[Section 15] Micheal Geist is being sued by Wayne Crookes

It's official: A defamation lawsuit has been filed in BC against Law Professor Micheal Geist by Wayne Crookes, the same person who is suing me. Geist is being sued for, among other things, having a named link to P2pnet, which has on it somewhere a page which has a named link to Open Politics, which has content on it somewhere which Crookes objects to.

Yes, you read that right.

Crookes claims that this makes Geist a republisher of libel!

Oh, by the way, in another area of the lawsuit, Crookes makes it clear that anyone who is part of Green Bloggers can be sued for a link which is in the aggregator's blogroll.

I'm too busy to say more right now... but I would hope that if this community truly values its existence, it would band together to do something about this.

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/28/2007 08:04:00 PM

[Section 15] I feel fine.. no wait... thunk!

Well, it wasn't quite that dramatic, but I did have something of a medical shock this weekend.

I started out as your standard moderate cramps, and, well, you all know where that usually leads. After picking my son up from school, I ended up drinking some beer at a friend's and eating pizza for supper while our sons played. I went home when it was dark, picked up some groceries, and went to bed feeling lousy. BY gut hurt, my back and my head hurt. And I still have this stupid head cold.

That night, the cramps were quite bad, but I largely slept through it all. As I suffered through peritonitis when I was a kid, cramps are something I can deal with.

Saturday I felt better. The cramps seemed to be over. I took it easy, did some easy work, and slept again. Eating wasn't pleasant, and I had no hunger whatsoever, so I avoided it. That evening my back started to hurt, a lot. I was audible. The cramps came back as well, and I developed radiating pain from my navel area through to my centre mid-back and back again. By midnight I was considering going to the hospital. Natalie -- my wife -- called Telehealth Ontario and after going through the symptoms, they recommended that I go to the ER for a checkup within the next few hours. We don't have a car, and as we have three young children, I made the decision to take an ambulance. I told Natalie to stay home with the kids as there was nothing for her to do at the hospital, and, heck, she'd be dead the next day if she stayed up all night. She has the little one to breast feed, the other kids to comfort, and the hospital is only a phone call away.

Just before the ambulance showed up, I started feeling better. "That figures," I thought. They took me in anyway, even though I could walk out to the vehicle. I sat up on the way in, though I got carsick very quickly. I barely made it out of the ambulance without throwing up. A paramedic told me to take in some fresh air as I got out, but, sadly, there were smokers right there.

Anyway, I got in and was waiting in the ambulatory area inside ER, when I noticed that I was feeling very fine. I was restless, so I walked around a bit. I pondered going home. Then I got itchy around my right underarm and forearm. I scratched. then I got itchy in the same place but on the other side. Then my ribs, and my belly, and my scalp and my groin and my thighs. What the hell?, I thought. So I got up, went in to the washroom, and looked at myself in the mirror. I was covered in a rash. I scratched.

I sat back in my wheelchair. I scratched. I figured they could find some sort of ointment to help. But I was fine. Really.

Then I couldn't get quite enough air and my peripheral vision vanished. I realized two things: I had spent several minutes being euphoric, and that I was passing out. I had enough brains to get help, and after passing out in a chair under watchful eyes, I was woken up and helped onto a gurney. Lying down made me feel much better. After being on an IV for an hour, I felt much improved. They sent off a blood test. I had an x-ray done of my back, though I nearly fainted while holding my breath.

About an hour later, they applied another a fluid, this time under a pump, forcing potassium into me. The blood test showed that I was critically short of it. This is odd as I consume potassium-rich foods daily, and not suffering from diarrhea or vomiting, which is about the only potential source of potassium loss in my case. Of course, a little later, I did have considerable fluid loss, from the usual source when you have had cramps.

