Reader Tips

Reader Tips 44 Comments

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s musical selection has a personal historic significance: when I first heard it, at the Edmonton Folk Festival, it was the only time in my life I’ve ever danced non-volitionally – as in, I didn’t even notice I was dancing until I was three feet in the air for the tenth time.
The twelve performers onstage in The Idan Raichel Project had been selected from a much larger group of seventy musicians, including Yemenis and Ethiopian Jews, brought together several years earlier by a brilliant young Israeli keyboardist named Idan Raichel for an ambitious recording project.
The brilliant contrapuntal energy – rhythmic and tonal – in the lower frequencies doesn’t come through in an online video, but hopefully the remarkable, electrifying spirit of the music will. Here then, without further ado, The Idan Raichel Project performs Back to Jerusalem.
The thread is open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

44 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Richard Fernandez:
    “It’s about money, money and more money. For a conference which was ostensibly about the soft songs of nature, the cooing sound of the whales and the primitive charms of nature piping in through a paneless window it sure got down to the nitty-gritty real fast. The translation from Chinese is approximately thus: ‘Quit the stalling Asgaard, or whatever your name is. Show me the money. Cash on the nail. If your wallet don’t talk, then start to walk.’
    “Copenhagen is shaking itself to pieces. Whatever the climate change movement may turn out to be, criminal conspiracies are typically held together by the prospect of dividing the loot. Up until the heist is consummated, a kind of brotherhood holds the perps together. But once the loot is in hand, but more especially if the loot comes up short, then the sidelong glances begin. Is this happening in Copenhagen? And as for the Left, why it’s about money too. The sound you hear in the streets isn’t necessarily about demonstrators bewailing the fate of the earth. It might also be the sound of environmentalists lamenting the fate of their jobs or people worrying about their carbon business. But don’t worry, they’ll get something — at the Western taxpayer’s expense.”

  2. Glad the cheap drugs wore off,EBD. Now,if the rest of the world with regards to AGW can wake up.

  4. Thanks EBD for both.
    Great music, and a great analysis of the wailing in Copenhagen.
    BTW…when is PMSH scheduled to be appear in Copenhagen? Since it is fizzling and ‘shaking iself to pieces’ perhaps he will speak up.

  6. The Washingon Post’s Anne Applebaum:
    “There is no nihilism like the nihilism of a 9-year-old. ‘Why should I bother,’ one of them recently demanded of me, when he was presented with the usual arguments in favor of doing homework: ‘By the time I’m grown up, the polar ice caps will have melted and everyone will have drowned.’
    “Watching the news from Copenhagen last weekend, it wasn’t hard to understand where he got that idea. Among the tens of thousands demonstrating outside the climate change summit, some were carrying giant clocks set at 10 minutes to midnight, indicating the imminent end of the world. Elsewhere, others staged a ‘resuscitation’ of planet Earth, symbolically represented by a large collapsing balloon. Near the conference center, an installation of skeletons standing knee-deep in water made a similar point, as did numerous melting ice sculptures and a melodramatic ‘die-in’ staged by protesters wearing white, ghost-like jumpsuits.
    “Danish police arrested about a thousand people on Saturday for smashing windows and burning cars, and on Sunday arrested 200 more (they were carrying gas masks and seem to have been planning to shut down the city harbor). Nevertheless, in the long run it is those peaceful demonstrators, the ones who say the end is nigh, who have the capacity to do the most psychological damage.”
    (h/t pelalusa)

  7. An excellent short excerpt from Ludwig von Mises’ monumental masterwork, Human Action.
    There is Money and Then There Are Money Substitutes
    Mises clearly explains the different kinds of money substitutes: money certificates (100% backed by money proper) and fiduciary media (the amount of substitute money that is in excess of actual reserves); the former causes credit expansion while the latter doesn’t.
    Gaining a better understanding of central banking and monetary policy has been my principal hobby for several months now. I have come to the conclusion that von Mises and Rothbard are absolutely correct: what is needed is (a) abolition of central banks AND (b) a 100% reserve gold money.
    Three recent reads I cannot recommend highly enough (all by Murray N. Rothbard and available from mises.org):
    – The Case Against the Fed
    – The Origins of the Federal Reserve
    – What Has Government Done to Our Money (with The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar)

  8. Here is Lord Monckton’s speech at this conference. He is naming names like Hansen, Jones et al and calling them liars and crooks. He is showing the way the corrupted data and their statements committed fraud. If he is wrong as he is stating this in a public forum he is subject to liable and slander charges but not one of these crooks and their lies that the left defend so vigorously has brought suit against Monckton, not one. Why is this? It is because he is stating the truth and they know it?
    http://www.cfact.tv/…/lord-monckton-on-climategate-at-the-2nd-international-climate-conference
    .

