A moratorium has been placed on tests done on B.C. youth sex offenders measuring their penis arousal in response to sexual stimuli after the province’s top child advocate launched an immediate investigation Wednesday.

The device in question is called a “penile plethysmograph” — or PPG. In a lab setting, it is attached to male genitals so technicians can measure changes in “penile tumescence” — essentially erections that reflect the state of arousal in subjects shown photographs of adults, children and even babies in varying states of undress while at the same time being read a story that describes coercive or forced sexual activity.

So, until it came to light, the government was showing provocative images and reading pornographic stories to teenage boys to find out if they got erections during the process? Would anyone be surprised to find that teenage boys found this whole exercise sexually arousing? Teenage boys are hard-wired to find all sorts of things sexually arousing!

The point of the test is to reportedly predict whether offenders have gained control of their deviant arousal patterns through treatment or if they have not learned how to suppress deviance and will be a strong risk for re-offending.

Again, we’re talking about teenage boys . . . I’d be more suspicious if they found that one of them was managing not to react to such stimulus!

Okay, yes, I’m unfairly stereotyping, at least to some degree. But this sort of “test” or “experiment” would be flagrantly illegal if it were being done by anyone other than a government-funded health organization, wouldn’t it?

FP Comment’s 12th annual Junk Science Week comes to a triumphant close with today’s 2nd annual Rubber Duck Awards to recognize the scientists, NGOs, activists, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who each year advance the principles of junk science. Junk Science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, when risk is exaggerated or discounted, when science is adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda. The Rubber Duckies are named in honour of Rick Smith, president of Environmental Defence Canada and co-author of a remarkable piece of junk science literature, the 2009 Slow Death by Rubber Duck. In the book, Mr. Smith perpetrated a science scam over the Bisphenol A and established himself as Canada’s leading scaremonger and distorter of science. Let this year’s awards begin!

I have become a convert on the Cap And Trade thing. I am all in; pedal to the metal; go for broke; shoot the moon; a true fracking believer now.

This C&T shit has more revenue generating potential than prohibition ever did. You’ll generally be dealing with a better class of people who aren’t as inclined to settle their differences with machine guns, which is a big plus. Another big advantage over bootlegging is there’s no actual product involved, so all the usual logistics and end point sales issues involved with smuggling vanish.

It is truly a beautiful beautiful thing; even better than selling lots on the moon or mars, because the government doesn’t force people to buy real estate on the moon and mars.

If Al Capone were alive today, he’d be a carbon trader.

Air pollution cuts a deadly but invisible swath through Canada. We know this because the Canadian Medical Association says there were 21,000 deaths from exposure to air-borne pollutants in 2008. Of these, 2,682 Canadians were instantly struck down by the acute effects of pollution. By 2031, 710,000 people will have been slain by this unseen killer.

The evidence on this epic death toll is chillingly precise. According to the Ontario Medical Association, exactly 348 people died from air pollution in Waterloo Region in 2008. In Hamilton, 445 lives were cut short. And Manitoulin Island tragically lost 14 residents due to pollutants that year.

In Toronto, the Big Smoke of Canada, the figures are appropriately larger. Calculations by Toronto Public Health claim air pollution kills 1,700 people annually and sends 6,000 to the hospital. Ten percent of all non-trauma deaths in Toronto are directly attributed to air pollution.

Did you know that? I certainly didn’t. Oh, and wait . . . neither of us knew it because it’s junk scientific bullshit:

Consider what happens when you take Toronto’s computer model and use it to determine the death toll in previous eras, when the air was far more polluted than today. For example, average sulfur dioxide levels in downtown Toronto were more than 100 parts per billion in the mid-1960s. It’s now less than 10 ppb. No surprise then, that the death toll was much greater in the bad old days. Across the 1960s, half of all non-trauma deaths were the direct result of air pollution, according to Toronto’s model. And in February 1965, more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!

In other words, air pollution killed more people inside the computer model than actually died of all causes in the real world. How’s that for deadly?

I can confidently assure any modern day pollution-panicked worrier that things were much, much worse in the 1960s and 70s: the air was much more difficult to breathe in downtown Toronto, the water was disgustingly polluted, and (we were assured) things could only get worse in our little slice of environmental hell. The air is far less polluted now than at any time in my life, the lakes are largely recovered from the worst environmental damage we inflicted on them.

It’s been a year and a month since the McGuinty government introduced legislation banning the use of pesticides everywhere except golf courses and farms. As a result weeds, primarily dandelions, have become the dominant ground cover for lawns, parks, school yards and sports fields across the province.

It took a while for the full impact of this ban to become apparent. Last year, many lawns seemed to retain vestigial protection against weeds due to previous pesticide treatments. Now, however, the weeds are here to stay. Forever. Residential streetscapes have switched from green to yellow. To white and fluffy. And back to yellow again.

It’s important to remember this effort was entirely political. There’s no reliable scientific evidence that regulated pesticides, when used correctly, pose any threat to human health. Ignoring the work of the federal government’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency, McGuinty blithely declared a sweeping ban was necessary for “our childrens’ health.” No other jurisdiction in North America went so far in forbidding chemical weed control.

Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.

‘It was only a matter of time before these people got hold of the material that they needed to make these bombs,’ said former UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, ‘The world is a much more dangerous place with the advent of these Weapons of Mass Dilution.’