Anyway, I picked up a lot, slept, and by noon they had me under a CT scanner, taking a look at my abdominal region. The CT technician (an understatement given how much schooling they require) was affable and had me ready to go in no time. I've never had one before and it was, well, boring, though the engineering required to get that machine spinning around me was interesting. I didn't enjoy the dye being pumped into me. I hurt, and made holding my breath hard, but, being transitory, I didn't mind.

I spent the afternoon sleeping and eating -- yes, I had two full meals there -- talked with Natalie (finally) in the mid-afternoon. She came by and took me home for six p.m.

So, the diagnosis? Infectious enteritis is the leading suspect, as the CT scan showed definite inflammation over a long segment of my terminal ileum, which is the end of the small intestine. However, it is also possibly an autoimmune disorder, though likely not. I have one more test to wait on, though they have no way to rule out a viral infection.

I'm feeling much better, but remain astounded as to how fast I went from being fine to crashing due to an electrolyte imbalance.

And while in the hospital, I lost my glasses. I put them down while in the washroom, and someone walked off with them. Despite two shifts looking for them, no luck. Who the heck steals prescription glasses anyway?

Anyway, thanks to the staff of St. Joseph's Health Care Centre for looking after me, and for my wife and family doing the same. And for those kind comments over at The Wingnuterer, of all places.

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/15/2007 01:00:00 PM

[Section 15] On a lighter note... blow me

If anyone has been following the other controversy this week, that is, the broohaha over Ontario Premier McGuinty's Flick Off conservation program, The Star's Linwood Barclay has some suggestions for additional add campaigns.

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/04/2007 06:52:00 AM

[Section 15] Neville again

Oh, I so don't want to do this, and have no tiem to blog, but, for thoroughness sake, here's more evidence of hypocrisy when it comes to using the example of Chamberlain's folly...

Philippe Gohier, Macleans.ca | May 2, 2007 | 7:07 pm EST

As Macleans.ca first pointed out this morning, Green Party leader Elizabeth May is hardly the first Canadian politician to use Neville Chamberlain as a rhetorical device.

For instance, in a manner strikingly similar to May's, NDP leader Jack Layton suggested in 2005 that then-prime minister Paul Martin's failure to meet Kyoto targets made "Neville Chamberlain look like a stalwart in standing up to a crisis." Two years later, Layton is feeling a sudden surge of decorum.

"Well, we certainly would have never made any such comparison," he said Tuesday, when asked by reporters about May's comment.

Pressed by Macleans.ca to explain this seeming contradiction, Layton's press secretary said the NDP stood by Layton's previous statement and said the party would continue to condemn May's "deplorable remarks." According to Karl Bélanger, the comparison "wasn't the same at all" because when Layton brought up Chamberlain, it wasn't a specific reference to appeasement but to Chamberlain's entire oeuvre while in office.

"Neville Chamberlain was not generally recognized as a strong leader," Bélanger explained. "He was prime minister for a few years."

Calls to the offices of Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and Prime Minister Stephen Harper to explain comments made by Liberal MP Robert Thibault and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay respectively went unanswered.

With party leaders of all stripes calling on May to retract her statement that the abandonment of Kyoto targets is "a grievance worse than Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis," the Green leader relented somewhat on Wednesday and offered a tepid apology.

"I am dismayed that members of the Harper government have chosen to distort my comments to create a firestorm of controversy designed to distract attention from their failure to live up to Canada's Kyoto commitments," May said. "I can assure the Canadian Jewish Congress and all Canadians that I did not compare Nazi Germany and the Holocaust to any current issue. The evil of the Nazi regime is without parallel and stands alone for its deliberate, systematic and inhuman genocide."

But that didn't stop Conservative MPs from hammering away in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

Gerald Keddy, for one, denounced May's "irresponsible comparison of Canadian public policy to Chamberlain's appeasement" and called on Dion to withdraw his party's support for May. However, in 2001, Keddy himself raised the spectre of Nazi appeasement to attack then-NDP leader Alexa McDonough's reluctance to support the mission in Afghanistan.

