There are other reasons why the Conservative Party got that majority; it would be an exaggeration to say we elected them.
Reality Check: It ain't just the Tories.
I remember one particular election I was working on for the Tories in the 80s. It was in Ottawa-Vanier, a riding that had elected a Tory only *once* since Confederation. That was back in the 1920s, when - for one election - Rockliffe (old money, filthy rich part of Ottawa) had been included in the riding. It was removed next election, and everything went back to Red, where it's been ever since.
The previous election, the LIberals had won by over 22,000 votes - the Tories didn't even get their deposit back, which means they got less than 10% of the vote. It was about as safe a seat as could possibly exist.
So, what happened? The Liberals "forgot" to enumerate whole apartment buildings in polls that had gone Tory the previous election. Signs were ripped down literally faster than we could put them back up. On election day, they moved the polls in Tory areas without notice. In the 6 polls that I was an scrutineer for, my Liberal counterparts literally tried to disqualify every Tory vote they came across.
The moral of the story is this: bad behavior during elections is hardly confined to the Tories. There are idiots on *all* sides - what saves us is our system, which is pretty good at catching this sort of thing, and the fact the the idiots are rare IN ALL PARTIES.
I think you need some more windex for your glass house there.
The problem is the First-Past-The-Post election system. If you say that General B'weto received less than 40% of the votes in the Republic of Masuto, but rules with absolute power, this person will be called a dictator. Now look at Canada's latest election results. Yes. The Ruler received just under 40% of the votes. Less than 4-in-10 voters gave their support. But the rule with absolute majority.
1) First-Past-The-Post favours different parties at different times - it all works out in the end, provided you think about time scales larger than one meal to the next. One thing it *does* do, is give a party chance to form a stable government and actually govern. In most proportional systems, you wind up with an almost permanent gridlock system, where the tail winds up wagging the dog. YMMV
2) The Prime Minister does not have absolute power - nothing even close to it.
3) General B'weto will remain in power until he dies, or is overthrown by a coup; any elections he decides to have, will be elections where he gets over 90% of the vote.
4) The WILL be another election - there is no choice in the matter. If the Prime Minster looses, he will leave 24 Sussex Drive on his own, without requiring police escort of military prompting.
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
The problem in the USA is not the health care that you do have. The problem is the health care that so many people *don't* have.
Most of the Arab Spring countries had pretty decent militaries too. Didn't stop them from being overthrown.
Having some really cool bang-bang toys to play with doesn't help you much if the people using them have no training, no spare parts, no discipline, and rely on foreigners to maintain said toys because they find it too much like work.
1. Pay unskilled programmers little money to quickly turn out software.
1. Pay the best programmers you can find and give them the time and resources they need to turn out a top quality product.
2. Release software you know is completely buggy and insecure.
2. Release software after it has been tested in every way you can think of, and fix even the smallest bugs you can find.
3. Offer bounty for better programmers to find bugs at overall cheaper rate.
This step remains the same - because it doesn't matter who you hire, how good they are, or how much time they have - any significant software system is so complex that only a total idiot would assume there are no bugs.
In my experience, if you adhere to their rules, PayPal is about as "evil" as any credit card company or bank I've dealt with. No more, no less.
I would certainly not feel it necessary to "go ballistic" if a colleague suggested dealing with them.
Big difference - banks are regulated, paypal is not. What the banks can and cannot do, and WHEN they can and cannot do it, is very precicely defined by regulators. What papal can and cannot do, and when, is absolutely up to them, with no oversight whatsoever.
As far as "going ballistic" is concerned - I'm guilty of hyperbole. Sue me.
Until recently, I was on the board of directors for a local homeless shelter here in town. RIght now, we're in the middle of planning a major fundraiser. When it was suggested that we get a paypal account so that people could purchase tickets on-line, I went ballistic - I've heard way too many horror stories over the years. I'm not sure others on the fundraising committee quite believed everything I said, but my reaction was so strong it spooked them, and they backed off the idea completly.
Paypal's changes will have to be effective, and in place for a very long, long time before they even have a *chance* of having people like me deal with them. That's a very large part of the market they've never had, and quite possibly never will.
