Canada's fight against ebola: Side by side with, ummm... North Korea.

You may have noticed that in the past week, Canada's currently sitting Government Of The Base, By The Base, For The Base, has banned visas from citizens of countries that have ebola outbreaks.

At a guess, it's probably calculated to play well with The Base. Especially in the drear-long, ummm, year-long run-up to what HarperCo is doing its level worst to turn into a tawdry burlesque of an election. I digress. We were talking here about ebola, not elections. Weren't we?

So in only the latest of what's becoming a pretty impressive pile of really badly misinformed — or maybe just plain pandering — sorta-science-y decisions, they've taken a policy cue from, I guess, North Korea. Which, along with those other global intelleckshul heavy-hitters, Gabon, Haiti and Mauritius, has banned travellers from the State of Ebola.

The sole other developed nation that's done it is Australia. Whose prime minister and ours, you will recall, held a like minded mutual butt sniffing and tail wagging session ummm, exceedingly cordial official state visit, back in June.

So we can probably take it as a given that Canada's rigged-on-the-fly visa policy on travelers from ebola-stricken nations was instituted for bad reasons. Given that, it also holds that if we were to look at, say, any intellectually-sound medical evidence, we can call the ban boneheaded for good reasons.

It falls under the aegis of what an editor of one of this country's large financial dailies is pleased to call "junk science". Which in his case, is just about any science with which he personally disagrees for inchoate ideological reasons. And in our case, is just about any policy purporting to appear to be evidence-based, from those clever hyperpartisan children running amok in the prime minister's office. And all of their uncritical mouthpieces.

You could look that up, but you don't have to, because I did it for you.

Sigh. In the hands of the prime minister's office, Canada's science-related policy (using the term ever more loosely as time goes one...) lately looks like a coyote blues standard: if it weren't for bad science, we wouldn't have no science at all. . .

The Dangers of Slacking Off

Have you read Zoom's latest posting? She says Ottawa bloggers are "remarkably uninspired lately" (including herself for the past two days) and has handed out assignments. For us, she says:

I had lunch with one of the Elgin Street Irregulars today and I had a brilliant idea for a series of posts for them. I don’t want to give it all away, but it would start with an official ESI policy statement on chocha shaving.

Let's make one thing clear. I did not have lunch with Zoom today (and I have an alibi witness if I need one.)

More importantly, now we have to call an Emergency meeting to decide if we should have a policy statement on bare chochas; then if we decide we should, we'll have to come up with the policy statement. But it won't end there. If we're going to take a stand on that topic, people will expect us to take a stand on other important topics. For instance, who do we endorse for President between Paris Hilton and Britney Spears?

I hope this is a wakeup call to you ESIs who have been taking it easy. When we don't metablog, we leave a vacuum that is filled by the less qualified.