‘A homeopathic attack could bring entire cities to a standstill,’ said BBC Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, ‘Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the ‘walking suggestible’.’

The severity of the situation has already resulted in the New Age terror threat level being raised from ‘lilac’ to the more worrisome ‘purple’ aura. Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane.

H/T to Megan McArdle.

In the conventional wisdom, conspiracy theorists are stubble-faced old coots missing every third tooth, who live in backwoods shacks and claim the Pope (who is really Hitler’s love child) is in league with the Freemasons and the World Economic Forum to enslave us all through the cashless society.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, live in low-energy townhouses in upscale neighbourhoods, drink fair-trade coffee from 100% post-consumer recyclable cups, drive hybrid cars and eat only organic food grown within 100 kilometres of their homes. They are trendy, tony, highly educated and socially conscious with small carbon footprints. So, surely, they can’t be conspiracy theorists.

But they are.

In his new book, for instance, Mr. McKibben spins a tale about a vast web of shadowy payoffs to for-hire scientists, and intense pressure placed on politicians and editors by powerful lobbyists. He, like many environmentalists, sees himself and his colleagues as the little guys battling an enormous, unseen disinformation machine funded by Big Oil and Big Coal that is keeping the people from hearing the truth about the coming climate catastrophe.

They fancy themselves the underdogs when in fact they are the overdogs.

Lorne Gunter, “Green paranoia on parade”, National Post, 2010-04-14

The Government of Ontario recently signed a $7 billion no-bid contract with two Korean companies to supply wind and solar power to the province. Officials claim the backroom deal will boost “green” industry and job creation. But it’s hard to fathom how the additional employment can possibly be beneficial when each new manufacturing job will cost taxpayers a whopping $303,472. Nor do dramatic increases in electricity rates constitute much of a bargain.

Having failed on his pledge to shutter all coal-fired plants in the province by 2007, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty evidently has sought a grand green gesture that would appease the global warming alarmists. Executives of Samsung C&T Corp., in concert with the Korean Electric Power Corporation, were understandably eager to cooperate.

The agreement commits the province to buy wind and solar energy from the two companies at artificially high rates. It also extends to Samsung and Korean Power preferential access to the transmission network at the expense of independent wind power producers. As if either provision won’t adequately punish Ontarians, McGuinty also has pledged to override local zoning laws in locating new wind farms and transmission corridors.

Can anyone tell me how The Economist got its title? I’m guessing it was probably founded in the early 18th century by some crazed charlatan called, perhaps, Zachariah Economist, who, because of the unfortunate coincidence of his surname managed to persuade thousands of gullible fools to part with their shirts on one of the South Sea Bubble companies. The one whose prospectus read “A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

One thing I know for sure: The Economist’s name can have no relationship whatsoever with the “dismal science” of economics because if it did then never in a million years could it have run an editorial (and feature) as lame, wrong-headed, intellectually dishonest and positively dangerous as the one it produced this week on the subject of Climate Change.

When I started reading The Economist, back in the early 1980s, I was very impressed by the quality of writing and the rather eclectic things they covered every week. I took up a subscription and it was something I never dumped in the garbage (or, later, the recycling bin), as there was always an interested party willing to take it off my hands.

I have to assume either an ownership change or very heavy turnover at the top of the editorial chain happened in the late 1990s, as the “tone” of the coverage changed significantly. The editorials and the choice of articles switched away from a free market emphasis to become much more like a British version of Time or Newsweek. The long-standing defence of free markets dwindled down to the occasional desultory mention of free trade, as they became more pro-state and pro-managed trade. I gave up my subscription a few years after that, as I found I was reading less and less of every issue. Where once I’d read the majority of the articles, at the end, I was just reading the odd editorial, an occasional feature, and the arts and sciences pages at the back.

From what James Delingpole writes, even the science pages have “turned”:

So, let me get this right: as even the Economist admits, scientists don’t really have a clue what the future holds regarding global warming. But that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t DO something. Anything is better than nothing.

Let’s transpose that level of lame-brainery to the world of business, shall we? The real, decisions-have-consequences world in which, I imagine, most of The Economist’s readers operate.

So, we currently have a proposed scheme by Global PLC to spend around $45 trillion (that’s the International Energy Agency’s best estimate) combatting a problem which may or may not exist. The potential returns on this investment? Virtually nil. As the Spanish “Green Jobs” disaster has demonstrated, for every Green Job created by government intervention, another 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. It will also shave between 1 and 5 per cent off global GDP, create massive new layers of business-stifling taxation and regulation, and cause energy costs to rise to stratospheric new levels. Nice.

This combines the pro-state preferences of the current editorial group with the “consensus” science of the current science correspondant. I’m glad I gave up my subscription when I did . . .

Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market.

My cynical prediction is that this vitally important story will gain little traction in the wider media, especially not with organisations like the BBC. Why? Because the activist body in question has a lovely, cuddly panda as its motif, and a reputation — brainwashed into children from an early age — for truly caring about the state of our planet. What’s more, this latest campaign by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) is very easy to spin as something unimpeachably noble and right. After all, what kind of fascistic, Gaia-hating sicko would you have to be NOT to applaud a delightful heartwarming scheme to buy up whole swathes of the beauteous, diversity-rich, Na’avi-style, Truffula-tree dotted Amazon rainforest to preserve it for all time from the depredations of evil loggers, cattleranchers and other such profiteering scum?