Reader Tips

Reader Tips 52 Comments

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) Late Nite Radio.
Every note of music, every voice that ever stirred the air prior to advent of the earliest sound-recording technology is gone forever. No one will ever hear Chopin playing his nocturnes, or an ancient Greek bard singing of the exploits of the gods as he strums his lyre, or hear the ringing voice of an 18th century Scottish balladeer. Because of a unique confluence of particular circumstances, though, tonight’s featured performer moves the line back – just a bit – and provides a tantalizing window into the pre-recording era sounds of mid-19th century American music.
David Harrison Macon was born in 1870 in Tennessee, the son of a distiller and former Confederate civil war captain. When he was 12 his father purchased Nashville’s Broadway Hotel, a famous hub for an assortment traveling minstrels and vaudevillians, where Macon would soak up hundreds of songs and lyrics and styles from older performers, some of whom had been playing their songs continuously since well before the civil war. After his father was stabbed to death the hotel was sold, and Macon began his 30-some year career as a muleskinner. Hauling goods between the towns of Woodbury and Murfreesboro, he always had his banjo with him as he sung to his mules and entertained passersby. By the time the voluble, musically deft and wisecracking Macon entered an early studio for the first time when he was in his mid-fifties, he was a real-life character, first and foremost; his recordings weren’t carefully-scripted studio creations but rather a documentation, replete with foot stomps and shouts and hollers, of a lifelong entertainer whose sensibility and music had been forged in an earlier era.
This wisecracking, entertaining, human-jukebox known professionally as Uncle Dave Macon takes us as close as we will ever get to hearing the sounds, styles and mannerisms of the US civil war-era music. In this 1926 recording mash up of “A-Monday Was My Courtin’ Day” and the 1844 song “Old Grey Goose”, he avows with a wink that he won’t get drunk no more Way Down The Old Plank Road.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

52 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  2. Robert VerBruggen writes at NRO about the be-rattlesnaked “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. Excerpt:
    “The sentiment behind the flag has roots among the borderland people called the Scotch-Irish, says historian David Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University and the author of Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas. ‘They lived for a thousand years under two governments that brought nothing but misery,’ he says. ‘They were double-taxed, and abused in every kind of way. They hated government and hated taxation, and looked instead to themselves, their clans, and their families.’
    “In America, it was immigrants from this region and their children who introduced versions of the…flag in 1775, the year the Revolutionary War began. It appeared simultaneously among militia units from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia…”
    (…)
    “…In December of 1775, writing under the pseudonym An American Guesser, Ben Franklin…noted the Marines’ painted drums. He meditated on the features that set the rattlesnake off from other creatures. After noting that the rattlesnake is found only in America; that its lack of eyelids signifies eternal vigilance; that it never attacks, but it defends itself to the death; and that its fangs are concealed but lethal, he wrote: ‘Was I wrong . . . in thinking this a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America? The poison of her teeth is the necessary means of digesting her food, and at the same time is certain destruction to her enemies. This may be understood to intimate that those things which are destructive to our enemies, may be to us not only harmless, but absolutely necessary to our existence. I confess I was wholly at a loss what to make of the rattles, ’till I went back and counted them and found them just thirteen, exactly the number of the Colonies united in America; and I recollected too that this was the only part of the Snake which increased in numbers.'”

  3. Yes, indeed, great selection EBD.
    I was struck by the syncopation going into the chorus. I could be wrong but I don’t think that technique was all that common then.

  4. Actually, Me No Dhimmi, that kinda’ one-early jumped-beat that starts the chorus had long been a common feature of Irish slip jigs like the 9/4 time “Rocky Road To Dublin,” which changes chords (in places) on the early beat. With the exception of (some) negro music, almost every American song from the 1800s is a variant, however many degrees removed, of some British Isles – particularly Scots or Irish – folk song.
    Straight talk from a Conservative Senator:
    “‘The mob took its cue from the (U of Ottawa’s provost),’ (Saskathewan Senator David Tkachuk) told the Senate….’The letter closed with a line that could have come straight out of the re-education camps of Pol Pot’s Cambodia,’ Tkachuk said.” (emph. mine)

  5. Bookmark-worthy Canadian blogger Ghost of a Flea exerpts Shelby Steele, who deftly limns the very different foundations of the left and the right:
    “Of the two great societal goals—freedom and ‘the good’—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today’s liberalism is focused on ‘the good’ more than on freedom. And ideas of ‘the good’ are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.”

