Please upgrade your Liberal dictionary immediately!

Taliban = "farmers in the wrong place at the wrong time"

Y2Kyoto: The Green Police (Bumped)

Update:

... the not-so-funny part.

Jail Chewbacca

Bonus:

Exxon slips $100,000 to the dark side.

... and speaking of courts (could be the start of a trend)

Update:

Chewbacca extra ... click.

"Who is Afraid of Big Government?"

Via Rob Zurrer who writes;

Victor Davis Hanson on what I would call a "blow off top" scenario in the bull market in government employees.

OK, I am in hope ( a foolish state) that we are dealing with the equivalent of the blow off top in the Nasdaq in 2000 , and a collapse in government employees on par with...... for example Yahoo's plunge from $130 to $3.75 in a bit more than a year. Personally, I'm glad the US is the most heavily armed citizenry in history. I won't elaborate.....

I just remember so well the day 3Com spun off 20% of its wholly owned subsidiary Palm, and at the end of the day that 20% of Palm was trading for a greater market value than the entire listed 3Com..... which still owned 80% of Palm.

It's that crazy.

And more crazy - Administration Proposes New Agency to Study Climate Change

Blog Notes

And so begins another road trip. The blog will be in the capable hands of the guest bloggers, while I do expect to be checking in once in a while. See you again next week. Same time, same station.

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Cheryl Bentyne, Janis Siegel, Allan Paul, and Tim Hauser, as The Manhattan Transfer, with special guest Stan Getz, performing Joyspring ¤, in Stuttgart, in 1989 (8:20). The first race of the 33rd America's Cup is now scheduled for 02:00 Mountain time, Wednesday. Archive material is now available here. Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans

If we're the ones doing all the polluting...

Taken near Swanson, SK Feb.7

...how come Toronto has all of the smog?

Y2Kyoto: The Problem With The Built In Solution

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

We're Doomed! - With the earth’s population growing by around 80 million - a new Germany - each year, the Optimum Population Trust has assembled a distinguished group of experts to discuss the scientific case for lowering global and national populations to environmentally sustainable levels. Speakers include [...] Prof. Andrew Watkinson, former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research...

We're Doomed! - Britain’s Met Office says the world is on a path towards a potential increase in global temperatures of 4 degrees as early as 2060. If this occurs, only about half a billion people out of about 9 billion will survive, according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate change ...

Open Thread On Superbowl Results

By inebriated request.

My President Went To A Democratic Fundraiser

And all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Wildrose Country

Chantal Hébert;

The advent of a right-wing challenger to Canada's longest serving dynasty is more than just a political junkie's once-in-a-lifetime dream come true.

More like the mainstream conservative remedy to the Liberals who have taken over their former party from the inside. But the rest of the column is still quite good.

This Is Not Your Grandma's Humane Society

Join the Yellow Tail wine boycott

Related: another disaster, another HSUS scam.

Sarah Palin's Redneck Teleprompter

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

May, 2009

February, 2010

Update: Hi Mom!

More - the secret behind His Eloquence?

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are our old friend & organist Karl Richter, and his Munich Bach Orchestra, performing George Frideric Handel's Organ Concerto, II & III, Op. 4, No. 1 (1971, ca. 16:00).

USA 17

Alinghi 5

The weather in Valencia looks good for some proper racing in the first match of the 33rd America's Cup challenge, which is ready to start, in a few hours, at 02:00 Mountain time on Monday, 2010-02-08. On the toss of a coin between the commodores of the defender yacht club, Switzerland's Société Nautique de Genève, and the challenger, the USA's Golden Gate Yacht Club, the priority to enter the start area for the first race, with the right of way on starboard tack, went to the USA's BMW ORACLE Racing. I've tested the live streaming Internet video coverage and it appears to be ready to go at www.americascup.com (you'll need to install the RayV viewer if you don't already have it).

Update, 00:30: it became apparent, at our little A/C 33 pre-party, here in the SDA LNR studios, when we were discussing the interaction between the torques involved in these structures and Reynolds numbers, that some folks just don't grok how big these sailboats are. I can fix that: the images to the left are to scale (pick to zoom). USA 17 is twenty stories high.

Update: Race 1 postponed to Wednesday due to lack of wind.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Global Disastrification

Don't laugh. You'll exhale, for one thing.

Not Waiting For The Asteroid

"The poodles are heading for the endangered species list, and deservedly so."

I Can See America From My House

"That's so not toast."

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Another Day

Another "gate" - and this one has Cancon!

The claims in the Synthesis Report go back to the IPCC’s report on the global impacts of climate change. It warns that all Africa faces a long-term threat from farmland turning to desert and then says of north Africa, “additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-20 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003)”.

“Agoumi” refers to a 2003 policy paper written for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. The paper was not peer-reviewed.

Its author was Professor Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan climate expert who looked at the potential impacts of climate change on Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. His report refers to the risk of “deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000–20 period”.

These claims refer to other reports prepared by civil servants in each of the three countries as submissions to the UN. These do not appear to have been peer-reviewed either.

EU Referendum;

Not least of the anomalies is that the author, Ali Agoumi, is not a climate scientist, as such. Although he seems to have worked for Morocco's Ministry of Land-use Management, Water and the Environment, he currently seems to make his living from drawing up carbon credit applications under the UN's clean development mechanism. He has worked as consultant for the firm Ecosecurities, a company which specialises in carbon trading.

