The increasingly poorly named Campaign 2000 project released its annual report on child poverty today. 1 in 6 Canadian children are currently living in poverty, which is a poor showing among other industrialized nations.

Excellent quote I nabbed at sylloge: The laws of nature are nature's evolving habits

the idea of a fixed and eternal law of nature is a carry-over from an archaic tradition of thought which is outmoded or superseded by the idea of the evolutionary universe. I'm suggesting that maybe the laws of nature themselves evolve; in fact, that maybe they're like habits, that there's a kind of memory in nature. I emphasise this evolutionary and habitual aspect of things as opposed to the idea that everything is governed by eternal, unchanging laws.

The cost of war: CBC News: Deadline Iraq - Uncensored Stories of the War. I don't care how you felt about the war, this is the one of the ways war needs to be covered, in all its horror and human cost. [In case it's not obvious, graphic imagery is present if you follow the link.]

The winner of the cutest-thing-I've-seen-this-week award is this video of a three year old xylophone prodigy.

Extraordinary (and long) hammering of David Frum's Dead Right.

The funny thing about this book is: it isn’t nearly as bad I just made it sound. I don’t think Frum is obsessed with beards or anything, actually. He sometimes seems like a pretty sharp guy. The middle chapters – full of history and policy detail, so forth – are quite cogent. Just the main chapters have problems. Frum has written a book about the need for a reflective, conservative philosophy. And: that’s the one thing he hasn’t got. He just has no clue why he is a conservative, or why being one might be a good idea – or even what ‘conservatism’ ought to mean. Whenever he starts trying to talk about that stuff, his mind just goes blank and he fantasizes about shaving beards and the Donner party.

Based on the vitriol of some of the reviews, I was expecting to really dislike The Matrix: Revolutions. But, I didn't; it's definitely arguable that the sequels shouldn't have been made (or, at least, these sequels shouldn't have been made), but Revolutions was way better than Reloaded. My recommendation: go, with low expectations.