36 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. This isn’t necessarily newsworthy, but….
    Statistician William M. Briggs has written a post about some Cornell computer scientists who have built an algorithm that, erm, sniffs out, with a remarkable degree of accuracy, fraudulent reviews (overly-positive ones) on sites like TripAdvisor.com, based on the content and (over)use of key words/phrases.
    Briggs does point out that “the model was fit to the data at hand. If new data was exactly like the data at hand, then the new accuracy rate would be the same as the old. But the new data is never exactly like the old data; if it was, it would be a mere copy. It is the inevitable differences between the old and new that account for the decrease in performance.”
    I must admit that my favourite reviews on sites like Tripadvisor are the over-the-top, quasi-libelous ones that *clearly* come from competing hotel/restaurant owners.

  4. As Waylon Jennings once pointed out in song: It don’t matter who’s in Austin, Bob Wills is still the King!

  5. Bob Wills et al really do swing, Derek. It’s the sort of thing you can’t really teach in a music lesson – trust me – without developing permanently crossed eyes.
    RT: I haven’t seen any coverage of the Bering Strait tunnel, but apparently it’s in the works:
    “This week the Kremlin finally gave the green light for a 65 mile (106 km) tunnel linking Asia and North America, taking the epic project a step nearer reality…”
    Who knew?

  6. Moron tattoos Jack Layton’s letter to his forearm
    Yeah, ya gotta wonder about someone who can’t remember what they believe, so they have to get it tattooed on their arm as a constant reminder.
    Says a lot about the NDP.

  7. Probably cheaper to just tattoo “velvet Touch” to your arm … and a couple of 787’s somewhere.
    Get naked to remember Jack!!!!

  9. Having lived in the land of lotus eaters at the time of imposition of the HST, here are some observations.
    The first and essential problem with the imposition of the HST was that the Liberals lied to the population during the election campaign. This is what got the peasants and mountain people really angry.
    If they, the Liberals proposed and debated the HST at the time of the election campaign, the results may have been different, instead they lied.
    The imposition of the HST made things that were not provincially taxed, taxable. That made the peasants and mountain people angry.
    However, once the HST was imposed, the peasants and mountain people should have let it go. Instead, they were so angry at the politicians that they just had to punish them regardless of the cost.
    If the current premieress of the land of lotus eaters actually changed the provincial portion of the tax to 5% as she debated during her leadership campaign, she might have gotten away with keeping the HST.
    The HST will probably stay around, the referendum is not binding. The politicians will blow some of the exhaust of BC bud over the people and everybody will be happy.
    It is interesting that the socialists, as opposed to closet socialists, the Liberals, were against the HST.
    Apparently the federal government was going to give BC some big bucks to ease themselves into the scheme.
    As would be expected, the federales are not going to pay. The socialists are all upset complaining that they, the BC should get the cash just the same. A neat trick as they say.
    Now, the lotus eaters should calm down and leave the HST be. As an economic device, it is cheaper to administer for all concerned.

  11. I’m so old I actually remember hearing Roly Poly on the radio, of course we had no TV so there was nothing else in the way of entertainment. Don’t think we got TV til about ’55 in Calgary.

  13. And Lev, I actually voted to keep the bloody thing because, well, we’re gonna pay some how or t’uther. What might happen as the premieress loses more and more ministers because of the BCR mess, the BC Conservatives under John Cummins may end up with a balance of power under a NDP government.

  15. Lev: “The HST will probably stay around, the referendum is not binding. The politicians will blow some of the exhaust of BC bud over the people and everybody will be happy.”
    LOL. Your writing is appealing, but this peasant sees you as a bit of a naif. 🙂

  17. “Black leader gets life in journalist’s murder”
    “OAKLAND – The former leader of an Oakland-based black community organization was sentenced on Friday to life in prison for the murders of three men, including a journalist working on an expose about the group.
    Yusuf Bey IV, 25, was sentenced by an Alameda County Superior Court judge to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole for the murders of Chauncey Bailey, Odell Roberson and Michael Wills in the summer of 2007.
    Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post, was the first U.S.-based journalist targeted and murdered for his work on a story in over a decade, said the Committee to Protect Journalists.
    At the time of his death Bailey, 57, had been working on an expose about the Oakland-based Your Black Muslim Bakery, an African American business and community organization headed by Bey.
    Bey ordered two of his followers, Antoine Mackey and Devaughndre Broussard, to kill Bailey because he believed the story would be “slanderous,” prosecutors said.”
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2011/08/27/18607796.html

  18. Bravo, Robert Fulford, who’s got the NDP’s number: “The alternative to reality”:
    http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/alternative+reality/5315860/story.html
    “Over five decades, under half a dozen different leaders, the NDP has evolved into a dream, a means of escape from ordinary life for those who feel the need of it.”
    ” … they don’t care to be reminded that corporations make the comfort and convenience of their lives possible.”
    “Those who are even a distant part of [the NDP] can consider themselves compassionate human beings without necessarily doing anything much that involves compassion.”
    Touché, Mr. Fulford!

  19. batb–again thanks for your link to a great article. (8:58 am)
    Mr. Ignatieff has ventured to comment on an article about the state of America. This is a link to his response. You can link to the article from that site: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/26/can-americans-hear-that-they-are-overstretched/
    The original article is interesting and his response is too–in that he seems to be using “our” and “we” as if he considered himself an American. I guess he doesn’t have to pretend to be Canadian anymore.