"Mr. Speaker, to go back to another era, perhaps Neville Chamberlain should move over and the honourable member for Halifax should sit down because they are both standing in the same place," Keddy said. "This is not the time nor place in Canadian history to try to stand on both sides of a line. We very clearly have drawn a line here and now is the time to take a stand."

That same year, Stockwell Day used a similar argument against then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, suggesting the Liberal government's failure to boost military spending and its cautious approach with Iraq was putting Canadians in danger.

"I hear the echo of Neville Chamberlain in everything he says," Day said of Chrétien. "He's saying 'peace in our time' while terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks on innocent populations. I don't know what it's going to take for him to wake up. He's exposing Canada as being vulnerable."

Of course, on Wednesday, Day condemned May's "horrific" statements.

In the spirit of once-and-for-all banishing this lazy bit of rhetoric, Macleans.ca presents a selection of other Chamberlain references made by MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons.

"That's the type of statement Chamberlain made before World War II." -Conservative MP Leon Benoit on the Liberal government's reluctance to back U.S. invasion of Iraq, August 2002

"It is not time for Neville Chamberlain. It's time for Winston Churchill." -Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, on the need to boost military spending, February 2002

"I remember a person in about 1939 coming back from a meeting with Adolph Hitler in Munich. He waved a piece of paper around saying 'peace in our times.' Thousands and thousands of people applauded him and said that it was a great accomplishment and that he was a man of peace. However there was another man, Sir Winston Churchill, who said that appeasement never works with evil and terrorism. These people cannot be negotiated with. They have no respect for the rule of law." -Conservative MP Brian Fitzpatrick on terrorism, October 2001

"Mr. Speaker, the minister still insists on his pathetic strategy of waiting eight months for the task force to report. He looks like Neville Chamberlain trumpeting the virtues of waiting while his foes make busy their preparations. The minister needs to acknowledge that the world does not stand still, not even for him." -NDP MP Alexa McDonough on the Chrétien government's refusal to establish a committee to look into bank mergers, February 1998

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/03/2007 06:26:00 PM

[Section 15] Of pots and kettles using Chamberlain analogies

So Elizabeth May is in the middle of a small controversy over her remarks comparing the lack of proper action regarding global warming in Canada to Neville Chamberlain's failure to appreciate the dangers of Nazi Germany. With some politicians calling for her to retract her remarks, I thought it fitting to visit similar recent remarks from other politicians.

From Hansard, Jack Layton:

Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. We have been hearing those kinds of comments from the Prime Minister for 16 years since he began promising to clean up the air for Canadians and instead we have worse pollution than ever. He makes Neville Chamberlain look like a stalwart in standing up to a crisis.

Smog is sending people to emergency wards at unprecedented levels. The prairies are drying up. We have forest fires like we have never had before. All we get are promises of plans to be brought forward some day. Will he bring forward a plan, yes or no?

From Hansard, Hon. Robert Thibault (West Nova, Lib.) (whom I just saw on CBC distancing himself a bit from May):

I listened to the Minister of Finance when he was reading his budget speech. He said that the long days of bickering between the federal and provincial governments were over. I have not heard a quote like that since I read about Neville Chamberlain talking about peace in our times right before the second world war.

And, finally, also from Hansard, Peter Mackay, MP for Central Nova, and soon to be running against Elizabeth May herself, is recently on record with this:

Mr. Speaker, what is completely sad is that the member would somehow diminish the real important work that is being done. Millions of Afghan children are now in school and work is being done to build villages with clean water, with hospitals and with schools. I do not know how the member can debase that effort and equate it with some of the rigorous activity that is going on inside that country, the activities that he described.

I do not expect members of the NDP to understand this. I fully expect that the Neville Chamberlains of the 21st century in the NDP do not want to be part of an effort that is aimed at elevating the lives of the people of Afghanistan. It is unfortunate that they would take this off track and try to debase the real activity, the important quality of life changes that are taking place because of our forces being in Afghanistan. That is what is so misleading about the position of the NDP.

