46 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. It is early, and there might be better comments posted somewhere, but for now, my vote goes to one on Shotgun re a holiday for PET. This guy says, ok, but make it for Feb 30th.
    Another guy say there is justice. PET is burning in Hell, fueled by Alberta oil.

  2. Just to revisit the post made yesterday with the video… That speaker was Evan Sayet … who among other things was once a writer for Bill Mahar.
    That video was made last March and widely posted on the web at places like Hot Air …. It was linked to here at SDA by me
    From LGF and others …..
    Interesting to note that a mere 8 months has apparently erased the memory of this rather significant analysis of modern liberal ideology.

  3. In some geeky news, Intel has had their WiMax tech approved by the ITU.
    “With a broadcast range of some 40 miles (64.4km) and the potential to operate at considerably higher speeds than existing [wireless] broadband Internet connections, WiMAX is gradually laying down its roots in the US market.
    For example, Illinois-based Motorola Inc. is presently constructing a WiMAX network in Chicago, which will be operated by Sprint Nextel offshoot Xohm. Motorola is also developing a further 30 WiMAX systems across the globe.
    Although its official ITU acceptance gives WiMAX a more attractive appeal in the US, existing European third-generation technology restrictions related to the use of specific radio spectrum may yet tarnish potential outside of the United States – where such restrictions do not apply.”
    WiMax enabled VoIP phone equals the death of current cell phone tech. Limited only by -regulations- I should add, the actual stuff to do a network with is cheap like borscht. Look for lots of political maneuvering on this, and really quick uptake in the 3rd world.

  4. BILL MAHER, MEDIA WHORE AND LEFTARD GATEKEEPER, GOES APESHIT OVER DISSENTING OPINION
    http://tinyurl.com/2rou6o
    Interesting how the left deals with people who disagree with them…note in this video how Bill gets real kicky when he has the oppertunuity to slug a girl…pathetic…the left has all the instincts of the statist goons who crafted their modern soviet attitudes towards civil liberty

  5. HEY WHITEMAN! WANT SOME CHEAP SMOKES EH?
    http://tinyurl.com/2flqvz
    “Caledonia man peddles from truck
    Selling contraband cigarettes to counter ‘illegal’ native smoke shops
    Dana Borcea
    The Hamilton Spectator
    (Oct 22, 2007)
    A Caledonia resident is selling contraband cigarettes from the back of his truck to protest the recent opening of two native smoke shops on Highway 6 that he describes as illegal.
    (…)
    He then drove his pickup down Argyle Street to the Caledonia OPP office and set up shop in their parking lot. Fleming said that after a couple of hours he was asked to leave by an OPP officer who told him the plaza owner had complained he was trespassing.
    He was not charged.
    “I’m challenging the OPP to deal with me but they won’t because if they deal with me, they’ll have to deal with the Indians,” said the 45-year-old swimming pool installer. “I’m openly breaking the law.”
    Fleming said that when the two shops recently sprung up on Highway 6 around 5th Line he went to officials at Haldimand County to complain.
    He said they are on land that belongs to the Six Nations Band Council. But he added that since it is not reserve land it is under Haldimand County’s jurisdiction and should be subject to the county’s rules. He was told by officials the land was “in limbo.”

  6. 35 Errors Discovered in Al Gore’s Film
    […]
    Now, famed climate change skeptic Christopher Monckton, in a detailed report published by the Science and Public Policy Institute, not only refuted Gore’s defense of the movie’s contents, but also listed a total of 35 errors in the award-winning abomination responsible for most of the global warming hysteria sweeping the planet (emphasis added):
    Story Continues …-
    http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/20/35-errors-discovered-al-gore-s-film

  7. Saw an Ipsos-Reid poll this Saturday in the Winnipeg Free Press, pegging Harper for a majority government. The Conservatives have now moved well ahead of the Liberals in Ontario. This result reconfirms an Ipsos-Reid poll done a week earlier with the same result.
    At that time, the Grope and Flail had published a poll, also broadcast on the CTV website, showing the Tories around 35%. The story trumpeted the fact that despite Dion’s problems, the Tories still couldn’t move to majority territory.
    I think I now know whose polling numbers were more accurate. Haven’t heard a peep from the Globe/CTV dorks about any more polls since then. I suspect if we do, they’d bury it with the obituaries.

  8. In the Belorussian city of Bobruisk, 15 graves in a Jewish cemetary were destroyed; toppled and broken gravestones were covered with excrement.
    A few days later, Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko spoke up: “This is Jewish city, and the Jews are not concerned for the place they live in. They have burned Bobruisk into a pigsty. Look at Israel — I was there.”
    Shlemazl (shlemazl.blogspot.com) notes that Jews are only one-half of one percent of Bobruisk’s population. He asks, “Are we really that bad that just a few elderly Jews can turn a big city into a pigsty?”
    Well, apparently. One can only begin to imagine what a blight Israel must be on the surrounding areas.
    http://shlemazl.blogspot.com/2007/10/spare-thought-for-belarus.html

  9. WLMR. Down here in eastern Ontario, we have over 60 smoke shacks on one reserve(there were 2 when chimpy mcliar won his first majority). With no law enforcement, what do you expect? The majority of this filthy product is going to the poor and the young, yet our glorious leader twiddles his thumbs and does nothing.

