Canajun, eh?

Any thoughts on this (BBC World television is running a series trying to explain us)?

What does it mean to be Canadian?

Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa

Via Instapundit;

Vitamin A deficiency affects the immune system, leading to illness and frequently to blindness. It probably causes more deaths than malaria, HIV or tuberculosis, killing as many people every single day as the Fukushima tsunami. It can be solved by eating green vegetables and meat, but for many poor Asians, who can afford only rice, that remains an impossible dream. To deal with the problem, “biofortification” with genetically modified food plants is 1/10th as costly as dietary supplements.

“Golden rice”—with two extra genes to make beta-carotene, the raw material for vitamin A—was a technical triumph, identical to ordinary rice except in color. Painstaking negotiations led to companies waiving their patent rights so the plant could be grown and regrown free by anybody.

Yet today, 14 years later, it still has not been licensed to growers anywhere in the world. The reason is regulatory red tape deliberately imposed to appease the opponents of genetic modification, which Adrian Dubock, head of the golden rice project, describes as “a witch-hunt for suspected theoretical environmental problems…[because] many activist NGOs thought that genetically engineered crops should be opposed as part of their anti-globalization agenda.”

It is surprising to find that an effective solution to the problem consistently rated by experts as the poor world’s highest priority has been stubbornly opposed by so many pressure groups supposedly acting on behalf of the poor.

The Children Are Our Future

And that's why I have 3 cases of mace in my basement.

The World Is Being Run By Crazy People

Energy Secretary Reviews Avengers on Facebook, Sees Promise of Green Energy in Hollywood Movie

H.M.S. Uh-Oh

Europe sees huge influx of deposits into the Bank of See-Ya'-Later:

Worries about a run on Greek banks have rattled Athens this week, after savers withdrew at least 700 million euros on Monday alone…Five of Greece’s top banks saw 37 billion euros taken out last year, including 12 billion from EFG Eurobank and 8-9 billion apiece at National Bank of Greece, Piraeus and Alpha Bank. In February, Evangelos Venizelos, finance minister at the time, said only 16 billion euros had gone abroad, with a third of that going to Britain. Savers have shifted to property, gold and other banks, or stashed it privately.

Well, at least the rest of Europe is secu….

It is not only Greeks who are worried about their savings. Data shows depositors have also taken flight from banks in Belgium, France and Italy. And on Thursday, Spain’s Bankia was reported to have seen more than 1 billion euros drained by its customers in the past week…..More than 120 billion euros was taken from two banks in Belgium alone...Some 90 billion euros was taken from France’s banks, including around 30 billion each from Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas.

It's all good.

Reader Tips

In our Saturday night long weekend musical amusement, bluegrass legends Flatt & Scruggs cover Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone.

No, really.

The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

Dim, dimmer...

…dimmest:

"At the moment that (Trayvon Martin) confronted or was confronted by the wannabe cop loser who was stalking him, turns out he probably did beat the dog shit out of that guy. I just want to say if I had a son he would not look like Trayvon Martin, but I hope he would act like him."

Well, he wouldn't. The son of Bill Maher would hire someone to act like Trayvon.

Getting up to speed

Yup, pretty much:

Okay, let me see if I have all this straight. Bill Clinton, a white Southerner, was the first black president. Obama, an apparently straight guy, is the first gay president. George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, is a white guy. Elizabeth Warren, the whitest white woman anybody ever saw, is an Injun.

Andrew Sullivan, a liberal, considers himself the last “true conservative.” The Democrat Socialists, left-wingers to a fault, consider themselves “centrist” or “moderate,” and Mitt Romney, who is a liberal, is a “right-wing extremist"…[…]...Violent OWS revolutionaries are “mostly peaceful.” Layabouts who collect government benefits are “hard-working Americans,” and…

Continue your re-education here.

h/t

The Preakness

America saw a rivalry not just between two horses, or even between two brothers, but between two worlds. Arthur, despite his own Thoroughbred breeding, came to represent the outsiders of the sport, while Easy Goer, bred by the great Claiborne Farm — now operated by Arthur’s brother Seth — and by 80-year-old Ogden Phipps, a pillar of New York racing, was thought to represent the racing establishment.

Post time for the the 2012 running is at 6pm Eastern.

And another win for Derby winner I'll Have Another.

Breaking sports news video. MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL highlights and more.

David Cameron's Britain

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and repeat after me: "Goo goo. Gaa gaa."

It's Probably Nothing

So, global finance again approaches the brink of severe crisis. And we all know what that means. Market participants have been conditioned to expect aggressive policy responses – and policymakers have been conditioned to dare not disappoint the markets. So the critical question becomes how close we have come to that perilous juncture where policymakers are unable to deliver. When does the scope of market and economic imbalances overwhelm policy tools? Or, more precisely and critically, when do the markets begin to lose faith in the efficacy of policy measures (not to mention, the actual policymakers)?

h/t george

This Is Awkward

After a poll released this week showed President Barack Obama only beating his Democratic primary opponent John Wolfe Jr. by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent, in Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District, state Democrats moved to practically disenfranchise Arkansas voters. "[D]elegates Wolfe might claim won't be recognized at the national convention," national party officials are telling state Democrats. Wolfe is being accused of not following the party rules.