  12. You’re welcome wallyj, glad you liked it.
    Conservative Senator Doug Finley:
    “Freedom of speech is as Canadian as maple syrup, hockey and the northern lights. It is part of our national identity, our history and our culture. It is section 2 of our 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, listed as one of our ‘fundamental freedoms;’ and it is in the first section of Canada’s 1960 Bill of Rights.
    “Honourable senators, our Canadian tradition of liberty goes much further back than that. In 1835, a 30-year-old newspaper publisher in Nova Scotia was charged with seditious libel for exposing corruption amongst Halifax politicians. The judge instructed the jury to convict him. At that time, truth was not a defence. The publisher passionately called on the jury to ‘leave an unshackled press as a legacy to your children.’ After only 10 minutes of deliberations, the jury acquitted him. That young man, of course, was Joseph Howe, who would go on to become the premier of Nova Scotia.
    “Our Canadian tradition of free speech is even older than that. It is part of our inheritance from Great Britain and France…”
    Conservative Senator David Tkachuk:
    “Prior restraint — regulating speech or expression before it occurs — is usually exercised through judicial or administrative regulations. At the University of Ottawa, the mob exercised prior restraint and the administration took cover behind it. The mob went so far as to prevent the speech itself — not the courts, not the law, but the mob, on the excuse of what Ms. Coulter might say. They prevented their fellow students from hearing her. Those students were there voluntarily to listen, debate and make up their own minds. They were prevented from doing so by that mob….”

  14. James P. Gannon at American Spectator:
    “There is a quiet anger boiling in America.
    “It is the anger of millions of hard-working citizens who pay their bills, send in their income taxes, maintain their homes and repay their mortgage loans — and see their government reward those who do not.”
    (…)
    “It is the fury of the voiceless, the powerless, the ordinary nobodies of Flyover Country who are ridiculed, preached to, satirized and insulted by the Celebrity Loudmouths of the two Left Coasts, the Jon Stewarts and Keith Olbermanns, the Paul Krugmans and their ilk.”
    (…)
    “It is the frustrating helplessness of citizens who revere the Founding Fathers and the genius of the Constitution that they wrote, who actually believe the words of the Constitution mean what they say, not more and not less. They who watch politicians and the courts stretch and bend that Constitution — finding ‘rights’ not enumerated, powers never granted, meanings unimagined — believe that their country is being redefined without their consent.”
    The whole thing here.

  15. A couple of great charts at today’s version of “Infectious Greed” – http://paul.kedrosky.com/ – showing how long Americans retain their cars, and the ratio of energy to entertainment spending in the US. Worth the visit!

  18. In his post Free speech senators Mark Steyn highlights this great quote from scaramouche:
    “Disagreement is freedom; complete agreement is totalitarian. It’s as simple as that.”

  19. From Ron Rosenbaum’s review of Paul Berman’s new book The Flight of the Intellectuals:
    “One of the most powerful sections of the book is Berman’s roll call of those dissidents—both Islamic and non—who have been threatened with death and may have to live with 24/7 security for the rest of their lives because of these threats.
    “It was not healthy for Theo van Gogh to get too close to Hirsi Ali. The Danish cartoonists are still under constant death threats, Berman reports. And Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym of another apostate, reads death threats against himself online, while Bassam Tibi, who, Berman tells us, ‘pioneered the concept of Islamism as a modern totalitarianism and pioneered the concept of a liberal ‘Euro-Islam’ [as well] … spent two years under twenty four hour police protection in Germany. … [T]he Egyptian and Italian journalist Magdi Allam …was travelling with a full complement of five bodyguards. … The Italian journalist Fiamma Nienstein … was accompanied by her own bodyguard. … Caroline Fourest in France, the author of the first and most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection. … [T]he French history professor Robert Redkeker had to go into hiding. In 2008 the police in Belgium broke up a terrorist group that had planned on assassinating, among other people Bernard Henri Levy.’
    “He spends an evening in New York ‘… with Flemming Rose the culture editor of the Danish newspaper who was visiting New York only because at that particular moment it was too dangerous for him to remain in Denmark.’
    “The list continues. Kurt Westergaard, Boulem Sansal. This is cumulatively (and individually) scandalous. The fact that we so rarely hear a peep about the cumulative terror experienced by these writers and artists from the likes of these intellectuals while they find time to sneer at Hirsi Ali is the real scandal to me…”
    The whole thing here.

