28 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. [ DETROIT (Reuters) – Chrysler has disbanded a team of engineers dedicated to rushing a range of electric vehicles to showrooms and dropped ambitious sales targets for battery-powered cars set as it was sliding toward bankruptcy and seeking government aid.
    The move by Fiat SpA marks a major reversal for Chrysler, which had used its electric car program as part of the case for a $12.5 billion federal aid package.
    As late as August, Chrysler took $70 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a test fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans, vehicles now scrapped in the sweeping turnaround plan for Chrysler announced this week by Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne.
    Chrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said on Friday that an in-house team of electric car development engineers had been disbanded in favor of a more traditional organization. ] WUWT

  9. Vitruvius…..robots won’t replace, first they will emulate ‘goodness of man’s image’ , then they’ll re-master.
    (self-distracting question: can one not endorse own post before referring to itself in a third person?)

  10. You can’t emulate me, Xiat, so why should you be able to emulate others?
    But seriously, don’t discount the fundamental mechanisms of species organization. It may well be that some will be enamoured for some time by some new technologies, thus it has always been, yet it also remains the case that those things too come to pass by. In the end, then, are we humans not left with our fellow humans, pace the robot machines and robot gods we create?

  14. Globe and Mail, Monday. Another pseudo-intellectual who simply doesn’t get it: Ian Buruma, “professor of human rights” at Bard College, in New York state, and a not infrequent contributor to the Globe’s op-ed page.
    His topic today is what he claims is the decline of the social democratic idea since the fall of communism 20 years ago. He worries that, rather than the emergence of a society based on freedom and justice, “xenophobic populism is stalking Europe’s democracies” (which is an undeniable problem in some places), and “right-wing demagogues promise to protect ‘Western values’ from the Islamic hordes”. But given the horrors of 9/11, that’s not such a bad idea, and the behaviour of Muslims has unfortunately brought problems of its own in some places in Europe. And not all Muslims necessarily understand freedom and justice the way westerners do.
    Buruma writes, “Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many social democratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism”.
    First of all, here we have it straight up that “social justice” is a Marxist concept, or more correctly a fraudulent “anti-concept” since it is meaningless and unusable, as “justice” applies only to individual actions. He’s admitting that social democracy is rooted in Marxism, which is a good reason to avoid it like the plague. Unfortunately, contrary to his disingenuous allegation, many leftists were or are of the “useful idiot” variety who turned a blind eye to the slaughterhouses run by monsters like Mao Tse-Tung.
    Buruma writes that since 1989 the left has been dissipating its energies on identity politics, multiculturalism and Third World culture, thereby losing “an ideological basis for their idealism”. But anything based on a fraud like “social justice” can hardly be called idealistic. What it really is is a cynical means of seizing political power to the detriment of those who wish to maintain their standard of living and live a good life without having to worry about the depredations of the state.
    He concludes: “what’s needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on promoting global justice, equality and freedom. Mr. Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Gorbachev assisted in the end of an ideology that once offered hope and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision that can lead to progress – this time, we hope, without tyranny”.
    Don’t hold your breath. First of all, equality and freedom cannot exist together. The leftist ideology seemed to inspire hope temporarily in the way a fairy tale might do, because it derives from Plato, Kant and Hegel: one who wrote fantasies about the way he thought society should be run without regard to individuals, one whose goal was to destroy the human mind, and one fiction writer who was the L. Ron Hubbard of his day.
    The fundamental moral principle of a civilized society is that no person has the right to initiate the use of force on any other person. Either one upholds this rejection of coercion by the state or one does not. Laissez-faire capitalism is a system that bans the coercion of one person by another. “Social democracy” does not, therefore it inevitably leads to tyranny. Many authors have written about this process. All Buruma needs to do is to read them.

  15. Thanks, Vitruvius, for this mellow offering. The clashing cymbals at the beginning woke me up, which is OK, seeing as it’s still early morning and I need to wake up.
    Keith Jarrett looks like an animated gnome at the piano!
    Thanks, nv53, for your bracing analysis of yet another leftard’s shallow interpretation of recent history. Re social democracy inevitably leading to tyranny: In a sermon I heard on Sunday, this rang true and has stuck with me: “Tyrants dethrone G*d.”

  18. North Korean and South Korean navies exchange fire
    http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091110/korea_fire_091110/20091110?hub=TopStoriesV2
    The predictable and pleasing result is the North Koreans got their nose smashed without any damage to the South Koreans.
    In the air and on the sea, technology based warefare, the North will get its butt kicked really badly. Sadly, after the initial rocket barrage and the damage it causes, the poor northern soldiers will get blasted worse than the Iraqi’s in Kuwait.
    The dnger is and will remain those two or three nukes the North has. Where will they be used. I wouldnt assume it will be in Korea but possibly Japan or some US associated target.
    If we are all very luucky the North Korean miitary will realize they cannot win and they can negotiate a soft landing for themselves. I fear they are too brainwashed to see reality.

