Reader Tips

we are legion.

Vit

Symbiotic, communicative, intelligent and vibrant....and that gal wasn't half bad either.

Then again I thought Horton Hears a Who was brilliant.

Syncro

Lots of excitement out here in Vancouver re the NHL playoffs. I don't quite understand how the match-ups work but my friend wants Colorado to beat St. Louis tomorrow.

Barack Obama flies a pizza chef 860 miles to make dinner for him and his colleagues.

I wonder what Captain Richard Phillips is eating aboard that lifeboat?

Happy Easter:

'His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. 4 And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here; for he has risen, as he said.'

Cheers

Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group "True North"

Canuck fan - your friend is hoping Blues come in 8th and play Sharks in round 1. Hope Blues win - playing well. I miss my Jets.

Yesterdays "Resenting the Rich" was interesting. The left and right are battling hard for their entitlements.

Intead of left verse right it should be wrong verse right. Neither side can say they are entirely right.

I'm a strong righty but have to admit there are some flaws within my camp. Too many on both sides laying excessive entitlement claims too what they deserve. Try and tell either camp that and you get an earful.

I generate revenue too but set my price points with reasonable margins so as not to gouge only because I can. My labour is aware of my cost and profit. I bonus on volume increase - they are happy and feel part of the team

The "big three" labour force and others on the left are just as guilty of gouging as the right wingers so prominent in the news today.

I remember a prominent Canuck right winger (T. Linden from Pincher Creek Alberta) was so far left he was in the upper deck at GM place. Good thing his camp lost and settled on a floating salary cap tied to revenue. What a novel concept.

NHL was in recession at that time but eventually figured it out and doing well now - like we will.

Played left wing all my life - hate the hockey analogy for political sides. Did the Liberals ever play center ice? - Always tried but would be cut from any of my teams.

Jet Fan

Go to www.canadianimmigrants.ca and click on Top 25 Canadian Immigrants to see profiles and vote for 3 choices. Ujjal Dosanjh doesn't seem to have a testimonial, but he is one of the contenders as is 'I am Adrienne Clarkson, and you are not".

I picked 3 others who seemed to be some of the few not obviously in the multicultural industry and seemed hard-working and deserving. My picks were Lorelai and Rosalind Sliverman (twins!) who seemed for some reason to be the only Jews on the list as far as I could tell, Wendy Yuan and John Halani. There is an Irish guy who is an organizer of the Olympics who looks interesting too, but I am not keen on the Olympics.

You can win a $500 Visa Gift Card from RBC for voting, which makes me wonder about how seriously people will look at the profiles.

Bernard Goldberg: Liberal Media Bias Detector

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/bernard-goldberg-liberal-media-bias-detector/

“[The MSM's] demise will be the result of one too many self-inflicted wounds. Even if they are too clueless to understand that,” said Goldberg.

So the next time you read about another round of newspaper layoffs, consider the following. Folks like Goldberg insist news outlets are disrespecting roughly half their audiences with their consistent bias. That’s hardly a way to run a business, especially one dealing with devastating market forces brought on by the Internet.

"There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them." -

Charles Caleb Cotton

Happy Easter to all, whether it be a special religious observance for you or simply a special occasion to feed a chocolate addiction. Or both for that matter.

and in other news.....

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/04/11/polar.bear.attack/index.html

Toronto's long had a bad name, but not this kind of bad name:

"Toronto the rowdy"

Regarding taxing the "rich".

So, who in Canada would our resident trolls trust to this noble task? Mr dithers and his fleet of Liberian ships? Stephen Lewis and his $3000.00 suits and private schools? Iggy Pop, because of his deep knowledge and experience in all things economic? Zimbobrae, and his power corp brother and friends?

Thanks, but no thanks. Every time one of these "limousine liberals" fosters a "tax the rich" program upon us, the only people who get taxed are the hard working slobs who are at the lower end of the "top earners".

The day that I see the family compact paying 40% will be the day that I stop complaining.

But we all know that day will never come.

Why do you seek the Living amongst the dead for;

He is risen!

He is risen indeed.

Blessed Resurrection Sunday!

Written date: Feb. 26, 2008.

Poster comments:

"This is an amazingly prescient article, written in Feb 2008. The author looks at then candidate Obama through what is known about his wife and mother. Well BEFORE the financial meltdown, he concludes:

"Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.""

"Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public."
...-

"Feb 26, 2008

Obama's women reveal his secret
By Spengler

"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he

edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world's 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama's mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

Fred, thanks for the link to the Pyjama's media article re bias in the news. This jaw-dropper is from the comments:

Increase Mather:

Four years ago, a close friend who burned out in a Wall Street job took his PhD and several years teaching experience to find a university job. He taught part time at a large university in the midwest…when a job opened on their faculty he applied and was interviewed, but not chosen.

When he checked back with a friend on the committee, he was told frankly, that his qualifications were amazing…but others on the committee feared he might be a Republican…and they could not have one of those on campus.

The job went to a leftist, critical theorist. A female, with no real experience, but she had a newly minted PhD in…critical theory…whatever that is.

My friend finally found a job in the South.

Thanks for the quorum sensing video, vitruvius. It was really great.

Just a minor note; Princeton is not the only place where quorum sensing research is being carried out; it's worldwide.

Oh, and it isn't simply living organisms that communicate - the physical and chemical realms do as well.
Part of our problem with accepting that communication is basic to abiotic and biotic life, is that we, elite humans that we are, have confined the meaning of both communication and information to the symbolic form. That's where you set up a secondary system which 'references' the more basic direct things that are going on.

So, when your biological body requires food, you 'reference' this need with a symbol. Words. You say - 'let's eat'. Now, this capacity to reference direct chemical actions has given man an incredible power.

He can not only 'reference' his basic chemical and biological nature and thus control them but he can reference his mental activities. He can put into words and diagrams, his imagined scenarios. That means man can build the airplane, the bridge, and those new antibiotics.

It's a great power but it has its drawbacks. For example, we can all directly, without words, see that Obama bowed to the Saudi King. But the White House can set up a 'secondary reference' to this bow, and tell us: "No, that wasn't a bow; he was just leaning over with both hands to shake the short little King's hand". And when we cry, but "No, we don't see any two-handed shake; we see a bow"...we are told - "Who has the greater authority over The Secondary Reference System - you or the White House'? So..secondary reference systems are great..and not so great.

Back to bacteria. The fact that they operate, not as single individuals, but as collectives, and as exclusive collectives..well, bacteria are tribal. Compare their behaviour to human tribes. Many similarities - That focus on the power of the tribe, the commitment to unilateral unanalyzed behaviour. Tribes and bacteria don't examine their behaviour using any secondary referential system. They just..do it.

The key thing missing from human tribes is that inter-species common commnication system. I'm not sure if we have it...unless it is the economy.

But, that strategy of tricking the intRA-species communication of the tribe, by filtering in 'look-alike' but 'behave differently' anti-quorum sensing molecules. We do that as well when we insert fake terrorists into their camps who can then inform us of plans - but, frankly, this is too dangerous to be successful.

All in all, a great lecture. We have a lot to learn about the collective behaviour of bacteria, for our own basic tribal behaviour has many similarities.

Islam.
...-

"Latest Offerings from the Religion of Peace

2009.04.10 (Mogadishu, Somalia) - The 'Mujahideen Youth Movement' take out two civilians in a mortar attack.

2009.04.10 (Bannu, Pakistan) - Islamists bomb a tribal elder meeting, killing one member.

2009.04.10 (North Waziristan, Pakistan) - Two civilians are kidnapped and beheaded by Taliban militants.

2009.04.10 (Narathiwat, Thailand) - Mujahideen gunmen fire into a passenger train, killing one railway worker.

2009.04.10 (Basilan, Philippines) - Muslim terrorists attack a Christian village, killing one and kidnapping several young children.

2009.04.10 (Mosul, Iraq) - Five Americans are among seven murdered by a Fedayeen suicide bomber."
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

lindal - that example of a university refusing someone based on political alignment and selecting someone with less merit and qualifications but who fit with the department's politics, is common to the academic world.

The academic world does not operate, at least in the social sciences and humanities, on merit but on political alignment. This includes whether you 'fit into' the current pecking order of the department. They will not hire someone who will publish, innovate and 'show them up'.

maz2 - with regard to Obama, I'm not sure if he hates America. Or loves it. His only emotional commitment is to himself. As a narcissist, he can only be emotionally committed to himself. He is intellectually and emotionally empty; his only interest is in controlling how others behave to him.

