Rotundus.com

One relatively failproof way to discover whether or not someone is Canadian, is to ask whether or not they watch CPAC. Generally speaking, foreigners do and Canadians don't. Canadian politics simply isn't the most exciting thing to watch.

Some compiled a list of 10 political battles, many including video of the incidents. If you want to watch politicians pulling each others hair and throwing chairs, this seems the place to go to.

We've come a long way, baby. And we've ended up back where we started before the rise of Christianity. In the Church's infancy abortion and infanticide were commonplace events, requiring little deliberation. ... Indeed most cultures considered it a duty to place "defective" newborns on the dunghills at the edge of town, where birds of prey could pick them apart. Most families interpreted the word "defective" broadly, to include female children as well as those with disabilities or disfigurement. Plato and Aristotle commended the practice, and the Roman historian Tacitus said it was "sinister and revolting" for Jews to forbid infanticide.

Yet these practices created a crisis for pagans. Abortion and infanticide led to low fertility rates, high maternal mortality, a shortage of marriageable women... That makes for an unstable social infrastructure. Various emperors tried to legislate fertility, but the law isn't much of an aphrodisiac. Abortion kills a couple's love every bit as much as it kills their baby. And besides, people had grown accustomed to an unmoored, leisurely life, drifting from pleasure to pleasure, without the encumberance of children.

(Excerpted from Touchstone Jan/Feb 2008, pp. 25/26)

Remind anyone of today?

• How to say that you've been beaten? The Airbus A380 is "too quiet" (from Boeing's VP for Marketing)
• A new pushback surcharge? The CRJ7 plane, with 69 passengers and seven crew members on board, had just flown from Guilin in the south of China, to Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. The plane landed safely but then died before it could taxi to the arrivals terminal. ... The staff could not push the airplane on its own, so the passengers were asked to pitch in.(Fox News)
• Surprise, surprise: another book on why people are leaving the church suggests shallowness as the problem
• Complementarian men earn more money on average than egalitarians. $8500 per year more according to the study, whereas complementarian wives average $1500 less income per year than their egalitarian counterparts. Still for a complementarian couple, on average that's a net gain of $6000 per year

There is some initial evidence that [the “How’s My Driving?” stickers that we often see affixed to the back bumpers of trucks] are “associated with fleet accident reductions ranging from 20 percent to 53 percent.” The idea is that truck drivers who know that they might be reported for driving dangerously are less likely to violate the rules of the road.

(In the Freakonomics blog)

The post discusses a proposal to extend these stickers to all vehicles. Personally I don't think it'd work. You could phone the cops to report a crazy driver now, couldn't you?

This seems more like the "can I speak to your boss?" approach - you don't necessarily need to be convicted of a crime to be fired.