Is milkweed really poisonous?

You probably know (if you're North American at least) that monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed plants, the idea being that when the caterpillars hatch, they feed on the milkweed, which is poisonous for most animals. Monarchs, though, are resistent to the milkweed's toxins, and so can safely ingest it, and in the process become poisonous and bad-tasting themselves. Birds and other predators know this, so the story goes, and so avoid attacking and eating them.

This is well known, as is the ancillary story that viceroy butterflies developed the evolutionary trick of mimicking the monarch, even though their caterpillars do not feed on milkweed (although it turns out, this story is actually not quite as simple as most people think).

But, from my own anecdotal observations, it seems that a whole host of other insects also feed on milkweed - beetles, ants, bees, wasps, you name it. The most common one I see is the milkweed beetle, which is also red to warn off predators. (In fact, I rarely actually see monarchs on them!) But many other insects, moths and birds like hummingbirds do eat milkweed, although perhaps not as exclusively as monarchs.

Red milkweed beetle

So, how poisonous can milkweed really be? Have all these other insect also developed a resistance to milkweed's toxins? Have we been mislead all these years?

Well, yes, milkweed is indeed poisonous. It contains a toxic substance called cardenolide which, if ingested in large enough quantities - and there's the key - can cause cardiac arrest in humans, livestock and other animals. But is also tastes really bad, so instances of cattle poisoning, etc, are very very rare. Livestock will not eat milkweed unless they are very desperate. Similarly, pets will find your garden milkweed very disagreeable to eat, and so will typically stop before any harn can occur.

Several different species of insects are commonly found on milkweed plants, including: large and small milkweed bugs; swamp, red and blue milkweed beetles; milkweed aphids; and the showy milkweed tussick moth caterpillar. Like the monarch, these insects have developed a resistance to milkweed toxins, and some can even sequester the toxins in certain special glands.

So, poisonous? Yes, to an extent. Exclusive to monarch butterflies? Nope.

If we can make diamonds in a lab, why do people still want the real thing?

Apparently, lab-grown diamonds are having a moment.

Rather than mining a diamond that took millions of years to create, it is now possible to manufacture artificially lab-grown diamonds that look identical, with essentially equal optical, physical and chemical properties  Using a tiny sliver of real diamond as a carbon seed, and the right pressure, temperature and gasses in a plasma chamber, lab-grown diamonds can be created in just a few weeks.

Lab-grown diamonds are significantly cheaper (up to 70-90% cheaper - they are not, after all, rare), not to mention more environmentally- and politically-friendly in their production process (no "blood diamonds", no environmental degradation from mining operations, even though synthetic diamonds do require a lot of electricity to produce them). Jewellery giants like Pandora, Swarovski and even Prada are getting in on the act. 

Given that celebs like Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez and Pamela Anderson are buying them, so are lots of other people. Sales of lab-grown diamonds have increased exponentially in recent years: supply has doubled every other year since 2015. Lab-grown diamonds now make up at least 40% of the diamond market.

All of which begs the question: what is the value of a real, natural diamond? Is there anything about a natural diamond that can compel a customer to pay up to ten times more for it over an identical-looking lab-grown version? 

An increasing number of potential customers would tell you "no", but perhaps the main reason that many people continue to say "yes" is the way in which real diamonds keep, and even increase, their value (and their re-sale value). It is their rarity value itself that some people still covet. If you want a family heirloom that you can pass down to your kids and grandkids, a lab-grown gem will just not cut it. And, honestly, some people just like to spend money, and to be seen to spend money (think cars, houses, designer brand clothing).

And don't count the natural diamond industry out just yet. South African company De Beers has traditionally had a stranglehold over the industry, with an almost 90% market share throughout most of the 20th century. It almost singlehandedly created the global industry, with its clever and effective advertising campaigns ("a diamond is forever") and its ability to control supply (and therefore price). It was De Beers that first associated diamonds with love, romance and enduring commitment, a powerful marketing ploy that paid handsome dividends. 

But De Beers no longer enjoys the effective monopoly it once had, and it too decided to get involved in the artificial diamond industry back in the 2010s. In 2024, though, came the news that De Beers was sitting on a huge stockpile of unsold diamonds, valued at around $2 billion. Did the diamond market fall through, or was this just a period of market correction?

