| Watch out, I'm feeling rant-y |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|05:03 pm] |
Ontario MPP France Gélinas has been getting some publicity lately for her private member's bill, Bill 156, The Healthy Decisions for Healthy Eating Act. This seemingly innocuous bit of legislation passed second reading the other day, and is now on its way to the standing committee on social policy, an unusual success for an opposition bill, which would usually be expected to sink without a trace. However, the more I think about this bill, the more it irritates me.
The bill stipulates that large food service providers who make more than $5 million a year (including their smaller franchises) be required to post the calorie counts of all their items on their menus in the same typeface and font size as the price. The legislation is being touted as a way to improve the overall health of Ontarians and reduce obesity in the province. The problem is that the premises it seems to be based upon have been pretty thoroughly exploded for some time. Let's look at them one by one.
( Read more... )
So if Bill 156 will probably have no effect on the health or weight of Ontarians, what's the big deal? Well, apart from the irritation it will cause people when they confuse the price and the calorie count on a menu, I think it sends an ugly message. Eating disorders have been on the rise in recent years. Unlike obesity, they're incredibly bad for your health. (The death rate for anorexia is something like 20%.) A 2001 study found that 27% of teenage girls in Ontario were engaged in some level of disordered food and weight behaviour. Why is it that we as a society feel the need to continually hector each other about how much we eat? You would think that an MPP from a party that tends to be pretty self-righteous about diversity and tolerance would think twice about a bill based on the assumption that bodies that differ from her own are unnatural and unacceptable.
*I'm being quick and dirty with the references here. If you want an introduction to the subject with proper cites, see Chapter 5 of Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin. |
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| When the big cats play |
[Nov. 16th, 2008|12:52 am] |
I see that Warren Kinsella has become involved in the federal Liberal party once again and has thrown his support behind Michael Ignatieff for the leadership. After all the negativity that Warren hurled at the man last time around, some people will surely see this as crass political opportunism on both of their parts. I'm not so sure. I think it's a prime example of the Alpha Human behaviour I was talking about last week.
Right now I'm reading Ignatieff's The Needs of Strangers. It would be kind of awesome to have someone with that much intellectual heft at the helm of the party. I'm not completely sold yet, though. I want to make sure that he's picked up enough political skills to avoid the kind of naive mistakes he was making in the last leadership campaign before I commit my support. |
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| If the whole world could vote in the U.S. election |
[Oct. 25th, 2008|08:29 pm] |
http://www.economist.com/Vote2008/
This is a SLOP of the readers of The Economist, not a real poll, but it's still pretty interesting. The Economist's readership isn't usually known for its warm and fuzzy liberal tendencies.
I can see why Iraq is red. Most readers there are probably dependent on the U.S. defence industry in some way. But what's up with the Macedonians and the Cubans? |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|06:05 pm] |
When I hear back-to-back news stories about David Miller calling for a ban on handguns and Stephen Harper promising to toughen the Youth Criminal Justice Act, it occurs to me that even though the two politicians come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they're really proceding from the same premises. Both of them believe that you can solve the problem of violence by making crime more illegal. |
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| Rethinking Thin |
[Jun. 22nd, 2008|07:38 pm] |
Every once in awhile I read something that takes everything I thought I knew about a topic and completely stands it on its head. I found a book like that this week; it’s called Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata, a science reporter for the New York Times. The thesis of the book is that most of the things we think we know about weight loss and obesity have no real scientific basis.
( Read more... )
Reading Rethinking Thin makes me kind of grateful to be in medieval studies instead of medical research. You never really hear of medievalists defecting to the dark side and founding lucrative snake oil empires based on theories that can’t possibly be true, but it happens all the time in medicine. On the other hand, maybe we’re missing a golden opportunity. Maybe we could have our own line of weight loss products. We could call it the Feudal Revolution Diet and we’d claim that the secret to keeping pounds off is to get ergotism. Exercise tips would be gleaned from martyrologies and penetentials. We could even sell a line of dodgy saints’ relics as supplements. Now there’s an idea... |
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| Bill C-51: a good idea |
[May. 12th, 2008|04:11 pm] |
Brace yourselves, folks: I'm about to praise a piece of Conservative legislation. The End Times are surely near.
