existing within the Soviet Union. I seriously doubt that this was what Harper meant to suggest, but the Bloc would certainly support such an inference.

More importantly, this statement (described by MacLeans as a "bombshell", providing the only case in history of said magazine being correct) will have two important political effects:

One: the statement that Quebec is a "nation within Canada" will have them clamoring for even more special treatment, as the recognition of Native tribes as "nations" within Canada has set them in pursuit of such accommodation. They'll demand more and more, saying that "if we're a nation within Canada, we need this power, we need this money, we need, we want, we demand". Eventually there'll be only one difference between Quebec's situation and that of a separate nation: Quebec will still get Alberta's money!

Two: as far as I can remember, no previous government has ever catagorically denied the right of a province to leave Confederation (or should that be "Empire"?). We finally have a conservative government, and their leader starts talking like a damn paternalist centralist liberal? To me, this is the first sign that Harper might be getting power-happy, and it is definitely a bad sign for provincial rights in general and for the Alberta separatist and firewall movements in the specific.

It amazes me how Harper can be at once so reformist and so blockheaded. Is he just playing politics, trying to appease Quebec? Time will tell.

If there's one thing a politician enjoys more than inactivity, it's activity that doesn't actually accomplish anything. Case in point: the City of Calgary has just enacted a so-called "behavior bylaw". It establishes fines for "public urination, defecation, loitering, spitting, fighting or carrying a visible knife". Now, some of those should well be offenses; using the city sidewalk as a restroom is something I think we can all agree should be outlawed. But much of the law is just ridiculous.

"Carrying a visible knife"? Does that mean that if I am to eat my lunch in public, it can't be anything I need a knife for? What about a Swiss Army knife? If it's plastic, is it okay? This is beyond stupid. Regulating guns is bad enough, and at least it's fairly clear if you're carrying a 9mm into the Petro-Canada Tower that you're probably not going to use it to cut your lasagna. But knives? If they keep moving the line between "tools" and "weapons", we'll soon be without icepicks, then hammers, then screwdrivers, and soon enough, you'll need a license to carry a vase because you might hit somebody on the back of the head with it. If they outlaw everything that's ever been used to kill someone on CSI, we'll each be allowed to own an eraser and a pair of earmuffs (unless there's an episode I've missed).

Then there's this "spitting" bit. Okay, I can see it with spitting on someone. But despite the fact that it might be a bit distasteful, spitting on the sidewalk doesn't do anyone or anything any harm. Maybe it's PETA worrying about people accidentally drowning worms.

And the "loitering" part is worst of all. Last time I heard, standing on a public street wasn't a crime. It's all well and good for restaurants and such to post "no loitering" signs; that's private property. But if I want to waste half my day by standing around leaning on a streetlight doing my best Joe Cool impersonation, I don't see why it's any business of the damn government's. Maybe we should just nip things in the bud and do away with sidewalks. You know what I think? It's all a big conspiracy being perpetrated by the HMOs, the MOH, the OMH, and possibly the OHM, designed to make sure that if we want to hang out on the street, we must remain in motion.

And wouldn't you know it, the protests, small that they were, weren't made on a basis of liberty; the challenge was, rather, that this bylaw would unfairly target the homeless. Witness the continued transformation of Calgary from Cowtown into, well, Vancouver.

(Note: HMOs are Health Maintenance Organizations, the MOH is the Ministry of Health, the OMH is the Office of Minority Health, and OHM is Offshore Hydrocarbon Mapping.)

Christian unions at universities across Britain are being attacked for, well, being Christian. They are finding themselves unable to use campus buildings and forbidden university recognition because of accusations that they are homophobic and exclude non-Christians. Well, I can't speak to the former, but it seems perfectly natural to me that a Christian group be made up of Christians. Call me crazy. If I, for some strange reason, wanted to join the Association of Black Student Leaders or some society for art majors, I would be laughed at with good reason. If a group is for engineering students, it's for engineering students; if it's for Christians, it's for Christians. But of course, far be it from the university system to miss out on an opportunity to attack religion.

Honestly, don't these people have better things to do with their lives than whine and make trouble? As a very wise man by the name of Tim Taylor once said, "People...people...get over it!"