  10. OMMAG – I’m still puzzled by that video. In my view, it wasn’t a ‘significant analysis’. It wasn’t an analysis at all; it was a description.
    He’s describing postmodernism, aka cultural relativism, a perspective that denies that we can access/understand external (to us) reality, and that we are therefore, ‘confined’ to our images of this reality. This perspective was criticized centuries ago by Plato.
    Postmodernism then says that since all that we can know is confined to our minds, then, each and every mindset – is equally valid. No universal ethics, morals. And certainly not universal truths. It’s all ‘personal’ and ‘subjective’.
    What I wanted to hear from him, rather than a long description of postmodernism (and he doesn’t use the word but instead defines it as ‘leftism’ or ‘democratism’)…is not WHAT it is. But WHY it developed after WWII. Not a word about that.

  11. common sense to be found here, so the Global Warming Crisis & Catastrophe can be called off. Gore has made a half a $billion and that should be enough.
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2709551.ece
    Tuesday, October 23, 2007
    Famous British Greenie rejects global warming
    David Bellamy:
    Am I worried about man-made global warming? The answer is “no” and “yes”. No, because the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction has come up against an “inconvenient truth”. Its research shows that since 1998 the average temperature of the planet has not risen, even though the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to increase.
    Yes, because the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the questioning rigours of hard science and become a political cause. Those of us who dare to question the dogma of the global-warming doomsters who claim that C not only stands for carbon but also for climate catastrophe are vilified as heretics or worse as deniers.
    I am happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up against dogma based on the bigotry of vested interests. But I don’t like being smeared as a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. The truth is that there are no facts that link the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming. Instead of facts, the advocates of man-made climate change trade in future scenarios based on complex and often unreliable computer models.
    Name-calling may be acceptable in politics but it should have no place in science; indeed, what is happening smacks of McCarthyism, witch-hunts and all. Scientific understanding, however, is advanced by robust, reasoned argument based on well-researched data. So I turn to simple sets of data that are already in the public domain.
    The last peak global temperatures were in 1998 and 1934 and the troughs of low temperature were around 1910 and 1970. The second dip caused pop science and the media to cry wolf about an impending, devastating Ice Age. Our end was nigh! Then, when temperatures took an upward swing in the 1980s, the scaremongers changed their tune. Global warming was the new imminent catastrophe. But the computer model – called “hockey stick” – that predicted the catastrophe of a frying planet proved to be so bent that it “disappeared” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s armoury of argument in 2007. It was bent because the historical data it used to predict the future dated from only the 1850s, when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age. Little wonder that temperatures showed an upward trend.
    In the Sixties I used to discuss climate change with my undergraduates at Durham University. I would point to the plethora of published scientific evidence that showed the cyclical nature of change – and how, for instance, the latest of a string of ice ages had affected the climate, sea levels and tree lines around the world. Thank goodness the latest crop of glaciers and ice sheets began to wane in earnest about 12,000 years ago; this gave Britain a window of opportunity to lead the industrial revolution.
    The Romans grew grapes in York and during the worldwide medieval warm period – when civilizations blossomed across the world – Nordic settlers farmed lowland Greenland (hence its name) and then got wiped out by the Little Ice Age that lasted roughly from the 16th century until about 1850.
    There is no escaping the fact that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising for 150 years – and very uniformly since the 1950s. Yet the temperature has not increased in step with CO2. Not only have there been long periods of little change in temperature, but also the year-to-year oscillations are totally unrelated to CO2 change. What is more, the trend lines of glacial shortening and rise in sea level have shown no marked change since the big increase in the use of fossil fuels since 1950.
    How can this be explained unless there are other factors at work overriding the greenhouse effect of CO2? There are, of course, many to be found in the peer-reviewed literature: solar cycles, cosmic rays, cloud control and those little rascals, such as El Nino and La Nina, all of which are played down or even ignored by the global-warming brigade.
    Let’s turn to Al Gore’s doom-laden Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. First, what is the point of scaring the families of the world with tales that polar bears are heading for extinction? Last year Mitchell Taylor, of the US National Biological Service, stated that “of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”
    Why create alarm about a potential increase in the spread of malaria thanks to rising temperatures when this mosquito-borne disease was a major killer of people in Britain and northern Russia throughout the Little Ice Age?
    Despite the $50 billion spent on greenwashing propaganda, the sceptics and their inconvenient questions are beginning to make their presence felt. A recent survey of Klaus-Martin Schulte, of Kings College Hospital, of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only 7 per cent explicitly endorsed a “so-called consensus” position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming. What is more, James Lovelock, the author and green guru, has changed his mind: he recently stated that neither Earth nor the human race is doomed.
    Yes, melting sea ice around Greenland has recently opened up the fabled North West passage. And, yes, the years 2006 and 2007 have seen massive flooding in Europe. However, a quick dip into the records of the Royal Society – which ranked alongside Dr Lovelock as arch doomsters, before his change of mind – shows that dramatic fluctuations happened long before the infernal combustion engine began spewing out carbon dioxide.
    The year 1816 went down in history as the “year without a summer”, thanks to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia that veiled much of the world with dust, screening out the Sun. Yet in 1817, while still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, the Royal Society was so worried that 2,000 square leagues of sea ice around Greenland had disappeared within two years, and massive flooding was taking place in Germany, that its president wrote to the Admiralty advising of the necessity of an expedition to find out what was the source of this new heat. Perhaps, when similar things are happening 190 years later, the Royal Society should accept that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is unlikely to be the main – or only – driver of “global warming”.

