Reader Tips

Reader Tips 29 Comments

Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips thread is a patriotic song by American songwriter Randy Newman. While the Los Angeles-based Newman, a prototypical Democrat, wrote the song during the years of the Bush Administration, the song is actually a defense of the long-term ship of state, as he uses historical context to take a shot at – or at least, to plead the case against – the naysayers around the world who constantly criticize America and characterize its leaders as the most immoral in history.
Sad, funny, and touching in turns, here’s Randy Newman’s A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

29 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  4. Speaking of laws and sausages, here’s one of the wurst SCC rulings ever:
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/tribunals-can-apply-charter-rights-supreme-court-rules/article1601806/
    The SCC is allowing all administrative tribunals to interpret the charter and make up remedies.
    Quotes from the article:
    “The possibilities now are kind of endless,” said lawyer Joseph Arvay, who represented the British Columbia Review Board in the appeal. “Whether in human rights, employment standards or a whole myriad of other areas, hundreds – or thousands – of these boards have been given a real boost.”
    Authorities are quietly bracing for a possible deluge of Charter litigation at tribunals. Lawyers who advocated for the legal change said that mental patients, prison inmates and students are among those who can now use these forums to assert such Charter rights as equal treatment under the law, religious freedom, free speech, freedom from unreasonable punishment and the right to life, liberty and security.
    Examples of the sort of litigation that could be forthcoming include: psychiatric patients asking to attend religious services outside their hospital; demands by prisoners or psychiatric patients for more humane living conditions, reading materials, free contact with the news media, or special programming that is sensitive to cultural background; and applications to be released from solitary confinement.
    I think Human Rights lawyers are now shopping for private islands. The rest of us should start looking for caves. This ruling is wrong for so many reasons.

  5. Does anybody else remember when a younger Mr. Harper speculated about the limits inherently faced by a Conservative government?
    Entrenched liberal thinking within the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the public service.
    Of course stating the obvious was met with scorn and fauxrage by the usual suspects.
    Just reminiscing.
    Syncro

  7. I admire President Obama for hanging in there,
    sweating through his and our domestic and international problems,
    giving everything he does his best shot..

    #38-
    President Barack Obama spent four hours on the golf course Sunday in temperatures that peaked in the low 90s.

    Tiger Woods could take lessons of stamina and loyalty from our great leader.

  11. TG
    Sitara does seem to have all the right stuff…the drones not so much.
    Any strikes Israel makes into Iran will be multiple, manned and many faceted.
    IMHO
    Syncro

  12. No-One @10:09 – surely the problem there is that if Kate flogged off SDA it would immediately become worthless; everyone would just jump ship – the rats too, like T – to her new blog, along with her advertizers and such, that is unless she signed a non-compete, in which case Warren Kinsella would breathe a sigh of relief, precious lurking-time newly freed up to prat around with Michael Ignatieff and be avoided by his family.
    It’s Kate who’se worth $191,943.60

  13. “Barack Obama’s Oil Spill’s Blog”
    “The Rhyme of the Ancient Oil Spill
    Hour after hour, hour after hour,
    I gush, with unquenchable devotion;
    As idle BO takes golfing tours
    Without care or sensible notion.
    Oil, oil, everywhere,
    And all the Regime did shrink;
    Oil, oil, everywhere,
    As their futures began to sink.
    — BO’s OilSpillBlog”
    “When BO stops by to see me today, and has His great photo op for the week, I’ll have to ask Him if He understands that I’m a hell of an albatross around His neck.”
    http://bosoilspill.blogspot.com/2010/06/rhyme-of-ancient-oil-spill.html

  15. An in depth analysis of the Gulf oil spill and some disturbing implications of whats not being reported.
    ( its a lengthy read but describes the well in technical and layman terms)
    “…
    It’s really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do…you will see the “sense” behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
    The well bore structure is compromised “Down hole”.”
    …
    “This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer’s immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?…we are beginning to the results of the well’s total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.”
    …
    “What is likely to happen now?
    Well…none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact…it’s about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don’t, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.
    Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well.”
    …
    Its a pretty dire prediction of failure, and I defer to the Oil and Gas experts that frequent Kate’s blog.
    But it makes sense in the way it is presented and the timeline we have witnessed.
    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593/648967

  16. “Perfect place for a thermometer in Oz”
    “For a write up on the evening, see the story by Richard Fernandez at Pajamas Media Belmont Club and also at Twaki.”
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/13/perfect-place-for-a-thermometer-in-oz/#comments
    …-
    “Whitewash versus Paint
    The northern summer months mean winter in the Antipodes so we drove to Anthony Watts‘ presentation in the dark even though it was only 6 pm. He was the principal author of Watts Up With That?, a climate change skeptic’s blogsite that gets about 3 million hits per month. And now he was in Australia on a speaking tour. The site has a large following in Australia probably due to two things. The first is his symbiotic relationship with the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt, who is Australia’s blogger/mainstream journalist — a combination you don’t often see — who appears to combine the strongest features of both and who quotes Watts continuously and extensively so that climate skepticism has become as it were, the new occult knowledge. Second, Watts’ focus on the weather taps into a major preoccupation in Australia: crops.
    As a consequence there is, one may be surprised to learn, a Climate Skeptics Party in Australia and a huge appetite for knowing Watts Up With That. Climate change is a much bigger political issue in Australia than in the USA.”
    http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/06/13/whitewash-versus-paint/#comments