  20. EBD at April 1, 2010 2:41 AM
    Last night, Leno had Maher as a guest. It is really, almost tragic the way Maher talks.
    Among other pronouncements, the guy said, paraphrasing, “Sarah when they start shooting stupid, you would be first to know”.
    How would that qualify as comedy?
    It is rather sad how demoralized the guy is and he think himself otherwise.

  22. Lev: I too find Bill Maher morally repulsive. He perfectly exemplifies the sort of holier-than-thou attitude you see in spoiled 14-year old bullies. I guess what he does qualifies as comedy because he laughs at all his own jokes.
    The best sendup – or put-down, really – of Maher was an SNL ad for a little plastic device called the “Templeton Magic Mouth” which was marketed to people who had nothing to say, intelligent or otherwise. The way it worked was, you would insert the product, erm, dorsally, and then every time you’d break wind it would “speak” one of ten pre-programmed phrases meant to stimulate conversation. One of the phrases was –
    “No one knows more about politics than Bill Maher…”
    Here’s a Reader Tip: at the Wilson Quarterly, Tom Vanderbilt examines the life and ideas of the late Hans Monderman, the most famous – actually, in all likelihood, the only famous – traffic engineer. Vanderbilt achieved notice because of his stated belief that metal railings, traffic lights, painted lines, warning signs, etc. actually made driving more dangerous.
    Vanderbilt describes driving with Monderman:
    “He repeatedly pointed out offending traffic signs. ‘Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?’ he might ask, about a sign warning that a bridge was ahead. ‘Why explain it?’”
    In the town of Drachten, Monderman had famously removed traffic lights and “virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, ‘traffic islands,’ and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a ‘squareabout,’ in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by ­law.”
    (…)
    “A year after the change, the results of this ‘extreme makeover’ were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the ­intersection—­buses spent less time waiting to get through, for ­example—­but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using ­signals—­of the electronic or hand ­variety—­more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he ‘would have changed it immediately.'”

  23. EBD,
    Too much common sense approach, can’t have that, how would the sign makers make money?

  24. Aaron (10:16), I don’t really see the problem. It sounds like the guy bet on some horses, and then automated machine screwed up and presented him with a cash voucher for $6m dollars that he didn’t actually win. If he didn’t place a winning bet – and it would have to be quite a long shot to win $6m – why should the track pay out?

  26. J.E. Dyer, Israel and the West, Geostrategically Speaking
    One of the most troubling aspects of Barack Obama’s remarkable treatment of Israel is the strategic shortsightedness of it. Others have written eloquently of the irresponsibility of Obama’s diplomatic posture: its unprofessional, uncollegial treatment of an ally; its partisan bad faith if the US expects to be respected as a mediator in the region; the signal it sends to other allies about the lack of standing or regard they can expect from this administration.
    But the geostrategic implications of Obama’s policy trend require comment as well. What Obama is doing by treating Israel with such partisan disdain comes perilously close to signaling that as far as the United States is concerned, the secure existence of Israel could very well be up for grabs…

  27. Scott Monk, Why the National Curriculum Must include the Bible
    Bible societies worldwide are unable to keep up with demand in countries like India and China, but in a so-called Christian country, many Australians have more knowledge of the television guide.
    With 2.5 billion to 6 billion copies in print, the Bible is the most circulated book, the most stolen book, the most criticised book and probably the least understood book…
    The fact that it is so poorly understood indicates a need for an open dialogue about its role in education…

  28. Aaron, I once had a banking machine in another country screw up and tell me I had just under a million bucks in my account.
    Me being a conscious human being, I realized that the machine had screwed up, so I decided against the spending spree.
    As an owner of race horses, this guy had to realize it was an error. $6.5 million race track payouts are pretty thin on the ground in this country. No sympathy at all for him trying to take advantage of a mistake. None.