There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the media recently about Bill C-51, an act introduced last month to update the Food and Drugs Act. Basically, it requires people who sell "therapeutic products" including herbs, beet juice, magnets and what-have-you to make sure that their advertising has some basis in reality. If you say that your garlic extract can cure cancer and give people a better sex life, you'd better be able to point to a double-blind clinical trial that proves it. As far as I'm concerned, this is an excellent idea that should have been implemented years ago.
( Read more... )
Expect to see more nonsense about "banning herbs" in the news. When I worked at Queen's Park, various alternative health organizations had a lobbying presence comparable to the pharmaceutical companies, and a lot of them are going to be losing business over this legislation. I'll be interested to see what happens to the bill. |
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| Malnourishing children = bad public policy |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|12:23 am] |
Since I wrote the Monica Grenfell post a few of days ago, I've been poking around a corner of the Internet known as the fatosphere. It turns out that in recent months a lot of self-described fat people have been banding together and producing some very smart blogs. The main aim of the movement, apart from providing a support network, is to challenge the common assumption that everyone who is overweight must also be unfit, sloppy and undisciplined.
It turns out to be a rather refreshing community. Folks there talk positively about their bodies, which is something you don't hear that often from people of any size elsewhere on the Internet. In fact, when you lurk somewhere like Shapely Prose for a little while, you start to look around you and realize just how much toxic crap about body image our culture spews at us every day.
You also start to squirm when you realize that you may be contributing to the problem. I mean, we're all surrounded by fat people who work out harder and eat better than we do but aren't turning into thin people. Yet somehow there's this pervasive insidious belief that they must have some kind of moral failing.
My new favourite blog is Junkfood Science by Sandy Szwarc. It demonstrates that a lot of what we think we know about diet and nutrition is either oversimplified to the point of uselessness or seriously garbled. If Queen's Park had passed Bill 8, The Healthy Food for Healthy Schools Act last week instead of today, I would have applauded. Now, I'm not so sure it's useful except as a politcal placebo. In fact, stampeding to force limited diets of "healthy" foods on kids can actually do them serious harm. Swarc reports that a recent study found that British nursery schools were malnourishing toddlers in the mistaken belief that a low-fat, low-calorie diet would be good for them. See also her essay here.
All this is making me do some serious spring head cleaning. More later, perhaps. |
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| Morbid but interesting |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|07:24 pm] |
I am perversely heartened by the the summary of the year's Toronto-area murders published in the Star yesterday. Looking through it, I conclude that if you're not connected to the underworld and you're not dating or related to anyone with violent tendencies, your odds of being killed by another human being are very, very slim in this city. If you want something to be paranoid about, you're probably better off worrying about dying by falling down the stairs.
The other datum I glean from the summary is that the gang- and mob-related murders seem mostly to have been carried out with firearms, while the others are mostly stabbings and strangulations. I think this raises an interesting question about gun control.
Critics of various firearms safety regulations like to point out that gun control is useless because criminals don't acquire and register their guns through legitimate channels anyway. This seems to be true if we're talking about the gangland murders. However, it's interesting to note that the murder weapons in the domestic slayings are mostly something other than firearms. Are the current laws and regulations keeping guns out of the hands of the kinds of murderers who don't belong to larger criminal organizations? If that's the case, then I would say that the current laws are still useful.
On a related tangent, supposing that violent independent criminals are being prevented from buying guns, how much is that affecting the murder rate? Is there a way to quantify whether someone is less likely to die if the same would-be murderer attacks them with a knife rather than a gun? My gut feeling is they're safer without the gun in the equation, but only marginally so in the kind of close indoor environments where domestic violence usually takes place.
My conclusion from all this is that firearms issues should really be seen as two separate problems: how to deal with gang violence and how to deal with the more independent kind of behavior. Public policy solutions to one problem may or may not work for the other one, and vice versa. |
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| Tomorrow I'll be humble, I promise |
[Oct. 11th, 2007|02:23 am] |
We have crushed the Tories.