But certainly, I think Michelle Obama hates America - and their 20 year committment to Wright's anti-Americanism shows that. And she hates individual success, the achievement of wealth and individual responsibility. She carries a huge grudge against America.

Her insistence that she felt like a visitor to America is due to her own behaviour not to reality, and this feeling of alienation underpins her influence on Obama who is equally a visitor to America, without commitment or respect or love for it. Her alienation and anger at others has also been revealed in the numerous actions of disrespect that both she and Obama have shown to foreign heads of state. She wishes to reduce the power of others because of her resentment - and Obama, as a narcissist, has that same agenda.

As for Obama's mother, her leftist leanings, her submersion into other cultures, her abandonment of her son, leaving her mother to raise him - all of that has left Obama with that drive to control and reduce the power of others.

Христос Воскрес!

Religious or secular, I wish a happy and blessed Easter to Kate, Vitruvius, EBD, and all posters and commentors (of all stripes)!

Now it's time to go eat that paska and kubasa...

*
"The United Nations, much like the bloated, pork-driven Canadian Senate...
is simply a way to reward your friends and political backers for a job well done."

"It's an anachronistic public-relations agency... that allows every
tin-pot dictator in the world to sugarcoat his bloodsoaked image."

*

So, Obama went to the marxist/black-liberationist hate-church for 20 years only at the behest of Michelle?
Michelle hates America (agreed!) but Barack doesn't?
C'mon ET. It's clear you're engaging in pretzel logic in order to maintain your false narrative that Obama is not a ideologue. A Marxist ideologue.

Obama clearly believes -- like one particular liberal/bolshie friend of mine -- that the US is the source of all evil in the world, not unlike Chomsky, the communist, or as he prefers to describe himself, "socialist libertarian". We can see this in ALL his foreign policy initiatives.

One more thing: do not underestimate Obama, which you do when you refer to him as a mere puppet. Be clear also, that as a Alinksyite-marxist operator he would consider this kind of underestimation a great asset! He is a great tactician. Consider: he has deliberately allowed the birth-certificate issue to percolate in order to cast a dark shadow on his conservative enemies who have been suckered into their own kind of trooferism.

THAT BIG WHITE WARM FURY THING BIT ME ....... (she said)

YUK!! ... GREEN LIBERALS FOR LUNCH AGAIN .... (Fury White said)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/5142098/Woman-survives-polar-bear-mauling-at-Berlin-Zoo.html

Mark steyn has a good and funny column at the oc register on the "distraction" of the pirates and others on BO.

me no dhimmi - sorry, but you've provided no data base or logic to convince me of the validity of your opinions. After all, as you know, just providing one's opinions can't make them valid. You consider Obama a Marxist. You've provided no data base.

Same with my opinions. You don't accept them. I think I've provided more data and logic than you have to substantiate them, but if you don't agree - that's that.

My data base for denying that Obama is, himself, intellectually committed to a particular ideology is that there is no data base! Nothing written; no evidence.

I do agree that he's a socialist but my opinion on that is that he is one, not for its political theory, but for its personal results. The operating infrastructure of Socialism puts people in his power because He is The Ruler, the elite Guardian, and the population is the hapless ignorant peasantry who must be manipulated in adulation of The Ruler.

I don't think that Obama hates or loves America. That in itself is worrisome for it means that he has no intellectual or emotional commitment to it. His emotions begin and end with himself. And he has no commitment to any intellectual ideology; his commitment, again, is personal power.

posted at BLY, Breaking - three pirates killed, one injured, Captain Richard Philips freed.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/12/somalia.pirates/index.html

"Captain Richard Philips freed".

Yeah but one former pirate hostage doesn't think this is the way to do it.

http://tinyurl.com/cvnwf8

Silly bunt.

Oh, and I'd say the good captain was rescued, not freed... MSM can't even get that right. :)

Taliban Jack Layton call your office - Your allies are out championing women's rights again
---------------------

A female provincial government official in Afghanistan who worked hard for women's rights was gunned down on Sunday during a weekend of violence that has rocked the south of the country.
[...]

Qari Yousef Ahmedi, a Taliban spokesperson, claimed responsibility for the killing.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090412/afghanistan_militants_090412/20090412?hub=TopStories

Thanks for the tip, Bruce. Despite the apologizing nature of the new president, it appears as though the Navy and Seals still know how to do their job. I am reminded of the hymn of the US Marines, that has the line "from the shores of Tripoli".