“They want a coronation,” Wolfe tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “They’re conflating [Obama] with the party. Are we supposed to call him ‘Dear Leader’? Is this some kind of North Korea thing?

Related!

h/t Bemused

Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa

You first, you son of a bitch.

You first.

Reader Tips

When all the skies are grey and it's a rainy day, think of the birdies in spring, and when you're up to your neck in hot water, Be Like The Kettle and Sing.

Thanks for the song, Vera.

The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

Honey, I Finished The Internet

Favourite British dogs: in pictures. (h/t John)

Submerged

Dauntless Doug Saunders of the Globe has some funny ideas in his cloud cuckoo land:

...

Today we need to recognize the fact that, despite what Laurier did a century ago, Canada remains a victim of underpopulation. We do not have enough people, given our dispersed geography, to form the cultural, educational and political institutions, the consumer markets, the technological, administrative and political talent pool, the infrastructure-building tax base, the creative and artistic mass necessary to have a leading role in the world...

It is time to act. Canada should build its population to a size – at least 100 million – that will allow it to determine its own future, maintain its standard of living against the coming challenges and have a large enough body of talent and revenue to solve its largest problems. All it takes is a sustained and determined increase in immigration, to at least 400,000 permanent immigrants per year...

Funny that the UK and France did pretty well in terms of the areas Dauntless Doug worries about--and played pretty leading roles in the word--with populations of 41.6 million and 40.7 million respectively. In 1901.

Canada's population is now estimated at 34.8 million. What is Dauntless Doug ingesting?

Y2Kyoto: I'll Miss The Polar Ice Caps

Via WUWT;

Overall, however, the observed changes have little impact on the mass balance of the region. We therefore conclude that in contrast with their counterparts in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas (Rignot et al., 2008) the ice streams and ice shelves in the broad region under investigation herein have not been changed in a significant way in the past 12 yr, which suggests that the ice dynamics of the entire region does not have a strong impact on the mass budget of the Antarctic continent.

Don't Tease Us Like That

Stursberg grimaces as he describes the impact of losing HNIC and its 450 hours of prime time Canadian programming. “What needs to happen is people need to have a serious conversation about the future of the CBC. The next few years are going to be very difficult. It’s at a point that, in three years, CBC might just collapse.

h/t EBD

Pleasing Your Enemies Does Not Turn Them Into Friends

"Even by Stupid Party standards, it was an impressive display of preemptive surrender."

The Tolerant Left

A plea for historical accuracy - "I wonder if I commisioned Ms. Sutherland to do a portrait of Messiah Jack with two young Asian girls in a tug and pull room with wifey partially hid behind a curtain as a voyeur the Kingston Library would hang it up for me?"

This Is Not Your Grandma's Humane Society

Guilt: It’s Not Just For Jews and Catholics Anymore.

The animal rights movement that emerged in the ‘70s was changing, too. I, myself, would have been ripe for the picking as literature flooded my mailbox exposing with sickening evidence the horrors of vivisection. But the movement morphed; It became polarizing, unreasonable, and increasingly radical. Where it had once appealed to our pathos, it devolved into using our old friend, guilt. Guilt for eating meat, guilt for wearing fur, riding in a rodeo and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken – all deeds vulnerable to criticism as we learned more about their respective industries.

But guilt for owning a purebred dog?

Welcome to the new elitism.

What's The Opposite Of Diversity?

University!

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

h/t EBD

Y2Kyoto: State Of Aneroxia Envirosa

And so it begins.

Vermont's governor has signed a bill making it the first U.S. state to ban fracking, the controversial practice to extract natural gas from the ground.

"This is a big deal," Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday. "This bill will ensure that we do not inject chemicals into groundwater in a desperate pursuit for energy."

Shumlin said fracking contaminates groundwater and the science behind it is "uncertain at best." He said he hopes other states will follow Vermont's lead in banning it.

And at Rigzone - "yet another blow has been dealt to energy companies hoping to strike it big as the Czech Republic mulls joining France, Bulgaria and Romania in banning shale gas exploration."

More in the comments;

There are no rigs in Vermont. There is no drilling in Vermont. There is no interest in drilling in Vermont. Nobody is leasing in Vermont. When asked about this, as I recall he said "We don't know if we have Natural Gas or not." Well the industry does know these things, and you don't.

This is roughly the same as Vermont enacting a law to require that everyone put a big green wooden ball on their roof to scare away the Tigers and the Huffalumps.

h/t Dan

Reader Tips

Tonight we are transported by the magic of music to a warm Polynesian paradise, as we listen to Spike Jones and his City Slickers perform Hawaiian War Chant.

The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

It's Probably Nothing

More; Obama - the first birther?

