My “No Country for Anyone Award” goes to … the Maldives, where in late May a man named Mohamed Nazim declared during a lecture that he was invoking his freedom of conscience, and leaving the Muslim faith. Nazim

was promptly attacked, taken into custody, and has been threatened with death and beheading, or other punishments for choosing his freedom of conscience.  Maldives media are reporting that it is the first time in many hundreds of years that a Maldivian has publicly renounced Islam, since Sultan King Hassan IX converted to Christianity in 1552 and was deposed. The Maldives constitution mandates that all citizens of Maldives must be Muslims.

Some time later, after undergoing “Islamic counseling” at the hands of the Maldivian government, Nazim publicly renounced his apostasy.

Nazim was brought before Maldivian media to make a statement to the press about his “reversion” to Islam, while the police are still deciding whether or not to bring criminal charges against Mohamed Nazim for choosing his freedom of conscience. A Maldivian lawyer previously told the Maldives press that Mohamed Nazim had to be given such government “Islamic counseling” before capital punishment charges were considered against Mohamed Nazim for “apostasy.”

Just as Winston Smith in 1984 could be made to believe that four fingers are really five, and just as he could be taught to embrace the all-encompassing love of Big Brother, so too was Nazim made to believe that his freedom of conscience is a perversity — one that can be easily cured by the all-encompassing love of God. (H/t P.Z. Myers)

On June 7, Afghanistan will officially be America’s longest war…

This summer, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. In a political era of ideological acrimony, hysteria and hyperbole, Lee’s story of racial equality and human dignity is as important as ever…

A study finds that people respond with empathy when they see others in pain — unless that other is of a different race. Is racism hard-wired into our brains? Perhaps not: Test subjects also responded with empathy when they were unable to determine the hurt person’s race. ”Humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play…”

Despite the fact that we share 98.7 percent of our DNA with the bonobo, we largely overlook this ape as one of our closest relatives. Which is a shame, because the bonobo could point us in the right direction as a species. Bonobos don’t kill each other, they don’t rape their females, and they live idyllic family lives. Oh, and they have gay sex…

Check out this interactive feature at Slate that tests your memory of political events over the past decade. Along the way, it may just show you how easily your memory can be manipulated…

I just love the lead sentence on this story from the Abbotsford Times, titled “Sex-trade worker honoured with plaque”:

More than 30 Lower Mainland drug addicts, prostitutes, friends and family gathered in Abbotsford Tuesday afternoon to honour the memory of dead sex-trade worker Penny Jodway….

…Jodway was known to rule the area with an iron fist. She used a combination of drugs, violence and intimidation to secure the corner for dealing and prostitution, said Barry Shantz, Fraser Valley director of the B.C. and Yukon Association of Drug War Survivors.

No, this isn’t a joke. The BC and Yukon Association of Drug War Survivors really does exist. Note how the article quotes this group, and not the police, on the issue of Abbotsford’s first street walker. (Really? The first one? Ever? What a boring town.)

See you in March, y'all!

CTV and the Globe and Mail are reporting that, once again, Prime Minister Stephen Harper plans to prorogue Parliament.

What started last year as an unusual (and successful) tactic by the Conservatives to forestall the collapse of their month-old government in the wake of their feeble attempt to legislate away the opposition parties has now become routine.

This is quite remarkable. Stephen Harper has decided that any controversy — such as the currently raging Afghan torture scandal — is reason enough to shut down the legislative branch of government. Under King Stephen the First, there is no democratic accountability.

Stephen Harper is hewing pretty close to abrogating his responsibilities as prime minister. And he may have no choice about it.

With his minority caucus, Harper can’t get anything substantial done in Parliament. He can’t use the confidence vote tactic — which forces the opposition to vote with the government or face an election — with anything that even smacks of ideology, because a majority of Canadians oppose him on most issues. (This, of course, is the irony of a minority government.) That’s why his only legislative successes so far have been crime bills — the only wedge issue on which the majority of Canadians falls on the Conservatives’ side of the wedge.

