Reader Tips

Reader Tips 38 Comments

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
Tonight’s selection is a light-hearted paean of sorts to the quotidian pleasures of long-distance domestic bus travel. Massachusetts native Jonathan Richman paints a picture, in short strokes, of the on-the-ground American expanse and the motley group of strangers who find themselves barreling down the highway together for a moment in time before disembarking, at various announced stops, to persevere with their unknown lives. We’re talking drunks, wailing infants, welfare moms, grit, rolling pop cans on the floor, unpleasant smells – and he likes it. Here it is: Richman’s live performance of You’re Crazy For Taking The Bus.
SDA Readers and visitors are invited, as always, to provide links to any interesting blog posts, news items, essays, ephemera or interesting tidbits you feel might be of interest to others.

38 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Ryan Mauro, in FrontPage Magazine:
    “As widely reported, Venezuela supports the Marxist narco-terrorist group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, common referred to as FARC. This group has been found to be working with Al Qaeda drug traffickers in West Africa…”
    “’All of the aircraft seizures that have been made in West Africa, and we’ve made about a half a dozen of them, had departed from Venezuela. If you look at the range and refueling requirements, that’s the place you have to fly from,’ Jay Bergman, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s director for South America’s Andean region told MSNBC.com.
    “Venezuela has become the number one supplier of cocaine to the U.S., Spain, and Colombia, with the amount increasing by four times between 2004 and 2007. Over half of the cocaine in the United Kingdom, and possibly as high as two-thirds, arrives via Venezuela. Since Chavez has come to power, the number of drug-related arrests in Venezuela has fallen dramatically, at one point to less than one-tenth of the number before he came to power….”
    Later,
    “On January 21, 2008…” (during the Bush Administration) “….the White House’s drug czar dismissed the notion that the drug trafficking in Venezuela was not necessarily a government enterprise.
    “”Where are the big seizures, where are the big arrests of individuals who are at least logistical coordinators? When it’s being launched from controlled airports and seaports, where are the arrests of corrupt officials? At some point here, this is tantamount to collusion,’ he said.”

  3. Re: You’re Crazy for taking the Bus! Not you best piece Vit!!
    Re: Haitian earthquake:
    Was Wiebo Ludwing in Haiti??

  7. The Breaking of Nations provides an excellent summary of the destruction of national sovereignty in Europe.
    Europe — the Europe of free and independent nations — is no more. Sovereignty is all but dead there, and a collective behemoth, tellingly referred to as the “European soviet” by Mikhail Gorbachev, now straddles the continent, ushering in a new tyranny for the 21st century. With the unanimous (and highly undemocratic) ratification of the infamous Lisbon Treaty on November 3, 2009, the European Union has achieved a transfer of authority that even the most aggressive military conquests could not. Even the German Anschluss can’t compare to this unified surrender of freedom by stargazing Europeans.
    And get this:
    The degradation of liberty has already begun. Lisbon comes complete with a European justice system, replacing centuries of Anglo-Saxon common law with the Code Napoleon — i.e., guilty until proven innocent. European courts can now kidnap innocent British citizens to stand trial in foreign lands by way of the new European Arrest Warrant (EAW). So far, over two hundred Britons have been arrested under the EAW, and 101 have been extradited.

  8. Can news from UK really create a feeling of sympathy anymore? They orchestrated their own demise when they surrendered the guns. Tough luck, suck it up.

  9. Hugo Rifkind, in the Spectator:
    “In a fantastic article in the Atlanticist last year, the American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg took a comprehensive look at post-9/11 airport security. Granted, anybody called Jeffrey Goldberg is going to have a different experience than somebody called, say Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, but his findings, nonetheless, were astonishing. Goldberg passed security with fake boarding passes, so as to illustrate the fallibility of no-fly lists. He boarded planes in a fake plastic beer belly full of liquid. He carried penknives. When his hand luggage was searched, it was stuffed full of matchbooks from hotels in Beirut and a Hezbollah flag featuring a slogan in Arabic and a logo of a man clutching an AK-47. Eventually, he was allowed to board a flight to Washington with no photo ID at all, while wearing a T-shirt sporting the legend ‘OSAMA BIN LADEN, HERO OF ISLAM’. Think of him next time you fly to the US, when they confiscate your nail clippers and your Highland Spring.”