We have seen them driven before us.
We have taken their horses and goods, and heard the lamentation of their women. |
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| Have you voted yet? |
[Oct. 9th, 2007|11:13 pm] |
All this talk of victory is making me really nervous. It's not over until the polls close.
Get the heck out and vote!
I remember reading somewhere that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had nearly identical public support the night before their respective elections. The difference in election results can be attributed to the fact that Clinton's campaign managed to GOTV, and Gore's didn't. Ponder that for a moment. |
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| My big decision |
[Oct. 9th, 2007|03:46 pm] |
It's E-Day -1. I'm still not sure how I want to vote on the referendum about changing Ontario's legislature to a mixed member proportional system.
( Read more... ) |
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| Meow! |
[Sep. 13th, 2007|05:16 pm] |
As Warren Kinsella points out in his blog today, it's been exactly four years since the day Ernie Eves' campaign called Dalton McGuinty "an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet" during the 2003 election. I was in the media monitoring section of the Liberal war room that day, watching the story spread like a forest fire from one news outlet to another. By the time the evening news rolled in, that one turn of phrase had consumed and obliterated every policy statement made that day. It was bizarre and hilarious, and made us giddy for days.
It makes me wish I was back in the war room right now, exploding my head by trying to watch television, read news websites and listen to a talk radio station all at once. Those were fun times. *Sigh.* Back to the dissertation. |
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| Good luck Dr. Marie |
[Jun. 15th, 2007|04:52 pm] |
This news makes me sad.
Marie Bountrogianni is the nicest of the political bosses I've henchminioned for, and she does a lot of good work, even when the media aren't watching. About five years ago, when I was working a few hours a week in her office, she went out of her way to help a disabled boy who didn't even live in her riding.
( Read more... )
The boy's father wrote a letter to the government, but unfortunately it was about 2000 words long and he spammed by e-mail to every MPP in Ontario (a strategy that usually ensures that every Member will stop reading by page 3 and think you're someone else's constituent). Marie, bless her, pulled the letter out of all the slush in her mailbox, declared "We have to fix this," and sicced us henchminions on the Health Minister. Within days, the program was reconsidering its policy on walkers.
It's moments like that and bosses like Marie Bountrogianni who make henchminioning more rewarding than many jobs with better salaries. I hope she's able to move on to better, if not necessarily bigger, things after the next election. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 2nd, 2007|12:44 pm] |
Is it a good sign or a bad one when provincial cabinet ministers wander through campus and nobody recognizes them? Last night on Bay Street, I ran into Jim Bradley. He'd just left the office. It was 11:30. This is why I no longer have ambitions to be a cabinet minister. |
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| It's about the future. |
[Jun. 24th, 2006|08:16 pm] |
I've managed to stay out of active politics for nearly a year, but I think I'm about to fall off the wagon again. It's all Bob Rae's fault.
Last night, I went to a party where he was the guest of honour. Until then, I'd forgotten how much I like the man in person. He's got that magic combination of geekiness and moral integrity that I do adore in a politician. And he's at where I'm at on so many issues, like Afghanistan, economic policy and rebuilding the Liberal Party. I think I've been converted.
Yeah, I know. The last thing the Party needs is to add the baggage of the Rae government to its own. But c'mon, haven't you always wondered what Bob could have done if he didn't have to govern through a recession and he had enough decent cabinet ministers and a platform that was actually meant to be implemented? (Okay, probably not. But you should.)
The thing I like about Bob Rae is that he knows his policy. When you hear him answer questions, you can tell that he hasn't just memorized the talking points, he's actually read the research on which they were based. When he disagrees with someone, he can explain exactly how and why he arrived at his position.