Interestingly, De Beers recently took the decision to end its short-lived lab-grown diamond company, Lightbox. As the cost (and value) of lab-grown diamonds continues to fall, De Beers has pledged to lean in to natural diamonds, creating meaningful pieces to celebrate key moments in people's lives, and relegating lab-grown gems to the more lowly function of costume jewellery. De Beers is once again turning its mighty marketing influence to re-establishing the dominance of natural diamonds in the jewellery market. And don't underestimate its ability to change the industry again.

Personally, I have never understood the attraction of jewellery and certainly not the attraction of spending large amounts of money on pieces that are identical to pieces of cut glass. But then, I am not De Beers' market.

Ultimately, it comes down to personal tastes (and money). Do you buy champagne over prosecco? Organic field tomatoes over greenhouse ones? Then you may well be the type to buy natural diamonds over synthetic ones. Horses for courses. Natural diamonds will probably never go out of style.

The social and psychological cost of staying drug-free in sports

Penny Oleksiak is one of Canada's most successful swimmers and Olympians (although that was before Summer Mackintosh became the new It Girl). As it happens she lives just up the road from me, here in the east end of Toronto. She is still on the Canadian national swim team, but, in the run-up to the next Olympics (July 2028 in Los Angeles, providing California is still part of the USA - and the USA is still part of the world - by then), she has blotted her copybook big time.

She's not a cheater and she's not a maverick, but she is nevertheless deemed to have violated the rules of the International Testing Agency, and has had to declare a voluntary provisional suspension of her ambitions while the matter is investigated, In the process, her case has opened up to the public some of the lesser known rules around doping that top athletes and sports people have to adhere to in order to be taken seriously at the top levels. 

See, Ms. Oleksiak is in violation of the "whereabouts" rules. It turns out that in order to get a clean bill of health from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for World Championships, Olympics, and other major international competitions, competitors need to log in using the ADAMS (Anti-Doping Administration and Management System) online system. 

Athletes are required to report an accurate and up to date record of their whereabouts at all times.  Every day. This is so that they can be drug tested at any time with no notice. "Late, inaccurate or incomplete whereabouts" constitutes a Filing Failure, and three such failures in any one year results in a WADA failure, which can mean an athlete is banned from competitions even if they have never ever taken a banned substance.

This is the position Ms. Oleksiak now finds herself in. She is branded as just as bad as the worst of the Russian serial offenders, even though she swears she has never ever taken any banned substance, but is merely caught up in this administrative snafu.

It makes you realize just how much privacy and autonomy top athletes have to sacrifice in order to pursue their sporting dreams. Penny hasn't commented publicly, other than a short, now-deleted Instagram post. But, as other athletes note, they go in to this system eyes open, and it is essentially just a cost of doing business at these rarefied heights. But what an imposition!

Danielle Smith channels Trump in her response to wildfire report

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has clearly graduated from the Donald Trump School of Public Relations, most recently exemplified by her complete refusal to any accept criticism of the province's fire-fighting contributions during last year's disastrous Jasper wildfire.

In fact, not only did she not accept criticism, she demanded that the inquiry apologize - to her and to Alberta - for having the temerity to reprimand them. She called the report "unfair" and "untrue" and demanded its withdrawal.

The "after-action review" was commissioned by the municipality of Jasper in an attempt to see how emergency response and coordination could be improved in the future, and it was independently authored. It noted that Smith's UCP party complicated the emergency response unnecessarily by constantly demanding information and trying to change the decision-making, even though the fire started in a national park and was therefore a "federal fire", not a provincial one. 

Rather than humbly accepting some responsibility and vowing to do better in the future, Smith just dismissed the report out of hand and tried to heap blame on the federal government. Like I say, the Donald Trump School.

Coincidentally, CBC recently re-broadcast a podcast describing how Alberta's fire-fighting system is far inferior to that of other provinces like Ontario and British Columbia, and is broken and unsustainable. Food for thought, eh, Danielle? Or maybe not.

Why are new sanctions on Russia still being considered, three years too late?

Three-and-a-half years after Russia invaded Ukraine, some western countries like the EU and Britain are vowing to impose strict new sanctions on Russia to "keep raising the pressure until Russia ends its war".