Climate change caused by Global Warming will likely be a catastrophe causing immense death and suffering unless we act with far more aggression now. Comparing our inaction and dithering to Neville Chamberlain's lack of vision is appropriate given the risks we are taking. Certainly, Elizabeth's use of the analogy is not out of the ordinary.

====
Update:

I forgot to cite my ultimate reference: Selective Memory by Aaron Wherry, though I don't think his Mackay citation link is correct.

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/02/2007 02:50:00 PM

[Section 15] Of pots and kettles using Chamberlain analogies

So Elizabeth May is in the middle of a small controversy over her remarks comparing the lack of proper action regarding global warming in Canada to Neville Chamberlain's failure to appreciate the dangers of Nazi Germany. With some politicians calling for her to retract her remarks, I thought it fitting to visit similar recent remarks from other politicians.

From Hansard, Jack Layton:

Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. We have been hearing those kinds of comments from the Prime Minister for 16 years since he began promising to clean up the air for Canadians and instead we have worse pollution than ever. He makes Neville Chamberlain look like a stalwart in standing up to a crisis.

Smog is sending people to emergency wards at unprecedented levels. The prairies are drying up. We have forest fires like we have never had before. All we get are promises of plans to be brought forward some day. Will he bring forward a plan, yes or no?

From Hansard, Hon. Robert Thibault (West Nova, Lib.) (whom I just saw on CBC distancing himself a bit from May):

I listened to the Minister of Finance when he was reading his budget speech. He said that the long days of bickering between the federal and provincial governments were over. I have not heard a quote like that since I read about Neville Chamberlain talking about peace in our times right before the second world war.

And, finally, also from Hansard, Peter Mackay, MP for Central Nova, and soon to be running against Elizabeth May herself, is recently on record with this:

Mr. Speaker, what is completely sad is that the member would somehow diminish the real important work that is being done. Millions of Afghan children are now in school and work is being done to build villages with clean water, with hospitals and with schools. I do not know how the member can debase that effort and equate it with some of the rigorous activity that is going on inside that country, the activities that he described.

I do not expect members of the NDP to understand this. I fully expect that the Neville Chamberlains of the 21st century in the NDP do not want to be part of an effort that is aimed at elevating the lives of the people of Afghanistan. It is unfortunate that they would take this off track and try to debase the real activity, the important quality of life changes that are taking place because of our forces being in Afghanistan. That is what is so misleading about the position of the NDP.

Climate change caused by Global Warming will likely be a catastrophe causing immense death and suffering unless we act with far more aggression now. Comparing our inaction and dithering to Neville Chamberlain's lack of vision is appropriate given the risks we are taking. Certainly, Elizabeth's use of the analogy is not out of the ordinary.

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/02/2007 02:50:00 PM

[Section 15] Election called in PEI

Canada's tiniest province is having an election, and the provincial Green Party there is running candidates. Their website is up at http://greenparty.pe.ca/.

I had the chance to talk in person last October with Sharon Labchuk, the outgoing leader of the GPPEI, and she's rightfully critical of the farm production monoculture on the island. The sheer volume of pesticides and fungicides is incredible. It's as if everyone on the island is a guinea pig in some mad evolutionary experiment. Being a largely closed, isolated ecosystem, I wonder what kind of damage is going on? There's some evidence that PEI is becoming a hotbed of cancer:

Despite repeated assertions from government officials that the statistics don't provide any proof, many Prince Edward Island residents believe that heavy pesticide use on the island's potato farms is causing high rates of cancer and other diseases. With about 7,000 fields spanning 110,000 acres, the small island produces more than a billion kilograms of potatoes every year, making PEI one of the most intensely-farmed areas in Canada.