Here's a little something that relates to my last post. I spent some time today reading Non Campus Mentis - World History According to College Students, a collection of student bloopers strung together in a hilarious retelling of world history, from Adam and Eve's experience with the Forbidding Fruit and God's wraith to the Iran Hostess Crisis, a dispute between Israel and the Parisians.

The postscript to this book contains the following amusing, yet disturbing passages:

It is probably safe to assume that every American college freshman knows the following:

At some point in the distant past the United States fought a war of independence against a major European or Asian power. An extraordinary Tea Party was a factor.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, and Richard Nixon served as presidents of the United States. Washington was the first president and Lincoln also lived a long time ago, while the latter two were in the twentieth century. Ronald Reagan and George Bush the First were more recent occupants of the Oval Office. (Jimmy Carter is already off the radar screen for more than a few young scholars of the 2000s.)

The United States still suffers from the horrors of its slaveholding past, whenever that was. The Civil War, which took place some time between 1750 and 1930, was mixed up with this.

Adolf Hitler (a foreigner of some kind) was a very bad man.

There was at least one World War, but absolutely not more than three.

The geography situation is even scarier. More than a few college freshmen cannot even locate their own home towns on a map of their state or province [...] Another common problem is confusing Mexico with Spain. In an effort to plumb these depths I once gave a brief geography quiz to a class of forty freshmen. About a third knew that Dublin was in Ireland. Other answers included England, China, France, South Africa, Boston, and Chicago. We can only hope that these people are not shy about asking for directions.

Right now, I'm dealing with a teacher in my "Diversity and Politics of Schooling" class (or as I like to call it, "White Men are Evil 101") who thinks that India is in southeast Asia, somewhere near Cambodia and Vietnam, but not Korea, because that is in north Asia, along with China and Japan. Siberia is not mentioned, but my guess is that it must be north of north Asia, or perhaps somewhere in Europe. As I said to one of my classmates, "has this woman ever seen a globe?" No wonder none of the old empires are left - most of Parliament probably thinks the Falkland Islands are just off the coast of Tasmania (which, of course, is at the southernmost tip of India).

We had a question in class today: "Who here has ever heard of the Cambodian Killing Fields?" Out of a class of twenty people, one hand went up: mine.

I have only one comment..."How?"

According to the Times of London, one of the Iraqi prime minister's advisors has expressed a desire among the Iraqi government for coalition forces to withdraw from Baghdad, saying that the current division of power makes it impossible to maintain security in the capital. Iraq is also soon to send a letter to the UN Security Council (when did they get involved?) requesting a one-year extension of the US's role in Iraq, with several handoffs of security responsibility in various areas of the country during 2007. Sounds like progress all around.

Interesting, though, that while the article makes it clear the Iraqis are asking for a return of complete control in Baghdad and nowhere else for the time being, the title of the said article is "Bomb kills 35 as Iraq presses US to withdraw". Any liberals want to step up to the plate and claim that "liberal media bias" is a myth? And this is Britain's conservative media outlet.

In Canada, the following poem is a staple of November 11 (Remembrance Day, Veterans Day, whatever you want to call it). Oftentimes, though, the last stanza is left out. I never liked the poem until the first time I read it in its entirity. So here it is, for anyone who's interested....

In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Here's a good message for Republicans in light of the recent election, courtesy of a high school girls' basketball team: the Ashley, Michigan team was down to two players on the court by the end of the game, thanks to penalties and injuries, and won anyway.

So I guess it's not how many people you've got in the game...it's how they play.

I'm sure most of my blogging friends will be discussing the serious(ly depressing) results of yesterday's election. For my part, I have a more amusing point to discuss.

Jerauld County, South Dakota has elected Marie Steichen to the position of County Commissioner. There's only one problem: she died two months ago. By some quirk of the political process, her name remained on the ballot, and though voters were well aware that she was, er, "out of the office", she was still elected by a margin of 100 votes to 64. 61% isn't bad for a candidate who had to go out on the campaign trail in a hearse. Then again, I suppose it doesn't half cut down on assassination attempts.

