Magic Statistics

On 16 April, American hunter Jim Martell shot an odd-looking bear near the southern tip of Banks Island, Northwest Territories.  DNA tests have now determined that it was a polar bear-grizzly hybrid, apparently the first ever found in the wild.

Martell, a sport hunter from the United States, was on a guided hunt when he shot the bear on April 16 near Nelson Head on southern Banks Island.

Since it looked like a polar bear but had strange colouration, the hide was turned over to the Environment and Natural Resources department for testing.

The probability of a polar bear and a grizzly bear mating is considered extremely low for two reasons.  Polar bears mate on the sea ice while grizzly bears mate on the land, and relationships between the two species are generally more adversarial.

The tests had serious implications for hunter Martell because he purchased a tag that allowed him to shoot a polar bear.  If he shot a grizzly instead, he'd have been liable for a $1000 fine or a year in jail, not to mention loss of the bear's hide and wasting the $50,000 he shelled out for his guided hunting trip.  Now the hide will be returned to him.

Mr Martell is quite the avid hunter: He's already back in NWT on a grizzly hunt.

via Clayton Cramer.

Some informed conjecture on how a polar bear and a grizzly bear came to mate, from this morning’s Whitehorse CBC Radio broadcast (not available online):

Ian Sterling has been studying polar bears on the Beaufort Sea for almost 30 years. He says it’s the first time he’s ever heard of the two species mating but has an idea of how the parents might have met.

“The polar bear in question was quite likely a younger female, may have even been the first time that she’d mated and hadn’t really got things all figured out.”

And Sterling points out that such a coupling would not have been a one night stand.

“And then he’ll stay with her and keep interacting until she lets him mate and mount and then for 2 or 3 days or 4 days they’ll mate many, many times and both polar bears and grizzly bears do this.”

Perhaps, for the sake of science, it’s a good thing the two bears met during mating season otherwise they may not have been consumed by passion but rather they may have consumed each other.

That parting shot passes for a joke on local CBC Radio.

That's the history of "Africa's four decades of independence in a nutshell", says David Blair, Africa correspondent for the London Telegraph.  Julius Nyerere's 24 years as President of Tanzania is a case in point.

Assuming power after Tanzania gained independence from Britain in 1961, Nyerere promptly implemented socialist economic policies with predictably appalling results.  Against all evidence of economic history—and advice from people who know that history—he collectivised his country's farms.  Virtually total economic destruction followed in due course.  Before independence, Tanzania was Africa's largest exporter of food; by 1976, Tanzania was the largest food importer.  (Now where have we heard that again recently?)

Undaunted, Nyerere proceeded to nationalise everything in sight, and Tanzania accordingly became an economic basket case.

By the late 1970s, Tanzania was a collapsing, chaotic shell, where the shops stocked almost nothing and even toothpaste was virtually unobtainable.

Dar-es-Salaam has never fully recovered from that era. The potholed, shabby streets look as if they are stuck in a 1970s time-warp.

Nyerere, to his great credit, recognised that he had been responsible for a catastrophe. He stepped down voluntarily in 1985, after a mere 24 years in power, and publicly admitted his failure. Thereafter, he devoted his life to good works. His successors opened up Tanzania's economy and welcomed western aid. Today, Tanzania is normally cited as one of Africa's more successful countries.

Another scene from socialism's sorry record of consistent, ruinous failure.  Yet some people never learn.

Three days ago Egyptian blogger and political activist Alaa Abdel Fatah was arrested with ten others who were peacefully demonstrating in support of judicial independence and the release of other demonstrators who had been arrested two weeks previously.  Alaa and the others were singled out by the police, beaten, and taken into custody.  They have now been officially detained for fifteen days "pending investigation", which status can be renewed indefinitely at the discretion of the state.

He and the men were sent to the infamous Torah Prison and the girls to the Qanatir prison for the duration. This makes them hardly safe, because stuff that goes on in Egyptian prisons on the hands of the jailors: beatings, sexual assaults, torture of all kinds.

Alaa was one of the first to start a blog in Egypt and one of the very few who posts dissident political opinions.  He and his wife Manal run an Egyptian blog aggregator from their site, Manal and Alaa's bit bucket.  There is good reason to think he was targeted because he is a well-known and outspoken political activist:

Government agents handpicked people to arrest from amongst the protesters. They have been wanting to get Alaa for a long time now, precisely because he is high profile, and because he helps organizes the protests and spread the information through the blog aggregator he runs (www.manalaa.net). With Alaa gone, Aggregator could shut down without his maintenance and other bloggers could get too scared to be active and find no way to organize or reach one other. It's of vital importance that he gets released ASAP.

A Free Alaa! blog has already been launched.  Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey is providing frequent updates.  Another good source of information is Global Voices, which has several stories from Egypt over the past few days posted here.

An online petition can be signed here.

In an item posted on Monday, Sandmonkey gave this contact information for the Egyptian Embassy:

Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt
454 Laurier Ave. East
Ottawa, ON K1N 6R3

Tel (613) 234-4931
Fax (613) 234-9347
www.egyptembassy.ca
egyptemb@sympatico.ca

I checked the website and it’s a dud, containing only this text: "This is the placeholder for egyptembassy.ca".

I hope that Canadians who support freedom of speech and freedom of non-violent political dissent will communicate their views to the Egyptian Embassy in Ottawa.  Free Alaa!

Quebec's per capita income ranks 54th in North America—only four Canadian provinces and two US states are lower.  The provincial government complains that it doesn’t get enough aid hand-outs charity fiscal support from Ottawa.  Yet Quebec's government spends more, taxes more, and—because the former consistently exceeds the latter—owes more than other provinces.  If those problems were tackled, the provincial economy would become more productive and generate a lot more tax revenue.  But no, we can't do that.  It's not the "Quebec model".

Rather than curtail expenses, Quebec demands more money from other parts of Canada.

Quebec, for example, has made social choices to keep university fees the lowest in North America, give families $7-a-day child-care spaces, provide a provincial drug plan, subsidize many industries, keep hydro rates well below North American market costs, and have a large public service.

No other equalization-receiving province can afford these kinds of choices, but they are part of the "Quebec model" and, therefore, are apparently difficult to change. The "Quebec model" contributes to the gap between spending and taxes that the Quebec political class believes is due to the "fiscal imbalance" rather than the province's own choices.

Alain Dubuc has written an "iconoclastic" book probing Quebec's economic malaise, pointing out what Quebec has to do if it wants to stop living beyond its means.

Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson thinks that much of what Mr Dubuc says applies as well to the rest of Canada.

[R]eading his description of Quebec's hang-ups, fear of success, useless anti-Americanism, ossified identity debates and refusal to focus on productivity instructs any reader how Canadian Quebec really is. These habits infect the entire Canadian political culture too.

Quebec's pathetic appeals to alleged "fiscal imbalance" have been enabled—indeed, cultivated—by decades of Liberal governance at the federal level.  Liberal prime ministers (who mostly originated from which province?) institutionalised the system of inter-regional transfer payments, euphemistically known as "equalisation" payments, that forms the basis for the "fiscal imbalance" fantasy.  The Liberal Party of Canada shares the blame for Quebec's economic debility.

For access to Mr Simpson's full column, click here.

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and the Royal College of General Practitioners have spoken out strongly against proposed legislation allowing euthanasia in Great Britain.  A survey of RCP members showed that almost three-fourths oppose changing the present law even for the terminally ill.

Proponents of the bill believe that public opinion is behind them, but it is facing mounting opposition in the House of Lords.

The Bill, proposed by human rights lawyer Lord Joffe, would enable adults who are suffering “unbearably” as a result of a terminal illness and are of sound mind to die at their own request.

In practice this would mean that a doctor has to hand them a lethal drug. Doctors are also worried about pressures that the option of assisted dying would put on patients who might feel a burden to relatives.
. . .
[T]he Bill, based on euthansia [sic] laws in Oregon, is seen as the thin end of the wedge by a formidable array of opponents, who will take the unusual step of forcing it to a vote in the Lords on Friday.

Speakers to oppose it include the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and Lord Carey of Clifton, his predecessor. Rather than let the Bill proceed to later stages without a vote, as is usual for a Second Reading, they are hoping for a decisive vote against.

Doctors’ leaders feared that their previous failure to take a position on euthanasia was being interpreted as tacit approval for mercy killing.

A letter signed by 24 professors and consultants in palliative care published in yesterday's Telegraph called the bill "fatally flawed".