A little history follows:

"To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the Marine role in Thomas Jefferson's war against the Barbary pirates. The "Barbary coast" was a collection of Moslem mini-states on Africa's Mediterranean coast stretching from present day Algeria to present day Libya. The principal source of revenue for the Barbary states was attacking shipping in the Mediterranean, stealing their cargoes, and hold the crews for ransom or selling them into slavery.

The European powers of the day thought it cheaper to pay tribute to the Barbary states than to attack the pirates, and in 1784, the U.S. Congress followed suit. This was opposed by Mr. Jefferson, then the minister to France, who thought paying tribute would lead to larger demands. "It will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them," Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to the president of Yale University in 1786.

Thomas Jefferson favored forming an international coalition to fight the pirates, but the Europeans wouldn't go along. When he became president in 1801, Mr. Jefferson refused Tripoli's demands for an immediate payment of $225,000, whereupon the Pasha of Tripoli, Yussif Karamanli, declared war on the United States.

This turned out to be a big mistake for Mr. Karamanli. President Jefferson dispatched naval forces to the Mediterranean, and sent one of the most remarkable of American heroes, William Eaton, to Egypt to raise an army to attack Tripoli. The only Americans Captain Eaton had with him were seven Marines led by Lt. Presley O'Bannon.

Mr. Eaton led the seven Marines and a motley force of about 500 Arab and Greek mercenaries on a 500-mile trek across the Libyan desert to attack Tripoli's capital of Derna, which was captured on April 27, 1805 in large part because of the reckless courage displayed by Lt. O'Bannon and his Marines. The dress sword Marine officers carry is modeled on the Mameluke sword an Arab prince presented to Lt. O'Bannon after the victory.

American naval forces commanded by Commodore Edward Preble and Captain Stephen Decatur had successes against the other Barbary states. On June 5, 1805, the Pasha signed a surrender treaty and President Jefferson told Congress the threat posed by the Barbary pirates was at an end.

Seizures of U.S.-flagged ships on the high seas have been few and far between since Jefferson's time, thanks largely to his forceful response.

My, how things remain the same. Well done, Navy Seals.

Thanks for the tip, Bruce. Despite the apologizing nature of the new president, it appears as though the Navy and Seals still know how to do their job. I am reminded of the hymn of the US Marines, that has the line "from the shores of Tripoli".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d38xUsc-fyI&feature=related

A little history follows:

"To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the Marine role in Thomas Jefferson's war against the Barbary pirates. The "Barbary coast" was a collection of Moslem mini-states on Africa's Mediterranean coast stretching from present day Algeria to present day Libya. The principal source of revenue for the Barbary states was attacking shipping in the Mediterranean, stealing their cargoes, and hold the crews for ransom or selling them into slavery.

The European powers of the day thought it cheaper to pay tribute to the Barbary states than to attack the pirates, and in 1784, the U.S. Congress followed suit. This was opposed by Mr. Jefferson, then the minister to France, who thought paying tribute would lead to larger demands. "It will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them," Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to the president of Yale University in 1786.

Thomas Jefferson favored forming an international coalition to fight the pirates, but the Europeans wouldn't go along. When he became president in 1801, Mr. Jefferson refused Tripoli's demands for an immediate payment of $225,000, whereupon the Pasha of Tripoli, Yussif Karamanli, declared war on the United States.

This turned out to be a big mistake for Mr. Karamanli. President Jefferson dispatched naval forces to the Mediterranean, and sent one of the most remarkable of American heroes, William Eaton, to Egypt to raise an army to attack Tripoli. The only Americans Captain Eaton had with him were seven Marines led by Lt. Presley O'Bannon.

Mr. Eaton led the seven Marines and a motley force of about 500 Arab and Greek mercenaries on a 500-mile trek across the Libyan desert to attack Tripoli's capital of Derna, which was captured on April 27, 1805 in large part because of the reckless courage displayed by Lt. O'Bannon and his Marines. The dress sword Marine officers carry is modeled on the Mameluke sword an Arab prince presented to Lt. O'Bannon after the victory.

American naval forces commanded by Commodore Edward Preble and Captain Stephen Decatur had successes against the other Barbary states. On June 5, 1805, the Pasha signed a surrender treaty and President Jefferson told Congress the threat posed by the Barbary pirates was at an end.

Seizures of U.S.-flagged ships on the high seas have been few and far between since Jefferson's time, thanks largely to his forceful response.