  29. Define ‘mistake’.
    If machine is capable of printing a 6 digit win, how could a customer determine it is a mistake, if the company is refusing to pay?
    Would you just take their words at face value? If that was the right thing to do, your bank account would have zero balance soon after you’d deposited some $$ in there every time.
    Give your head a shake.
    Notice, I nowhere said the person was entitled to the win. IMO he was entitled to reimbursement of his costs but got screwed, this is the gist of the article.

  31. Al Gore’s Weather (AGW):
    “Those days are now gone.”
    …-
    “Climate Catastrophe
    A Superstorm for Global Warming Research
    Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?
    Life has become “awful” for Phil Jones. Just a few months ago, he was a man with an enviable reputation: the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an expert in his field and the father of an alarming global temperature curve that apparently showed how the Earth was heating up as a result of anthropogenic global warming.
    Those days are now gone.
    Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the “Climategate” affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.
    His days are now shaped by investigative commissions at the university and in the British Parliament. He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. “We know where you live,” his detractors taunt.
    Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.
    ‘100 Percent Confident’
    One of the conclusions of his famous statistical analysis of the world’s climate is that the average temperature on Earth rose by 0.166 degrees Celsius per decade between 1975 and 1998. This, according to Jones, was the clear result of his research and that of many other scientists.”
    http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html

  32. Jonah Goldberg:
    “Patriot Act hysteria consumed American politics for years, even though the bill was reasonable and the number of those affected by it comparatively miniscule. No libraries were searched. Terrorists were caught. Inconveniences and mistakes surely transpired, but not on some grand scale. American privacy endured.
    “Now consider what the left-wing magazine Salon calls the conservative ‘freakout’ over the health-care legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama. Unlike the Patriot Act, which passed with overwhelming, almost unanimous, bipartisan support, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed narrowly, against the public’s wishes and in the face of bipartisan opposition. It will cost trillions of dollars we do not have. It gives the government greater say in the most intimate areas of your life, far more private than your library record. It is based on dubious constitutional assumptions.
    “Lots of liberals opposed the Patriot Act on slippery-slope grounds, but it’s worth noting that very few conservatives said the Patriot Act was just a ‘first step’ or a ‘down payment’ toward an even more aggressive police state, while many hoped it would be a temporary measure. Lots of liberals insist health-care reform merely begins the process of pushing for full governmentalization of health care.
    “And yet (those who opposed the Patriot Act) were treated by the mainstream press as not merely sane and serious, but as the conscience of the nation. Those of us justifiably freaking out about this far more massive and far more outrageous expansion of the government into our lives are treated like crackpots…”

  33. It ain’t over – the proverbial fat lady is choking on a chicken bone:
    “The Democrats know that the law is also exceedingly vulnerable to a wholesale repeal effort: Its major provisions do not take effect for four years, yet in the interim it is likely to begin wreaking havoc with the health care sector—raising insurance premiums, health care costs, and public anxieties. If those major provisions do take effect, moreover, the true costs of the program will soon become clear, and its unsustainable structure will grow painfully obvious. So, to protect it from an angry public and from Republicans armed with alternatives, the new law must be made to seem thoroughly established and utterly irrevocable—a fact on the ground that must be lived with; tweaked, if necessary, at the edges, but at its core politically untouchable.
    “But it is no such thing. Obamacare starts life strikingly unpopular and looks likely to grow more so as we get to know it in the coming months and years. The entire House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and the president will be up for election before the law’s most significant provisions become fully active…”

  34. If the voucher was issued in error, Aaron, then that means the recipient did not actually win the contest, in which case a moral conservative would refuse to accept any prize monies; moreover, as someone who respects private property, a moral conservative would not swear about it in someone else’s blog.