  19. The Glory of the Arctic: Jupi Angootealuk.
    “Jupi Angootealuk, 17, was stranded on the same ice floe as a polar bear and her two cubs.”
    “That’s the glory of the Arctic,” Ms. Griffin said. “A 17-year-old young man and he’s seasoned enough that he was able to save his own life – so very resilient.
    “It is amazing.”
    …-
    “Alone and adrift, teen refuses to give up
    As the ice heaved and cracked beneath him and temperatures dipped below -20, teen hunter persevered for two days before rescuers parachuted onto the floes”
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/alone-and-adrift-teen-refuses-to-give-up/article1357482/

  20. I do not know if iam more angry or more saddened at this Shamefull act of Vandalism before Remembrance Day.
    “Vandals Damage Fredericton Cenotaph”
    cbc.ca Nov.10/2009
    *Members of Frederictons Royal Canadian Legion are asking vandals who destroyed part of the city’s cenotaph to turn themselves in as the organization prepares for Remembrance Day…
    note i looked for this story on CTV did not find.

  22. Islam: a cult of cave dwellers.
    …-
    “Pissed Off Bear: 2, Islamic Terrorists: 0
    In Indian Kashmir, an Islamic terrorist leader, and one of his followers was killed by a black bear. Two other terrorists were wounded, but were able to flee to a nearby village. Although the terrorists were armed with assault rifles, the bear attacked quickly, and at night, and the men were unable to use their weapons in the restricted confines of the cave. Apparently the bear was going to use the cave to hibernate in, and was upset to find that the terrorists had moved in. The four terrorists thought the cave was abandoned, and a good place to hide out in.
    The Asiatic Black Bear is related to the American black bear, but is larger (up to 400 pounds for an older male), and is much more aggressive towards humans. The Asiatic bear has a more powerful jaw, and bigger claws. The smaller American black bear usually flees humans, although they have been known to attack and kill small children. In the Americas, and parts of Eurasia, the larger (half a ton) brown bear, especially the American Grizzly, is the most dangerous bear for humans. American brown bears are more aggressive towards humans than the Eurasian cousins. It is the black bear you have to be wary of in Eurasia.
    All black bears can climb trees, which makes it more difficult for fleeing humans. If travelling in woods that contain bears, the safest thing to do is take along someone you can outrun. The European black bears are vegetarians (unless very hungry, in which case they will eat meat), and a big pest to farmers located near forests (where black bears prefer to live). The black bear, of several types, is native all of Eurasia, from Europe to Japan.
    The black bear population in Kashmir has become more of a problem over the last twenty years, because the Indian police disarmed the rural Moslem population. Police are now called in to kill bears that become a nuisance. In the past, the rural folk would often hunt the Black Bears, because some of their body parts are very valuable (to folk medicine practitioners, especially in China.) Those parts could be worth $2,000 or more. The pelts are very warm, and Kashmir gets very cold in the Winter. It is believed that other Islamic terrorists have come to grief after encounters with black bears in the large forested areas that make up so much of Kashmir. But in these other cases, there were no survivors, and the bodies were never found. Several small groups of Islamic terrorists have simply disappeared in the hills, and the local black bears are the top predator in the area.”
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2382899/posts

  27. Islam:
    “[Muslim] Washington sniper to be executed”
    (nnw)
    “Bomb kills 24, wounds more than 100 in NW Pakistan
    The Associated Press”
    “The Beltway snipers and the Fort Hood killer: Peas in a jihad-inspired pod
    Michelle Malkin
    John Allen Muhammad is scheduled to be executed tomorrow for the Beltway-area sniper spree that left 10 innocent people dead in 2002.
    Several family members of the victims will attend.
    At the time of the murderous rampage that stretched over three, horror-filled weeks, I lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, where Muhammad and his young partner in crime, Lee Malvo, wreaked bloody havoc. I covered two main aspects of the story that were underplayed by the MSM–Lee Malvo’s illegal alien catch-and-release story and Nation of Islam convert Muhammad and Malvo’s Muslim hate-mongering. Snide MSM’ers and the CAIR propagandists attacked those of who called these thugs what they are: terrorists.
    The parallels with the Fort Hood case — jihad-inspired killers, media whitewash — are striking. They’re the parallels you can’t talk about without being labeled a bigot, racist, or “extremist.”
    A reminder of what Muhammad and Malvo plotted:
    Malvo testified that Muhammad, driven by hatred of America because of its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy” and his belief that “the white man is the devil”, planned to kill six whites a day for 30 days.
    Malvo alleged that Muhammad had said: “We are going to go to the Washington DC area and we are going to terrorise these people.”
    They then intended to move to Baltimore for stage two of their campaign, to shoot a policeman and then blow up explosives at his funeral.
    More explosives would target the ambulances that would then rush to the funeral. Another plan to kill three busloads of schoolchildren was thwarted because the pair were arrested when Malvo fell asleep while keeping watch at a Maryland petrol station.
    Muhammad’s ultimate plan, Malvo testified, was to indoctrinate 140 young homeless men at a Canada compound who would “shut things down” in cities across America, unless they received £5 million.
    And what kind of indoctrination would Muhammad and Malvo’s army have received to prepare them for their terrorist assaults on American cities? The jailhouse drawings of Malvo are worth a thousands words. I’ve dug them up again from the Wayback Machine to refresh your memories:”
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2383127/posts

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