Last year British member of parliament George Galloway was labeled a supporter of Hamas by Jason Kenney, Canada’s immigration minister. That resulted in Galloway being denied entry into the country for a speaking tour.

Here’s an interview from “The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos” from May 2009.

Galloway was recently cleared as a security threat by Canadian courts and on a speaking engagement in Toronto yesterday challenged Kenney to “go five rounds with me.” He also threatened to sue Kenney and the Canadian government for damages due to the harm to his reputation and threats to his security caused by the government actions.

Galloway claims he will use the money he wins in his suit to mount a massive anti-war campaign. He says he will be back in November on a 10 city Canadian tour.

The CBC TV report of this event contains footage from a Youtube video clearly showing Galloway handing money to Hamas leaders.

On our way back from our annual September getaway to Muskoka we got off Hwy 400 just before coming to the Holland Marsh and took a detour along Canal Road. We eventually ended up in the small town of Sharon just outside of Newmarket.

Sharon is the site of what is now known as Sharon Temple, a uniquely quirky structure built in the early 1800s by a small religious sect called the Children of Peace. This group of former Quakers was led by a man called David Willson whose vision of society was “founded on the values of peace, equality and social justice.”

The Children of Peace also had an unusually fervent love of music along with an appreciation of artistic expression and symbolism. You can see this reflected in the construction of Sharon Temple. For more information you can consult the official Sharon Temple website.

I first visited Sharon shortly after graduating from WLU (then, Waterloo Lutheran University). During my first few years at WLU I sang in the university choir (under director Walter Kemp) and during one of those years the choir premiered a piece of contemporary music written by John Beckwith called “Sharon Fragments”. That was way back in 1966 or 1967 (not sure which).

In 1981 John Beckwith was also involved in establishing the Music at Sharon festival, a summer concert series featuring different classical music themes. After a lapse of 15 years or so, Music at Sharon was revived in 2007 under the leadership of Larry Beckwith and Rick Phillips.

Governments around the world spent millions if not billions of dollars fighting the great H1N1 (swine flu) “pandemic” of 2009 – a pandemic that never really materialized.

As of April 2010, when the virus had essentially run its course, the total number of Canadians who had died from the H1N1 “pandemic” was 428. Compare that to between 5000 and 8000 Canadians who die every year from “normal” influenza.

Worldwide just slightly more than 12,300 people died from H1N1 by last November. Compare that to more than 25,000,000 deaths from HIV/Aids since 1980.

Fuss not justified?

It seems the fuss over H1N1 was hardly justified. However, it is important to keep in mind that the big concern was that H1N1 had some characteristics that made it seem likely that it might mutate into a deadly “1918-style” pandemic. At least that’s what the experts at the WHO and elsewhere thought.

The great 1918 influenza outbreak at the end of WWI killed millions of people around the world. And world health officials – lacking a definitive set of reasons for why the 1918 pandemic even happened – constantly work against the background of such a possibility happening again.

Should I get vaccinated?

One thing is certain. It was not the Tamiflu vaccine that kept H1N1 in check. A significant majority of Canadians did not even get the vaccine. According to one study of Ontario H1N1 statistics, “The impact of immunization appears to have been tiny – reducing the outbreak by less than one per cent. Immunization prevented fewer than 20,000 cases of influenza illness and no more than three deaths. This is not nothing but it is a very small return for an outlay of more than $250 million.” – from The Real Lessons of H1N1

In any event there were questions right from the beginning whether Tamiflu would adequately protect people from H1N1. Given the rate at which flu viruses mutate it is never completely predictable how effective a particular vaccine is going to be.

H1N1 has also made health officials question their standard flu vaccination strategy. It has generally been assumed that the sick, elderly and very young are especially vulnerable to influenza, and should therefore be the ones who especially need the vaccine. But for whatever reason H1N1 seems to have infected somewhat younger people than “normal” influenza. We’ve all heard accounts of the otherwise “perfectly healthy” young people struck down by H1N1.

However, this tendency may have also been overstated. As Dr. Richard Schabas points out the median age of death in Canada from H1N1 was actually 53. And most younger people killed from the virus had other health issues that made them vulnerable.

Realistic conclusions

Early on I developed a pretty robust scepticism about the whole H1N1 pandemic thing. My general feeling about quasi-political pronouncements emanating from agencies like the UN, WHO, or the Ontario Chief Medical Officer is that they are usually motivated by empire-building and chest thumping.

That does not even begin to touch on the obvious sinister commercial implications of mandating the production and distribution of millions of dollars worth of vaccines to be distributed to the population at large.