I believe you're right - I'm a bit fuzzy on the details myself, but AFAIK, it was something he was forced into..
But that again, that was my point - it's easy to distort things when you pick one item from your arse and use that as the basis for comparison or equivalency.
No, I'm a bog-standard Canuck - Newfoundlander, actually. But I've been using the name Gorshkov ever since I first got on the internet (DARPANET, actually) back in 1982. I took it from Admiral Sergei Gorshkov - I'm a great admirer of his writings regarding Naval strategy.
I mentioned in another post that I was in intelligence during the cold war, and have a degree in Soviet & East European Studies (basically, combination of history, political science, culture, and language)
Would you mind explaining to me the difference between today's USA and the old Soviet Union?
It would be like trying to explain the differences between a car and a banana. There are so many differences, and they have so little in common, it's hard to know where to start.
I'm not trying to be flip here - I'm being perfectly honest. You're talking to somebody here who used to be in the intelligence services, and has an honours degree in Soviet & East European Studies. If you seriously want an explanation, send me an email, and I'll write something up for you - but it would be way too long to post here, unless you can be a bit more specific about what you're asking, and can narrow it down for me?
Germany in the 1930s was a Western Democracy. Does the word Gestapo ring any bells for you?
Germany also introduced the world's first universal health care system. Does that make them communist? Oh no, wait - that can't be right. They're fascists.
Hey - Obama introduced universal health care, too. Does that make him a fascist? Oh no, wait - that can't be right. He's a communist.
See how easy it is to distort things, by creating false equivalences?
Well at least they are honest about the "state" of their country. They don't hide the fact they are a police state.
Actually, they wern't honest about it at all. They claimed to be the most free, democratic country in the world.
With the US they run around yelling freedom! freedom! while stripping away freedom. The US being the "Defenders of Freedom" is just an out right lie.
And in the Soviet Union, you'd have just won a free life-time vacation at a beautiful resort in Irkutsk just for expressing that sentiment.
Bit of a difference, don't you think?
Lol Africa is about the furthest thing from a police state in existence. It's not even a country for starters, also the majority of it's constituent countries enact martial law because they are wrapped in small scale tribal civil wars that have existed for decades if not hundreds of years.
I'm pretty sure I'm aware that Africa isn't a country - my apologies for not naming them all individually. Most of them are dictatorships - which are invariably police states. It's how dictators hold power.
So what's the difference? If cops in Canada or the U.S. can do whatever they want with no consequences, what's the difference between that and your "actual" police states?
key word - consequences. You are assuming there will be none.
Well, recent events have demonstrated that the difference still exists in frequency, but the practices of reviled police states have now become acceptable practice in western democracy, which means the difference no longer exists in principle.
Acceptable, according to *who*? Look at the outrage accompanying this story, just in THIS thread - doesn't look to be particularly acceptable to me. I think you're dreaming. Let's look at the differences between what happened here, and what would have happened in a REAL police state.
- the kid is free. In a police state, he'd be in jail (assuming he was still alive)
- the kid still has his camera. In a police state, it would be either confiscated, or laying in smashed, ittty bitty bits on the floor of the mall.
- the kid was able to tell his story to reporters. In a police state, no reporter would have touched this, even if he *had* heard of the event
- the story was published. In a police state, that wouldn't happen unless the reporter wanted to have the kid for a roomie, where they could break bread and water together.
Now maybe I'm being a bit picky - but to me, there's a lot of differences there.
In the USA, the president can ask for anyone to be assassinated, and he will get this wish.
There's a bit of a difference between ordering the death of an enemy combatant - regardless of nationality - and ordering the death of the guy down the street because his dog annoys you when it barks at 3am. That being said, I'm pretty sure that what powers the president has in the US, doesn't really have much meaning when it comes to events in Canada
There is no oversight on this process, and the legal doctrine which creates this power out of thin air is sealed from public review.
Not being an American, I don't know all the details of this - but I'm pretty sure that even though it's sealed, it still had to pass muster in front of a judge, or panel of judges.
Also, in the USA, paramilitary police can now break down the door to your home, assassinate everyone inside, later admit they had the wrong house, and not face any repercussions whatsoever.
citation?