Amazingly, this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened...this Fall. A local election in the Aleutian region of Alaska on October 3 resulted in a tie for a position on the school board. One of the candidates died on the day of the election, but this was not considered sufficient to break the tie (or "dead heat", if you prefer). A coin toss was the chosen method for making the final decision, but unfortunately, the coin came up in favor of the dead woman, producing a rather exemplary instance of a lame duck. Also a dead duck.

Mel Carnahan was posthumously elected as a senator for Missouri in 2000, but at least he had a successor (his wife was promised appointment by the governor if he won the election). There's no word yet on who's going to fill this year's vacancies now that these candidates have, well, "passed the post".

Then again, seeing as dead people seem to form so much of our electorate, I suppose we can't deny them representation.

A guest lecturer in one of my classes today mentioned that a UN resolution exists which declares that children have the right to receive education "in the language of their mother".

I said "Um, excuse me, what about the father?" After looking at me like I was from Mars, the lecturer gave sort of a verbal shrug and went on with his talk.

I was unable to find a copy of this particular resolution online (which isn't surprising, considering the number of resolutions the UN has passed over the years), but I did find the following little gems during my search (emphases mine):

The child shall enjoy the benefits of social security. He shall be entitled to grow and develop in health; to this end, special care and protection shall be provided both to him and to his mother

a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother

There's not really a whole lot I can say here...I'm too sickened to say much of anything. The enormous disparity in the respect our society gives mothers and fathers today - particularly in the realm of single parenting - is absolutely atrocious. Mothers are between four and eight times as likely as fathers to be awarded custody in a divorce, while 94% of single-parent adoptions go to women.

And with "progressive" organizations like the UN out there, the situation looks like getting worse rather than better.

I had considered starting a second blog to talk about politics in education, but I think I'm just going to keep things like this here...it's important that people know the sorts of things that are going on with our teachers today.

This semester, I've been forced to take a course called "Diversity and Politics of Schooling", which fulfills a dual purpose for the University of Wyoming College of Education: first, it functions as a four-month guilt trip for white students, where our opinions are looked on as essentially meaningless because of our skin color (this goes double for males). Second, it teaches us about "diversity", which means recognizing that people are defined by their ethnicities and teaching a black student will always be different from teaching a hispanic student or a Japanese student or anyone else. White students rarely come up because the system is, of course, skewed in our favor. Other lessons I've learned from this course:

being agnostic in a class full of Christians doesn't make me a minority, because I'm a white man

standardized tests are inherently racist because different races learn differently

the above is not a racist judgement

illegal immigrants are victims who can't be blamed for bringing their kids into the country illegally and turning them into criminals

"You're saying that because you're a white male" (actually said to me by my prof)

textbooks are racist because the majority of the people in them are white, irregardless of the fact that most historical figures in Europe and the US were white until about the last century

conversely to the last, "Black Studies" classes and the like are NOT racist

white people congregating in groups is racist; black people doing the same is not

culture=race

While doing some research for a rather ridiculous paper attached to this class, I found an article called "We Don't Need That Kind of Attitude". I can't post the entire article here, unfortunately, because of copyright stuff (I got access to it through my university library). In case anyone cares enough to go out and find it, I'll post the citation at the end of this.

The article talks about the way universities these days are trying to force teachers to demonstrate the right "disposition". It starts out with this anecdote:

Partway through her teacher-training program, Karen K. Siegfried started pulling her red compact car to the far end of the campus parking lot. She didn't want her professors at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to see her bumper stickers: One proclaims her opposition to abortion, and the other is emblazoned with the name of one of Alaska's Republican senators.

"It worried me what they could do based on my politics," says Ms. Siegfried, who had already clashed with education professors over her views on affirmative action and gun control. When Ms. Siegfried disagreed with one professor's contention that video games make children violent, she says, the professor told her: "We don't need that kind of attitude."

Siegfried has a 3.75 GPA, but was told she didn't have the right "disposition" about "other cultures" to be a teacher. She left the teacher education program "before they could show her the door", and is now studying to be an aviation technician. Good news for me, as it's one fewer competitor in the Alaska teaching job market (I'm planning to move there in two years, by the way)...but it's also bad news, as Karen sounds like the type of person I would really have enjoyed working with.