My, how things remain the same. Well done, Navy Seals.

Obama's women reveal his secret - By Spengler

Pssst, ET: the secret is that he hates America; he got it in his mother's milk. Mum was a communist symphasizer, fellow traveler, america-hating anthropologist, so I presume she breast-fed!

I didn't realize that Obama Sr had a PhD from Harvard (economics, not Austrian school I'm sure!).

Database? Here's a backwards elimination test: can you think of anything Obama has said that is NOT consistent with a radical marxist view? Anything at all favourable about free markets, capitalism, entrepreneurship, wealth creation?

BTW, we agree mostly on Obama! I only disagree with your view that he isn't a radical marxist ideologue, that's all. And your seeing that Michelle hates America but being open to Obama NOT hating America, I find bewildering.

And in herein Woodstock Ontario, today, we are hoping for a miracle.

The safe return of Victoria Stafford.

The captain of the Alabama Maersk, Richard Phillips, has been rescued, apparently by US frogmen. Three pirates are reported to have been killed.

The response? Reporters in Somalia are now wondering if this will ESCALATE the violence by the pirates, who, up to now, have been "generous" with their hostages.

Please excuse me while I say "WTF?!?J!". If I had a ship running in those lanes today, I'd be equipping it with surface radar, 50 cal machine guns, and 24 hour watches. Shoot first and ask questions later would be SOP.

I'm overjoyed about the safe rescue of Richard Phillips. Clearly this goes well beyond just saving his life. [Hopefully] this will send a message to all terrorist pigs that they WILL suffer dramatic consequences if they mess around with Americans ... and other Westerners.

I just had to go check what the haters at the Daily Kos Had To Say about all of this.

First off, the opening piece is complete hypocrisy as is Obama. What happened to his pledge to "dialogue" with murderers and terrorists? When it comes down to it, his values are flatter than a French crepe.

But scroll down a little and you'll get some of the usual crap from the Left, very less than enthusiastic about saving this innocent man's life.

I wonder how many European-registered ships will now be flying the Stars and Stripes as they pass through the Gulf of Aden. Would that be the moral equivalent of traveling in Europe with a Canadian flag stitched to your backpack?

[Hopefully] this will send a message to all terrorists that they WILL suffer dramatic consequences if they mess around with Americans

Well, not to the 3 that had their fate, er, Sealed. One of the benefits of this turn of events is that no one needs to tell them not to do it again.

Hey look! A puppy!!!

Ted Kennedy gives Obamas a dog noted for it's swimming ability.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/green-puppy-in-obama-white-house.php

Interesting, but if you take a look at the BBC online, you would assume that the pirates had freed Capt. Phillips.
Nothing is said about the US Navy Seals, though there is "was freed in what appeared to be a swift firefight". Ahh. Fire fight between who and whom? Not a word.

CNN is quite specific: US Navy Seals shot and killed three pirates.

Toronto Star? There's that 'swift firefight' but no mention of who and whom.
Globe and Mail - nothing.

Fox News - a 'navy firefight'.

USAToday - Navy Seals.

me no dhimmi - again, there is no proof that Obama follows any intellectual ideology for its content. As I've said, he is 'with the socialists' only because socialism sets him up as an Elite Ruler, in control of others. Conservatives or Republicans reject elitism and focus on the powers and responsibilities of each individual. Obama can't operate with other individuals who have power and aren't in his control.

As for his wife hating America and Obama not - my view is that he follows her focus but that he, himself, is capable of emotional bonds - for and against - only, only when they refer directly to himself. He has no capacity for emotion unless it is directly related to himself.

Just watching the news briefing re the pirates and one would get the impression from the first few questions that the pirates were heroes and the navy, ship's captain and crew were evil for not giving in to the pirates demands.

Good reason that their readership/viewership is dropping rapidly.

Does anyone else see the sad irony of Ted Kennedy actually presenting a dog that is known for it's swimming ability?
And calling it Bo..
as in BO...
vanity, thy name is Obama.

That aside, I'm happy for Americans today as they can stand proud of their Navy once again, and no apologies needed.

Happy Resurrection Celebration to all!!!

ET: All people (no exceptions) espousing socialism/communism do so out of a quest for personal power/aggrandisement. They don't actually believe that the populace is better off with their programme. So Obama is no different in this respect, and therefore your argument that he doesn't adhere to an ideology because he's merely seeeking personal power, fails.