Any issue important enough to warrant a parliamentary battle will also be seen as important enough by at least some of the opposition to fight an election over. So Stephen Harper is stuck, and he has to find a way to hide the fact that he can’t govern. And shutting down the legislative branch of government on the pretext that we can’t have political rancor during the Vancouver Olympics buys him time until the next budget.

It also means that all the bills in the House and Senate will die, and will have to be reintroduced in the spring. That’ll allow Harper to reannounce all those crime-fighting initiatives that are the only things he can get through Parliament.

The question now is: How long can Harper keep it up? How long can he maintain the illusion that he is the prime minister of Canada?

Turns out we have a black hole much closer to our neighborhood than anyone had suspected.

An international team of astronomers has accurately measured the distance from Earth to a black hole for the first time. Without needing to rely on mathematical models the astronomers came up with a distance of 7800 light years, much closer than had been assumed until now.

[T]he astronomers could establish that the black hole of V404 Cygni is 7800 light years from Earth, slightly more than half the distance that was previously assumed.

Fellow researcher James Miller-Jones adds: “We are now trying to apply the same measurement method to several other black holes.”

Just short of eight thousand light years isn’t all that bad. Though in cosmic terms, it really is the neighborhood. Guess we’ll find out soon enough how many of these we have floating around in the back yard.

On Monday the Guardian became the latest major institution to serve Canada its own ass on a platter. “This thuggish petro-state is today the only obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen,” writes George Monbiot.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

Yowza. This is overstating the case, but sadly, only a little. Mr. Harper is not the only world leader in the Let’s-Do-Nothing Club, but his list of allies grows thin. Now that even China and India have committed to reducing carbon emissions (if you call intensity-based targets “reducing carbon emissions,” which Mr. Harper does), Canada is the last country of any global consequence still refusing to play ball. Mr. Harper’s long-term emissions target for 2050 is a big fat question mark.

Until last year, the world could pretend that Mr. Harper was just providing cover for George Bush, but with Barack Obama in the White House, it’s pretty clear that the prime minister is doing this on his own initiative. The world’s last neo-conservative government is setting fire to a few bridges on the way out. And yes, obviously the Alberta oil sands have everything to do with it.

The Canadian public and the media have done their best to ignore this problem. For the most part, this issue was barely on the radar until people like Ban Ki-Moon started dissing Canada in public. The Globe and Mail noticed last Friday, but still buried Moon’s comments in the third paragraph.

That’s still a whole hell of a lot better than the National Post, which — for reasons I can only imagine have to do with prior proprietary relationships — decided that a convicted fraudster with no credentials in science is the proper person to define the newspaper’s take on the whole issue. Here is Conrad Black uttering one falsehood per sentence about climate change:

The basic relevant facts are that carbon emissions are not the principal factor in global warming, and despite dire contrary forecasts and ever-increasing carbon-emissions in the world — especially as the economies of China and India, representing 40% of the world’s population, expand by six to 10 percent each year — the world has not grown a millidegree warmer since the start of this millennium. And its mean temperature rose by only one centigrade degree in the 25 years before that. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide emissions does have a gentle warming effect if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

I love that expression — “a gentle warming effect.” What, exactly, is gentle about coastal flooding and the desertification of southern Europe? Whatever; fortunately, most Canadians are not buying Black’s take on climate change, in much the same way they’re not buying the newspaper he launched a decade ago. About two-thirds of Canadians want Canada to lead global efforts to fight climate change, not lag in them. But for Mr. Harper, it’s all about making excuses for a currently lucrative industry that has no long-term prospects. My bet is the world will have moved on from Alberta oil long before the Alberta oil has been exhausted.

Which is sad, because it’s exactly this economic angle that Mr. Harper is missing. Kind of pathetic for an economist, if you ask me.