  12. The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
    By most objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to male happiness.
    The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found examining multiple countries, datasets, and measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men.
    These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men. Our findings raise provocative questions about the contribution of the women’s movement to women’s welfare and about the legitimacy of using subjective well-being to assess broad social changes.
    bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Paradox%20of%20declining%20female%20happiness.pdf

  13. Elizabeth May Suicidal Over Harper Election
    “The election of Stephen Harper changed my life because I saw I was going to lose 20 years of my life’s work. … You’ve got a right-wing agenda that’s anti-environmental to an extent we’ve never seen,” she said. “You’re going to spend all of your time tearing your hair out and wanting to slit your wrists. So you might as well get into politics.”
    http://tinyurl.com/2ppxvu
    What IS she putting in that bread?

  15. “Bombardier has been subsidized by Canadian taxpayers over a great many decades and now they will sell to Americans — and only Americans — for 40 per cent less? That’s the reward we get?”
    “A soaring Canadian dollar and ongoing news of price disparity between cars sold in Canada and the United States has prompted 4 new car buyers to take matters to court.”
    Why would companies, such as Bombardier and Honda, GM, Nissan, Chrysler and others risk a backlash ?
    Why are companies, some Canadian, demanding that their US dealers not sell to Canadians ?
    Why are prices so much lower in the US ?
    Were prices always much lower in the US ? Just more obvious with parity ?
    A thought; If the companies allow the much cheaper items(from Ski Doos to Accords)to enter Canada, the price of all these items, already in Canada, will drop. A LOT !!
    Who will take the biggest bath if the items may be worth less than what is owing on them ? Leases are, in effect, also loans.
    But the big question is; Why are prices so much higher in Canada ??
    Good on Finance Minister Flaherty to raise this issue with the retailers.
    http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=03dd4bdd-269f-4215-bdff-c09a6006781b&k=80180
    http://thegarageblog.com/garage/canadians-launch-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-car-manufacturers/

  16. garth begs for money to finance election campaign..also,looking for ideas to present in the House..I made suggestion for him to thank PMSH for good job/leadership..wonder if that post will go thru,and waiting for response from the koolaid drinkin’sots that post over there.

  17. kingstonlad, come on, all the guys i know who smoke buy in that area. 12 bucks for 250 cigs. takes the crime out of smuggling.

  18. There is a must read in todays Toronto Sun…Lorrie Goldstein`s column regarding crime legislation.

  20. If it was just “old white guys” buying the smokes, I would not care. I would consider it an interesting form of tax protest. But the problem is the criminals(who also sell dope, weapons, etc)who are selling these smokes to children as young as 12. Premier McF@#$face the useless has done nothing to stop it, and it is criminal negligence as far as I am concerned. Watch out for a lawsuit filed by the health authorities in eastern Ontario against the provincial government. Should make for interesting reading.

  21. Whitehorse Daily Star says that a “surging Tweedsmuir Glacier” could reach and potentially dam the Alsek River.
    Global warming, anyone?

  23. Arbour attacks Harper on human rights
    http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/269224
    Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in, straight from her Love-In at the feet of Iran’s President. How nice.
    ____
    OTTAWA – Louise Arbour, the Canadian who leads the United Nations on human rights, attacked the Harper government today for failing to maintain Canada’s stature as a champion of individual rights and freedoms in the world.
    __________
    So many ironies here, I can’t even begin to bring them up. The one good thing is, I believe, that having publically criticized the government of the land, there is no way she can return to any office as a judge in CAnada. Is that not so??
    Canada’s judges have become a law unto themselves. We need to address this issue.

  24. Ron In Kelowna: the Canadian retailers always have a good excuse when we question them about price. However, I must admit, that as of lately, I am finding that the price gap on some items of interest to me (broad variety, actually!) is narrower than I thought before. The growing CDN$ makes it cheaper for both us and retailers to buy in the US!

  25. Louise, Arbour is just back from applauding Iran’s contempt for human rights, and approving its rejection of universal human rights and its focus on ‘cultural diversity’ or ‘We Do As We Wish’.
    She now has moved from praising Iran’s ‘non-selective’ actions in dealing with its citizens (ie, making decisions without reference to human rights)into condemning Canada’s focus on those universal human rights that she (and Iran) rejects.
    She said that,”There is a sense that Canada is moving away from its total commitment to multilateralism and is now, I think, advancing other forms of either national or regional alliances.”
    Now – what does this mean? Multilateralism? Since she, in Iran, supported their rejection of universal human rights and their support of states doing whatever they want with their citizens, including stoning and hanging for being ‘un-Iranian’ – what’s her point? What are these ‘other forms of nationa/regional alliances’?
    Or is her beef that Canada voted with the US?
    And, is her agenda with her Liberal friends – who are keen on defining Harper as a ‘bully’ (they’ve given up on the Hidden Agenda meme).
    Remember that the Liberals and NDP screamed at Harper for defending universal human rights in China – and said that he shouldn’t chastize China’s lack of human rights in public…it would hurt the economy. Never mind the people whose rights are ‘hurt’….

