February 29, 2012
Honey, I Finished The Internet
6 everyday things seen close up.
Life After Politics?
Spotted yesterday in Manhattan Beach, California:
Above all, die safely
41-year-old Simon Burgess was feeding swans in a shallow pond in Walpole Park in Gosport, England last year when he suffered an epileptic seizure and fell unconscious into the water. Twenty-five emergency personnel arrived on scene but Burgess remained floating face down, twenty-five feet from shore, for over half an hour after the first responders arrived.
The Daily Mail reports on the results of the official inquest:
Even though they could all swim, the first fire crew to arrive hadn’t been ‘trained’ to enter water higher than ankle-deep. Instead they waited for ‘specialists’ to arrive to retrieve his body. They had decided Mr Burgess must surely be dead because he had been in the water for ten minutes. When a policeman decided to go in anyway, he was ordered not to. A paramedic was also told not to enter the water because he didn’t have the right ‘protective’ clothing and might be in breach of the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992.
Daily Mail reporter Nick Constable later waded out to the spot and found that "at no point did the depth rise higher than 3½ ft, and at no point did I feel as if I was in the remotest danger."
The Curious Case of the Disappearing NYSE
A story of
INTRIGUE!
SUSPENSE!
FAST CARS!
LOOSE WOMEN!
and charty goodness.
You have to be kidding me.
“Through consolidation, we should be able to save hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re not at a point where we have an exact number yet, of course.” - Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid
I wonder how Mr. McGuinty can blame the petro-dollar for Ontario's state of affairs when his own minister doesn't really know where the monies are going?
Um..uh Mammy my man...that'd demoliate my chances. Kin ya do me a solid 'n hold off'n 'til Nov 7th....
In the next 60 days Obama's presidential career will finally meet that concrete wall of reality. He will either fail or survive. Trouble is, he might take many innocent people with him if he fails
So far, the most hyped-up and unqualified president in US history has shown no capacity at all to act, in the face of a do-or-die challenge. This is the ultimate test of character, the one that John F. Kennedy met well enough in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This is the test that Jimmy Carter failed so miserably that Ronald Reagan beat him handily in the following election. This is the same test of reality that every single Democratic Administration has tried to avoid; it's the reason why Bill Clinton refused to do anything about Osama Bin Laden when he had four separate chances to take him out.
Reader Tips
In the BBC documentary A Tudor Feast, historian Ruth Goodman and three archaeologists undertake the difficult work of preparing an elaborate meal using authentic recipes from the Tudor Period, and using only the original techniques, ingredients, and kitchen implements that were available in 1590. Broken into four fifteen minute(ish) segments, here's A Tudor Feast, parts I, II, III, and IV.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 28, 2012
Help me, I can't put down the phone!
Incompetents. All that work trying to misdirect and still failing. Who cares about Guelph, that failure is inexcusable.
Ralph must have been quite put out that he wasn't getting enough press. I'm very positive about this though. The next time I get a call late at night or early in the morning I too, can scream, "ELECTION FRAUD!"
FWIW, this is about as close to a statement as you're going to get until the file is close to being closed. Kudos to Macleans for giving him space.
If Women Ran The World
Mankind would still be living in caves, but with really, really fancy curtains.*
Yes, yes, remember the old rule: Whenever researchers find something to be true of females, they will interpret and report it as evidence of female superiority. As I've pointed out many times, this rush to patronize women reveals an underlying fear that women actually are inferior.
Trying to put the science back in climate science
Climate scientist Judith A. Curry's belief that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming doesn't exactly make her the darling of climate skeptics, but many warmists detest her for an entirely different reason: she believes that climate scientists should behave like scientists, with all that entails -- rigorous peer review, open debate, and greater transparency about source data and methodology.
Such an approach is anathema to those who brook no criticism. After Curry made the observation that some warmist scientists "tolerate no dissent" – a statement that's essentially inarguable, particularly in light of the CRU emails – atmospheric scientist Bart Verheggen ("I am particularly interested in science communication") harrumphed:
Excuse me? Is this a respected scientist talking?
His confusion and unfamiliarity is understandable, but yes, that is a scientist talking, one who actually thinks like a scientist.
Via Kate, here's Curry's recent interview with OilPrice.com in which she suggests that, for a variety of reasons, The IPCC Might Have Outlived Its Usefulness.
Y2Kyoto: Gleick-Out
During the third week of February our global community of Earth and space scientists witnessed the shocking fall from grace of an accomplished AGU member who betrayed the principles of scientific integrity. In doing so he compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society, weakened the public’s trust in scientists, and produced fresh fuel for the unproductive and seemingly endless ideological firestorm surrounding the reality of the Earth’s changing climate.
The World Still Has Too Many Philosophers
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. - The Journal of Medical Ethics
Update: The Editor responds.
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
The story was too good to be true... (h/t K. Shaidle)
Dennis Prager & Adam Carolla Together on Stage
This past Saturday evening, radio talkshow host Dennis Prager and podcast phenom Adam Carolla appeared on stage together at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center in California. Though Prager is a devout Jew and Carolla is an atheist, it was remarkable to see that the two men share very similar values on most things.
