The libertarian devotion to individual freedom that led the Harper Government to kill Statistic Canada's mandatory long form census questionnaire apparently did not extend to the Chief Statistician of Canada's letter of resignation. Munir A. Sheikh posted a note about his resignation on the agency's website late Wednesday night. The Harper Libertarians redacted it Thursday morning, replacing it with an uninformative generic message. Here, for the record, thanks to Kady O'Malley, is the full text of the Chief Statistician's censored message to Canadians: July 21, 2010 OTTAWA -- There has been considerable discussion in the media regarding the 2011 Census of Population. There...

23 July, 2010

Frank MacDonald chats with friends among the capacity crowd that packed the Inverness County Centre for the Arts Wednesday night for a tribute to the Inverness County author and poet. The River Hill Players performed several of MacDonald's songs and plays, and read from his poems, newspaper columns, and the novel A Forest for Calum, widely touted as a Canadian classic....

22 July, 2010

Docking fee: $150 if you're from around here; $250 if you're not. So the summer residents who return year after year — buying goods in our stores, attending our concerts, paying property taxes for services they don't use, spreading the word about Cape Breton to folks back home — let's stick them for an extra 67%. Wouldn't want them to think we're neighbourly, or appreciative of their commitment to Cape Breton, now would we? Mean-spirited. Dumb....

22 July, 2010

The only voice I've heard in support of the Harper government's census vandalism is that of the libertarian Fraser Institute, which believes data of the kind produced by the mandatory long form should be available only to those who can afford to pay to gather it. Coincidentally, German artist Fabian Brunsing has produced a whimsical video that hints at the dystopic world we might achieve if the Fraserites get their way (or Harper gets a majority): Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan...

20 July, 2010

The blogosphere is agog at a Washington Post series that uncovers the astonishing, bloated, secret, and likely ineffective national security apparatus that has grown up in the United States following 9/11. Two crack WaPo reporters, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, spent two years tracking down the story, an increasingly rare example of what the dead-tree media can do when it taps its traditional strengths. Here's the opening sentence: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it...

20 July, 2010

As a child of eight in 1926, George Thomas Of Sheffield, England, thought nothing of walking six miles to his favorite fishing hole. Today, his eight-year-old great-grandson Edward is forbidden to wander more than 300 yards from home. The London Daily Mail mapped the diminishing scope of childhood roaming through four generations. Grandfather Jack, who turned eight in 1950, could roam through a one-mile radius. Mother Vicky, who turned eight in 1979, could walk unaccompanied half a mile to the local swimming pool. Jack's experience mirrors mine, as a 1953 eight-year-old in Chappaqua, NY, with a roaming scope of about one mile...

19 July, 2010

In his latest Ted talk, population guru Hans Rosling says improving child survival rates is the counterintuitive path to population control: Previous Rosling post here. View more of Rosling's Gapminder graphs here (click on "browse example graphs," at lower left)....

19 July, 2010

The deniers have some explaining to do: The Weather Underground reports that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Climatic Data Center rates last month as the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, while  NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calls it the third warmest (behind June 1998 and June 2009). Both NOAA and NASA rated the year-to-date period, January - June, as the warmest such period on record. Moneyquote: A withering heat wave of unprecedented intensity brought the hottest temperatures in recorded history to six nations in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, in June 2010....

18 July, 2010

A burrow of puffins surveys Sydney Bight from Hertford Island off Cape Dauphin in Cape Breton Friday afternoon. From late May through early August, Hertford and nearby Ciboux — the Bird Islands — host vast flocks of razor-billed auks, black guillemots, Atlantic puffins, and black-legged kittiwakes, seabirds that spend the rest of their lives on the open ocean. The province designated the islands a protected wildlife management area last year. Regulations bar the the public from landing, but Bird Island Boat Tours offers close up views from twice-daily, two-and-a-half hour boat tours. (Joshua Barss Donham photo)...

17 July, 2010
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