In the USA, children are being encouraged to report suspicious activities of their parents to government school employees.
Newsflash - that also happened during the cold war. And WWII. And WWI. Political & social paranoia isn't the same thing as a police state, not by a long shot.
Ex-military and persons who profess an interest in the founding legal documents of the country are officially to be considered possible terrorists.
Sorry - but that's kind of like saying that anybody who professes interest in the Koran is a terrorist. It's not the interest that gets you considered to be a possible terrorist - it's how you bend and twist it to fit your agenda.
In Canada, if you profess a religious opinion in public which someone finds upsetting, you are hauled into a secret court.
I call total, utter, unadulterated bullcrap. The *closest* think I can think of that you might possibly be referring to are the various provincial rights tribunals that interpret the laws regarding hate speech. Even so, your characterization is at best grossly misleading, and at worst, intentionally distorted and inflammatory. Yes, some people *have* tried to use them the last few years to "punish" those they don't agree with..... so what's happened? In those jurisdictions where those attempts have been made (Alberta, BC and (I think) Ontario), those sections are in the process of being repealed (I believe this is already the case in Alberta). So I guess that argument doesn't work for you, either.
So yeah. The US and Canada haven't quite caught up with former USSR, but we're working hard to get there.
No one with a brain is interested in visiting a police state, even if it is the
half-assed sort of mess typical of everything else Canadians do.
Try living in an *actual* police state sometime - the old Soviet Union, Communist Romania, today's China, Cuba, or most middle-eastern/third world countries, most of Africa or Asia, and get back to me, k?
Not trying to belittle what happened to the kid - it was wrong by any measure. But I really wish the hell people realized just how much difference there is between a western democracy and a REAL police state........
So basically, you left 8 out of 9 pages of well researched views from multiple experts with opposing views because the first page had the opinion of a person whose views are not scientific.
How very scientific of you to throw out the entire data because 11 percent of it was suspect.
The rest of it came from different experiments and you lost it.
You have thus provied a live example of how the internet shapes thinking - impatience and conditioning to trolling - and you have proved the point the article was trying to make!
No, what it proves is that I have no desire to waste my time reading an article written by somebody who considers somebody like Greenfield an expert.
If it was the alternative - that they were looking at Greenfield's claims and then debunking them - well, there's still no need to waste my time, because I already know she's full of it.
I was going to read TFA - believe it or not, I usually do. But after seeing Susan Greenfield's name in the summary, I decided to skip it. Anybody here who's familiar with Ben Goldachre's site, badscience.net, is certainly familiar enough with her antics that they'd know anything that comes out of her mouth is, at best, fiction.
Funny how the Canadian Conservative government is trying to eliminate our deficite in 4 years by fixing problems that don't exist: E-voting, renaming each part of our military, (anything else I am forgetting?)
The report in TFA is from the Elections Commissioner, who is NOT a member of the conservative government. Given the frequency with which he pisses off *all* parties, it's pretty safe to say that he's in nobody's pocket.
Why does that make it OK? Why should judges be able to stop scientists from reporting their results to the public in a timely manner? As long as the evidence she gives on the stand is accurate, why does it matter what she does in the media?
For the same reason that witnesses aren't allowed to talk to other witnesses before their testimony, why juries are often sequestered - or if not, invariably forbidden as a matter of course to not discuss the case with anybody else, or read news coverage of the trial they're on, etc - to avoid influencing somebody else's testimony, and to maintain impartiality so that any decision is based only on the evidence presented in court.
Also - I know I'm sounding like a broken record - she has NOT been prevented from reporting her results. That was done when she was published in the Lancet. She's been forbidden from talking to reporters till after she's testified - nothing more, nothing less.
That is entirely dependent on the assumption that the the inquiry isn't just the excuse currently being used to muzzle her.
Am I the only person here who's actually read TFA? Her paper has been published in the freaking LANCET
Do you have any idea how the government works? How many levels up the food chain she would have had to go to get permission to submit the paper in the first place? How many times it would have been reviewed by her bosses, on multiple levels, before it was allowed to go out the door? If this is what you call suppression, then every federal politician should be shot to remove them from the gene pool, and every civil servant in that department should be fired for being too stupid to live.
