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Earth Hour is fast approaching - do your bit!

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2010/03/24/13345801.html

Every time we turn a light off, a third world person dies.

[ Is Anthropogenic Global Warming the New Intelligent Design? ] Annie Gottlieb

Some people just have to believe in something.
Some people seem to enjoy being scared silly.
Some people just have to have that moral superiority feeling.

If not global warming it probably would have been something else.

And then there is always the money thing.

...and a great pick Vit. William Shatner is great example of a person who doesn't take himself too seriously.

Hey, Native Indian, uhmmmm no.... Mr. Aboriginal (that makes me feel better)... no ... no ... uh .... First Nations Person, uhmmm, I'm not sure really what turns my PC crank..... how about ....Hey Progressive Indian,
I checked out your blog.
Very refreshing perspective from an indian! Bravo.

Enjoy your Earth Day.

(p.s. folks, If my greeting is confusing check out this guy's bio on his blog.)

Does William Shatner really think he has musical talent or is he just yanking our collective chain? That was painful.

In view of the Coulter/UofO cancellation and the announcement of the reduction in CHRC activities, perhaps some would like a chuckle or two in watching this video youtube satire about a California policeman trying to enforce political correctness: vegan, smoking, AGW, and hate speech ordinances in 2009

Kate: Steyn links to you again.

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3083/128/

Read the whole thing.

LOL!

Has anybody seen this YouTube video of G.W.Bush and Bill Clinton down in Haiti shaking hands with the natives?
Seems that G.W. Bush doesn't like the "cooties" he's getting from "Glad Handing" the local Haitians,so on the sly he goes and wipes his hand on Bill Clintons back!

Check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygvF_XPbo60

Lol, funny watching Shatner trying to smoke.

Krista Erickson, the CBC reporter who was feeding questions to her Liberal pal, Pablo Rodriguez, a few years ago, to put to Brian Mulroney, has now taken up with Tory Lee Richardson and is flying on his taxpayer-funded flight passes.

Ah, the heart has its reasons ....

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/9015793.html

Britain where the foxes frolic unmolested but if your a kid in school you might be $hit up a gum tree

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260253/Teachers-leave-boy-5-tree-health-safety.html

Globe and Mail, Thursday, Mar. 25.

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney blames business for low productivity.

Article: "Carney's comments represent a certain frustration among policy makers who feel that they have done everything the business lobby says is necessary to encourage better productivity and innovation - only to see executives sit on piles of cash and [avoid risks] ..."

Toronto Star, Thursday, Mar. 25.

Ottawa seeks ideas on pension reform.

Article: "The federal government is launching a series of cross-country meetings with Canadians to ask for public input on ways to improve the country's pension system."

Toronto Star, Thursday, Mar. 25.

Letter to the editor from Mahmood Elahi (who, if memory serves, is female): 'Free market' fanaticism won't sell here (header supplied by newspaper).

The thread that links these three articles is precisely the notion foolishly denied by that letter: the solution to our economic problems is to move to a fully free-market economy. Before the nanny state started expanding in the '70s, the economy grew at up to 8% a year; since then, it's more like 3% in a good year. Then, wages were not stagnating as they have done for the past few decades.

So it's not true that policy makers have done everything they can - they haven't streamlined the personal and corporate tax systems, got rid of loopholes, "encouragements" and subsidies, eliminated idiotic regulations, or cut off all the extremist "activist groups" from funding.

As for the cross-country meetings on pension reform, maybe the problem isn't the pensions so much as lack of productivity needed to support them - which means the solution isn't tinkering with pensions but freeing the economy.

And as for Elahi's letter, if Canadians want to maintain a reasonable standard of living with some hope for the future, they'd better find some free market fanaticism in a hurry.

Another fatuous comment in Elahi's letter: "The collapse of the Soviet Union and iconic capitalist organization like Enron and Lehman Brothers shows that both ideas [totalitarian communism and unregulated capitalism] are wrong."

Wrong. Lehman Brothers failed as part of the 2008 market meltdown that resulted from regulation of the economy, namely the requirement to lend mortgage funds to people who couldn't afford them. And Enron was a case of fraud, which is always ethically and legally wrong.

"your" should be "you're"

too much time in a tree and not the desk

Hey The Progressive Indian, nice blog you've got. It is nice of you to visit here and chat a while. There is always room at the table.

Vitruvius, Horatio Nelson had that right. There is always something to smile or laugh at if we look for it.

There are a lot of great paintings of Nelson's career in the Royal Navy. The painting of the battle of Ca Ira is particularly great.