  37. Scientific fraud is like all other fraud, Xiat, in that it is a property of human misbehaviour, which means it’s been around for as long a humans and science have. The interesting thing about fraud in the sciences (or at least in the less bureaucratic and less “soft” sciences), though, is that it is much less common than in other fields, because of the ethical status of the scientific method. For your further research, you may wish to start here.

  38. > If the voucher was issued in error then that means the recipient did not actually win the contest
    No doubt, but do define ‘error’ and explain how an error can be discovered and established.
    On one hand, there is a company whose business is making promise to pay the amount, printed by a ‘machine’. On another hand there is a voucher that states $X. The company does not want to pay $X and claims it was an ‘error’.
    Now explain to me why a person who insists on discovery is liable for the cost of it. He did has not made any errors, the company who received his money has. Why is he forced to fund a failing business model of a bug-prone company?
    Are you still not getting it? They don’t be surprised that everything conservative in this world is failing. If you are conservatism’s most exemplary follower, you have only yourself to blame.

  39. True, Vitruvius, but to go back to xiat’s question (because that’s what it was, a question, and not an assertion) there’s little doubt that, in light of the multi-billion dollar – potentially trillion dollar, for a while – AGW rent-seeking industry, and the untold millions of people who believed in it with a quasi-religious fervour – to say nothing of the earnest attempts to in effect rewrite the world’s economy – that scientific fraud has unarguably become more popular recently, by many orders of magnitude.

  40. I agree with Vit on the science fraud has always been there. What has changed is the way the data is handled. Computers have given a tremendous advantage to cooking the data. They do leave a trail but the examination of that is rarely done unless there is a glaring error. Smoothing that would take months of work is done automatically. Data can be ‘played’ with until it says what you want it to. I am kind of old fashioned, the data says what the data says. Garbage in garbage out.
    There are controls on this in regulatory fields but some science is not at that stage.

  41. I agree with Speedy, dubious statistical methods and the ability of computers to help tweak the data has had a large contribution to scientific fraud. Government grants tied to financial and political benefits is the other relevant factor:
    Like other species in the order homo scientifica, the climate researcher gathers and organizes data to lure grant money to the hive… The Alpha Grantwriter in our hive has been very successful indeed. He has earned three publications, a keynote address, and attracts the attention of a suitor from the symbiotic grant-giving predator genus Lucra Ecologica Hysterica. The suitor’s grant bags are bulging with carbon credits and tax revenues harvested using the hive’s last graphs, and the pair once again engage in their annual cross-pollination ritual. They relax with a cigarette, and return to their respective hives: the Grantwriter with fresh money, the Grantgiver to Washington or Brussels with new carbon tax proposals. The circle of life is completed.”
    http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/11/iowahawk-geographic-the-secret-life-of-climate-researchers.html
    EBD, I enjoyed last nights song. A nice selection for all redneck hicks to enjoy.

  42. Well, if you want to split hares, EBD, (mmm, rabbit stifado), arguably AGW isn’t scientific fraud at all: it is religious fraud hiding under the skirts of science. (One should never bring the unarguable weapon to an argument, as one is thus automatically disqualified 😉

    And, Aaron, since AtlanticJim already answered at 11:32 supra your thusly redundant question to me, and since you are willing to assume ill-will on behalf of your interlocutors hereto, and to assume your own righteousness solely on the basis of a single newspaper story, without the benefit of all the information available to the judge in this case, we shall have to simply conclude that you are nothing more than a troll.

    Furthermore, Aaron, since you have just again violated the profanity rule clearly stated below, in your 2:32 (which I have just unpublished), you can expect that until you learn how behave here, you will continue to be unpublished. Good day, sir.