Is she also forbidden to speak at conferences, to her fellow scientists? Has she been told she also can't talk to others in her department, involved in the same areas of research? Other colleagues in her area of expertise, who don't work at Fisheries? Well, I don't know, and neither do you or anybody else here - because TFA doesn't mention it. Bottom line - there is nothing in that story that supports a claim of repression. The fact that the article was published at all makes it false on it's face. Hell - I came up with a reasonable, rational argument for why this may have been done while reading the article in the first place - it's not like it took any large amounts of brain power, so you can't exactly jump to conclusions and scream "THIS IS THE REASON! THIS IS THE REASON!".
The point isn't to suppress the information for ever, because that won't work, it's to mitigate the damage done by the report.
WHAT damage? Salmon are dying on the west coast. Not exactly news - it's been happening for years. Federal officials have conducted a study, and think they may have a lead on the cause.... and published the results in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. How is any of this possibly bad news? What is there to be suppressed?
Harper just needs to make sure that the media interest in the topic dies out first, then she'll be free to talk to all the reporters who no longer want to talk to her.
Right. Well, the paper was published in February - and there's still a queue of how many reporters wanting to talk to her, 7 months later? She's due to testify in August - without knowing the dates, she could be on the stand and done within the next week, or it could be a long as 30 days. Either way, I doubt they're all going to disappear that quickly, of they've been waiting this long and are still interested.
Occams Razor: The simplest explanation that fits all known facts is the one most likely to be correct. So tell me - what do you think is the simplest explanation - that they want to hold off till she's finished her testimony sometime within the next month, or that's it's a plot on the part of the federal government to suppress a report that shows progress for solving a major economic and environmental problem that can't be suppressed because it's already been published?
Slashdot Mirror
There are other reasons why the Conservative Party got that majority; it would be an exaggeration to say we elected them.
Reality Check: It ain't just the Tories. I remember one particular election I was working on for the Tories in the 80s. It was in Ottawa-Vanier, a riding that had elected a Tory only *once* since Confederation. That was back in the 1920s, when - for one election - Rockliffe (old money, filthy rich part of Ottawa) had been included in the riding. It was removed next election, and everything went back to Red, where it's been ever since. The previous election, the LIberals had won by over 22,000 votes - the Tories didn't even get their deposit back, which means they got less than 10% of the vote. It was about as safe a seat as could possibly exist. So, what happened? The Liberals "forgot" to enumerate whole apartment buildings in polls that had gone Tory the previous election. Signs were ripped down literally faster than we could put them back up. On election day, they moved the polls in Tory areas without notice. In the 6 polls that I was an scrutineer for, my Liberal counterparts literally tried to disqualify every Tory vote they came across.
The moral of the story is this: bad behavior during elections is hardly confined to the Tories. There are idiots on *all* sides - what saves us is our system, which is pretty good at catching this sort of thing, and the fact the the idiots are rare IN ALL PARTIES.
I think you need some more windex for your glass house there.
The problem is the First-Past-The-Post election system. If you say that General B'weto received less than 40% of the votes in the Republic of Masuto, but rules with absolute power, this person will be called a dictator. Now look at Canada's latest election results. Yes. The Ruler received just under 40% of the votes. Less than 4-in-10 voters gave their support. But the rule with absolute majority.
1) First-Past-The-Post favours different parties at different times - it all works out in the end, provided you think about time scales larger than one meal to the next. One thing it *does* do, is give a party chance to form a stable government and actually govern. In most proportional systems, you wind up with an almost permanent gridlock system, where the tail winds up wagging the dog. YMMV
2) The Prime Minister does not have absolute power - nothing even close to it.
3) General B'weto will remain in power until he dies, or is overthrown by a coup; any elections he decides to have, will be elections where he gets over 90% of the vote.
4) The WILL be another election - there is no choice in the matter. If the Prime Minster looses, he will leave 24 Sussex Drive on his own, without requiring police escort of military prompting.
Yeah - we live in such a brutal dictatorship.
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.
The problem in the USA is not the health care that you do have. The problem is the health care that so many people *don't* have.