Let’s say for a moment that Conrad Black is right, and climate change is a massive lie foisted on the world’s public. (Incidentally, to believe this, you would have to believe in the largest, most improbable conspiracy theory ever concocted, which is that two or three generations of scientists from all corners of the globe came together in a plot to defraud the public by infiltrating all the major peer-reviewed journals on earth and publishing falsehoods, while at the same time suppressing any publication of basic data that would disprove the fraud. But anyway.) Let’s just say climate change isn’t happening. You know what? Signing on to a climate change deal is still a good idea.

Because here’s the reality of our situation. We are running out of fossil fuels. This is a mathematical certainty. The demand for fossil fuels is growing, and the finite supply is shrinking. The analysts can debate all they want whether peak oil will be in ten years, or five years, or whether it happened last year. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that if we want to maintain anything even remotely resembling our modern standard of living, we need to find viable alternatives to carbon-burning fuels.

And right now the only tools we have to initiate any sort of global effort to replace fossil fuels are climate deals like Kyoto and whatever comes out of Copenhagen, if anything. They create an impetus to search for alternative energy sources. And whether or not we put any effort into it won’t change the fact that a few generations from now, we will be using alternative energy sources, because fossil fuels will have run out. The only question is, which countries will lead the effort, and reap the profits when the time comes to switch technologies, and which countries will face a net loss by having to buy those technologies from other countries.

It simply doesn’t make sense for Mr. Harper to protect the Alberta oil sands at the price of Canada’s long-term economic health. But then, what sense have any of Mr. Harper’s policies had, thus far? It’s all been ideologically-driven nonsense, and most Canadians aren’t expecting any different when it comes to the environment.

The one saving grace that Mr. Harper has is that, ultimately, he’s a coward who doesn’t think for himself. (This is why he first declared he wasn’t going to Copenhagen, and then promptly changed his mind when Obama announced he plans to go, and then even had the gall to get his lackeys to claim he “always” planned to go.) This is a saving grace because, now that Harper is isolated on the world stage and looking increasingly like the dinosaur that he is, he’s likely to bend to public opinion. When even your conservative allies like Sarkozy and Berlusconi won’t back you up, you better have big cojones to tell the world go screw itself. And Mr. Harper’s cojones just aren’t that big.

So he is going to have to come up with something. My bet is we will see yet another turnaround from Mr. Harper, some sort of sudden “announcement” of a change in Canadian policy either before or after Copenhagen. It will likely be a snow job, but if it actually involves something concrete, like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade or even tougher emissions targets, Mr. Harper might inadvertently do some long-term good for Canada’s economy, and prevent it from becoming the petro-state that it’s morphing into. With any luck, Mr. Harper might show some of those “leadership qualities” everybody’s trying to convince me he actually has.

In 2004, researchers studied 49 people who believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible or partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, to see what their reaction would  be when confronted by evidence, straight from the Bush administration, that this wasn’t true. What the researchers found is that — surprise, surprise — people believe what they want to believe:

Of 49 people included in the study who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn’t true.

The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence — even when it came from President Bush himself.

The voters weren’t dupes of an elaborate misinformation campaign, the researchers concluded; rather, they were actively engaged in reasoning that the belief they already held was true.

“Crossword puzzles are a threat to the criminal justice system,” says the Guardian:

Determined to determine whether reading or doing a puzzle can lead to a detriment in face processing, Lewis did an experiment. In his words: “The tasks tested within the experiment presented here were: reading a passage from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code; solving a sudoku puzzle; solving a literal cross- word; solving a cryptic crossword”.

Sixty volunteers took part. They looked at some faces, “then engaged in their puzzle or read the passage for five minutes”. Lewis then began to test their memory of the faces. “Between each test item, however, participants continued with their puzzle or read the text for 30 seconds.”

Sudoku and literal crosswords seemed not to affect how well the volunteers identified the faces. But, according to Lewis, when the volunteers did cryptic crossword puzzles, they became less reliable at recognising faces.