  10. tonight’s musical selection… bravo!
    something outside of the radio… but not fingernails on chalkboard.
    EBD, I’m starting to think the gig may be up for Hugo, and not for anything so… unsavory as the international drug trade. Hugo couldn’t care less for the opinion of the other countries of the world, but when the lights/air conditioning go out in April because there’s nothing behind the dam to move the turbines, and then the electricity that powers the Maricaibo basin oil production disappears, the next revolution will start. Yes, I know I’m the millionth person to guess this occurrence.
    The dry season has just started in Venezuela, the water level in the Guri Reservoir that supplies +70% of the country’s electricity is at minimal levels, and country wide rolling blackouts for 4 hours at a stretch are expected until sufficient rains fall.. that’s expected in april/may, but has it been a normal year for weather?
    Did I mention the election this fall? jajaja.
    http://caracasgringo.wordpress.com/ … he isn’t painting a pretty picture.

  11. Thanks for the link to that blog, Marc – it’s a great go-to resource for informed, detailed, first-hand information on what’s happening in Venezuela.
    Good find. Cheers!

  12. Thanks for the vid, EBD. I saw him perform that song in Edmonton at the old media club, and the song’s been in my head ever since. He was wearing the same clothes too. He puts on a very engaging show, and I thank you for reminding me of it.

  13. You’re welcome, Jimbo, glad you liked it. I saw him live a couple of times too; I found him roundly amusing and really, erm, present. Mind you, I did notice a couple of people with no sense of humour, or wonder, being kind of angry at him.

  14. “To be perfectly blunt about it, The Beaver was an impediment on the Internet. People were literally writing us and saying, ‘We can’t get your e-newsletter because it’s being spam-filtered out, can you change the title of the heading?’ … There were some really unfortunate but practical reasons why The Beaver couldn’t be the universal brand. That’s the factor why it was a deterrent — particularly amongst women and people under the age of 45. Unfortunately, sometimes words take on an identity that wasn’t intended in 1920, when it was all about the fur trade.”
    — Deborah Morrison, president of Canada’s National History Society, explains why The Beaver, Canada’s second-oldest history magazine has decided to change its name to the very straightforward and respectable Canada’s History.
    http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=2430440

  16. Fritz, I’m having a bit of a chuckle here over the renaming of The Beaver.
    15-20 years ago, I took my younger daughter on a hike to a glacier near Nelson BC. Not being a outdoor type, I approved her decision to drink some water out of a stream en route.
    Anyway, long story short, she got very sick and upon our return to Vancouver was diagnosed with Beaver Fever. On a follow up doctor’s appointment, when I returned from the loo, she was sitting there, in the outer waiting room, mischievously reading The Beaver which she held aloft to cover her face. We’ve been chuckling about it off and on ever since.
    Up to then, I had never heard of the publication, being as much an adept in Canadian history as I am in the great outdoors.

  18. This is worth a read from FP. It relates to CARP, an organization supposed to lobby for better treatment of Seniors from Government. The Harper Government, as all know, has been especially benevolent to Retirees with pension income splitting etc. But the CARP Magazine, Zoomer seems bent on making Jack Layton poster boy and sported a front cover photo of Iggy last spring. This is an article in FP 12 Jan., page FP11.
    http://tinyurl.com/yjfd42w

  19. I have to admit I’ve never read the Beaver and was barely aware it existed. I came across the item as the featured quote in the daily e-newsletter Good Morning Silicon Valley. It’s nice to know the good people of nerd central are so concerned with Canadian history.