It's interesting that, pace the left (am I using pace here correctly?), there's no actual power in capitalism, except consumer power of course. And for that reason, capitalism is never really very popular with politicians, even Republican ones.

*
apparently the globe and mail... feels the pirate's pain...

"Jamac Habeb, a 30-year-old pirate, said that the
killing of the three pirates was... “a painful
experience.”

*

Here's something for the Y2Kyoto file, and the Twilight Zone for that matter...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090411.wbcmason11/BNStory/National/home

Reading this opinion piece made my poor head hurt.

Will Obama be dressing someone down over this?

Vaguely related.
To see how libertarianism (my own core political philosophy) can sometimes go a bit overboard (no pun intended) try this piece from the recent issue of the Freeman from FEE:

Somalia: Failed State, Economic Success?

You'll all get a kick out of this: Obama's World View

no, me no dhimmi - the problem with your argument that "All people (no exceptions) espousing socialism/communism do so out of a quest for personal power/aggrandisement. They don't actually believe that the populace is better off with their programme"....is that this isn't an argument. It's circular, a 'begging the question' fallacy.

It's just your unsubstantiated opinion. You provide no proof of your opinion. You cannot assert with any validity that everyone who believes in socialism/communism does so only for personal power. Some people may actually believe that a collectivist ideology is better for the collective and even, for the individual, because they feel that 'individualism' is a selfish focus. Read Plato, read Marx, St. Simon, the Frankfurt school with Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, read even Hobbes.

There IS power in capitalism, but it is not control over people but control over matter. Socialism attempts to control both people and material reality and locates this control in a small elite segment of the population. Capitalism controls material reality and the control is open to anyone who can control this material reality.

That's why socialists don't like capitalism; you have to work to achieve something. That is, there has to be that middle class of individual private workers.

In socialism, if you are a member of the elite - which means in a government funded job - you don't need to work that much; and if you are a member of the lower classes, you are supposedly provided for by the govt. BUT, the problem with socialism is that it, economically, can't suceed. It cannot produce surplus; it can't produce enough to support that dependent population. It requires a middle class of individual, private business people - and socialism rejects this class.

Blutech,
"Does anyone else see the sad irony of Ted Kennedy actually presenting a dog that is known for it's swimming ability?"

No, what's your point?
;)

ET: You're right, I over-did it with "everyone (no exceptions)".
Chris Hitchens HIMSELF admitted in a recent interview, abashedly I felt, that he DID (up to quite recently I think), believe that the the proletariat would RULE and that the state would wither away. To feel that believing this past, say, age 18, is pathetic! I vividly remember the son of a CBC on-air personality telling me when I was 16 that "deep in the heart of every socialist lies a desire for a Mercedes Benz" and me nodding furiously.

I still think however that you are wrong in suggesting that because a person is seeking personal power he can't be a ideologue, which is how I interpret your comments on this topic. And I think you do underestimate Obama (which would please him). Everything about his background strongly suggests to me that he is a marxist. Either that, or he's like those mafia accountants -- you know not mobsters as such, just associating for the thrill of it all.

me no dhimmi - you simply don't 'get it'. Don't turn statements around.

I did not say that because/if someone is seeking personal power, then he can't be an idealogue. You are setting up an If/Then causal relation and I did no such thing.

All I said was that Obama seeks personal power AND he is not an idealogue. Don't link the two in any kind of causal relationship.

Again, my view is that Obama is not a Marxist or a follower, intellectually, of any ideology. You still have not provided any proof that he is.

Nor do I underestimate him. Indeed, my view that he follows no ideology but only personal power means that I consider him far more dangerous than someone who actually, intellectually, believes in something higher than himself.

By the way, with regard to the G&M (and other coverage), the MSM is rapidly trying to link Obama to the rescue..i.e., "US special forces shot the pirates in an operation personally approved by President Obama". Nonsense.

This particular operation of shooting three pirates in the head was not given prior approval by the President; all he did, as CIC, was to approve 'any measure required to save Capt. Phillip's life'. That's hardly 'an operation personally approved'.

But, the MSM, and I refer here to the G&M spends a large part of its column on Obama. Not Phillips. Not the Navy Seals. Not the Navy. But Obama. So, from a bow to a Muslim King to acting as a sharpshooting Navy Seal - is there anything Obama cannot do?