A spokesman for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is quoted as saying "It is not the job of a state university to implement an orthodox ideology." He says that professors have no business judging students' dispositions "after a classroom session where they are encouraging students to voice their opinions, and then extrapolating from those that these people cannot teach."

In 2002, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education's guidelines changed to include a passage about "social justice", which it did not bother to define. This was interpreted by individual universities as anything from the obvious "all children should be treated fairly so that they can reach their potential" to the University of Alabama's demand that education students "break silences" and "be change agents, and [...] recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism". The aforementioned U of A Fairbanks says that "all teachers, counselors, and administrators need to constantly examine the status and power that comes from being white". Brooklyn College claims to educate teacher candidates on "institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism".

An assistant professor at Brooklyn College, teaching a class called Language Literacy in Secondary Education, showed Fahrenheit 9/11 in class a week before the 2004 election. Five students complained about this, and the prof's constant remarks labelling English as "the oppressors' language". One of the students who complained was accused by the administration of "bullying", "aggressive behavior", and plagiarism.

Another story:

Ed Swan, who is earning his bachelor's degree in teacher education at Washington State, flunked the evaluation four times last academic year. He first ran into problems when a female professor talked about "white-male privilege" in her course as if it were a given, he says. "I told her I don't think it exists." Instead of completing a classroom writing assignment on how ethnic groups learn differently, he told her he wanted to write about how education could bring different cultures together. The professor, he says, encouraged him to do so, and he earned a good grade on the paper. But then she failed him on the test of his disposition. She said he "revealed opinions that have caused me great concern in the areas of race, gender, sexual orientation and privilege." In the evaluation, the professor acknowledged that she had "asked students to be honest" about their opinions and that Mr. Swan's "honesty led to a number of concerns that I have about him." Another professor who evaluated Mr. Swan's disposition called him a "white supremacist."

Swan says he sometimes wears conservative T-shirts to class just to take a jab at his liberal professors, something I've been known to do in my time. He contacted the aforementioned Foundation for Individual Rights in Education when his university tried to force him into a sensitivity training session, whereupon the Foundation's president said "You may think the sun god Ra has appointed you to be his ambassador in the Pacific Northwest, but if you're teaching seventh-grade math well, you're teaching seventh-grade math well."

Scott McConnel, meanwhile, has been forced out of the graduate program in education at Le Moyne College because there is a "mismatch between [his] personal beliefs [...] and the Le Moyne college program goals".

The article ends with a quote from Karen Siegfried: "I'm really skeptical about the future of public education if they're not going to let anyone in who questions the system."

Amen.

The article is...
Wilson, R. (2005). 'WE DON'T NEED THAT KIND OF ATTITUDE'. Chronicle of Higher Education, 52(17), A8-A11.

Tonight, for the first time, I saw an ad for a movie called "Shut Up and Sing", a "documentary" about the Dixie Chicks and their valiant struggle against the free market economy. I'm sure Michael Moore will love it.

The tagline for this 90-minute salute to idiocy is "If you think you are living in a free society, wait until you disagree with it." What Natalie Maines apparently fails to realize is that the backlash she experienced came from our free society. She seems to think it was the Secret Police of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, but as far as I know, the SPOTVRWC had nothing to do with the fact that most of America found pandering to European audiences by insulting the president offensive. They're usually called in for bigger jobs, like stealing John Kerry bumper stickers and throwing Fair Trade coffee off ships in the Boston harbor.

Face it, Natalie: country music listeners, who by the way are the people who raised your net worth and ego to the considerable levels they are at today, have decided that we don't like you any more. Stop whining and get over it.

You know, I'd be less annoyed if the Dixie Chicks' latest song hadn't been a four-minute whine about how they didn't do anything wrong, or if this summer they hadn't essentially said that country music is beneath them. But the truth is, these girls aren't just politically stupid...they're offensive in general.

EDIT: Check this list out...very funny. Although I did have to call the author out on insulting Saint Bernards by saying one of them could have sired Hilary Clinton.