Toronto Star, Wednesday, Mar. 24.

"Lesbians used racial slurs, black neighbour testifies."

Assault charges arose from an altercation outside an Oshawa school in November, 2008.

One of the lesbians screamed out, "you goddamn f---ing n-----."

No word as to whether the, uh, racialized couple referred to the homophilized couple as "c----- m------- d----."

Anyway, it looks like political correctness hasn't permeated all nooks and crannies of society yet. Or is the idea that minorities can't be racist still applicable?

God Bless the Shat. Love the Rock-Et-Man.

[ I'm glad you liked that. He has a certain suchness. ~Vitruvius ]

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed a problem with one of the links on SDA. Noticed that my laptop was using 42% of CPU time in Firefox while doing nothing so I terminated it and switched to Opera. Same thing happened in Opera and closing the SDA home page link resulted in idle CPU time using going to a saner 2-4%. I suspect this is the Foxnews link as keeping the SDA home page open on my browser didn't cause excessive CPU useage until yesterday. I know I can just make a link to SDA and click on the link every time I want to read it but I'm lazy and just leave the page open in my browser and hit refresh a couple of times/day.

[ No observed problems in the three browsers I have access to. ~Vitruvius ]

Another poll gone horribly wrong:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/pointofview/2010/03/ann-coulter.html

And pardon me if I don't wave my Canadian flag, vis a vis Shatner, but to each his own.

I was at Coulter's talk at the Red and White in Calgary tonight. They said attendance was about 900 (the room was mostly full), and my best quick estimate was about 100 protestors outside (there was some intermingling, and it wasn't clear who was who always) and perhaps the same number who were inside for the talk. To their credit, those who sat through the talk did nothing to interrupt it (although Ezra laid the gauntlet down pretty forcefully about how free speech was on the line). Questions at the end were all over the place - some good, some bizarre, some weren't questions, but statements that people wanted to make themselves.

I'm a big Ann fan, but my one criticism of her talk was that it was so US-focussed. I can't really fault her for that, but I felt like I was in a room where only 1/3 to 1/2 understood more than a handful of her references to US personalities.

Thanks Vit!!

Check out the headlines at CBC.Ca. A bold headline says, "Afghans routinely executed detaineees: soldier."

Then in fine print, it says: Psychiatrists says killings may nver have happened.

More FALSE PROPAGANDA FROM CBC!

We should be glad that the Harper Government struck down Bob Rae's motion to fund Planed Parent Hood.

C-Fam reported: “For 14 years, the Girl Scouts co-sponsored a conference in Waco, Texas with Planned Parenthood on sex education. At the 2004 Waco conference, a sex book titled “It’s Perfectly Normal” was handed out to 700 grade-school girls. That guide celebrates masturbation and explicit drawings of couples having sex and a boy putting on a condom, as well as listing the top nine reasons to have an abortion. The subsequent brouhaha started a cookie boycott and was covered by the national media.” C-Fam article written by Terrence Mckeegan,J.D. cites from the New York Times that UN Population Fund had co-sponsored a very controversial curriculum with UNESCO that included teaching children as young as five to be sexually active and training adolescents to advocate for abortion.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Myers/juda101.htm

Scroll down the article and look for a video by Miriam Grossman, M.D

Frum fired from AEI.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/25/AR2010032502336.html?hpid=topnews

DF seemed to loose his bearings when McCain got the nomination. His claim that the GOP failed because they wouldn't negotiate over healthcare flies in the face of the facts. The dems wouldn't budge on anything not torte reform or interstate commerce reform or anything.

He really seems to be a man without a country politically speaking.

Enabling dependency

By David Warren

There have been many subtle arguments over the years, about why the Canadian health-care system is better than the American one -- how it costs less, how even the administrative overheads are lower, how it is fairer, how we don't have 30 or 40 or however many million people who are uninsured.

http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/

Moderator: This is very off-topic (although I'd defend it as being team-building), feel free to delete.

AtlanticJim, that Genesis Coupe is a pretty striking automobile, I saw one in Montreal last week and did a double-take. Too bad about that weird rear quarter window treatment.

The Koreans' progress in car design and manufacturing is pretty amazing. Hyundai has come a long way since the Pony, eh?

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100325/national/coulter_controversy

An astonishing thing happens when I click on the Rogers/Yahoo news item above, "900 listen to Coulter in Calgary..." The article opens and then is immediately obliterated by a full-page Sony ad which I have no way of getting out of. There seems to be no "Close" button to click.

