As many of you know, one of the most striking differences between Canada and the United States is in the strength of religious feelings. Despite cheerful whistling past the graveyard by the usual suspects, religion in Canada is on life support. The commonly quoted proportion of Canadians who attend church weekly stays within a few points of 20% according to surveys, but there is hard evidence, provided by on the spot head-counting, that such surveys over-report actual physical presence at church by up to 100%:

Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves repeated their Ohio study in Oxford Country in southern Ontario, Canada. Most polls show that 20% of the adult population say that they go to church weekly. Again, half were lying, as only about 10% actually attend church weekly. [source]

However, fifty years ago, the situation was very different. In the early 1960s, church attendance in Canada was not only as high or higher than in the United States, it was steadily increasing.

On 4th February, 1946, the Supreme Court of the United States sentenced George W. Bush to death.

Well, not Bush himself, of course. The person under trial was a Japanese general commanding troops in the Philippines, Tomoyuki Yamashita.

I do not approve of the death penalty, and I wish Bush as long a life as nature and medical science cares to give him, if only to give him more opportunity for repentance and reparation. But the Yamashita precedent makes it clear that under accepted law and treaties signed over a century ago, Bush is liable to a capital sentence for his actions.

Canada has become the first jurisdiction in the world to take steps towards ending the use of bisphenol A, widely found in baby bottles and can linings, which can mimic estrogen and has been accused of causing genetic damage. Present measures will formally ban the use of plastic baby bottles containing the chemical by next year. In response, retailers have already taken most of the offending products off the market voluntarily.

The industry association representing BPA manufacturers, the Arlington, Va.-based American Chemistry Council, issued a statement contending the Canadian government acted without justification. It said consumer product bans "are not supported by science and are inconsistent with Health Canada's assessment" that found infants are not exposed to bisphenol A at harmful levels.

Although Mr. Clement agreed...."We believe that the current safety margin needs to be higher. We have concluded that it is better to be safe than sorry," Mr. Clement told a news conference yesterday in Ottawa, announcing the decision as "precautionary action."

There's been a good deal of debate over the China/Tibet situation here recently. Much of it has been heated, with discreditable contributions from both the "f*ck China" and the "America is always wrong" ideological bedlams.

For myself, I have always found it odd that anyone claiming a progressive position could defend any action of an unrepresentative dictatorship that has invaded and occupied a neighboring country. The extent and nature of our response should be discussed, of course: would boycotts be productive? if so, of what kind? protests? to what extent and of what nature? But simple approval of China's actions in Tibet seems quite beyond the pale for anyone to the left of Genghis Khan.

In case anyone still doubts this, I've put together below a list of one major logical error in the "pro-China" case, and five questions that have the same effect on pro-Peking elements that garlic has on a vampire. The same five questions, softly and tactfully advanced, can usually at least discomfit even a rabid Chinese nationalist, though as we see in our own part of the world, nationalism has a powerfully solvent activity on logic and reason.

The tag "troll diary" has been retired, for good reason. Why would you want to dig up garbage anyway? But like all good ideas, the banning of "troll" has created its own problems.

What do you do with a real, steaming pile of bs, the kind of thing that calls Obama a racist or HRC a bitch, for instance? Diaries have to have at least one tag. I've been tagging some of these "fantasy," but that is only a stopgap solution, since "fantasy" is as searchable as "troll."

So, to the admins on the site: can we have a tag that is by design unsearchable? One that will fill the tag slot, but not appear in any index, so that the garbage is not recyclable? Maybe "rubbish"? or "unspeakable"?

This is very short, but a story that just went up on Talking Points Memo deserves our full attention (and thanks to that site for pursuing the matter in depth). It seems that when bashing Obama, Senator Clinton was.... attacking him for what she herself had done first.

...the first hint wasn't about stuff the Canadians had heard from the Obama camp. It was about reassurances the Canadians got from the Clinton campaign. According to a reporter who heard the original conversation, Brodie said "someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Go to Josh Marshall's place and read it. (There's a link to Canadian newspaper sources there as well.) What a sick, sad joke Senator Clinton is becoming.

I've been a bit harsh sometimes with the people that try to link autism with heavy metal exposure (my younger son is high-functioning autistic or Asperger's). It's tempting, but the numbers simply don't pan out -- countries that removed mercury-based preservatives from their vaccines, for instance, didn't see a reduction in autism rates. The timeline is wrong as well -- heavy metals have been an environmental hazard for many decades, in some cases centuries (remember mercury wood preservative? white lead in paint?).

However, even if it isn't heavy metals or other pollutants, something seems to be driving a sharp rise in autism rates. Of course, we have to remember that the syndrome was poorly recognized until a few decades ago, and might have been ignored or diagnosed differently. But still....

