Sunday morning dribs and drabs

- Media giant Torstar has dropped any pretension of political neutrality in one fell swoop. (On a side note, if my MP David McGuinty enters the race for Liberal leader, I hope he does well. I wrote a letter to about six MPs a while back and he's the only one who got back to me. He seems like a hard-working, stand-up guy.)

- Speaking of media, good article here about how there are just too many damn conspiracy theories out there posing as real journalism these days. Could the emergence of blogs be part of the reason?

- Interesting post at Andrew Coyne's site from guest blogger Andrew Potter titled "Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to do Ph Ds". The crappy pay is one reason I never did one myself, in addition to the fact that I am an Angry White Male (TM) who, even if I did make it past the hiring committee, would just be banging my head against the wall the whole time anyways because I'm a (gasp) conservative.

- LA Muslim psychologist Wafa Sultan has shown a lot of courage in speaking out against Islamic extremists. We need more people like Sultan to build bridges. David Warren applauds her here.

- A few days ago, I wrote how I think that the talk about China is a lot of hype. Here's another reason why that society has some serious internal issues which are going to pose a major challenge going forward in the world economy.

- Finally, an excellent reminder why governance is so key in the fight against Third World poverty.