  18. “Hate crimes increase in Canada, StatsCan reports.”
    “Hate crimes increased 35% between 2007 and 2008, according to a report from Statistics Canada released on Monday, with Jewish and black people the most targeted groups for attacks. The data shows hate crimes are on the rise in each motivation grouping: race and ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation.”
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/06/14/hate-crimes-on-the-rise-in-canada/#ixzz0qq08i4i7
    And my comment:
    Racism and hate are 100% nurture, 0% nature. If only we could create a whole country (say, Canada) with progressive laws (say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and a powerful thought police (say, the Human Rights Commissions) that would suppress free speech in the name of peace & love, hate crimes would vanish within two generation.
    Not.

  21. “Humans too simple to understand universe: scientist
    ‘Just as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee’
    A top British scientist says we may never know all the secrets of the universe because, quite simply, we’re just not smart enough.
    “Just as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee,” said President of the Royal Society Lord Martin Rees, gaining a full understanding of how the universe works might not be possible “simply because they’re beyond human brains.”
    “Just as a fish may be barely aware of he medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains.”
    Lord Rees made the comments to the Sunday Times in London in response to the fact that scientists have been yet unable to create a unifying theory to describe how the universe works.
    He suggests that the idea of multiple parallel universes, human consciousness and the very idea of reality may be simply beyond our understanding.
    It’s as if a fish is swimming in one pond, completely unaware that thousands of other ponds exist mere meters away from it. Understanding that those ponds even exist, let alone understanding their connection to the original pond, is understandably beyond the comprehension of a single fish.
    Similarly, that parallel universes could exist in up to 11 dimensions – while humanity is restricted to three spatial dimensions and time – is beyond human understanding.
    “In theory, there could be another entire universe less than a millimetre away from us, but we are oblivious to it because that millimetre is measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we are imprisoned in just three,” he said in the interview.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2010/06/13/14373261.html
    …-
    Ludwig von Mises:
    “Man is not infallible. He searches for truth—that is, for the most adequate comprehension of reality as far as the structure of his mind and reason makes it accessible to him. Man can never become omniscient. He can never be absolutely certain that his inquiries were not misled and that what he considers as certain truth is not error. All that man can do is to submit all his theories again and again to the most critical reexamination.”
    http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/HmA/msHmA2.html

  23. Canadian MPs are meeting in secret.
    A scoop for BLY.
    Quote: “a secret meeting”.
    This is contempt of Parliament.
    This is contempt of Canadians.
    Down with “secret” meetings.
    “Fraser was invited Monday to appear before a secret meeting of the Board of Internal Economy, the House of Commons committee that administers a $540-million budget.”
    “MPs, auditor general meet over expenses
    Auditor General Sheila Fraser said MPs have nothing to fear about a possible audit, as long as they’re following all the rules.
    Fraser was invited Monday to appear before a secret meeting of the Board of Internal Economy, the House of Commons committee that administers a $540-million budget.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2010/06/14/14382491.html
    http://www.bluelikeyou.com/2010/06/13/its-all-theyve-got/#comment-83662

  24. O’surprise? O’surprise? Not here at SDA.
    Doc’O’narcissist.
    ““Obama refuses to deal with the media world as it is”. It never occurred to Dowd that he couldn’t deal with the world as it is, not just the media part of it.”
    …-
    “Try, Try Again
    The saga of Dr. Jayant Patel is that of a man who concealed his incompetence by never staying in one place long enough for consequences to catch up to him. But though he buried his true track record, Patel took care to bring with him enough social proof to persuade a new set of victims to trust him. As long as he could stay one step ahead, he was gold. It wasn’t as if nobody suspected Patel wasn’t all he claimed to be.”
    http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/06/13/try-try-again/#more-9415

  28. Who is helping the murderous Muslim Taliban?
    The “Afghan detainees” are Muslim Taliban murderers.
    The dishonourable Separatist Coalition is helping the murderous Muslim Taliban.
    The leaders of the Separatist Coalition are:
    Liberal Bob Rae/Ziffy, Taliban Jack LaytoNDP, and commie Duceppe Bloc.
    …-
    “Possible [Muslim] Honour Crime in Montreal
    Montreal Police confirm they’re investigating what could be an honour crime, something often seen in some Muslim societies.
    A 38-year-old Montreal mother is accused of attempted murder, assault, and weapons possession after her teenage daughter suffered stab wounds to her head and chest Sunday.
    The 19-year-old victim is now in stable condition.
    There are reports that the suspect was very upset her daughter had been out late on Saturday night.
    Honour crimes typically involve the murder of a family member, usually female, for bringing dishonour on the family through they way they dress, through an unapproved marriage, or through sexual behaviour.
    The United Nations Population Fund estimates there are five-thousand honour killings world-wide every year.”
    http://www.cfra.com/
    http://www.bluelikeyou.com/2010/06/14/rob-ford-slightly-ahead-nanos/#comment-83685

  29. As per usual the CBC is not allowing comments. We can’t have a whole bunch of Canadians knowing that there are others thinking the same.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation