Magic Statistics

It’s been almost 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but KGB officers in Belarus aren’t over it yet.

Belarus discourages the commemoration of Orthodox Christians killed for their faith by the Soviet Union, Forum 18 News Service has found. Today's KGB secret police have sought to have icons of the New Martyrs, as they are known by the Orthodox Church, removed from Grodno Cathedral. Russian Orthodox Deacon Andrei Kurayev told Forum 18 that "Some comrades from the local KGB asked local clergy why they were inciting the people in such a way." While there was no official order to remove the icons – "it was on the level of a chat" - Kurayev reported that Bishop Artemi (Kishchenko) of Grodno and Volkovysk refused to take them down. "He told the KGB that he couldn't rewrite history."

Of 90,000 Orthodox believed to have been killed for their faith by the Soviet regime, the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) formally canonised 1000 as New Martyrs in August 2000.

And, no, in Belarus, the KGB never been changed its name.  In fact, the agency is proud of its Soviet roots. 

Previous related posts:

• Belarusian pastor fined for organising church holiday
• Belarus: Europe’s most oppressively anti-religious nation

A Canadian biochemistry professor has made a startling discovery: University research work increases global warming.

Hervé Philippe, a Université de Montréal professor of biochemistry, is a committed environmentalist who found that his own research produces 44 tonnes of CO2 per year. The average American citizen produces 20 tonnes.
. . .
Philippe has a well-established international reputation for his work on phylogeny and according to his calculations his computers produce 19 tonnes of CO2 per year, the air conditioning in the laboratory produces 10 tonnes of CO2 per year, and transport from one meeting to another produces 15 tonnes of CO2 per year.

The “committed environmentalist” suggests a few cosmetic changes.

For universities, he recommends having less frequent international conferences, increasing the use of video-conferences, avoiding research on well explored topics, reducing publications and evaluating the amount of CO2 produced by research projects.

Fie on such trivial and timid counsel.  This calls for radical action: Shut down every environmental studies department in the world.

Previous related posts:

• I blame global warming
• Is there anything that doesn’t make global warming worse?
• Cleaner air may be exacerbating global warming

What is happening to politics in this country?  The Liberal Party of Canada has apparently tossed aside the rights and freedoms that gave the party its name, and now the Liberal premier of Newfoundland and Labrador tells poor constituents to be patient: Oil wealth will improve their lot—eventually.

A cascade of oil-based revenues will, sooner or later, fall in all corners of Newfoundland and Labrador, the premier promises.
. . .
Even so, Williams recognizes that many people in the province feel like the oil-fuelled boom is passing them by.

In recent days, news reports have detailed how various people — seniors needing home care, others requiring medical services, such as portable oxygen tanks — have been turned down for public aid, and found no help in the blockbuster budget.

"I know there's instances of hardship, and I'm very, very sensitive to them," Williams said.

"We'll always find an example of some poor person who's hard done by, and it's not getting down to them. But we're trying to spread it out as much as we can at this stage, and hopefully the trickle-down effect will benefit everybody."

Translation: After Danny’s friends and supporters get their share, those ubiquitous poor people might get some leftovers.

"We’ll always find an example of some poor person"?  How callous can you get.  Nineteenth-century robber barons couldn’t have said it better.

Danny should be careful with this trickle-down rhetoric or he may find fewer votes trickling up come the next provincial election.

Previous related post: Danny Williams: Not a have-not, but plays one on the national stage

Ezra Levant yesterday linked to a Seattle Times editorial that looked with sadness at its foolish neighbours to the north.

We do not envy the Canadians. They have entrusted to their government a power Americans never would, and they follow it into foolishness.
. . .
British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person … to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation." This sounds like a libel law for groups, except that libel is a misstatement of fact that damages an individual reputation. In the United States, for a public figure to be libeled, the false statement has to be made maliciously or recklessly.

The Canadian idea of hate speech is less specific and more dangerous. Hate is like obscenity, about which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, "I know it when I see it." The difference is that a ban on obscenity does not touch political discourse, and a ban on hate does.
. . .
Racial harmony in Canada would have been safer had the question never become official.

To understand the full import of this editorial, some background needs to be kept in mind, I think.

The Seattle Times is the newspaper of record in one of the most notoriously left-wing Democrat cities in the United States.  Having lived there for four years in the late 1970s, I can attest that Wikipedia has it right:

Seattle's politics lean famously to the left compared to the U.S. as a whole. In this regard, it sits with a small set of similar U.S. cities (such as Madison, Wisconsin, Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts) where the dominant politics tend to range from center-left to social democratic. Seattle politics are generally dominated by the liberal wing (in the U.S. sense of the word "liberal") of the Democratic Party; in some local elections, Greens (and even, on at least one occasion, a member of the Freedom Socialist Party) have fared better than Republicans.

The journalistic voice of a hotbed of leftist American politics believes that Canada’s human rights codes have given unelected authorities arbitrary power to censor public discourse.  That says a lot.

h/t: Ezra Levant

Previous related posts:

• Unelected “experts” destroying credibility of human rights
• Ezra Levant faces down the “human rights” cops

Not only are Americans far more generous than Canadians, a study released yesterday indicates that, when it comes to philanthropy toward foreigners, they are more generous than anyone else on the planet.  This chart of donations by private individuals and businesses shows that Americans gave an estimated $34.8 billion in 2006, over 21 times more than second-place Britain.

The data come from the Index of Global Philanthropy, published by the Hudson Institute.  The executive summary can be downloaded here and the full report here.  (Both documents pdf.)

h/t: Free Exchange at The Economist

Previous related posts:

• Faith in government suppresses charitable giving
• Why are Americans far more generous than Canadians?
• Americans far more generous than Canadians

Unfortunately, the court was in Sweden, not Canada.

Dahn Pettersson, a politician from a suburb of Malmö, was charged with “agitation against an ethnic group” for submitting a motion to town council that linked heroin smuggling with Kosovar Albanians resident in Sweden.  A district court found him guilty and levied a fine equivalent to 100 days’ pay, but the verdict was overturned by the Court of Appeals.

Get this: Mr Pettersson was acquitted even though his motion erroneously claimed that 95 percent of all heroin in Sweden arrives via Kosovo.

Ultimately, the court choose to release Pettersson, arguing that freedom of expression and the right to criticize current policy is important, especially when it comes to political debate.

Pay attention, Canadian "human rights" commissions: Freedom of expression is especially important in political debates.  What a radical idea!

h/t: Tongue Tied 3

Data released last week by Statistics Canada show that Canada continues to be a country where very few people languish near the bottom of the income scale for long periods of time.  Indeed, these new data show that incidence of low income has decreased even further since the mid-1990s.

Last week's release is based on the Survey of Labour Income and Dynamics (SLID), which is designed to track the income of a very large sample of Canadians over six-year periods, thus enabling comparison of incomes earned by families and unattached individuals over time.  The summary in Statistics Canada's The Daily, however, fails to mention or discuss SLID's time-series aspect and presents only a snapshot of the 2006 results.

The Census release on May 1 showed an 11.1% increase in median family income (pre-tax) between 1980 and 2005. As a result of strong economic growth fostered by gains in employment, a further 2.1% increase was observed between 2005 and 2006, according to new data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. At the same time, government transfers also increased, leading to a similar increase in after-tax family income.

Families had an estimated median income after taxes of $58,300 in 2006, up 2.1% from 2005 in real terms. It was the third consecutive annual increase.
. . .
The incidence of low income in Canada remained relatively stable in 2006. An estimated 3.4 million Canadians (or 10.5%) lived in low income (after-taxes) in 2006.

To find the time-series analyses, one must dig deeper in Statistics Canada's website.  I'll describe that more fully later in this post.  Right now, let's cut to the data.

For purposes of this data release, low income is measured by the low-income cut-off (after taxes and government transfers), or LICO.  (As Statistics Canada has repeatedly affirmed, the LICO is a measure of income inequality, not poverty—an admonition that is frequently and annoyingly ignored by poverty "activists" and opposition politicians.)

The proportion of Canadians who did not fall below the LICO at any time during the years 1993-1998 was 75.5%.  That fell slightly during 1996-2001 to 74.6%, but then jumped to 80.0% during 1999-2004.

All age groups (except 55-64) and both sexes saw increasing percentages with incomes above the LICO throughout the period 1999-2004 compared to 1993-1998.  (For those aged 55-64, the percentage declined from 77.6% to 77.3%.)  Moreover, Canadians at all education levels—from less than high school through university degree—were less likely to fall below the LICO in 1999-2004.

During the same time period, the proportion of Canadians experiencing persistent low income fell by over 30%.  Between 1993 and 1998, 3.6% had incomes below the LICO every year, dropping to 3.4% in 1996-2001, and then to 2.2% in 1999-2004.  Without exception, all age groups, both sexes, and those at all education levels were less likely to experience six years of below-LICO income in 1999-2004 compared to 1993-1998.

These new data bolster an earlier Statistics Canada study (blogged here) demonstrating that Canadians have lower rates of low income than do people in the US, Britain, or Germany.

Statistics Canada last week posted some 40 tables of time-series data showing income trends in Canada back to 1976 but, as I said, they're not easy to find, especially for those unfamiliar with Statistics Canada's labyrinthine website.  As a public service, Magic Statistics has done the digging for you.

We start back at The Daily, where the last line of text reads:

Also available today, the 2006 Income Trends in Canada (13F0022XIE, free) provides 40 tables at the Canada and province level as well as some data at the census metropolitan area level.

That link takes you to a page describing the data product along with a link to another page, styled "Income Trends in Canada 1976 to 2006".  In the left sidebar of that page, click on "data tables" to go to another page where nine sets of data tables are listed and linked.  Click on one of those links to go to yet another page where the corresponding tables can be downloaded.

We’re not out of the woods yet, however: there's another wrinkle. The data tables can only be read with a software product called "Beyond 20/20".  You can download the Beyond 20/20 Browser from Statistics Canada; but I, for one, would find it much easier if the data were loaded into Excel spreadsheets.  Also, Beyond 20/20 is only available in Windoze versions.  What a pain!

Once the tables are opened in Beyond 20/20, they can be exported to Excel.

The data discussed above come from Low Income table 2020807 — "Persistence of low income, by selected characteristics, Canada and provinces".

Sources:

Statistics Canada, 2008.  "Income of Canadians".  The Daily, 5 May.  Statistics Canada catalogue no. 11-001-XIE.
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/080505/d080505a.htm
(accessed 13 May 2008).

Statistics Canada, 2008.  "Income trends in Canada: data tables".  Released 5 May, no catalogue number.
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/13F0022XIE/2006000/nettabletitles-en.htm
(accessed 13 May 2008).

Previous related posts:

• Dion’s anti-poverty commitment based on spurious statistics
• Widening income gap in Canada?

The collect for today, Tuesday in Whitsun-Week, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

God, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit; Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

For the Epistle: Acts 8:14-17
The Gospel: St John 10:1-10