The other thing I like about Bob Rae is that he has the political skills that only come from years of practice. He's mastered soundbyte haiku. He knows that some questions don't have answers and some answers aren't his to give. He also words his answers in such a way that he never repeats negative allegations about himself. Those moves are harder to learn than they look. It takes most party leaders, even former cabinet ministers, a couple of years of on-the-job training to become adept at them. We're not going to have that kind of time before the next election. A leader who's already broken in would be a huge asset.
I know this is such an insane choice. The Conservatives are probably rubbing their hands at the prospect of exhuming all their old oppo on Bob Rae. But sometimes I think you just have to be Quixotic and hope that the rest of the country comes to see things your way. How could I complain that the public never elects the candidate I like best, if I never give them the opportunity to vote for him? |
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| A Henchminion Easter |
[Apr. 16th, 2006|02:55 pm] |
I like to think of the Easter story as a cautionary parable about bad election campaign management.
( Blasphemy ensues )
Despite the way it's been spun since, the defeat really was a bad one. It took the party three hundred years to get into power after that. Frankly, the chief wonder of this campaign is that it is remembered at all. |
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| In Which a Crime is Solved |
[Mar. 14th, 2006|04:10 pm] |
I'm actually kind of pleased that Bob Rae is likely running for the Liberal leadership. I always felt sort of guilty about liking him, being a partisan Grit and all. I can remember reading The Three Questions and thinking I agree with this part. I agree with this part too. And this part. Why is this guy a Dipper?
Bob Rae is also responsible for important parts of my early political education. ( Read more... )
However, since a good deal of Mr. Rae's premiership is probably going to come back and haunt him, I'd like to clear his name of one small misdemeanor, of which he is innocent and I was an accessory.
Bob Rae never mooned 10,000 protesters from his office window. I know this for a fact.
( The truth is published at last )I remember overhearing two little old ladies sitting behind me on the bus the next morning saying "Shocking, isn't it? To think that political discourse has fallen to this level!" And so, I have always guiltily liked Bob Rae, who is not responsible for quite everything that went wrong while he was Premier.
1. Skippy was our nickname for a page who shall not be named and may very well be a respected doctor or lawyer by this point. |
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| L'esprit d'escalier |
[Mar. 2nd, 2006|10:38 pm] |
So last night after sword practice and a goodly quantity of beer, the conversation turned to religion and politics and the subject of the Danish cartoons came up yet again. I think the cartoons are obnoxious and shouldn't have been published, but I don't think I held up my side of the debate particularly well. It wasn't until this morning that I came up with a good analogy to explain my position.
Supposing we're all sitting around the armoury one night, and I crack a joke about one member's dead wife. Everyone thinks the joke is hilarious, except for that member. When he says "Guys, that's not funny," I say "Shut up, it's a free country." While it's true that I'm acting well within my rights, it still makes me a jerk. And the fact that everyone else thinks the joke is funny is also a bit beside the point.
If the guy whose wife I'm mocking gets really irritated and turns around and socks me, it is true that he's wrong to turn the matter into a fist fight. And if I charge him with assault and run around complaining about how he's trying to trample my freedom of speech, I am still within my legal rights. However, that makes me a pretty sucky schoolyard bully, doesn't it? |
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| Georges Duby on the Guardian Angels |
[Feb. 28th, 2006|02:13 pm] |
Today's reading is George Duby's "The evolution of judicial institutions" from The Chivalrous Society. Interestingly enough, his description of how barons and warlords in tenth and eleventh century Burgundy took control of the courts away from the king kind of explains why the Guardian Angels' attempts to start a Toronto chapter are not going over very well with the mayor and the police chief.
One of the great many ways to define feudalism* is as a system in which public justice is exercised by private individuals. And that's where the Angels are running into problems. While they may have been a grassroots community organization when they were founded in New York, it's not clear that the Toronto chapter is particularly representative of the communities it wants to patrol. The public doesn't seem to have any input into the Angels' training and the Angels don't seem to be accountable to anyone if the public has complaints about them. For some reason, the mayor and the chief of police seem to be attached to the quaint notion that officials with public power should be democratically elected. I can't imagine why.
*...if indeed the term feudalism should be used or defined at all, but that's another academic bunfight for another day. |
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