August 31, 2010
The Guild, Season 4 Episode 7
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Commercial hypocrisy, oilsands edition
Ezra Levant isn’t amused by some US businesses trying to make political statements by slagging Alberta’s oilsands while being less than clean themselves:
Walgreens is the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.
It’s also corrupt.
For years, they secretly altered their customers’ prescriptions, without their doctor’s knowledge, in a giant insurance scam across 42 states. They targeted Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans. So they were stealing from taxpayers and the poor at the same time. That kind of big thinking is why Walgreens is number one.
Walgreens replaced inexpensive drugs with drugs that were up to four times more costly. Only when an honest pharmacist finally blew the whistle on them were they stopped — and fined a whopping $35 million.
Are you ready to take moral lessons from Walgreens? Because they’ve just announced that they’re switching their trucks to fuel that doesn’t come from Canada’s oilsands — as an ethical statement.
Taking ethical guidance from Walgreens is sort of like taking abstinence lessons from Hugh Hefner.
I’d call for a boycott of Walgreens, but they don’t have any stores in Canada (and, despite their name, they are no relation to Walmart).
But Walgreens isn’t the only moral hypocrite to come out against Canada. So did The Gap, which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy.
Do yourself a favour: Don’t buy their clothes.
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Do we live in a “basement” universe?
Many years back, one of the mailing lists I regularly read had a long and interesting discussion about the possibilities of creating new universes. Not in a science-fictional sense, but based on the theories then current and using the technologies which were already under development at the time. They were referred to as “basement universes”, “pocket universes” and so on. It was fascinating, although my weak math abilities forced me to skip over the parts of the discussion with all the numbers and symbols.
Elizabeth sent me a link to John Gribbin’s “Are we living in a designer universe?”, which took me back to those fascinating discussions:
The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored — the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.
As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.
However, to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC — and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way.
The inevitable result of that crazy marijuana legalization
Just as drug warriors have been predicting for years, the Netherlands government is paying the price for their irresponsible and dangerous legalization of drugs: they’re having to close prisons for lack of criminals to fill them with:
The Dutch government is getting ready to close eight prisons because they don’t have enough criminals to fill them. Officials attribute the shortage of prisoners to a declining crime rate.
Just for fun, let’s compare the Netherlands to California. With a population of 16.6 million, the Dutch prison population is about 12,000. With its population of 36.7 million, California should have a bit more than double the Dutch prison population. California’s actual prison population is 171,000.
So, whose drug policies are keeping the streets safer?
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