More hits on "freedom of expression" in Canada. I can't read the article.

I guess I'll try to Google Ann Coulter, Calgary, and see what comes up.

BTW, I've been opening these news items for years and this has NEVER happened. EVER.

[ It seems to work on the three browsers I have access to. ~Vitruvius ]

AGW Green Juggernaut collapsing?

"The Green Juggernaut likely has many more wheels to come off before it collapses."

"The highlight (at least for me) was the announcement by Alberta utility TransAlta that it would be seeking carbon dioxide emission credits by corking cattle farts in Uganda."

"Were there ever sweeter words to bureaucratic ears?"
...-

"Peter Foster: Trillion-dollar green troughs

Unfortunately, I had to miss this week’s biennial Globe Foundation conference on business and the environment. Set in Vancouver, Globe is the greatest show on Earth (or at least in North America) for green policy wonks, eco consultants, aggressively growth-oriented NGOs and corporate rent seekers (all delegates carbon-neutralized). There’s no more beautiful place to bask in the notion that the world is going to environmental hell without more government regulation and subsidy, or to reflect on how much money is to be made from promoting and exploiting undefinable “sustainability.”

[ More at link. ~Vitruvius ]

The Green Juggernaut likely has many more wheels to come off before it collapses. And if Globe is based on anything, it is based on faith in the ability of policy to ignore reality, or else to shape reality via the promotion of public hysteria. Unfortunately for Globesters, that’s another strategy that seems to be foundering as public skepticism about the climate change/sustainability scam grows.

Two announcements yesterday indicated that the Juggernaut’s burden of big policy inertia and Stepford Wives’ conformity is still trundling on."

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/25/peter-foster-trillion-dollar-green-troughs.aspx

I don't think the B.C. Human rights commission has been closed.

batb that kept happening to me too. I was getting quite cross about it but, at the same time, I took it to mean that it was peaceful and civilized. Meaning nothing happened that could be used to score points off of conservatives.

Earth Hour is Mucked.

"Tracing the Demise of Cap and Trade", aka Cap'n Tax.

Funny and Scary: Death of Cap'n Trade.

Left-liberals have no sense of humour.

“I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means,” Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said last fall in introducing his original climate change plan."

...-

"‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice

Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change.

Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it. President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it.

Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it “cap and tax,” and Tea Party followers using it as a symbol of much of what they say is wrong with Washington."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/science/earth/26climate.html?hpw

doing a few warmup runs for earth hour. there are over 200 lights to turn on plus the TVs and there are a few fans and the airconditioner to get running. might take me 15 minutes to get up to speed.

Further proves that intelligence and education are not the same thing.

Anyone, familiarize the researcher with clipboard:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7521357/Typing-technique-could-trap-paedophiles.html

He is so full of himself, thinking he found a way to catch criminals on the Internet. OMG!

I'll be running the left over gas out of my 3hp, 10 inch, dirty 2 stroke ice auger during earth hour with Neil Young's "Keep On Rockin In The Free World" cranked in my fully lit apartment with the fridge door open to commemorate Earth Hour.

Roseberry....

so...what are you saying? Conservatives in bed with CBC, who would thought?(!)

Separation of the state and the economy

I've wondered why the politicians/ bureaucrats always talk about investment and never about malinvestment.

(PDF warning) Thomas M. Sanderson, Daniel Kimmage, and David A. Gordon, From the Ferghana Valley to South Waziristan

The Evolving Threat of Central Asian Jihadists

Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are active fronts in the wider conflict against violent extremism centered on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although these states are less prominent in discussions about U.S. security interests in the region than nuclear-armed Pakistan, their stability is an important and unacknowledged component of the AfPak equation...

PET Cemetery News:

The "(living)" and the dead.

Liberal Iffy/Rae's Ad$Cam Convention: Admission $0.02 (Cdn).

...-

"Liberal thinkfest: Jean and Paul's two cents

All five (living) former leaders of the Liberal Party are in Montreal for the Canada 150 conference.

Walking into the gathering this morning, former prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin spoke very briefly with reporters.

I asked both men what they felt was the best idea to come out of the party's last "thinkers conference" at Aylmer, Quebec in 1991.

Martin responded, "I think the fact that you could deal with the economic problems and you could have a very strong social vision at the same time and you simply had to mesh them."

Chrétien said, "there were a lot of them (good ideas) but to make sure we win the next election, I think."

He added, "We can't re-invent the wheel," and that the 1991 conference was just a component of his success...and that the main thing is to do everything right."