Most of the Arab Spring countries had pretty decent militaries too. Didn't stop them from being overthrown.
Having some really cool bang-bang toys to play with doesn't help you much if the people using them have no training, no spare parts, no discipline, and rely on foreigners to maintain said toys because they find it too much like work.
1. Pay unskilled programmers little money to quickly turn out software.
1. Pay the best programmers you can find and give them the time and resources they need to turn out a top quality product.
2. Release software you know is completely buggy and insecure.
2. Release software after it has been tested in every way you can think of, and fix even the smallest bugs you can find.
3. Offer bounty for better programmers to find bugs at overall cheaper rate.
This step remains the same - because it doesn't matter who you hire, how good they are, or how much time they have - any significant software system is so complex that only a total idiot would assume there are no bugs.
In my experience, if you adhere to their rules, PayPal is about as "evil" as any credit card company or bank I've dealt with. No more, no less.
I would certainly not feel it necessary to "go ballistic" if a colleague suggested dealing with them.
Big difference - banks are regulated, paypal is not. What the banks can and cannot do, and WHEN they can and cannot do it, is very precicely defined by regulators. What papal can and cannot do, and when, is absolutely up to them, with no oversight whatsoever. As far as "going ballistic" is concerned - I'm guilty of hyperbole. Sue me.
Until recently, I was on the board of directors for a local homeless shelter here in town. RIght now, we're in the middle of planning a major fundraiser. When it was suggested that we get a paypal account so that people could purchase tickets on-line, I went ballistic - I've heard way too many horror stories over the years. I'm not sure others on the fundraising committee quite believed everything I said, but my reaction was so strong it spooked them, and they backed off the idea completly. Paypal's changes will have to be effective, and in place for a very long, long time before they even have a *chance* of having people like me deal with them. That's a very large part of the market they've never had, and quite possibly never will.
I believe you're right - I'm a bit fuzzy on the details myself, but AFAIK, it was something he was forced into..
But that again, that was my point - it's easy to distort things when you pick one item from your arse and use that as the basis for comparison or equivalency.
No, I'm a bog-standard Canuck - Newfoundlander, actually. But I've been using the name Gorshkov ever since I first got on the internet (DARPANET, actually) back in 1982. I took it from Admiral Sergei Gorshkov - I'm a great admirer of his writings regarding Naval strategy.
I mentioned in another post that I was in intelligence during the cold war, and have a degree in Soviet & East European Studies (basically, combination of history, political science, culture, and language)
Would you mind explaining to me the difference between today's USA and the old Soviet Union?
It would be like trying to explain the differences between a car and a banana. There are so many differences, and they have so little in common, it's hard to know where to start.
I'm not trying to be flip here - I'm being perfectly honest. You're talking to somebody here who used to be in the intelligence services, and has an honours degree in Soviet & East European Studies. If you seriously want an explanation, send me an email, and I'll write something up for you - but it would be way too long to post here, unless you can be a bit more specific about what you're asking, and can narrow it down for me?
Germany in the 1930s was a Western Democracy. Does the word Gestapo ring any bells for you?
Germany also introduced the world's first universal health care system. Does that make them communist? Oh no, wait - that can't be right. They're fascists.
Hey - Obama introduced universal health care, too. Does that make him a fascist? Oh no, wait - that can't be right. He's a communist.
See how easy it is to distort things, by creating false equivalences?
Well at least they are honest about the "state" of their country. They don't hide the fact they are a police state.
Actually, they wern't honest about it at all. They claimed to be the most free, democratic country in the world.
With the US they run around yelling freedom! freedom! while stripping away freedom. The US being the "Defenders of Freedom" is just an out right lie.
And in the Soviet Union, you'd have just won a free life-time vacation at a beautiful resort in Irkutsk just for expressing that sentiment. Bit of a difference, don't you think?
Lol Africa is about the furthest thing from a police state in existence. It's not even a country for starters, also the majority of it's constituent countries enact martial law because they are wrapped in small scale tribal civil wars that have existed for decades if not hundreds of years.