What I don't understand is how they are managing to find new pressure points three-and-a-half years after countries first started imposing sanctions. If they have sanctions they can easily impose on Russia, why didn't they do it three years ago, before a million plus casualties arose?

Maybe there is some clever strategy at work here, turning the screws very gradually for maximum effect or something like that. But, looking in from the outside, it just seems like Western nations have had perfectly good means of blocking Russia's ability to prosecute their illegal war that they have just not used. And if they have just found these means now, how many other avenues are there that have still not been pursued.

Is this just a case of keeping something in reserve so they can say, "Look at us, see what we're doing to help"? Are there compelling reasons why these forces have not been brought to bear before now? Does Canada have a whole list of potential sanctions that they are holding off on imposing? Hard to say.

Immigration is really not the problem

It's almost politically incorrect these days to suggest that, actually, maybe we don't really need to reduce our immigration numbers. So ingrained is the (relatively recent) notion that all our ills - from the housing crisis to the healthcare crisis to the productivity crisis - are a direct result of out-of-control immigration, that to even suggest otherwise is a radical action. So, kudos to Andrew Coyne for questioning this new orthodoxy in a hard-hitting article in the Globe today.

Pierre Poilievre, the Conservatives' sort-of leader, continues to make anti-immigration his main message - hey, it worked for Donald Trump! - but, unfortunately his policy is almost identical to the (very un-Liberal, it must be said) one that the governing Liberals are already pursuing. This amounts to not just reining in the levels of immigration, but actual de-population - "more people leaving than coming". This is unheard-of in Canadian history, and certainly a long way from the immigration policies that made Canada as successful as it is.

Mr. Coyne points out that it is by no means certain that immigration has been responsible for our housing crisis or our healthcare crisis, both of which started well before the recent years of extreme (and arguably out-of-control) immigration. Previous periods of very high immigration, such as the 1950s and 1960s were not accompanied by such crises, so the causal link is far from proven. Poor management and lack of investment are more likely the causes. The pandemic itself was a major contributing factor in much that has gone wrong since.

And, like it or not, we do need a lot of immigration, if only to pay for the ever-increasing financial burdens (for healthcare, pensions, and other things) imposed by our ageing population and low natural birth rates. Absolute population decline will put us in an even worse situation than we already find ourselves in. I have already argued this some time ago.

So, where is all this across-the-board anti-immigrant sentiment coming from? For almost the first time ever, polls in Canada suggest that a plurality of the population is against immigration, a huge change in a country that has always been - as recently as just a few short years ago - strongly pro-immigration. 

For whatever reason - and I blame Donald Trump and his radical repositioning of the Overton window - anti-immigration is a political winner at the moment, and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. The pendulum will swing back, I believe, hopefully sooner rather than later. Maybe it will just take another pandemic-style labour shortage to bring that about. There's nothing like deteriorating service in restaurants to focus the collective mind.

Yes, we need to improve productivity, technical excellence and capital investment. But let's not throw immigration - the engine of Canadian success - under the bus at the same time.

Are the markets in denial about Trump's tariffs?

With all that's going on at at the moment - wars, economic uncertainty, climate change-related extreme weather events, persistent inflation worries, weakened consumer confidence, and a global trade war, just to to name a few - it's hard to believe that the world's stock exchanges are just shrugging it all off.

But, more than that, the major stock exchanges are in all-time record territory. Do they know something we don't? Well, they should: stock brokers and institutional investors are supposed to be the experts; they are highly paid professional, and spend almost all their waking hours researching and looking at past trends and future predictions. But I have to wonder.

In the USA, the S&P500, the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq indexes are all showing record highs, as is Canada's TSE. European stock exchanges are being more circumspect, but they too were trading at record levels just recently. Asian markets too are showing broadly positive vibes, if not actual record highs.

But it's still hard to believe that they see a rosier future than most of the rest of us can envisage at this juncture. While those who are in the know admit that economic modelling is "very difficult" right now because "things are changing constantly", that doesn't seem to be holding investors back any. Some experts, however, are warning that markets may be taking a "naive view of what's happening on the trade front". 

For example, there seems to be a rather gung-ho reliance on TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) on the part of many investors. Yes, Trump has indeed "chickened out" many times over the last few months of tariff negotiations, if that's how you want to interpret it. But to bank on that trend continuing seems, well, unjustifiably optimistic and idealistic to me. Can the glass really be half-full? Or are they in denial?

