Graham Templeton

Originally printed in The Peak June 23, 2008 (Volume 129, Issue 8,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

The last stand for Canadian free speech

McLean’s magazine is under attack from pitiful religious fanatics for an article warning of Islam’s rapidly increasing influence in Eastern Canada. This week could see it acquitted of all charges. But, let’s go back a bit.

It was in 2005 that the Canadian government officially stopped supporting free expression as a virtue, and allied itself with the international forces of political and religious censorship. 2005 was the year that we deported a detestable little toad named Ernst Zündel, a German national and rabidly anti-Semitic holocaust denier. Though he lived in Canada for forty years, Zündel’s views kept him from ever gaining Canadian citizenship. Since he wasn’t a citizen, it was possible to deport him to Germany under the guise of being a national security risk – “Oh no! Not ideas!” – and he was there convicted of “Incitement to Holocaust Denial,” which is apparently a crime, there.
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Ground Zero mosque: A terrible, stupid idea
By Graham Templeton

Last year, Israeli bombs fell on a UN school, a so-called “safe haven” set up to allow students to experience an existence somewhat distanced from a national childhood characterized largely by post-traumatic stress. Dozens were killed, and hundreds wounded, mostly between the ages of 10 and 15. Israel claims that Hamas militants were hidden in the school’s gymnasium, though no evidence for this claim has so far been found. Today, an Israeli Jewish group called The Hebrew Alliance has decided to erect a Jewish temple and Israeli cultural center just meters from the site of the former academy.

As it turns out, only the final sentence of the preceding paragraph is fictional. Israel did blow up a UN-run school, did murder dozens of Palestinian children, and has yet to produce any evidence for its claim that the school was a legitimate military target. To their everlasting shame, they have yet to admit their error. Still, they have at least not been so callous, so cold-blooded, so brain-paralyzingly stupid, as to build an Israeli cultural center within eyesight of the place where Israeli bombs tore a community apart.
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So, here are a few of the spoof articles I’ve written for The Peak’s various annual spoof issues. They’re not available anywhere else online. A grahamtempleton.com exclusive – my goodness!
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Originally printed in The Peak August 2, 2010 (Volume 136, Issue 13,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

Our childish approach to sex crimes
By Graham Templeton

In every way, pedophiles are an odd case. There’s the inherent “oddness,” if you want to be forgiving, of their predilections, but it goes well beyond that. No other crime has such a strong connection (somewhat in the stats, but more importantly in the conventional wisdom) between committing the act and having been a prior victim of it. It’s led to an unusual stratification of opinion, people tending to either think of pedophiles as the devil incarnate, or as mentally ill people, more to be pitied than punished. The latter is given little heed in politics — no politician is going to risk being called “soft on pedophilia.” Slavish, totally unchallenged adherence to the former, however, is starting to get out of control.
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Originally printed in The Peak June 1, 2009 (Volume 132, Issue 6,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

The life and work of Arthur Erickson
By Graham Templeton

There is a famous saying that there are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art to walk around, and architecture is art to walk through. For many of us, the buildings of SFU are not simply places to walk through, but places to live, both figuratively and literally. With the recent death of SFU’s most famous architect, Arthur Erickson, we would do well to consider just how much our daily experience is shaped by walking through, and living in, his art. Though Erickson has designed buildings ranging from museums to laboratories to subway stations, it is SFU which launched his career, and which gave him his name.
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Originally printed in The Peak July 26, 2010 (Volume 136, Issue 12,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

HIV treatment related to lowered infection rates
By Graham Templeton

A new study lead by Julio Montaner, director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, has shown a strong correlation between increasing use of anti-retroviral drugs in a population and a drop in new infections within that population. These findings represent a major boon for those advocating the use of HIV treatments as a means to prevent the spread of the virus.

The treatment in question is the now-ubiquitous Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART), an umbrella term referring to the many “cocktails” of anti-retroviral drugs used to control the progression of HIV infection. The study analyzed a decade of statistical data from B.C., concluding that “for every 100 additional individuals on HAART, the number of new HIV cases decreased by [three per cent].” Put more dramatically, the researchers found that the 547 per cent increase in HAART use over the period of 1996 to 2009 was accompanied by a 52 per cent drop in new infections per year.
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Originally printed in The Peak March 8, 2010 (Volume 134, Issue 8,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

What SFPIRG does
By Graham Templeton

Last week, The Peak published no fewer than four articles on the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group, and the most common piece of feedback was, to quote one email: “I still don’t know what SFPIRG does.”

I can sympathize; in preparation for writing this article I scoured their website, read the dozens of leaflets posted outside their office, perused their library, and spent upwards of an hour talking to some of their employees, and I still can’t say that I’m entirely certain about everything that they do.

The best description they seem to be able to come up with is that they are a “resource centre dedicated to environmental and social change,” which contains about as much useful, concrete information as the self-descriptions that come out of the Church of Scientology. So, let’s start at the beginning.
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Originally printed in The Peak July 19, 2010 (Volume 136, Issue 11,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

Nerves explain large, slow animals
By Graham Templeton

New research into the relationship between body size and the nervous system could provide insight in fields as diverse as kinesiology and paleontology. SFU researcher Max Donelan and PhD student Heather More were interested in how the nervous system would adapt to work around the fact that, for instance, an elephant’s nerve impulse must travel hundreds of times further than a shrew’s. Their research has come to a somewhat unintuitive conclusion: for the most part, it doesn’t.

The maximum nerve conduction speed in a shrew was clocked at 42 metres per second, while that of an elephant was just 70 metres per second — an increase in speed which cannot even begin to compensate for the huge difference in path length. “The basic idea is that for a large animal to have the same response time as a small one, their nerves would have to be really, really big,” explained More.
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Originally printed in The Peak February 16, 2009 (Volume 131, Issue 7,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

Let’s mature the torture debate
Graham Templeton

In 2002, an 11-year-old boy was kidnapped, and buried alive. His kidnapper was found and arrested, but the boy’s location was unknown; as he slowly suffocated, the kidnapper refused to cooperate. In response, Wolfgang Daschner, the local deputy police chief, threatened the man with torture. Daschner got his answer, and police rushed to the scene, only to find that they had been just barely too late; the boy had asphyxiated and died. Amazingly, the controversy surrounding this case was not what to do with the killer (“Burning!” “No, flaying!”) but rather, over the subsequent firing of the courageous deputy chief. Some, it seems, believe that his threat of torture makes Daschner the real monster, in this story. These people are wrong.
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Originally printed in The Peak June 8, 2009 (Volume 132, Issue 6,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.

Vegitarianism is logically flawed
Graham Templeton

Salad is murder.

Yes, you read that correctly. Leafy, no-good-without-animal-derived-oil-dressings salad, the torchbearer for the veggie movement, is cruel and inhumane. What, you think that just because lettuce doesn’t have big, watery sad-eyes that it doesn’t feel?

What separates a plant form an animal, qualitatively? Plants have immune systems, after a fashion, and they have the ability to detect and repair physical damage. We can see plants stretch towards nice things, like water and sun, and we can see them recoil from harm. We can watch the chemical signals run distress calls to various structures of the plant’s body, not unlike human sensory neurons; in every meaningful sense, plants experience pain, and they experience alarm. Plants are blind, deaf, and mute; they have no voice, but can they not still scream? Plants are alive, with everything that that entails.
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