I must say I’ve changed my mind fairly dramatically about the entire matter. It is almost embarassing to admit that I’ve come to realize these things are much more complicated than I was aware. The truth is, I had barely thought about the “science” of the matter – how viruses spread, how vaccines are developed and how they work, etc., etc. On these matters my opinion, and the opinions of the vast majority of us are virtually worthless.

My eyes were opened just a tiny bit by reading the book called Splendid Solution – Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio. As it happens, long before developing the polio vaccine Salk worked for the US military to find a vaccine to prevent influenza and thereby avert a repeat of the 1918 pandemic. He was largely succesful where many others had failed.

Salk then went on to develop a vaccine against the polio virus. He didn’t do it alone – there were hundreds of researches working on all aspects of the problem.

What struck me about the process was the amazing complexity of it all. There’s a popular belief that many significant scientific discoveries are the result of an accident – you know, the mold growing in the dish that led to penicillin sort of thing. But what the movies about these things gloss over is the years of research that lead to these breakthrus.

I still believe there are many corrupt officials motivated by the wrong things. And I still think the general public is mostly in the dark about the real story behind most issues.

This is partly because the media sensationalize and present only a superficial view of issues. It is partly because people are uninformed or lazy. But it is mostly because the world is just a very complicated place.

Some Resources:
The real lessons of H1N1

As swine flu pandemic ends, Canada must rethink flu-fighting strategy: Expert

Dedicated to being the best at what they do

I just read a glowing tribute to the “Olympic spirit” displayed by all the happy young Olympic athletes. The focus of the tribute was on how we can apply some of the dedication shown by Olympians to our personal, business and professional lives.

Now I don’t want to come down on anybody, but I think a little bit of reality about this Olympic dedication thing would be a good thing. Surely the big question one must ask about dedicating yourself lock stock and barrel to snowboarding or skiing or (horrors!) mastering the luge is “Why am I doing this?”

Glorifying the Winners

Just saying “Because I want to be the best at what I do” is not a very good answer.

First, the odds of actually being the best – or even in the top ten or twenty – is a long shot at best. So isn’t this a rather bad investment of your time, energy and (probably someone else’s) money if the likelihood of your success is so low?

Yes, sure we glorify the winners once every four years. We see winners parading to the podium one after the other. But isn’t that rather an unrealistic picture given that there are probably at least 10 losers for every winner?

That isn’t even to mention the thousands who never make it to the games. What about them? What about the guy who continually comes up 16th or 17th in the short program or the half pipe? Is he or she “living the dream”? Or are they just the fodder that keeps the machine humming along?

Being the Best We Can Be

Second, what’s so great about “being the best” anyway. Is it an ego trip these people are on? Are we encouraging them to be and feel superior to everyone else? Is it the monetary payoff that justifies it? Or is it just the “Olympic spirit” (whatever that is) or “being the very best you can be” that makes us all value this process so much?

If “being the very best I can be” is such a cherished goal, why are not the rest of us doing it? If we say we value this sort of thing but don’t live it in our own lives, doesn’t that make us hypocrites?

Probably, but there is a much more practical answer to why most of don’t care about “being the very best I can be”. It is impractical, hard work, and ultimately rather pointless. There is simply no payoff. Most of us are happy to make our moderate living, live our unspectacular lives, and play a round of golf with our buddies on the weekend.

I’ve been involved in competitive sports pretty much all my life, and I know how addictive the idea of “winning” can be. But when all is said and done, in any competition there is one winner and a whole bunch of losers.

Is Tiger Happy?

If you go into a golf tournament, for example, to win, chances are you are going to be disappointed. Only Tiger Woods can consistently beat the odds and that doesn’t seem to have made him a very happy person.

I am not just talking about being realistic about your chances of winning. I am talking about being realistic about how much of your “spirit” you should invest in trying to win.

The Olympic Spirit

This is really what the classic Olympic spirit is about – and sportsmanship in general. Playing the game because you enjoy it, and keeping it in perspective with the rest of your life.

Today’s Olympians who are paid to devote their entire existence to training and striving to win are not exemplifying this spirit at all.

When you get right down to it most of them are naive young people being used for the benefit of commercial and political interests. They are being pushed and cajoled by parents and coaches into performing to feed their egos and the public’s gluttonous (and often profitable) appetite for entertainment.

For the past few months I’ve been conducting an email campaign where I give away “Green Tips for Homeowners” to real estate agents. I make this offer to hundreds of thousands of agents and have hundreds who take me up on the offer.