One indication that all is not quite as hunky-dory as the stock exchanges suggest is the increasing value of, and investment activity in, gold. If things are so great, then why are so many people putting big money into gold bullion, which is usually seen as a solid fall-back position when stocks seem risky? Also, US government bond yields have been heading higher for some time now, for much the same reason.

Some influential market commentators certainly believe that investors are in denial about where all this tariff talk is going to end up, and I'm inclined to agree with them.

America's Faustian bargain

I know it doesn't do to dwell on what-if's, but it's hard not to muse on what life might have been like had Donald Trump not been elected by a relatively slim majority.

Had just a few thousand voters here and there in swing states decided not to vote for nastiness, hatred and selfishness - and here I can't help but think of the swathes of immigrants who voted for Trump because they thought he would somehow make them a little bit richer; did they really not think it through? - America would be living under a Kamala Harris presidency, and the status quo would be very much in force.

Ms. Harris was never going to set the world on fire, but then that's the whole point. The United States would be doing very nicely thank you, just as it was under Joe Biden - the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, with the grudging respect of the rest of the world.

Instead, it is now more deeply polarized than ever before, riven by hate and division, and buckling under the yoke of a super-wealthy plutocracy. Years of painstaking gains in environmental and social policy have been scuppered overnight. The populace, Republican and Democrat alike, is starting to feel the effects of the unnecessary and ill-advised tariffs. Hundreds of thousands have been, or are soon to be, laid off from their jobs. Hundreds of thousands more live day to day, traumatized by the prospect of being kicked out of the USA, sometimes the only country they have ever known. And any respect and goodwill the country may have enjoyed across the world have come crashing down, and America is thought of abroad as a maverick state and a pariah on a par with Russian and China.

Good job, guys.

And the rest of the world? I'm not saying that everything was entirely hunky-dory before Trump was elected. But, despite wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, it was at least functional. Today, Trump's ongoing tariff war with every country on earth has set everyone against everyone else, and the whole world is teetering on the edge of recession. Multinational organizations and humanitarian agencies have been hamstrung and hung out to dry. China has nimbly stepped into the USA-shaped vacuum in international relations and, frankly, is looking pretty good in comparison.

To say that the American public struck a Faustian bargain in November last year is putting it mildly indeed. Right now Mephistopheles is running rampant across the world.

Emergency food to be destroyed

In one of the more outrageous actions of the Trump administration - and that's a pretty high bar - the US has ordered 550 tonnes of emergency food aid to be destroyed (incinerated!) because it has cut funding for USAID.

The "high energy biscuits", intended for malnourished children living in war and disaster zones, and sufficient to feed 1.5 million kids (think the starving younger residents of Gaza) are currently being stored in a warehouse in Dubai. But in the absence of USAID staff, now laid off by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the stores will instead be destroyed.

And this won't be the last. There is currently an estimated 60,000 tons of emergency food aid languishing in US warehouses around the world which will probably end up being destroyed too. And all in the interests of saving a few bucks towards Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy.

How ridiculous! 

Can it not be given to a sensible aid organization like UNHCR, UNWRA, UNICEF, or the World Food Programme. I'm guessing it's not quite so simple. And even those organizations are severely constrained by staffing and funding shortages. Can Dubai not distribute it itself (Dubai is not short of money, and think of the kudos to be earned)?

If even Daivd Suzuki is sounding defeatist...

I'm not sure I've ever heard the usually ebullient and ever-young David Suzuki being quite so pessimistic about climate change.

Canada's best-known environmentalist is usually so positive and upbeat that I often wonder how he keeps it up in the face of all the challenges and set-backs facing the environmental movement. In a recent interview, though, he admits that he has basically given up on expecting politicians, governments and large-scale political entities to see the light and to push for legislative change to curb the worst effects of climate change.

It's not that he has completely given up on fighting against global warming. It's just that he has realized that the political system in which we operate is too much geared towards short term solutions, optics, and winning the next election to expect politicians to fight for any meaningful changes vis-à-vis the climate.