I'm pretty sure I'm aware that Africa isn't a country - my apologies for not naming them all individually. Most of them are dictatorships - which are invariably police states. It's how dictators hold power.
So what's the difference? If cops in Canada or the U.S. can do whatever they want with no consequences, what's the difference between that and your "actual" police states?
key word - consequences. You are assuming there will be none.
Well, recent events have demonstrated that the difference still exists in frequency, but the practices of reviled police states have now become acceptable practice in western democracy, which means the difference no longer exists in principle.
Acceptable, according to *who*? Look at the outrage accompanying this story, just in THIS thread - doesn't look to be particularly acceptable to me. I think you're dreaming. Let's look at the differences between what happened here, and what would have happened in a REAL police state.
- the kid is free. In a police state, he'd be in jail (assuming he was still alive)
- the kid still has his camera. In a police state, it would be either confiscated, or laying in smashed, ittty bitty bits on the floor of the mall.
- the kid was able to tell his story to reporters. In a police state, no reporter would have touched this, even if he *had* heard of the event
- the story was published. In a police state, that wouldn't happen unless the reporter wanted to have the kid for a roomie, where they could break bread and water together.
Now maybe I'm being a bit picky - but to me, there's a lot of differences there.
In the USA, the president can ask for anyone to be assassinated, and he will get this wish.
There's a bit of a difference between ordering the death of an enemy combatant - regardless of nationality - and ordering the death of the guy down the street because his dog annoys you when it barks at 3am. That being said, I'm pretty sure that what powers the president has in the US, doesn't really have much meaning when it comes to events in Canada
There is no oversight on this process, and the legal doctrine which creates this power out of thin air is sealed from public review.
Not being an American, I don't know all the details of this - but I'm pretty sure that even though it's sealed, it still had to pass muster in front of a judge, or panel of judges.
Also, in the USA, paramilitary police can now break down the door to your home, assassinate everyone inside, later admit they had the wrong house, and not face any repercussions whatsoever.
citation?
In the USA, children are being encouraged to report suspicious activities of their parents to government school employees.
Newsflash - that also happened during the cold war. And WWII. And WWI. Political & social paranoia isn't the same thing as a police state, not by a long shot.
Ex-military and persons who profess an interest in the founding legal documents of the country are officially to be considered possible terrorists.
Sorry - but that's kind of like saying that anybody who professes interest in the Koran is a terrorist. It's not the interest that gets you considered to be a possible terrorist - it's how you bend and twist it to fit your agenda.
In Canada, if you profess a religious opinion in public which someone finds upsetting, you are hauled into a secret court.
I call total, utter, unadulterated bullcrap. The *closest* think I can think of that you might possibly be referring to are the various provincial rights tribunals that interpret the laws regarding hate speech. Even so, your characterization is at best grossly misleading, and at worst, intentionally distorted and inflammatory. Yes, some people *have* tried to use them the last few years to "punish" those they don't agree with ..... so what's happened? In those jurisdictions where those attempts have been made (Alberta, BC and (I think) Ontario), those sections are in the process of being repealed (I believe this is already the case in Alberta). So I guess that argument doesn't work for you, either.
So yeah. The US and Canada haven't quite caught up with former USSR, but we're working hard to get there.
Anywhere
No one with a brain is interested in visiting a police state, even if it is the half-assed sort of mess typical of everything else Canadians do.
Try living in an *actual* police state sometime - the old Soviet Union, Communist Romania, today's China, Cuba, or most middle-eastern/third world countries, most of Africa or Asia, and get back to me, k? Not trying to belittle what happened to the kid - it was wrong by any measure. But I really wish the hell people realized just how much difference there is between a western democracy and a REAL police state ........
The fact that we elect representatives and don't vote directly on every single issue ever brought up for discussion.
Which is why it's called a REPRESENTATIVE democracy, and not a DIRECT democracy.
That's almost like saying being a hooker is good training for being a mom.
So basically, you left 8 out of 9 pages of well researched views from multiple experts with opposing views because the first page had the opinion of a person whose views are not scientific.
How very scientific of you to throw out the entire data because 11 percent of it was suspect.
The rest of it came from different experiments and you lost it.