  26. From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb
    André Glucksmann
    Modern terrorism seeks to combine the annihilating power of Hiroshima with the nihilistic gospel of Auschwitz.
    With what measureless naivety has the twenty-first-century democratic citizen managed to be surprised when hate breaks down his door? He has—along with his father and his father’s father—witnessed, directly or indirectly, wars, murderous revolutions, and the genocides that were the last century’s specialty. How could he believe himself immune? “Not here, not me,” he told himself. But then, on September 11, 2001, Americans saw several thousand of their own assassinated, for no reason. There they were, unsuspecting, in their usual places, at work or at a café, white, black, and yellow, housewife and banker, when they suddenly realized that they were targets of an indiscriminate, merciless will to kill.
    A pitiless new day is dawning. …-
    http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_modern_terrorism.html

  27. Kittens make violence OK!
    Kittens are so cute. Even the psycho killer ones.
    Still, this image is one for the And-If-A-Conservative-Did-It file.
    Consider this cartoon from Liberal Lite:
    […]
    A high-powered rifle in the hands of someone who would like to kill a Conservative (Jim Flaherty? Stephen Harper?) over the decision to bring income trusts in line with other taxable investment vehicles.
    But since it is a kitten holding on to the sniper’s rifle, this is a cartoon?
    I didn’t realize it was that easy to avoid being accused of advocating violence. …-
    http://stevejanke.com/archives/244230.php

  28. I think that Louise Arbour is ill-informed about what exactly is being done by the Harper Government. I thought that Harper has been quite outspoken regarding human rights in China, for example, and has also shown support for human rights in Columbia. Harper’s outspoken support for Israel can also be argued in terms of human rights and freedom. I have suspected for quite some time that Arbour is quite partisan (someone suggested her name a while back as a wonderful “Liberal” candidate, so she is surely well known in Liberal circles. I feel that in making this type of partisan public critique on Canadian politics she is overstepping whatever mandate she has and undermining her credibility as a spokesperson for issues of justice.

  29. Kingstonlad- I’m one of those “old white guys” that purchase my tobacco products on the Six Nations reserve. I can purchase a carton of legitimatley manufactured cigarettes there for
    $29.00 a carton, whereas if I was to purchase them off-reserve, they would cost some $72.00
    The difference of course is all the various taxes levied by the Federal and Provincial Governments.
    Forgetting for a moment that they are cigarettes, how would you feel if you had to pay such a huge difference for something that you wanted, thanks to Government intervention?
    The McGuinty government’s blind rejection to
    common-sense and their desperate clinging to their form of social dogma is one of the main reasons for the proliferation of these smoke-shops.
    The folks that shop in these establishments are there for two reasons. One of couse, is to save money. The other, suprisingly enough in politically correct Ontario is because it’s a form of protest against ludicrous taxation.
    Consider it the Ontarian version of the Boston tea Party.

  31. “crack-up on al-Qaida in Iraq,”
    Attention Mohammed/Allah: Muslim murderers defeated.
    …-
    Bin Laden Sounds the Call of Defeat in Iraq
    By Andrew Cochran
    This new message from OBL is the second signal since early September that OBL smells and fears strategic defeat in Iraq. Look at Walid Phare’s September 10 post about the September 8 video, in which he noted “unease among wider circles of the usually sympathetic commentators” and “a chaos unseen before” on jihadist websites, in reaction to his 9/11 commemoration video. Quoting Walid: “So the first reason behind the tape was a pressing need to show The Commander in command, to underline that the struggle continues.” The quotes released thus far from this new audio include no boasts about America’s weakness, as were made by his henchman Zawahiri in his tape on January 5 of this year. Instead, OBL whines about laziness and division in the ranks. Leaders on the road to victory never issue such demoralizing warnings.
    This tape is the best confirmation of the crack-up on al-Qaida in Iraq, as reported here over the past month by Evan Kohlmann, and of the strategic turn of events in the Sunni triangle since the increase in U.S. troops and change in tactics. It’s a desperate warning of defeat by a hidden, scared leader who senses that the basket into which he put many of his eggs has almost slipped irretrievably from his fingers. …-
    http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/10/bin_laden_sounds_the_call_of_d.php#trackbacks

  32. From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb
    Modern terrorism seeks to combine the annihilating power of Hiroshima with the nihilistic gospel of Auschwitz.
    André Glucksmann
    Autumn 2007
    With what measureless naivety has the twenty-first-century democratic citizen managed to be surprised when hate breaks down his door? He has—along with his father and his father’s father—witnessed, directly or indirectly, wars, murderous revolutions, and the genocides that were the last century’s specialty. How could he believe himself immune? “Not here, not me,” he told himself. But then, on September 11, 2001, Americans saw several thousand of their own assassinated, for no reason. There they were, unsuspecting, in their usual places, at work or at a café, white, black, and yellow, housewife and banker, when they suddenly realized that they were targets of an indiscriminate, merciless will to kill.
    A pitiless new day is dawning. The powers of the inhuman and the efficacy of hatreds mutate dangerously. A generation that worked diligently to tame the threat of nuclear war finds itself driven toward a horizon more frightening to contemplate than the one it dreamed of avoiding. Now it must try again to think the unthinkable, to leave the era of the H-bomb and enter the time of the human bomb.
    Barely two generations separate us from the shock of Hiroshima, whose terrifying force we have tried over the decades to neutralize. At the time, overcome by the unprecedented event, Jean-Paul Sartre, along with many others, described a fundamental break in history: “The community that has made itself the custodian of the atomic bomb is above the natural realm, since it is responsible for life and death: it will now be necessary that each day, each minute, it consent to live.” Irreversibly endowed with the power to blow up the world, mankind became defined by its capacity for universal homicide, and thus for suicide. The previously unimaginable capacity to put an end to the human adventure remained the privilege first of a single nuclear power, then of two, and then of seven.
    But soon, people grew used to the new condition. Coexistence on the edge of the cliff, a balance of terror, seemed more and more reasonable. The prospect of mutual annihilation for the rival powers chilled bellicose passions. Five billion vaguely concerned men and women attended to their affairs and delegated—democratically or not—the ultimate care for their survival to a small number of political leaders. For half a century, we fashioned our peace, both external and internal, according to Sartre’s fragile axiom: “The atomic bomb is not available to just anyone; the crazy person [who unleashed Armageddon] would have to be a Hitler.”
    Great confusion understandably resulted when this certainty disintegrated before our eyes, exploded by human bombs in Manhattan. An annihilating power is available today, or will soon be available, to just about anyone; the destructive will of an enemy without borders, equivalent to Nazi dreams, targets civilians: this combination amounts to a do-it-yourself Hitler kit. How can one make sense of, how can one neutralize, a human bomb?
    The history of our last 100 years consists of a number of unexpected ruptures, of which September 11 is the most recent. Revelations so powerful as to rob us of breath have confronted us with the scorched face of a human condition too troubling, too overwhelming, to perceive during ordinary times. Rare but decisive moments of truth have short-circuited current opinions. Respected traditions have yielded to the greater strength of a searing realization. The events broke out like lightning in a calm sky, like the storm before the shipwreck.
    These poor metaphors inadequately represent the irresistible enthusiasm of August 1914, which plunged Belle Époque Europe—enlightened, unaware, and tranquil—into the abyss. The declaration of war, the unexpected zeal, the joyful mobilization on all sides—in the end, these overturned the material, economic, and social foundations of the old continent, wounding civilians in their flesh and in their spirit, shaking their convictions and their faith. But this amazing reversal of values came to light only after the fact, little by little. In 1915, Freud, among the first to describe it, unveiled the prodigious “disappointment” or “disillusion” of the war, a war that rejected “all the restrictions pledged in times of peace.” The “blind rage” that our civilizations unknowingly harbored “hurls down . . . whatever bars its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace after it is over.” The inventor of psychoanalysis detected at the heart of the human condition a “death wish,” burrowing silently beneath the pleasure principle, the musical and deceptive call of Eros.
    Four years later, the peace treaties were signed but nothing was settled. Those who insisted on worshiping at the altar of soporific right thinking—those who thought that conflict had become obsolete—were swept away in less than 20 years. “The asses!” whispered France’s prime minister, Édouard Daladier, after winning a plebiscite for saving the “peace” by backing down from Nazi Germany; he had expected—wanted—to lose. The upheaval of World War I had produced only partial truths; history would repeat its tragic warnings more harshly still.
    World War II was hardly over when the need to think through its horrors—Auschwitz, the atom bomb, millions dead—became pressing. Les Temps Modernes, the journal for European intellectuals after the war, set the tone for a whole generation, at least until disagreements between its founding editors, Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, tore it apart. Even in its first issue, in 1945, Merleau-Ponty showed scant respect for the sleepwalking intellectual elders who had guided his studies: “We knew that the concentration camps existed, that the Jews were persecuted, but these certainties belonged to the universe of thought. We did not yet live in the presence of the cruelty of death; we had never confronted the alternative of submitting to them or confronting them.” Sartre, a few pages removed, was no more sanguine: “We believed without proof that peace was the natural state and the substance of the universe, that war was only a temporary agitation on its surface. Today, we recognize our error: the end of war was merely the end of this war.”
    It is doubtful whether these authors’ writings and commitments after 1945 truly addressed the radicality of the existential problem that they raised here. Indeed, twice in one century, unprecedented conflicts drove a kind of questioning that turned out to be more important, more profound than the answers that intellectual elites dispensed to prove their innocence and to comfort fragile souls. The answers camouflaged the truth. The questioning, by contrast, reflected the true image—scrambled and torn—of man reduced to nothing.
    Western universities had for two centuries taken pride in responding in Enlightened terms to critical questions: What can one know? What must one do? For what may one hope? These were, according to Immanuel Kant, three different ways—learned, moral, and religious—to formulate the question of questions: What is man? After 1918, and still more after 1945, the idea of man became equivocal. In the dark light of mass graves that assumed an increasingly planetary scale, other questions took priority: What about the inhumanity of man? About what is it necessary to despair?
    The European conflict offered not just the truth of the man in uniform but that of man stripped naked—the truth of man purged of the illusions of guaranteed peace, whether a Roman or a modern peace, an internal or an external one. Terrible ordeals tear individuals from their false shelters and rose-colored dreams, summoning society to face the hardness of reality. In the best case, Aeschylus teaches, the lesson enables one to move from passion to reason, or, more precisely, from the experience of suffering to the knowledge of that experience. This tragic understanding consists of awareness of the human condition and of its limits.
    More often, though, one runs up against the limits of awareness. The worst of the storm has barely passed, and one is busy “moving on”—renovating dead-end roads, regilding the clocks of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. We turn away from reality and its truths, which are neither easy to live with nor pleasant to talk about. Before long, repression is complete.
    Will repression overtake us again as we get further from the revelation of 9/11? “Who is a terrorist?” we increasingly hear. The despot or invader says: Terrorists are all those who take part in irregular warfare, led by nonuniformed combatants against those in uniform. This was Napoleon’s definition as he engaged Spanish and Russian guerrillas; and the Nazis’ as they hunted down resistance movements.
    A better definition of terrorism is a deliberate attack by armed men on unarmed civilians. Terrorism is aggression against civilians as civilians, inevitably taken by surprise and defenseless. Whether the hostage-takers and killers of innocents are in uniform or not, or what kind of weapons they use—whether bombs or blades—does not change anything; neither does the fact that they may appeal to sublime ideals. The only thing that counts is the intention to wipe out random victims. The systematic resort to the car bomb, to suicide attacks, randomly killing as many passersby as possible, defines a specific style of engagement. When, after Saddam Hussein’s fall, terrorist attacks multiplied in Iraq, they spared no one, especially not Iraqis: schoolchildren in buses or on sidewalks, men and women at the market, the faithful at prayer.
    When the naive, the falsely naive, and the downright evil blur categories in support of their ideological prejudices and christen the killer of innocents a “resistance fighter,” more lucid minds disclose a different landscape. Consider an editorial published in a Lebanese paper on August 20, 2003, the day after a bomb-laden cement truck destroyed the United Nations’ center of operations in Baghdad: “Yesterday’s operation against the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations exemplifies this mentality of destruction. Expel all mediators. Banish every international organization. Let things collapse. Let electricity and water be cut off, and the pumping of oil cease. Let theft prevail. Let universities and schools close. Let businesses fail. Let civic life cease. And at the end of the day the occupation will fail. ‘No!’ protests Joseph Samara, ‘at the end of the road, there will be a catastrophe for Iraq. . . . The attack against the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad belongs to another world: it is a form of nihilism, of absurdity, and of chaos hiding behind fallacious slogans, which proves the convergence among those responsible for this action, their intellectual limitation and their criminal behavior.’ ”
    We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks—just a few minutes—the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.
    The business of terrorists, after all, is to terrorize—so said Lenin, an uncontested master in the field. The ultimate refinement lies in the inversion of responsibility. Operating instructions: I take hostages, I cut off their heads, I show them on video; those who beg for mercy must address themselves to their governments, who alone are to blame for my crimes: my hubris is their problem. The less the terrorist’s restraint, the more he causes fear and the sooner you will yield in tears, or so he believes.
    Recall the cries of hostage Nick Berg, agonizing as his torturers persisted laboriously over his bent body. “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it,” one of them informs us. “We did not kidnap to frighten those we hold,” another corrects him, “but to put pressure on the countries that help or might help the Americans. . . . It is not a good thing to decapitate, but it is a method that works. In a fight, Americans tremble. . . . Besides, I tried to negotiate an exchange of prisoners for Nick Berg. It was the Americans who refused. They are the ones truly responsible for his death.” Terrorist hubris bases its arguments on uncontrollable drives: I can’t help myself—give up! A similar strategy shows up on playgrounds: Stop me or I’ll do something terrible! The terrorist refines this rationale; he draws out his pleasure, prolongs death, cuts the throat slowly, goes beyond physical torture.
    To resurrect the dead, if only by video, in order to execute them a second time: this compulsion prolongs war infinitely from the other side of life. It is pure hatred. A traditional war, however savage, comes to an end. Terrorist war, given over to limitless fury, knows no cease-fire. For the demonstration of force it substitutes the demonstration of hatred, which, nourished by its own atrocities, becomes inextinguishable.
    Nowhere is this demonstration more visible than in Iraq. For a long time, the mental sin of Western armies was to dive into a new conflict as if they were fighting the previous war. This weakness now affects pundits and politicians, who reproach the U.S. for getting bogged down in “another Vietnam.” But Zarqawi was not Ho Chi Minh. No geopolitical fact permits us to impose the framework of the last great hot war of the cold war on the current situation in Iraq. Every month, thousands of Iraqis fall, indiscriminate victims of terror—over 500 peaceful Iraqi Yezidis on August 14 of this year, in the deadliest terrorist attack since September 11—while the total number of American soldiers killed in four years is approximately 3,600. In Iraq, then, what rages is a war of terror against civilians, not a war of independence against an occupying foreign army and its indigenous military supporters. Vietnam is far away; those who miss Woodstock forget that the world has changed in 40 years.
    What threatens Iraqi society is not Vietnamization but Somalization. Recall Operation Restore Hope, in which an international force, led by Americans, disembarked in Mogadishu in 1993, seeking to ensure the survival of a population that was starving and being massacred by rival clans. After losing 19 in a horrific trap, the GIs left. The rest is well known. An angry President Clinton swore “never again,” and a year later refused to intervene in Rwanda, where 5,000 blue helmets would have been enough to interrupt the genocide that wiped out as many as 1 million Tutsi in three months.
    The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various pretexts—religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology—commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria, Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians.
    Between 1945 and 1989, the war between Eastern and Western blocs was a cold one, in Europe as in North America. Everywhere else, however, there were outbreaks of revolution and counterrevolution, coups d’états and massacres. Never before were human societies so shaken as during that brief half-century, in which colonial empires crumbled, but in which, all too often, the uprisings, insurrections, and wars of liberation gave birth to new despotisms. Centuries-old regimes, customs, and bonds were destroyed. As a result of this world-historical earthquake, two-thirds of the globe’s population lost its bearings. These people can no longer live as before. Nor can they—yet, says the optimist—exist as tranquil citizens of Western-style liberal democracies.
    Across the world, breeding grounds have as a consequence formed for young and not-so-young warriors, who—uniformed or not—prove equally eager to conquer homes, women, and wealth, equally ready to use machine guns or mortars to take control of the countryside or to use car bombs or human bombs to dominate urban slums. Ambitious and unscrupulous forces readily exploit these breeding grounds, sponsoring diverse terrorist groups to gain power.
    The war unleashed this process in Iraq. Would it have been better, therefore, not to have overthrown Saddam Hussein and to have allowed him another decade to complete his horrible record of tortures, mutilations, and corpses—1 or 2 million victims in a quarter-century? The Iraqis, despite the threat of murder, have gone to the polls three times, en masse; they do not seem to regret the dictator’s fall. Should the GIs and their allies now withdraw, as in Somalia? Even some anti-American governments must cross their fingers against the possibility of abandoning the terrain to the beheaders.
    The fight to avoid the Somalization of the planet is just beginning, and it will probably dominate the twenty-first century. If they resist the sirens of isolationism, Americans will learn from their mistakes. Europe will either resolve to help them or abandon itself to the care of the petro-czar Vladimir Putin, who stands ready to police the old continent, while preaching antiterrorist terrorism, with his devastation of Chechnya as a case in point. The borderless challenge of emancipated warriors allows us little leisure for procrastination.
    Astrophysicists have found, wandering in the starry expanse, certain black holes. When faraway stars come into contact with them, the stars disappear, along with their planets, swallowed by bottomless darkness. From the beginning, human civilizations have existed alongside analogous moral abysses, which foreshadow an end of all things. According to tradition, such annihilation suggests a jealous and vengeful divinity, or malevolent demons.
    In their endeavor to understand the black holes that threaten societies, the inventors of Western philosophy, comparing them to natural cataclysms, earthquakes, volcanoes, and epidemics, refused to see in them a supernatural sanction or to deny the responsibility of mortals. If God is not a cause, the darkness that threatens to overtake humanity is human, irreducible to an impersonal fate. The destructive principle inheres in us, whether we know it or not—this is the persistent message of the tragedians. Hate moves like Thucydides’s plague, not a purely physiological condition but an essentially mental disorder, which takes over bodies, minds, and society. The idea of a contagion of hatred must be taken literally: hatred spreads hatred, an outbreak that inoculates itself against all who oppose it.
    Maybe one day, we will view the last century with nostalgia, even if it was dealt Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For today’s terrorism strives to mix these two ingredients into new cocktails of horror. During the cold war, the threat to man was dual: one, between two blocs, involved reciprocal annihilation; the other, terrorist, confined the savage extermination of civilian populations to the interior of each camp. Today, global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,” the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,” the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred.
    Imre Kertész was twice a survivor, once from the death camps and then again from Communism; saved by literature, he was Hungary’s first Nobel Prize winner. He writes: “Some day we should analyze the mass of resentments that bring the contemporary mind to scorn reason; we should undertake an intellectual history of the hatred of the intellect.” The various forms of racism, chauvinism, fanaticism, and the apparent rebirth of an aggression that was thought to be a thing of the past surprise us. Should we not be surprised at our surprise? The understandable but wrongheaded choice to sleep peacefully, whatever the price, puts us all in jeopardy.
    André Glucksmann is a French philosopher. His books include The Master Thinkers and, most recently, Une Rage d’Enfant. His article was translated from the French by Ralph C. Hancock and John C. Hancock.