But occasionally (twice to be exact) a guy (so far it’s always been a guy) will say something like “Stick your green tips up your a**. I don’t want anything to do with your green Al Gore-loving liberal bs.”

Usually I just ignore this kind of message and take them off the list. But a few days ago when I got this kind of message I decided to send a response to see what would happen.

I innocently thought that if I explained that these “green” tips had nothing to do with “global warming”, but were basically about saving money, this would suddenly make the guy at the other end of the message more receptive.

It didn’t work. He thought I sounded like a “liberal”.

I resisted the temptation to explain that, well, yes I am a kind of liberal, but I’m also a kind of conservative, and that I think people (mostly American people) throw these terms around without really knowing what they mean.

As far as the man-in-the-street is concerned the term “liberal” has been defined in recent years in a negative way by people like Rush Limbaugh. It is hard to understand exactly what guys like this don’t like about “liberals”, but whatever it is, they sure have strong feelings about it. The man in the street who listens approvingly to guys like Limbaugh know even less why they disapprove of “liberals”, but dammit, they just do.

The superficial answer is that “liberals” are in favour of things like big government, universal health care, handouts to the poor, wasteful social programs and high taxes. Perhaps more to the point, “conservatives” think “liberals” are slippery when it comes to things like right and wrong, and individual responsibility.

Now this is getting us closer to the meat of the matter. What “conservatives” want are solid answers, black and white distinctions between things like right and wrong, good and bad, the individual and society. Liberals, on the other hand want to be free to be noncommital about values.

In other words, “conservatives” like things black and white. “Liberals” only see shades of grey.

This can (and does) get confusing because “conservatism” sounds like a principled stance, but on its own really has no content, no inherent core principles other than conserving what already exists. A “conservative” wants to conserve good old fashioned values simply because they are good and old fashioned, not because they are inherently good or bad.

This is really a kind of pragmatism. For a “conservative”, values are worth conserving in any given society because they have become part of the fabric of that society. They have worked in the past, so there is no good reason why they shouldn’t work in the future.

There are obvious problems with this “pragmatic” rationale for conservatism. Clearly, different societies have different “good old fashioned values”. Chinese traditional values are different from American traditional values, and both are different from the traditional values of Iran. Could it be that simply conserving these in any given society is automatically a good thing?

Of course most “conservatives” would deny that their position is inherently unprincipled. But this is where the “principled conservative” as opposed to the “pragmatic” one starts sounding vaguely like a “liberal”.

Because there is no question that liberalism does have principles – or at least one. Its most cherished principle is “freedom” or “liberty” – the origin of the word “liberal”. Practising “liberals” are just hesitant to cash this general principle out in terms of simplistic things like traditional values, or some particular society’s view of right and wrong.

What they want is the freedom to choose – the freedom, as it were, to be free of traditional views, or the views of the elite, or of a bunch of priests or lawyers or bureaucrats, or of loud-talking guys like Rush Limbaugh.

Which brings us back to slippery – the thing that “conservatives” most dislike about “liberals”. “Conservatives” want to say “This is right and that’s wrong” while “liberals” want to say “Hold on. It may be right in your eyes, but there are other things we have to take into consideration.”

Does this make me sound like a “liberal”? I’m afraid it does.

Talk about stereotypes! There’s this classic image of a guy and a girl sitting across from each other at a cafe. It’s been lampooned in any number of commercials and sitcoms. The girl is yapping non-stop about who knows what and the guy sits there nodding, “Uh huh, Uh huh, Uh huh,” while the bubble over his head is filled with images of cars or golf clubs or whatever…

Well, just about every time I go to my favourite coffee shop I see this scenario in the flesh. Tonight I could here this rapid-fire one-way stream of jibber jabber coming from two tables over.

How anyone can keep talking that fast for so long about nothing is completely baffling to me.

Damn! I see WordPress version 2.8.5 is now available. Don’t these people ever stop making changes.

Every six or nine months I decide to change the focus of my blogging efforts. For the last three years or so I’ve blogged about various aspects of marketing. But the truth is I find it all kind of boring.

The only reason anyone really cares about marketing is out of necessity – the necessity to run a successful business, to make a splash in the world – ultimately to make a living. There’s really not much more to it than that. Try as we might to make marketing ideas sound exciting and insightful, there is very little that is inspiring about the quest to get people to buy more of your products.

So instead I am going to write about things I care about: politics, history, society, technology, ethics, music, philosophy, and other things I’m sure I’ve left out. That should be enought to keep me busy.