He believes that we have already overshot on seven of the nine global "tipping points" or "planetary boundaries" identified by influential environmentalist Johan Rockström, and there is now no way back. All that remains, he says, is to try to minimize the damage and to help each other deal with the fallout at a small-scale community level.

As Suzuki says, "The science says we're done for ... let's fight like mad to be as resilient as we can in the face of what's coming". Self-sufficiency and self-reliance will be key in the future world we are inheriting, he warns. 

It all sounds pretty gloomy and apocalyptic. But he's probably not wrong.

Masked ICE agents part of the long slide into totalitarian terror

More and more report and videos are emerging of some of the nefarious tactics being employed by Trump's ICE warriors. Women and children separated from husbands and fathers, disguised and unmarked officers punching victims repeatedly in the head. They may be detained unlawfully in unsanitary conditions for many hours, even days. There seem to be few, if any, checks on their behaviour.

These are scenes straight out of dystopian fuction, but this is real. And this is not theocratic Iran, or 1980s El Salvador, or Chile under Pinochet; this is today's America under Donald Trump.

So, if ICE is a legitimate government department in a democratic country, why are its agents wearing face-obscuring masks and dark glasses and using unmarked vehicles? The official line is that they are protecting themselves from doxing (maliciously publishing private information about individuals on the internet) and increasing threats to their safety. 

But these are not clandestine operations agsainst organized drug rings or violent criminal gangs. The subjects being targeted by ICE are usually private individuals - family men (and women and children), students, construction workers, restaurant staff, delivery guys, often born and raised in America.

Civil rights workers and legal advocates say this approach, much like that of Elon Musk's DOGE goons, is deliberately designed to create a climate of fear and intimidation, and to undermine public trust. It is quite literally terrorism. Masked men do not feel accountable because they cannot be identified, and so they are much more likely to engage in violence and to flout the existing laws. There have already been cases of people impersonating ICE or Homeland Security agents to carry out robberies and other crimes.

It can't be long until cattle prods and state-sanctioned rapes become part of the American urban landcscape.

MAGA feeling threatened by the new Superman movie

The MAGA-verse is up in arms about the new Superman movie. I kid you not.

Many right-wing commentators - Kellyanne Conway, Jesse Watters, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, End Wokeness and others - have taken issue with director/writer James Gunn's characterization of the Superman story as an immigrant narrative.

Clearly, it IS.(and always has been) an immigrant narrative - Kal-El came from the planet Krypton, and landed in rural Kansas as an illegal immigrant. Superman's original creators, Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster, were the childen of Jewish immigrants from Europe in the early 20th century. 

MAGA, of course, clearly feels threatened by the portrayal of America's greatest ever hero as an immigrant, legal or otherwise. I guess they have never thought about it before. Gunn, let it be said, is unarguably a political animal, and probably deliberately stressed the immigrant/outsider aspect of his movie. But MAGA is going off half-cocked, and not responding very coolly (or rationally).

Hell, Trump himself is the son of a Scottish immigrant mother and a son-of-a-German immigrant father. Like Canada, hardly anybody in America is that far removed from immigrant forebears. Why is immigration such a big deal for Republicans. Oh, wait, some of them are not even white, right?

Trump's tariffs nothing to to do with economics

As Trump threatens more tariffs on Canada - 35% this time, supposedly starting August 1st, unless of course that changes - he is still trying to tie it to the perceived egregious supply of fentanyl and other drugs from Canada to USA.

As had been noted before, months ago, the flow of fentanyl from Canada to the United States is miniscule - of the order of 0.2%, according to the US's own Customs and Border Control agency - with 99% of it actually coming in from the Mexican border. Maybe he's getting the two countries mixed up? Easily done. 

In fact, there are many more drugs (principally methamphetamine, cocaine and fentanyl) flowing from the US to Canada than the other way round. Not to mention guns and other bad stuff

I'm sure someone has explained all this to him, although given how shit-scared all his staff seem to be of saying anything that might be seen to contradict him, that is by no means certain. Mark Carney should be very sure to mention it to him, though. It's possible, just possible, that he doesn't know.

But we should be past the stage of trying to find rhyme or reason in all this. The US tariffs, in general terms, are supposed to be about correcting the "unfair" trade balances countries have with America. But Brazil just got slapped with a 50% tariff, and they have a negative trade balance with the US. 