  20. Thomas Sowell writes about his personal experiences with the airport security in Israel – a nation with a one-hundred percent success rate in preventing terrorist attacks on its planes:
    “Probably the country with the strongest security checks for airline passengers— and the strongest reason for such checks— is Israel. Israel profiles. I have been to Israel more than once and it is clear that they profile.
    “Fortunately, my wife and I obviously don’t fit their profile, whatever that may be. Others who have been to Israel are amazed when I tell them that we have gone through Israeli security four times and they have never opened our luggage.
    “That is all the more surprising, since we take a lot of luggage. We have stopped in Israel while on trips completely around the world, including countries both above and below the equator, so we had to have clothing for hot weather and cold weather, since the seasons are the opposite in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, I carry a lot of photographic equipment in a large, separate piece of luggage.
    “In short, our luggage could carry enough explosives to blow up any building in the country.
    “But, whatever their security system and whatever their profile, they didn’t seem to want to waste any time on us.”

  21. The longest (I also think the only … outside of local service) bus trip I took was in 1972 from The Pas to Edmonton on a Greyhound. Google maps says that it would take between 12-15 hours by car … I think it took close to 24 hours.
    Met a nice girl from somewhere who was going to the U of A (if I wasn’t going back for the same reason, I would have lied). Anyway, about 16 hours of effort didn’t have the outcome I had worked for … on the other hand, didn’t cost me anything to waste wasted time.

  23. Weston(Toronto Sun) remarks on the PM’s fast action in wake of the Haitian Disaster.
    also ctv.ca National News Bob Fife has a report at the 7:35 mark on this, reporting on the PM’s swift actions.
    Taber yesterday reported that many involved from Cabinet & PM’s office have been going with very little sleep if any to cordinate Canada’s quick response.

  24. (NYT warning) Ethan Watters, The Americanization of Mental Illness
    …We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
    This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing…

  25. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies
    or cold weather.

  26. http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100114/NEWS/1140319
    “A former chief United Nations weapons inspector is accused of contacting what he thought was a 15-year-old girl in an Internet chat room, engaging in a sexual conversation and showing himself …..on a web camera.
    Scott Ritter of Delmar, N.Y., who served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-98 and who was an outspoken critic of the second Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq, is accused of contacting what turned out to be a Barrett Township police officer posing undercover as a teen girl.”

  29. “Jean Driven to Tears Over Earthquake” (cfra.com)
    ” The Haiti quake must not be dismissed as an ‘act of God’
    The Guardian – ‎41 minutes ago‎
    This was foreseeable.”
    …-
    “Possibilty of Earthquake in Port-au-Prince?
    Oct 11, 2008
    A recent article in Haiti’s Le Matin newspaper has quoted 65 year old geologist and former professor at the Geological Institute of Havana, Patrick Charles, as stating that “conditions are ripe for major seismic activity in Port-au-Prince. The inhabitants of the Haitian capital need to prepare themselves for an event which will inevitably occur…” According to him, the danger is imminent. He ads “Thank God that science has provided instruments that help predict these types of events and show how we have arrived at these conclusions.”
    According to Patrick Charles, Port-au-Prince is traversed by a large fault which is part of the Enriquillo Fault Zone. The fault starts in Petionville and follows the Southern Peninsula ending at Tiburon. In 1751 and 1771, this town was completely destroyed by an earthquake. As proof to his claims, he referred to recent tremors that have occurred in Petionville, Delmas, Croix des Bouquets, and La Plaine. Minor tremors such as these usually signal a larger earthquake to come.
    According to Patrick Charles, Port-au-Prince is traversed by a large fault which is part of the Enriquillo Fault Zone. The fault starts in Petionville and follows the Southern Peninsula ending at Tiburon. In 1751 and 1771, this town was completely destroyed by an earthquake. As proof to his claims, he referred to recent tremors that have occurred in Petionville, Delmas, Croix des Bouquets, and La Plaine. Minor tremors such as these usually signal a larger earthquake to come.
    Haiti is no stranger to large quakes with the destruction of Palais Sans Souci near the Citadelle in 1842. It has also been 200 years since any major seismic activity has occurred in Port-au-Prince. This means that the level of built up stress and energy in the earth could one day be released resulting in an earthquake measuring 7.2 or more on the Richter Scale. This would be an event of catastrophic proportions in a city with loose building codes, and an abundance of shanty-towns built in ravines and other undesirable locations. Even the super-rich may not be immune as many own homes with great views, but precariously perched on the mountainsides above Petionville, on ground which is also susceptible to landslides.
    Although city officials often discuss this, it is noted that no measures have been put into place to address the situation. Mr. Charles mentions the following devastating scenarios: A giant tsunami reaching all the way to Lake Azuéi (aka Étang Saumâtre) flooding La Plaine, and the complete destruction of Morne l’Hopital which is currently dotted with flimsy shantytowns. If we thought the recent back-to-back hurricanes were devastating, they surely will pale in comparison to a major earthquake in the densely populated Haitian capital.
    Is this all scientific rhetoric, or something that Haitian officials should take seriously?
    Participate in the poll and say what you want. Di sa’w vle!”
    http://www.haitixchange.com/index.php/hx/Articles/possibilty-of-earthquake-in-port-au-prince/