  43. Swine flu fraud = AGW fraud.
    Swinier before it gets swinier.
    …-
    “Latest U.S. Swine-Flu Problem: Getting Rid of the Unused Vaccine
    First the problem was getting enough vaccine to treat the first flu pandemic in decades. Now the problem is getting rid of millions of doses of the H1N1 vaccine before they go bad.
    An estimated 71.5 million of the 229 million doses of swine-flu vaccine bought by the U.S. have been put in vials and syringes and will have to be discarded if they aren’t used before their expiration date, the Washington Post reported this morning. That’s after 25 million doses bought by the U.S. are sent to poor countries, the paper said.
    Flu followers know that the latest pandemic hasn’t delivered the worst-case punch feared in the U.S. or in Europe, where governments also are trying to figure out how to unload unused vaccine supplies. Delivering the vaccine supplies was delayed by production problems, but after seeing two waves of swine flu that mostly affected children and young adults, many older people decided the pandemic wasn’t severe enough to worry about getting vaccinated.”
    http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/04/01/latest-us-swine-flu-problem-getting-rid-of-the-unused-vaccine/

  45. “UBC” = ?.
    AGW = Al Gore’s Weather (AGW).
    “UBC” = ?.
    …-
    “UBC grad dies in California snow cave
    A rescue team on Thursday recovered the body of a missing climber who was stranded near the summit of Mount Shasta in Northern California.
    Rangers found the body of 26-year-old Thomas Bennett of Oakland in a snow cave where his friend had left him before going for help, the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office said.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/04/01/13440011-ap.html
    …-
    “Powerful Storm Aims for Seattle, Portland Friday
    A powerful storm taking aim on the Pacific Northwest will rival some of the strongest storms typically experienced during the winter time with damaging winds, building seas, flooding rain and lowering snow levels.
    A storm set on being very disruptive at the start of the Easter weekend will slam into coastal Washington, Oregon and southern British Columbia Friday morning.”
    http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/26928/powerful-storm-aims-for-seattl.asp

  46. O’Soros + O’Summers = O’s AGW Fraud + Indulgences.
    “several options, including a tax on international financial transactions, a levy on global aviation and shipping and schemes that would raise money from auctioning off “permits” to emit greenhouse gases.”
    Liberal Citoyen Kyoto Dion shrugs: It’s not fair, comrades of the CCCP/USSR.
    But, AGW = AGW.
    “Conferences of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” = CPUNFCCC.
    “The UNFCCC’s secretariat” = AGW Fraudsters.
    …-
    “UN climate change ‘needs permanent home'”
    “UN climate change officials told to cut carbon footprint with permanent home
    It is a giant travelling circus that has spent 20 years touring some of the world’s most exotic locations — Bali, Marrakesh, Barcelona, Rio, Buenos Aires — all at taxpayers’ expense.
    But the good times may soon be over for the 20,000 people who attend the annual climate change summit because the Government wants to reduce its carbon footprint by choosing a permanent location.
    The proposal will prompt an international squabble over which city should win the right to host all future Conferences of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
    More than half of those who attend come from Europe and, with flights contributing more than 80 per cent of each summit’s carbon footprint, a European city might seem the obvious choice.”
    “The meeting at Downing Street was attended by Guyanan President Bharrat Jagdeo, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Ethiopian Premier Meles Zenawi, as well as US President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser Larry Summers and the billionaire financier George Soros.
    The group, the creation of which was one of the few positive outcomes of the Copenhagen summit, is considering several options, including a tax on international financial transactions, a levy on global aviation and shipping and schemes that would raise money from auctioning off “permits” to emit greenhouse gases. It is due to make recommendations in time for the Cancún summit.”
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7084603.ece

  50. Neighbourhood Green Police.
    You Are Being Surveilled.
    You Are Being Knocked Up.
    Edmund Burke foresaw the natural end result:
    “*In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.””
    …-
    “Litter and junk scar the earth”
    “Van Luit, a former Ontario Provincial Police officer with investigative skills, said he has taken several perpetrators to court, where they were slapped with $500 fines plus surcharges.
    “I probably see two big dumped pickup truck loads every month. It doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter,” he said.
    “Usually it’s when people move out of an apartment. Anything they don’t want to take with them, they dump. They just don’t want to pay the dumping fees to get rid of it.”
    People dump everything: televisions, diapers, toys, mattresses, – “whatever people don’t want.”
    “They’re usually surprised when I knock on the door and say, ‘I found garbage that belongs to you.’
    He said the Maritime provinces are much cleaner than Ontario.”
    http://recorder.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2516602
    Burke:
    http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=564&loc=b&type=cbbp

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