  9. Turbines not harmful, study finds – wind turbines can be annoying, but it’s not harmful to human health, or so says a study funded by the Canadian and American Wind Energy Association”. A likely story! They say the only distinctive noise of the turbines is the “swooshing” sound. Well I guess that’s better than the sound of “swishing”, if nothing else.

  10. Dave…exactly! They are hiding, cowering. Not a peep of self-defence from any of them.
    Lord Moncton is hitting hard.Great vids at cfact!
    I wonder how much Lord Moncton knows about ‘the whistleblower’?

  13. I know this isn’t supposed to be a chat site, but today I heard more “Merry Christmas-es” than I have in the past five years put together. I don’t think it’s a “Christian resurgence”, but more a cultural reaffirmation.
    At the school concert, there was an audience Q and A session. Nobody knew the Buddhist solstician celebration, and few people knew about Kwanzaa. (Don’t get me started on Kwanzaa). Interestingly, most people knew about Eid though.
    It was asked if people knew what Hannukah stands for. I said it was Hebrew for “Christmas”, but the person next to me didn’t laugh. (It’s “dedication”, or “consecration”)

  14. I know this isn’t supposed to be a chat site, but today I heard more “Merry Christmas-es” than I have in the past five years put together.
    Me too and that’s a good thing.
    Anybody else having a hard time getting Lord Moncton’s video to play or is it just overloaded with users?

  19. This short video of Lord Monckton chatting with climate protesters has probably been linked to a few times, but if anyone hasn’t seen it, be sure to watch. It’s a natural classic – pure comedy gold.

  20. David Warren on the exploitative mindset of the “scare tacticians”:
    “The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure, and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure, while themselves being on the take.”
    On the profound and inherent conflict of interest inherent in the vast rent-seeking operation:
    “The more any percipient reader pours through those ‘hacked’ documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting ‘the right results.’ This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.”
    Do read the whole thing.
    (h/t Warren Z)

  21. A good short excerpt from Ludwig von Mises’s monumental masterwork, Human Action, about money and money substitutes: money certificates (backed 100% by money proper) and fiduciary media (money substitutes in excess of reserves); the former do not create credit expansion, while the latter do.
    === http://mises.org/daily/3958 ===
    One of my main interests in recent months has been trying to better understand money, monetary policy and central banking. I’ve come to the conclusion that analagous to the separation of church and state we need a separation of money and state. Moreoever, I think we need to (a) abolish central banks and (b) return to a enhanced gold standard. I fear that no matter the putative ideological flavour of a government, unless we adopt these radical changes, there is ZERO prospect for reigning in Leviathan.
    If you’re interested in this subject, I cannot recommend highly enough the following three short books by Murray Rothbard which are all available at mises.org.
    – The Case Against the Fed
    – The Origins of the Federal Reserve
    – What Has Government Done to Our money and The Case for a 100% Percent Gold Dollar
    Even the inestimable George Will is ignorant of the role of the Federal Reserve, having recently retailed the propaganda that it was instituted to assure the stability of the dollar, whereas, in actual fact, this government-engineered banking cartel’s purpose was the precise opposite of this, namely, to INFLATE. Since 1913, $1 has dropped to 5 cents; since the last link to gold was severed in 1971, $1 has declined to 19 cents.

  22. Thanks to all for the excellent links tonight. I found particularly interesting the blog dispatch by Richard Fernandez of Pajamas Media. His summary of the conference can be summed up by these 5 simple words: It’s all about the money!
    One of the links lead me to a Climategate Document Database. I started scanning this page and picked at random a document to read. It was entitled “Mann uncertainty.doc”.
    As was pointed out by Roger L. Simon on the Pajamas Media website, 11 AP reporters were assigned to fact check Sarah Palin’s book. And just 5 were assigned to fact check the Climategate documents. That difference in numbers alone speaks volumes about media bias but here’s a question related to their competence: What scientific background did these reporters have?
    I VERY MUCH DOUBT that virtually ANY AP reporter would be able to make heads or tails of what’s contained in the document I referred to earlier. And I’ll bet you a box of Tim Hortons donuts that Elizabeth May wouldn’t be able to either. Yet we were told by all of these folks that there was nothing wrong or improper with the documents. How would they know???
    I would LOVE to see Lord Monckton or Tim Ball, on live TV, pull out one of the scientific documents at random and get the “climate change expert” to explain even a tiny bit of the science or math within. What a spectacle that would be!