  30. California set to redraw its low carbon fuel standards to include indirect land use.
    For example: Planting more core acres displaces soybean acres which are then increased internationally in a country like Brazil. To increase arable land area Brazil tills up pasture which prompts clearing of more rain-forest for cattle production.
    So through indirect land use, corn ethanol is going to be penalized with taxes. A constitutional lawsuit has been filed regarding the low carbon fuel standard.
    http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/free/news/template1&product=/ag/news/topstories&vendorReference=eddd1310-50bf-4ee7-adbd-597512891e22&paneContentId=3030&paneParentId=0

  31. Re: The Americanization of Mental Illness: “Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing…”
    Rango (Sudanese xylophone) music is played to induce a trance in voodoo healing ceremonies; zar is the same music performed for women behind closed doors.

  33. Research in Canada paid for by Canadians is a sore spot.
    Montreal’s McGill supported water purification research yet the professor patented the breakthrough discoveries in his name and sold off to GE for millions.
    It’s still the leading trick to fresh water and countries pay GE royalties for the system.
    GE need not lift a finger, only grant permission. Profits from YOUR tax dollar.
    Also, in BC we are still shipping raw logs offshore. Too bad university research could’t prove the folly of that game.
    All major nations like China, France, India, Japan, Norway and Russia are producing electric vehicles and modern battery tech.
    Does university research suggest we should remain sleeping at the switch? How does that produce employment?

  34. “NASA Caught in Climate Data Manipulation; New Revelations Headlined on KUSI-TV Climate Special
    Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.”
    KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at http://www.kusi.com.
    In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City.
    Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.
    The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.
    The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now. “That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says D’Aleo.
    The NCDC data are regularly used by the National Weather Service to declare a given month or year as setting a record for warmth. Such pronouncements are typically made in support of the global warming alarmism agenda. Researchers who support the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also regularly use the NASA/NCDC data, including researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that is now at the center of the “Climategate” controversy.
    This problem is only the tip of the iceberg with NCDC data. “For one thing, it is clear that comparing data from previous years, when the final figure was produced by averaging a large number of temperatures, with those of later years, produced from a small temperature base and the grid method, is like comparing apples and oranges,” says Smith. “When the differences between the warmest year in history and the tenth warmest year is less than three quarters of a degree, it becomes silly to rely on such comparisons,” added D’Aleo who asserts that the data manipulation is “scientific travesty” that was committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.”
    http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=30000