Things You'll Never See On The CBC

"Homicide of women by firearms in this country is medically insignificant." Caillin Langmann on Jerry Agar Show, discussing Canadian Firearm Legislation from 1974 to 2008.

The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

Welcome to the Hotel California...

The Sound Of Settled Science

And the crack of a broken hockey stick.

Although the chronology itself was not yet available, the list of sites was sufficient for McIntyre to calculate the numbers himself, and the results were breathtaking. Firstly, the URALS regional chronology had vastly more data behind it than the Yamal-only figures presented in Briffa’s paper

But what was worse, the regional chronology did not have a hockey stick shape — the twentieth century uptick that Briffa had got from the handful of trees in the Yamal-only series had completely disappeared.

Direct comparison of the chronology that Briffa chose to publish against the full chronology that he withheld makes the point clear:

It seems clear then that the URALS chronology Briffa prepared to go alongside the others he put together for the 2008 paper gave a message that did not comply with the message that he wanted to convey — one of unprecedented warmth at the end of the twentieth century. In essence the URALS regional chronology was suffering from the divergence problem — the widely noted failure of some tree ring series to pick up the recent warming seen in instrumental temperature records, which led to the infamous ‘hide the decline’ episode.

More at WUWT - "Give it up fellows, your cover’s blown."

This Is My Brother Mohammed, And This Is My Other Brother Mohammed

.... suspicion was fed by the fact that this particular bird had much larger nostrils than usual. This was enough for the specimen to land in the laboratory of Turkey’s ministry of agriculture, and for the dossier to be passed on to the country’s secret services, who were tasked with deciding whether those two enlarged nostrils may have contained an antenna, or other nefarious devices.

h/t EBD

The World Is Being Run By Crazy People

Enjoy!

Reader Tips

There'll be no time for complainin' at the Alabama Barbecue.

The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Let’s Erect A Plaque At 787 Dundas St W To Remember Jack Layton

I want to personally thank each and every NDP member who is responsible for giving us the gift of Tom Mulcair;

New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair dismissed on Tuesday criticism of him from the premiers of B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan, saying they’re simply acting as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “messengers” in the NDP’s fight with Harper over the impact of the oil sands industry on the Canadian economy.

I seriously mean that. Thank you.

But wait, there's more!

Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?

Obama budget defeated 99-0 in Senate

It's Probably Nothing

“There are indicators that the run on Greek banks is already over, leaving many institutions near complete collapse.”

The Children Are Our Future

The root cause of the Quebec student "strike"? Not expelling students.

We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Via Powerline;

[T]wenty-nine states (and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) have required utility companies to deliver specified minimum amounts of electricity from “renewable” sources, including wind and solar power. California recently adopted the most stringent of these so-called renewable portfolio standards (RPS), requiring 33 percent of its electricity to be renewable by 2020. […]

In 2010, the average price of residential electricity in RPS states was 31.9 percent higher than it was in non-RPS states. Commercial electricity rates were 27.4 percent higher, and industrial rates were 30.7 percent higher.

Forward this to your own provincial MLA. Let them know we're watching them - and their ridiculous, wasteful political eye candy projects.

But consumers who have less money for groceries and gasoline because they are spending more on electricity tend to blame the power companies, not the government. That is why politicians love mandates.

Not when they're "Crown Corporations", they don't.

Related - Only global poverty can save the planet...

Hashtag Of The Entitlement Generation

Glenn Reynolds;

OWS was never mighty. It was always a bubble full of media hot air, and it collapsed when its actual behavior damaged it to the point that even the media’s best efforts couldn’t keep it inflated, at which point the press started pretending it had never existed. . .

More at the link.

The Children Are Our Future

And that's why I have bear traps concealed in strategic locations about my property.

More...

(h/t James)

Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?

Obama’s glory was inevitable, says Obama.

Honey, I Finished The Internet

Texts From My Dog

Reader Tips

Tonight, Robbie Fulks welcomes you to the town of Rock Bottom, Pop. 1.

The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

What We Really Need Is Democracy

Forecast for Tunisia - As hopes fade for an Arab Spring, the country where the movement started remains a sunny spot—but for how long?

This Is Not Your Grandma's Humane Society

The facts are as follows: HSUS not only receives a “D” grade from the American Institute of Philanthropy, but the Better Business Bureau is reviewing whether HSUS meets its charity standards. This “Humane Society” gives just one percent of the money it collects to pet shelters, according to its tax returns.

Meanwhile, as local humane societies struggle to make ends meet and keep sheltering pets, HSUS has $32 million stuffed away in hedge funds and has about 50 lawyers on staff.

Quégrec

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

1) Violence pays off

2) Greece announces snap elections after blazing protests

Will some of us soon be living in Ontareece?

I'll Take "Leg Thrill Media" For $200, Alex

Newsbusters; - On at least four occasions, MSNBC's Chris Matthews mocked Sarah Palin for how he felt she'd do if she were ever on the hit television game show Jeopardy!.

Enjoy.