  33. Tories turn tables, accuse Liberals of having database that invades privacy, too
    Liberal MPs use a constituent database that has some of the same invasive privacy capabilities as the maligned Conservative party system, according to a promotional web site for the software. …-
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/10/18/4586939-cp.html
    MSM has reported the above.
    However, MSM, the cowards, omits to mention blogger: Steve Janke, aka Angry in the Great White North.
    Janke broke the story; a victory for bloggers.
    Notice how the MSM weasily inserts the weasel word, “too”; they imply/assert that the Conservatives invade privacy; this is an unproven calumny/slander.
    MSM, prove your assertion. RSVP.
    This slander is : “By Bruce Cheadle, THE CANADIAN PRESS”; MSM, aka cheadling-Weasels.
    …-
    Election databases and Liberal accusations [updated] Comments: 47 …-
    http://stevejanke.com/archives/244120.php

  34. rattfuc – 5:41PM. AMEN,
    I don’t live near a reserve, maybe someday, but they haven’t claimed land near me as yet. It is ridiculous the taxes on cigarettes $20.00 versus $63.00. Guess we are talking $43.00 in taxes. I’ve been smoking 45years and I will quit when I say so. I’m fed up with government’s intrusion. So, I buy my smokes out of someone’s van. Not right – I hear some say. Well excuse me – when they tax your booze out of your expense account maybe then you will understand.
    A few years back I did all my shopping across border. Gas – cheaper, Groceries – cheaper, Furniture – cheaper, and cigarettes – cheaper. That when our dollar was 10 cents more. Can you guess what I’ll be doing this Christmas. Yep, cross border shopping. McGuinty is talking about raising the PST 2 cents. Any gift certificates I purchase will be in a US mall saving my kids PST and GST.
    We revolted some years ago and the Provincial government relented – we plan to do it again and have already started. Not very patriotic of me you say. Well tough, Charity begins right at home.