  35. “NASA Caught in Climate Data Manipulation; New Revelations Headlined on KUSI-TV Climate Special
    Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.”
    KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at http://www.kusi.com.
    In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City.
    Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.
    The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.
    The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now. “That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says D’Aleo.
    The NCDC data are regularly used by the National Weather Service to declare a given month or year as setting a record for warmth. Such pronouncements are typically made in support of the global warming alarmism agenda. Researchers who support the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also regularly use the NASA/NCDC data, including researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that is now at the center of the “Climategate” controversy.
    This problem is only the tip of the iceberg with NCDC data. “For one thing, it is clear that comparing data from previous years, when the final figure was produced by averaging a large number of temperatures, with those of later years, produced from a small temperature base and the grid method, is like comparing apples and oranges,” says Smith. “When the differences between the warmest year in history and the tenth warmest year is less than three quarters of a degree, it becomes silly to rely on such comparisons,” added D’Aleo who asserts that the data manipulation is “scientific travesty” that was committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.”
    http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=30000

  36. The natural end result of the religion of socialism, the religion of the stomach.
    (H/T *Gustave Le Bon)
    …-
    “Gangs Armed With Machetes Loot Port-Au-Prince
    Central Business District Resembles Hell On Earth As Bodies Pile Up And Armed Men Battle Over Food, Supplies
    PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (CBS) The earthquake aftermath has brought out the best and worst of the people of Haiti.
    Much like the days after Hurricane Katrina, looting has become a problem very quickly.
    The looting appears to be isolated to Port-au-Prince’s old commercial center. It’s an area that under normal circumstances would be filled with many shops, markets and a few homes. But on Wednesday it was a completely different scene.
    It looked like a war zone.
    Some of the buildings were on fire. Smoke was everywhere and there were bodies in the streets, many just quake victims lying where they were when the magnitude 7.0 blast hit.
    What made the situation that much more tense was sightings of gangs of young men with machetes. On Wednesday they were seen getting into stores and taking all the supplies they could carry. The armed men were seen marching up and down the streets with machetes raised and the competition among the gangs turned quite fierce.
    Fights between gangs were seen on the streets. Machetes were flailing and it was impossible to predict what would happen next.”
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2428645/posts
    …-
    “*Before Camus: Gustave Le Bon on ‘The World in Revolt’
    From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Thu, 2010-01-14 10:40
    Albert Camus’ L’Homme revolté [Man in Revolt] or The Rebel (1951) is a milestone of postwar philosophical writing, widely admired for its diagnosis of a combat-shattered, God-deprived, ideologically disgruntled world. In The Rebel Camus (1913-1960) was distancing himself from Existentialism – that of Sartre, anyway – in favor of something more like a tradition-rooted perspective. Existentialism had already caricatured itself in the early 1950s so that its slogans might serve undergraduates and taxicab drivers. Camus quoted at length from Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; he reiterated that modernity itself was askew and had become bitterly unsatisfying to those caught up in its tenacious grip. Despite his range of reference, however, Camus makes no mention in The Rebel of Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), author of The Psychology of Revolution (1895) and The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896). Nevertheless Le Bon’s sharp-eyed meditations prefigure Camus’ “Absurdist” critique of society and culture, but from a non-disgruntled and distinctly rightwing point of view. Le Bon’s World in Revolt: A Psychological Study of our Times (1920) even anticipated Camus’ title. Le Bon’s follow-up, Le déséquilibre du monde [The Disequilibrium of the World] (1923) offered a trope – that of vertigo – which the Existentialists, including Camus, would eagerly receive and exploit. Camus’ protagonist in The Stranger, Mersault, feels such dizziness just before he murders a random Arab on the Algerian beach.”
    http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4272

  37. EDB: Please don’t flagellate yourself because of my comment. I like most “easy listening” kind of music.

  38. Praise be, Joe Citizen! Bless you!
    I’d been losing a great deal of sleep over your comment.
    Mercy.

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