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/insidepolitics/2010/03/liberal-thinkfest-jean-and-pauls-two-cents.html

Woman wants to hit 1000 lbs:

http://www.winnipegsun.com/news/weird/2010/03/26/13365921.html

Now is the time for all good left-liberals-socialists to speak out, forcefully speak out, and condemn their socialist buddy Mugabe.

Let's hear Liberal Iffy/Rae, Taliban Jack Layton (NDP), commie Bloc Duceppe, CBC/MSM, etc.

Where are the voices of the tolerant, diversity-loving compassionate left?

Silence is consent.
...-

"Mugabe: No gay rights in Zimbabwe
Associated Press ^ | March 26, 2010

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Zimbabwe's president says gay rights will not be protected in a constitution being drawn up under a power-sharing deal.

State radio on Friday quoted President Robert Mugabe saying that Western rights groups have called for constitutional reforms to include gay rights. He calls that "insanity."

Same-sex acts are illegal in Zimbabwe. Mugabe once described homosexuals as "lower than pigs and dogs."

(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2480481/posts

Vit,
How about finding and posting a Gordon Lightfoot rendition of the "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

We still have registry, don't we?
Why is police asking a vague question 'Is anyone missing any firearms?' when they can clearly query the registry and it would tell right away whose those guns were?

Or is that a fishing expedition for the owners of unregistered?

PDF warning :P

http://www.yrp.ca/docs/press_releases/%5B2010-03-17%5D%20ARRESTS%20FOR%20WEAPONS%20AND%20THEFT%20OFFENCES%20IN%20THE%20TOWN%20OF%20EAST%20GWILLIMBURY.pdf

UK now totally lost sovereignty:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/8589688.stm

Ok i take back part of what i said yesterday & the niqab. I said watch for the Liberal charter & all that.
Well looks like iam wrong the G&M is reporting that
"Ignatieff Backs Quebec Veil Ban"

However that was not before Don Martin had a article in the Calgary Herald

"PM quietly supports Quebec's veil ban"

"Earth Hour is fast approaching - do your bit!"

I need to vent. I just completed the mandatory "sustainability" exam for my employer and all I can say is..."thank gawd for employee therapy benefits". I was expecting the typical Climate Change and Social Justice propaganda but I'm shocked(not really) and appalled(really) to see my employer touting China as a world leader in sustainability with respect to they're "One Child Only" program.

The only thing holding my sanity together today is the small bit of hope that the people that created this "exam" are truly unaware of the gender genocide that has been occurring in China for most of my lifetime.

Sorry for abusing this thread, but I had to vent.

Perhaps you were correct Kathy.

A Twofer: Free.

The Dichotomy of Socialism:

""It's a clear example of the City of Austin's left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing," Rick Cofer, co-chairman of the city's Solid Waste Advisory Commission, said".

Yup, er puY.

...-

"Replacing old Austin toilets means landfill trash

Old toilets are backing up Austin-area landfills.

The City Council plan approved last month to help apartment complexes install new water-efficient toilets has resulted in older models packing rapidly filling landfills. Critics say up to 280 tons of toilets could be dumped in county landfills, contradicting the city's long-held commitment to recycling.

"It's a clear example of the City of Austin's left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing," Rick Cofer, co-chairman of the city's Solid Waste Advisory Commission, said in Friday's editions of the Austin American-Statesman.

The city offers free and discounted water-saving toilets to homeowners and apartment complex owners to conserve limited water supplies. Toilet recycling can be complicated, and water utility officials acknowledge they only recently began exploring the idea."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2480712/posts
...-

puY, er Yup:

"Hébert: Liberals dare not wade into major policy waters"

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/785576--hebert-liberals-dare-not-wade-into-major-policy-waters

This is way too funny. On Power Play today,someone cleaned up a dumpster dweller,fed him some downs,probably oxy,gave him a few lines to memorize ,and passed him off as a university professor to discuss Project Hero. Wow,CTV got the old woolen sweater pulled over their eyes on this one. OTOH,if this Hunter fellow is the real deal,nah can't be,no f'en way,but it would explain a heck of a lot why our universities are so messed up.--- http://watch.ctv.ca/news/power-play/march-26/#clip281602

wallyj at 8;28,

What an unbelievable piece of work that guy was! Folks, you need to check out wally's link and see who is, apparently, teaching your kids at the University of Regina!

Hate going too far off topic, but wonder what Horatio, great man that he was, had to humour the wife he walked out on. Though she may have had the last laugh as I believe she got Nelson's pension before the Lady Hamilton could get her claws in it.