  36. Did Czarina/Commissar Arbour, she of the UN “Human Rights”, mention this:
    “Canada’s parliament has unanimously adopted a motion to give honorary citizenship to Burma’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.”
    Arbour is a sour, bitter, hag masquerading as a Librano$.
    Arbour mouths the left-socialist takkiyah: “tolerance and diversity”. Translation: intolerance and conformity by coercion; the shining path of socialism; the end result: the Gulag.
    …-
    UN human rights czar lashes Canada for vote against native rights
    OTTAWA – Canada’s vote against a United Nations declaration of aboriginal rights was an “astonishing” move for a country that claims to be a model of tolerance and diversity, says UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour. (canoe news)
    [Burma] Myanmar agrees to visit by UN rights official
    [Burma’s] Myanmar’s government has agreed to a visit by the UN’s human rights investigator, who has been barred from entering the military-ruled country since 2003, the United Nations said Monday. (canoe news)…-
    Canada’s parliament has unanimously adopted a motion to give honorary citizenship to Burma’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
    Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper says Ms Suu Kyi is one of the leading forces in the continuing struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.
    He says she is also the symbol of the Burmese desire for political freedom focusing international attention on the plight of her people.
    Mr Harper says because of these efforts Canada is awarding her honorary Canadian citizenship. …-
    http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/s2063038.htm

  42. Actually, this, by Mark Steyn is how Jean Chretien may have handled Adscam in a fourth term.
    Some journos let him get away with worse.
    [What would Chrétien have done? He’d have said, “Waal, da scam is da scam and, when you got da good scam, dat da scam. Me, I like da scam-and-eggs wid da home fries at da Auberge Grand-Mère every Sunday morning. And Aline, she always spray da pepper on it. Like Popeye say, I scam what I scam. Don’ make me give you da ol’ Shawiniscam handshake …” Etc., etc., until it all dribbled away into a fog of artfully constructed incoherence, and the heads of the last two journalists following the story exploded, and he won his fourth term.]MS

  43. RUMOUR: The Dion Liberals have an opposition day next week and they are planning to bring in a motion that they do not have confidence in the government and they want to bring ’em down.
    Garth Turner was letting slip today that there will be in election “in weeks” and if you read his recent blog posting it is pure unadulterated bravado. It is known that he is lobbying other Liberal MPs to join him and Dion is already on board.
    The REAL deadline for Dion is to have an election before the December 1st meeting of the 308 Liberal riding presidents where it is rumoured they are planning to oust Dion by convincing him to step aside.
    Insiders say this Dion ouster is being orchestrated from within the MP ranks. The only way he can avoid it is to force an election.
    They also don’t want Flaherty to have a good economic update or any more successes. They especially do not want another good news Harper budget. (Good news for Canadians is ALWAYS bad news for Liberals I guess).
    So, Garth Turner and Dion are frothing for personal survival and hatred of all things Harper to have us spend $300 million for an election Canadians don’t need or want.
    But when did Liberals ever put Canadians before their own survival?

  44. PM Harper announced his meeting two days before President Bush announced his meeting.
    Mao Stlong say: No egg loll for Halpel.
    …-
    Harper plans public meeting with Dalai Lama
    Previous PM [Librano$ AdScam Martin] skipped photo-ops to avoid offending China
    [Previous Librano$ PM AdScam Chretien refused meeting]
    When the Dalai Lama meets Stephen Harper in Ottawa next week, it will be the first time a Canadian prime minister agrees to meet the exiled Tibetan leader in public.
    Conservative Senator Consiglio Di Nino said that, unlike Paul Martin, the previous prime minister who would only agree to meet the Dalai Lama privately to avoid angering the Chinese government, Mr. Harper will allow cameras to record the moment. […]
    n 2004, Mr. Martin met the Dalai Lama at the home of Ottawa Roman Catholic archbishop Marcel Gervais in what was billed as a historic meeting after Jean Chrétien, his predecessor, refused such a meeting while he was prime minister. …-
    http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=277e44f9-515b-4427-9d2a-20683fb0a8ab

  46. Who swung the vote to Dion in the leadership race. Wasn’t it Kennedy and MHF. These two are going to run in a by-election. Will voters vote for them, when everyone (almost) knows Dion is a disaster as leader. Why elect his cohorts.

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