You have thus provied a live example of how the internet shapes thinking - impatience and conditioning to trolling - and you have proved the point the article was trying to make!
No, what it proves is that I have no desire to waste my time reading an article written by somebody who considers somebody like Greenfield an expert. If it was the alternative - that they were looking at Greenfield's claims and then debunking them - well, there's still no need to waste my time, because I already know she's full of it.
I was going to read TFA - believe it or not, I usually do. But after seeing Susan Greenfield's name in the summary, I decided to skip it. Anybody here who's familiar with Ben Goldachre's site, badscience.net, is certainly familiar enough with her antics that they'd know anything that comes out of her mouth is, at best, fiction.
"God made the world in 7 days" sounds far simpler than anything science has come up with.
Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is the one most likely to be correct.
........
All those niggly details about things like fossils and evolution and stuff can be soooooo inconvenient
Funny how the Canadian Conservative government is trying to eliminate our deficite in 4 years by fixing problems that don't exist: E-voting, renaming each part of our military, (anything else I am forgetting?)
The report in TFA is from the Elections Commissioner, who is NOT a member of the conservative government. Given the frequency with which he pisses off *all* parties, it's pretty safe to say that he's in nobody's pocket.
J Edgar Hoover. 'nuff said.
Why does that make it OK? Why should judges be able to stop scientists from reporting their results to the public in a timely manner? As long as the evidence she gives on the stand is accurate, why does it matter what she does in the media?
For the same reason that witnesses aren't allowed to talk to other witnesses before their testimony, why juries are often sequestered - or if not, invariably forbidden as a matter of course to not discuss the case with anybody else, or read news coverage of the trial they're on, etc - to avoid influencing somebody else's testimony, and to maintain impartiality so that any decision is based only on the evidence presented in court.
Also - I know I'm sounding like a broken record - she has NOT been prevented from reporting her results. That was done when she was published in the Lancet. She's been forbidden from talking to reporters till after she's testified - nothing more, nothing less.
That is entirely dependent on the assumption that the the inquiry isn't just the excuse currently being used to muzzle her.
Am I the only person here who's actually read TFA? Her paper has been published in the freaking LANCET
Do you have any idea how the government works? How many levels up the food chain she would have had to go to get permission to submit the paper in the first place? How many times it would have been reviewed by her bosses, on multiple levels, before it was allowed to go out the door? If this is what you call suppression, then every federal politician should be shot to remove them from the gene pool, and every civil servant in that department should be fired for being too stupid to live.
Is she also forbidden to speak at conferences, to her fellow scientists? Has she been told she also can't talk to others in her department, involved in the same areas of research? Other colleagues in her area of expertise, who don't work at Fisheries? Well, I don't know, and neither do you or anybody else here - because TFA doesn't mention it. Bottom line - there is nothing in that story that supports a claim of repression. The fact that the article was published at all makes it false on it's face. Hell - I came up with a reasonable, rational argument for why this may have been done while reading the article in the first place - it's not like it took any large amounts of brain power, so you can't exactly jump to conclusions and scream "THIS IS THE REASON! THIS IS THE REASON!".
The point isn't to suppress the information for ever, because that won't work, it's to mitigate the damage done by the report.
WHAT damage? Salmon are dying on the west coast. Not exactly news - it's been happening for years. Federal officials have conducted a study, and think they may have a lead on the cause .... and published the results in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. How is any of this possibly bad news? What is there to be suppressed?
Harper just needs to make sure that the media interest in the topic dies out first, then she'll be free to talk to all the reporters who no longer want to talk to her.
Right. Well, the paper was published in February - and there's still a queue of how many reporters wanting to talk to her, 7 months later? She's due to testify in August - without knowing the dates, she could be on the stand and done within the next week, or it could be a long as 30 days. Either way, I doubt they're all going to disappear that quickly, of they've been waiting this long and are still interested.
Occams Razor: The simplest explanation that fits all known facts is the one most likely to be correct.
So tell me - what do you think is the simplest explanation - that they want to hold off till she's finished her testimony sometime within the next month, or that's it's a plot on the part of the federal government to suppress a report that shows progress for solving a major economic and environmental problem that can't be suppressed because it's already been published?