The justification Trump uses there is that he objects to the country's treatment of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, an old Trump buddy and copycat, and fellow far-right populist, is currently on trial for trying to stage a Trump-style coup after he lost the vote in the last Brazilian elections. So, nothing to do with economics, then. This is public policy based on whims, grudges and the Old Boy's Network. And the rates - 25%, 30%, 35%, 50% - completely random.

The whole world, apart from some Republican extremists in the USA, are now heartily sick of the whole random Trump tariff thing. A world that was operating, at least macro-ecconomically, quite well before he showed up, is now in tatters, all due to the misguided beliefs of one man. He has set one country against another, and destroyed any goodwill the world bore towards the USA. 

History will certaunly judge him badly, whatever he.says, but in the meantime, we have to live through that history.

Canadian army members' revolutionary plans are kind of ludicrous

Well, this is kind of crazy. The RCMP has arrested four members of the Canadian Armed Forces.(CAF) on terrorism (and related) charges. The four Quebec squaddies diverted a huge number of guns, ammo, grenades, night-vision goggles and laser-sighters, etc, in an unprecedented ideologically-motivated plot by extemist army members to form an "anti-government militia" and take over some land in the Quebec City area. I'm not entirely sure how this qualifies as "terrorism", but I'll take that on trust.

These guys apparently held their own military-style training exercises - shooting, ambushing, survival and navigation - and there are even some awkward posed photos of at least some of them holding their oversized guns on social media. It's rather cute in some ways - like a group of boys playing at soldiers, except these ARE soldiers, and the weapons are real. Two of the four are current active CAF members.

It's thought they have ties with some pretty shadowy extreme right-wing groups. For example, there is a Facebook group called the "Blue Hackle Mafia", which boasts many members of the CAF, and which features "racist, misogynistic, homophobic and antisemitic comments and images", and there is speculation that the four would-be revolutionaries are also involved in various white supremacist groups.

But it was the detail about their plans to "forcibly take possession of land in the Quebec City area" that struck me most. It seemed like such a modest goal. And what would they do there? Hold military parades? Farm it? They apparently wanted to set up an "anti-government community" north of Quebec, which sounds rather quaint, like a hippy commune or something.

You just have this feeling that they didn't quite think it all the way through. The whole thing seems equal parts scary and hilarious.

The Enhanced Games could only happen in Trump's America

Disillusioned about the Olympic Games? Yeah, me too. Cheating, drug dealing and graft are par for the course these days (arguably they always were). But, woah, I don't see this as the solution.

The Enhanced Games will hold its inaugural competition in Las Vegas on May 2026. Yes, you read that right. It's a sports competition celebrating unabashed performance-enhancing drugs use. The brainchild of Australian lawyer Aron D'Souza, and bankrolled by the likes of maverick tech bro billionaire Peter Thiel and all-round idiot Donald Trump Jr., it was perhaps inevitable that just about the only place to hold it would be in Donald Trump's brash iconclastic America.

The USA's anti-doping in sports stance remains one of the strictest in the world - their top 100-metres sprinter was banned for smoking weed in the 2021 Olympics. So, it will be interesting to see how this new initiative progresses, and whether it takes hold in the public's imagination. 

Questions abound. Which athletes will be willing to burn their bridges and compete? Is it safe (probably not)? Will enough people watch it to make it worthwhile, and to pave the way for future development (again probably not, but who knows)?

Most Olympic athletes and the official responses from country representatives have, predictably, been very negative about the enterprise, despite ongoing complaints about athletes' pay and allegations of secret and unmitigated doping in the established sports competition world. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) calls it a "betrayal of everything that we stand for".

But if it ever takes off, the time would be now and in Trump's America.

China does not seem to understand Buddhism

Here's an excellent quote from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning: "The reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and other living Buddhas must be approved by the central government".

This, of course, is China trying to assert its authority over the Tibetan government-in-exile. But I can't help but think that they have the whole thing rather misunderstood. Dalai Lamas are not voted in by government committee, and they are certainly not imposed by government decree as Ms. Mao seems to think.

You can roll your eyes to your heart's content over the idea of a religious leader appearing as a reincarnation, especially one that is somehow picked by the Gaden Phodrang Trust. But China's willful misconstructions are even more hilarious.