Emphasis mine.

Via Climate Audit, where the issue was raised two weeks ago.

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is The Pizza Parlor ¤, II ¤ & III ¤, the twenty- second episode of the first season of Hogan's Heroes (1965, ½ hour). Papa Bear Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

"Who'd want a Hummer, oops! Humvee...

...if you can have an M-ATV?..."

Update: Car and Driver video:

Not Watching For The Asteroid

"That my friend, is not media bias. It's contempt for the American people."

Via Gateway Pundit, h/t Fritz

The Sound Of Settled Science

Scandals just keep pouring from the laboratories ...

This has not been the proudest of weeks for science. Twelve years after publishing an article purporting to prove a link between childhood vaccines and autism, the prominent British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the paper in its entirety. But only after Britain's General Medical Council found that the author of that article had been "irresponsible and dishonest" in his research, bringing medical science "into disrepute."

That wasn't the only controversy involving scholarly journals and the repute of researchers to flare up this week. Also in Britain, two prominent stem-cell researchers went to the BBC with their complaint that the peer review system has become corrupt. Flawed and unoriginal work gets published and promoted, while publication of truly original findings is often delayed or rejected, according to Austin Smith of Cambridge University and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research.

Why would that happen?

Shock Update - and into the Globe and Mail? Check the comments, too.

More - Skepticism on the rise in Britain. Must be the shoveling.

Y2Kyoto: Snowmageddon

If you don't believe in global warming...

... just look out your window.

Related: Errata, patron saint of typos, wants in on Gaia's prank....

“An epic snowstorm has the mid-Atlantic region in its crosshairs,” Jane Lubchenco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Distraction (NOAA) said in a statement.

h/t KevinB

So Many Young Suicides Cut Short

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority issued a warning this afternoon about tainted cocaine.

h/t Allen

Well This Didn't Take Long

Heh.

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Old-time listeners will recall that since my ownership, as a young man, of KC 166 (which was Canada's Tornado-class Olympic catamaran the year before I purchased it), I have been keeping abreast of developments in the fields of multihull and hydrofoil sailing, as a result of which we have had previous mentions here at LNR of, for example: the hydrofoil trimaran l'Hydroptère (and here ~ she's currently the world's fastest sailboat, at just under 90 km/h), of the sixty-foot ORMA-class ocean-going Brossard and Géant (and here) trimarans, and, of course, of HMCS Bras d'Or.

So it should not surprise that I have been keeping track of developments in the perhaps bizarre saga of The 33rd edition of the venerable America's Cup yacht races, which, if all goes as planned, and if no more legal challenges are launched over the next two days, will begin, in Valencia, Spain, on Monday morning at 02:00 Mountain time. Furthermore, if all goes as planned, it is my understanding that live streaming video will be available at the americascup.com website. I've scheduled a little party for that time here at my place.

While I find some of the legal wrangling kind of silly (I s'pose a deed is a legal matter, though) it remains the case that these 90-foot "load waterline length" multihull sailboats in this 33rd cup are fascinating reflections of the state of the art in sailing technology. Not only that, in my experience as a multihull skipper and occasional monohull crewman, the strategy and tactics of this sort of race will be radically different from that of a monohull challenge. We shall see.

Anyway, I just wanted to give y'all a heads up about the timing of the first race and the streaming video option, so that those who may be further interested in watching, live, how this all turns out, will have time to prepare.

The Challenger USA 17 BMW Oracle Racing Golden Gate Yacht Club 113 × 90 × 223 Feet Watch Video ¤

The Defender Alinghi 5 Team Alinghi Société Nautique de Genève 110 × 83 × 165 Feet Watch Video ¤

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Mass murder, some Muslims, and morality

Earlier:

Who's murdering Muslims?

Now: one bomb goes off in Karachi and a second in set off in the hospital to which victims are being taken:

Note that the victims are Muslims and that the deed and tactics are those of other Muslims (though one supposes some, somewhere, will suggest the CIA did it).

Let us know if any Canadian Muslim organization of note has anything to say. Remember such killings do not have the cover of raison d'état, thin or thick as one may make that. These actions are simply those of self-organized and self-justified people who choose to obliterate the lives of many other people. Muslims. Go figure.

Then there is Karbala kaboom.

Update: On the mind of two apparently important Canadian Muslim organizations:

CAIR-CAN Calls for Proactive Government Response to Supreme Court Ruling on Khadr Case

2009 DEADLIEST YEAR IN AFGHANISTAN: IS THE MISSION WORTH IT?

Another view on our mission, and its future (hah!), here.

Harry Reid Defends: Says It's A "Dialect"

h/t Ramon Daley

Y2Kyoto: The "Denier"

Just another way to say "Nazi!"

Elections Party Of Canada

Lorne Gunter; (link fixed)

But let's assume for a moment that the goal of campaign equity is both attainable and desirable. How can it be achieved if the arbiters of our elections -Elections Canada -appear bent on favouring some parties and prosecuting others?

Flashback - "Shortly after the results of the investigation [of questionable Liberal donations] began to make its way onto the pages of major publications, Elections Canada pulled down the database search function and replaced it with a version that renders the site useless."