The ideal "trigger" for autism would be something that was not common, say, thirty or forty years ago, but has spread rapidly all over the developed world since then. One obvious candidate, of course, is television, and a new study has just come out in a refereed journal suggesting TV exposure might be to blame for this and a number of other unhealthy trends, such as the steadily dropping age of female puberty.

A lot of people seem to be fond of the idea of Al Gore running for President again. However, Gore himself seems to feel that his work on the environment, specifically global warming, is more important than a more diffuse and more difficult Presidential mandate would be. But there's a way to square that circle....

During the last election, Conservative leader Stephen Harper promised to hold another vote on the legality of same-sex marriage in Canada. This in spite of the fact that mere parlimentary action would not be enough to make gay marriage illegal, since the courts had consistenly held that it was demanded by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As anyone who follows video games even casually knows, the latest "hot item" to hit the market is Gears of War for the XBox 360. It's a shooter, loser-hero got-gun shoot-aliens impossible-odds save-world, so hardly original there. What caught my eye when looking at the official advertising trailer was not the theme or the story, which is thin in places, but the overall mood, and how gamers seem to be reacting to that mood....

I used to have to deal with a kid with some behavioral problems. One of them was that he couldn't lose board games like chess and keep his cool. If it looked like he was going to lose, he'd just flip the board over or "accidentally" knock some of the pieces off. In his mind, that meant he hadn't lost, even though he hadn't won either....

I have a feeling we might be looking at Election 2006 here.

One of the depressing things about reading history is finding the lessons we didn't learn. Many people have pointed out the lunacy of relying on torture for anything but causing terror, and some have noted that this has been known for a long time. Like dull students, we need many repetitions before we get something into our collective heads.

The passage below is Rossel Hope Robbins' translation of Question 51 of the Cautio Criminalis, found in Robbins' Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. It was written in Latin by Friedrich von Spee, a German Jesuit who wrote it to bear witness to what he had seen as a confessor in witchcraft trials in the late 16th and early 17th century. (Persons with slow computers or connections should note that the text is quite long.)

I really, really don't like how contemporary some of it sounds. Note in particular paragraphs 15 (!), 17 (Gitmo SOP), 21, 22-23 ("severe" interrogations not considered torture), 25, 30-31 (replace "woman" with "Muslim"), 35 (renditions), 46 (replace "witchcraft" with "terrorism").

From the Republican standpoint, Gitmo, with its suicidal detainees that are impossible to try and impractical to let go, is a pure win-win situation.

(Remember we're talking Republican here, not human.)

Why? Well, if we work the scenario a bit, no outcome harms them, and many possible outcomes are to their benefit.

There has been a quarrel over softwood lumber exports going on for years between Canada and the United States. Canada has taken its case to NAFTA and won repeatedly. The US has dealt with this in a very simple way -- it has ignored the rulings.  At the present time, the US has collected over five billion dollars in tariffs that NAFTA has ruled are illegal.

So, what is the latest US proposal to deal with this situation?

There's been a lot of discussion whether Bush wants to become a dictator, whether he is already a dictator... and so on. Most of this has focused around his outrageous disrespect for the Constitution, various laws passed by Congress, and the doctrine of the separation of powers. All valid comments, in my opinion. But there are other aspects of Bush's policy that lead straight to dictatorship, along a road that has been travelled before....

There has been some speculation that the ports deal with a UAR-controlled company is the price the UAR is exacting for cooperation in an attack on Iran. While this is possible, I think there is another possibility to keep in mind. It might be just the reverse -- an excuse to withdraw from Iraq, rather than to advance into Iran.

Although the election was a squeaker -- a minority government short more than 30 seats of majority -- the election of Stephen Harper as the Prime Minister of Canada had an ominous potential. Many people thought he might improve his dismal image (about 40% of Canadians would see the Conservatives in a better light if he disappeared) by suppressing the wingnut section of his party and concentrating on popular measures such as tax cuts and cleaning up the corruption left by the preceding Liberal government. Then, after a year or two of moral grandstanding, he could trigger another election and get a majority.

Whoops. Looks like his greed and shortsightedness, plus the invincible wingnut tendency to get back for any and all slights, have put a massive hole in that strategy.

There's something very odd about the latest revelations about spying on American citizens. Two things, as a matter of fact. First, Dubya has played a simple up-yours defence, saying that he broke the law because, well, he could and what are you going to do about it? Second, there seem to be no substantial gains from the program -- no huge terrorist cells uncovered, no nuclear or chemical or biological weapons found, not much of anything as a matter of fact.

This could mean that the idea all along was purely political spying, and the reason we aren't being told what was found is that we can't be told. But surely they knew that sooner or later someone would blow the cover on this program. Why isn't there a better cover story and justification than W's middle finger?

But this has happened before....