  20. They’re back up to 26 articles about Jack Layton,my favourite is the excellent one BATB linked to, by Robert Fulford.
    Let us hope this is the last day of the deification of the “saint”.

  21. batb, thanks for the link @ 8:58.
    I am watching FoxNews this morning to see the storm’s progress as I do not want to watch the funeral of a man who wanted to make Canada a Soviet state.

  22. Firstly, the ‘rats came for your guitar.
    Then the ‘rats came for you.
    …-
    “Monstrous Vermin”
    “What if one day you woke up to find that everything you’d been doing for years was illegal? Sorry, wrong novel. The one we want isn’t Metamorphosis, but Franz Kafka’s other work, The Castle, where the narrator fails to discover to the last what he had to do to receive approval from the Castle’s bureaucrats. The protagonist K, deals with men whose powers are indefinite and who prohibit things for reasons that are never explained. Possibly they don’t know the reasons themselves. The same sort of mystery surrounds the raid of the Gibson guitar factory. The Department of Justice wants to shut them down for a reason. Is it really sane to ask ‘why’?
    The ostensible reason given is that Gibson — but not other manufacturers who are — are using wood harvested in environmentally harmful ways from the Third World. Yet with permits from the foreign governments, the US Customs and the Forest Stewardship Council in hand, it is hard to know what more Gibson could have done before making the guitars. Except to stop making guitars. The WSJ provides the bare narrative.
    Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company’s manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. “The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier,” he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle. …
    It isn’t just Gibson that is sweating. Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next.”
    http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/08/26/monstrous-vermin/#comments

  24. Mark Steyn: Depraved but not deprived
    Not enough Westerners do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives.
    The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” – or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America calls “Social Security.”
    http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/non-314006-class-state.html

  25. The REV. Dr. Brent Hawkes: “These are my academic robes, not my religious robes, out of respect for other religions/traditions.”
    Huh?
    Brent Hawkes is, apparently, a “Christian” minister (with a Divinity degree from Anglican Trinity College, U. of T.) but he shies away from wearing Christian robes.
    Turmel is reading from Philippians 2 without any mention of the central message of the passage:
    In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Chr**t J*sus:
    Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
    Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
    that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that J*sus Chr**t is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
    Did Turmel even mention that her reading was from the Christian Bible — that it was a reading from Philippians? The Muslim woman cited the Koran when she read.
    Over and out. So far!

  26. Re: The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise and insurance.
    Some policies specifically EXCLUDE riot, wars, floods, as well as acts of God(?).
    Nevertheless looting is still …stealing.

  27. batb: Going to seminary means you are Christian like going to a funeral means you are dead.
    I can’t tell you the number of people who have been to seminary who don’t understand even the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. Might I suggest you ignore their education because it is by their fruits they shall be known.

  28. Joe, I thought that was the point I was making! I, essentially, was being sarcastic about Hawkes’ wearing his “academic regalia.”
    Like you, I know a ton of guys/gals who went through seminary to equip them for a career, not a ministry.

  29. The Conservatives’ faces say it all: Go on, NDP, s*it all over our government and the ROC who don’t agree with the NDP agenda. Go ahead. We’re listening. We’re taking note. We gave you a very generous opportunity to honour Jack Layton, the man.
    You’ve gone way over the top, to deify him, and along with that, to insult us, to insult all the other parties, to insult Canadians who didn’t vote NDP — a whole lot of Canadians, BTW — so, we’re listening, we’re watching, and we won’t forget.

  30. I am somewhat happy that some of you have the intestinal fortitude to watch the deification circus in Toronto. I will read what you say, but I refuse to watch the attempted deification of a commie lite.

  32. Yes the three ringed lefty circu….I mean state funeral is on TV which is why I am watching a ball game. Life has its priorities. After all you can speak empty humanist platitudes over a dead leftist any day of the week but today the Blue Jays are losing!!!
    Out of passing curiosity I wonder how Jack is doing now. Having lived his entire adult life in the fantasy known as leftism he is now face to face with REALITY. Funnily enough, denying reality does not change reality. Contrary to leftist thinking everywhere, Tinkering with the circumstance does not change the nature.

  34. Our CBC says, Kemo Sabay.
    …-
    “Second-largest U.S. Indian tribe expels slave descendants”
    “OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) – The nation’s second-largest Indian tribe formally booted from membership thousands of descendants of black slaves who were brought to Oklahoma more than 170 years ago by Native American owners.
    The Cherokee nation voted after the Civil War to admit the slave descendants to the tribe.
    But on Monday, the Cherokee nation Supreme Court ruled that a 2007 tribal decision to kick the so-called “Freedmen” out of the tribe was proper.
    The controversy stems from a footnote in the brutal history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans. When many Indians were forced to move to what later became Oklahoma from the eastern U.S. in 1838, some who had owned plantations in the South brought along their slaves.”
    http://news.yahoo.com/second-largest-u-indian-tribe-expels-slave-descendants-011650136.html

  35. I’m with Ken & Joe, too much king jack is bad for your health. I’ll sit here nursing an amber beverage and tend to my grill (baby back ribs, btw). Even the weather channel gave the weather prediction for the funeral goers.

  36. Blogwrath @ 2:54 a.m.:
    One of the photo ‘tributes’ said, “Now Canada has its own Che Guevara”
    I didn’t know Jack was a psychopathic assassin. Did you?

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