  24. KevinB – it would be interesting on a log plot – and I bet even more scary as one would look out two years!

  25. Most every day I check my political YouTube channel to read the latest hate mail from the Looney Left. Tonight though there was a compliment about a Dennis Miller interview with Phelim McAleer that I had turned into a video.
    With the Copenhagen Conference imploding, I listened to it again in full. I must say that McAleer has a pretty good sense of humour.
    Enjoy!

  27. “*Last Exit to Utopia”
    O’narcissist to the rescue.
    The distressed AGW damsel is being rescued from “failure”.
    Hildabeast puts down the Red-Green carpet for O’s entrance from stage-left.
    …-
    “Dramatic American intervention brings climate deal closer
    The United States today pledged support for a $100billion annual climate protection fund in a move that could clinch a global deal and which came just as the Copenhagen summit appeared to be heading for failure.”
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6960211.ece
    …-
    “*Last Exit to Utopia”
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240504574585881108040134.html

  29. Lawfare from the Bench. Quid nunc?
    Do the judges don their woolsack before or after sitting on the bench? Do they wash their hands after sentencing?
    …-
    “Stephen Harper’s robed opposition
    If the Conservative Party of Canada has a protocol office, they should consider sending a thank-you card to Justice David Cole of the Ontario Court of Justice. Last month, he provided validation of a staple Conservative talking point: that certain members of the judiciary, when they want to be, can be a major obstacle to implementing criminal justice reform.
    In the middle of an otherwise rote piece in a Toronto-area newspaper about how Stephen Harper is just too gosh-darn mean to criminals, there appeared this remarkable passage: “Judges are skilled at devising creative ways to fight back against laws they believe may skew the system. For example, Judge Cole said the elimination of two-for-one pre-trial credit has prompted judges to begin talking openly about forcing trials to be held more quickly. He said Canadian judges may also start compensating by intentionally lowering sentences: ‘That appears to have been the experience in other jurisdictions where Draconian sentencing policies have been forced upon the judiciary.’ ”
    The passage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Neither Justice Cole nor the newspaper’s justice reporter, both of whom can be assumed to have at least a glancing familiarity with the role of judges in our constitutional democracy, saw anything striking in characterizing the proper task of the judiciary as “fighting back” against laws they don’t like.
    Nor do they find anything striking about a judge viewing duly enacted legislation as something being “forced upon” the judiciary — as if it were the judges who were being sent to jail.
    And judges won’t just be “fighting back” against Parliament — in order to make good on the threat of handing down “intentionally” lower sentences, they will need to ignore case-law precedent. Evidently, neither Parliament nor the previous decisions of judges themselves will be allowed to stand in the way of the determination of certain members of the judiciary to treat convicted criminals lightly.
    It is important to note that we are not talking about laws which are unconstitutional –“.
    http://www.nationalpost.com/toda…html? id=2349714

  30. The buses in Mississauga alternately flash their route and “Merry Christmas.”
    Posted by: Mississauga Matt at December 17, 2009 12:27 AM ”
    it’s called the good people individually take it upon themselves to fight back in spontaneous but mysteriously perfectly coordinated countermoves.
    and the Good Lord takes it all in with a ‘uh hum. I see ….’. it then becomes the realm of the caustic atheistic crowd to object and the vast apathetic majority think ‘chill out man it’s only a bus’.
    we just wrapped up (pun intended) a bus strike here in the biggest hick town in Canada. looks like the unit dressed up for the holidays (with the generic ‘best wishes’) will make the rounds in time after all:
    http://static.zooomr.com/images/445362_b411d7a3cb_o.jpg

  31. A Frightening Christmas wish from the United Nations
    A week to the day before Christmas Eve, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, Special Adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General on Pandemic Influenza, will address a virtual press briefing on Pandemic (H1N1).
    Commonsense states HIN1 is hype. Politicians elected as World leaders would never have holed up in one place if there was even the slightest danger of them coming home with Swine Flu.
    http://godcountryusa.ning.com/group/alerts/forum/topics/a-frightening-christmas-wish?xg_source=activity

  32. Siobhan Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole, Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones
    Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations…
    Some of the most detailed evidence of intercepted feeds has been discovered in Iraq, but adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, according to people briefed on the matter…

  37. Since I live in Edmonton I have no need of a freezer. I just store my meat in my igloo, year round.

  38. uhuh; seems the nordic hottie isn’t interested in being brushed aside and bought off:
    http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Golf/PGA/2009/12/16/12179506-qmi.html
    ….seems those breathtaking blondes from the northern latitudes are not to be trifled with or cheated on. you go girl. apple, tree, #1 book title on tiger’s xmas wish list: ‘avoiding sport figure groupies for dummies’.
    #2 title: ‘dealing with an irreconcilably miffed missus post-infidelity-scandal for dummies’.