The tiny island of PEI, which is small enough to fit into Saskatchewan 115 times, supplies nearly 30 percent of Canada's potato market. But there is a heavy price to pay for the tremendous agricultural production. According to PEI Green Party leader Sharon Labchuk, potatoes grown on that magnitude require "enormous amounts" of fungicidal chemicals to ward off blight, a disease that can devastate potato crops. Labchuk says the crops are sprayed about 20 times per year—every four days in blight season—and the three main fungicidals used on the potatoes have been classed as carcinogens by the U.S. government.

Since the 1980s, potato production in PEI has doubled, but pesticide use has soared by 700 percent in the same period.

"Both Liberals and Conservatives have sunk a ton of taxpayers' money into subsidizing the industry, and what we have now is a virtual potato monoculture," says Labchuk. "You grow a monoculture in this industrial system and you're tied to the chemicals."

Labchuk points out that because PEI is densely populated—the most densely-populated province in Canada, in far—the potato fields are interspersed among the homes, hospitals, daycares and schools, which means that people are constantly within range of the sprays.

But experts disagree on whether this chemical exposure has resulted in unusually high cancer rates on the island.

Linda Van Til, Epidemiologist for the PEI Department of Health, says that while PEI cancer rates have spiked here and there, the overall trend tends to be on a par with the rest of Canada. Van Til says one of the few cancers that has been demonstrated to fluctuate with pesticide use is non-Hodgekins lymphoma, but tracking by the Health Department has shown no increase in the prevalence of that cancer.

"It certainly seems that the cancers we do see, the higher trends are related to much more mundane things such as smoking and diet, which is regrettably low in fruits and vegetables," says Van Til.

But Dr. Ron Matsusaki, emergency room physician at Western Hospital in Alberton, says that in all the years he's worked as a doctor both in Canada and the U.S., he hasn't seen cancer rates that come even remotely close to what he's seeing in the West Prince area of PEI. He says he has no doubt that these cancers are caused by "an insane amount" of chemical pesticides. Every second household in Mimnegash, a fishing village in West Prince surrounded by potato fields, has been afflicted with cancer, according to Matsusaki.

Since the 1980s, potato production in PEI has doubled, but pesticide use has soared by 700 percent in the same period.

"Both Liberals and Conservatives have sunk a ton of taxpayers' money into subsidizing the industry, and what we have now is a virtual potato monoculture," says Labchuk. "You grow a monoculture in this industrial system and you're tied to the chemicals."

Labchuk points out that because PEI is densely populated—the most densely-populated province in Canada, in far—the potato fields are interspersed among the homes, hospitals, daycares and schools, which means that people are constantly within range of the sprays.

But experts disagree on whether this chemical exposure has resulted in unusually high cancer rates on the island.

Linda Van Til, Epidemiologist for the PEI Department of Health, says that while PEI cancer rates have spiked here and there, the overall trend tends to be on a par with the rest of Canada. Van Til says one of the few cancers that has been demonstrated to fluctuate with pesticide use is non-Hodgekins lymphoma, but tracking by the Health Department has shown no increase in the prevalence of that cancer.

"It certainly seems that the cancers we do see, the higher trends are related to much more mundane things such as smoking and diet, which is regrettably low in fruits and vegetables," says Van Til.

But Dr. Ron Matsusaki, emergency room physician at Western Hospital in Alberton, says that in all the years he's worked as a doctor both in Canada and the U.S., he hasn't seen cancer rates that come even remotely close to what he's seeing in the West Prince area of PEI. He says he has no doubt that these cancers are caused by "an insane amount" of chemical pesticides. Every second household in Mimnegash, a fishing village in West Prince surrounded by potato fields, has been afflicted with cancer, according to Matsusaki.

These things are always controversial... but is it not warranted to be cautious? Is the potato production monoculture worth it?

Binn is expected to coast to a majority. I wonder if the greens can make the road a bit more bumpy for him?

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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/01/2007 05:32:00 PM