  39. Yeah right, curious_george, it’s great to know that “breathtaking blondes from northern latitudes” are as willing as anyone else to play the money-grubbing victim.
    An opinion columnist – I don’t remember who it was – noted quite correctly that if Ms. Nordegren had cheated on Woods, and then he attacked her with a golf club and smashed her car windows in, the news coverage wouldn’t only be about Ms. Nordegren’s infidelities.
    No one should shed a tear for Tiger Woods regarding his financial situation, but it’s appalling – legally speaking – that a woman who married a famous athlete, and lived in incredible luxury for several years is entitled to half of everything he owns – $500m, in some estimates. The fact that the pre-nup amount of $50m is considered an insult to her as a woman shows that the whole “victim” shtick has taken the ball and run out of bounds and then out of the stadium.

  40. William M. Briggs at Pajamas Media:
    “A lefty organization sent me an indignant press release stating that the Danish police have ‘aggressed on protesters outside the Bella Center.’ By this, they mean that the agitants, who moments before were shouting ‘Push the police away!,’ were physically held back from entering an already crowded room.
    “It is true that it is depressing to see the heretofore useful word aggression turned into another mouth-numbing verb. But it’s heartening to hear that a group of professional whiners were told ‘No.’ True to form, when turned away the perpetually petulant started screaming ‘Rights!,’ by which they mean, as they always do, ‘My desires, not yours.’”

  41. Aaron P. Jackson, Moving Beyond Manoeuvre: A Conceptual Coming-of-Age for the Australian and Canadian Armies
    (Pp. 85-100)
    All countries that have contributed forces to the coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq have also had to adjust to the nature of conflict in these theatres. In some cases, adjustments have been quite innovative. This article examines two such cases—the Australian and Canadian armies. Even prior to the War on Terror, the Australian and Canadian armies were similarly sized and shared a similar history, and both armies have responded similarly to operations in the War on Terror. What is surprising is that adjusting to the recent operations has brought about unique conceptual innovations within both armies…

  42. O’narcissist report: Leftists desert O'”Con man”.
    “*This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.”
    …-
    “Con man Obama [Another Lefty Jumps Ship]
    Salt Lake Trbinune ^ | 12/16/09 | Bob Brister
    President Barack Obama is on a path to becoming the greatest con man in history. He conned the Nobel Committee into awarding him the Peace Prize, even as he continues military occupations and escalates and expands his wars. He conned many peace advocates into voting for him, but now he continues President George W. Bush’s military policies. He conned many environmental activists into voting for him, but now his administration promotes nuclear power, persecutes endangered species such as wolves, and promotes an ineffectual, loophole-filled “cap and trade” carbon scheme. He conned many health reform advocates into voting for him, but now he pushes policies that would further entrench private health insurance corporations and has taken single-payer health insurance off the table.
    Now that Obama has established himself as part of the problem, will his political base be conned again in 2012?
    Bob Brister
    Salt Lake City”
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2409797/posts
    *O’narcissist:
    http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections

  43. Harper skips Canada’s climate conference speech to dine with leaders
    http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/091217/national/climate_where_s_harper
    Apparently, Prime Minister Stephen Harper left his Minister of the Environment to give a speech to delegates at the Copenhagen climate talks, alongside world leaders Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while he hobnobbed with OTHER world leaders at a dinner hosted by the Queen of Denmark — and, according to the Canadian Press this is somehow suspect — at least to judge by the headline.
    Why does a Prime Minister have Ministers if not to ask them to take their place when another important event is happening? Last time I looked, no world leader had the ability to bilocate — OK, OK, maybe the Obamessiah.
    I can only imagine what the headline would be if PMSH had decided not to go to the dinner hosted by the Queen of Denmark: Harper snubs Queen of Denmark.

  44. Re PMSH skipping the speeches at the Climate Conference: I suspect he was sending a message about his feelings toward the AGW shysters. At least, that’s what I’m hoping he was doing.
    I also hope he had a good visit with the Queen.

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