I was very privileged to have been able to photograph both shows that evening. It was a most memorable event that I will not soon forget. If they ever do release the shows on video, I would highly recommend you get a copy, as you will not be disappointed by the insight, wisdom, and wit.
Three Year American Recovery Watch Remains On High Alert
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer, Feb.26th;
“How do you go after Barack Obama, though, right now? I mean, the stock market is up. It looks like the unemployment is going down. David Axelrod in his campaign said the other day Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. It’s going to be a tough job for you, is it now?”
New orders for U.S. manufactured goods fell in January by the most in three years as demand fell across the board from machinery to aircraft, suggesting the economy started the year on weaker footing than expected.
We need you!
"The report by the council also said keeping employees will be a challenge with 18 per cent of the construction workforce or about 6,600 workers expected to retire within the next 10 years." - CKOM
"Over the next five years, between 75,000 and 90,000 skilled workers will be needed to plug the labour shortage. Recruitment will mainly be in areas of advanced technology, construction, mineral exploration, agriculture and petroleum." - and we'll go to Europe to get you.
I wonder if this tweet might have something to do with that?
"Brad Wall @PremierBradWall In Sask we'll make decisions that ensure our budget is balanced, promises are kept and programs that help people are sustainable. #skpoli"
It's Probably Nothing
America's per capita government debt worse than Greece.
(h/t EBD)
Reader Tips
Tonight's Tips music comes in the form of one of the best farming songs extant: here's the late Stan Rogers singing The Field Behind the Plow.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 27, 2012
Jack MacLaren MPP Carleton Mississippi Mills - Maiden Speech
It's long, but give him time to warm up.
h/t James
Why who did what to who
I looked at my watch
I looked at my wrist
I punched myself in the face with my fist*
Two Boston lesbians who beat up a man have been charged with a hate crime because the victim of the pummelling is gay:
"What this really demonstrates is the idiocy of the hate-crime legislation,” said civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate. “If you beat someone up, you’re guilty of assault and battery of a human being. Period. The idea of trying to break down human beings into categories is doomed to failure.”
Not necessarily, says ACLU attorney Sarah Wunsch, who could be arguing in her spare time:
"The mere fact that someone is a member of the same class doesn’t mean they could not be motivated by hatred for their very own group.”
Well, that could open up a whole new can of worms.
It's all so confusing.
The Fordson Snow Devil (1929)
It's a Screw-Propelled Vehicle (pick image for video).
Bob Rae's Nixonian moment
Well, two controversies, two staffers fired...err resigned.
Now, how about everyone in the HoC grow up, eh? Flying off the handle is our job.
@SunNewsNetwork and wallyj in comments report Adam Carroll was the staffer.
Carroll's cached twitter feed. Thanks, mark.
His Politwiiter feed and his twitter pictures. Thanks, Kapusta.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
I guess the best efforts to make the toy-gun story go away, failed.
KW's 570News - Jeff Allen's 9am podcast, and the 10 am podcast (although I couldn't get it working so it may not be up yet). 10 am podcast is working now.
Allen's 9am show features the police and the CAS's Scott. Recommended listening.
Update: Solomon Friedman is confirmed to be the Samsone's lawyer. He is on Adler and has advised the Samsone's to avoid the media.
This Is Not Your Grandma's Humane Society
Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.
h/t Ed S.
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music, shamelessly filched from Word Around The Net, Philadelphia punk rockers The Obama Supporters The Dead Milkmen sing Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 26, 2012
Tribute to a murderer
In Galway, Ireland, the T-shirts aren't enough:
A major and innovative monument to the Irish-Argentinean revolutionary, guerilla, doctor, writer, and politician Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has taken a step closer to becoming a reality this week….City Hall's arts officer James Harrold will commission a scale model of the proposed monument to be made. This will then be presented to the Galway City Council’s Working Group on Public Arts for consideration..
Labour Councillor Billy Cameron:
"Che is an international figure who has inspired thousands of people and it is time we honoured and recognised him…”
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Congolese wrestlers, a photo essay. h/t
Weather Watchers
Keeping an eye on the horizon, prairie style:
CHEYENNE — State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.
They're not saying, they're just sayin':
“I don’t think there’s anyone in this room today what would come up here and say that this country is in good shape, that the world is stable and in good shape — because that is clearly not the case,” state Rep. Lorraine Quarberg, R-Thermopolis, said. “To put your head in the sand and think that nothing bad’s going to happen, and that we have no obligation to the citizens of the state of Wyoming to at least have the discussion, is not healthy.”
The post-reason society
As a companion piece to Cjunk's "Wrong Rights" post below, here's Daniel Greenfield on the destruction of liberty brought about by the implementation of said positive rights:
The only way to implement civil rights was to destroy civil rights in the name of civil rights so that everyone ends up with fewer rights, but learns to feel good about it. This has been the pattern for every civil rights movement since which demands its special privileges. Having run out of races, we are now pandering to such bizarre notions as sexual identity as genetic and permanently fixed, yet existing entirely apart from the body of the person, and that religiously motivated terrorism exists entirely apart from the religion.This isn't post-modernism, it's post-reason. It's post-everything. The left has always sought out the taboo and the transgressive, but as a society we are swiftly running out of transgressions to embrace and protect with government legislation. The more tolerant that Americans grudgingly become in the name of decency, the harder the commissars of correctness have to search for some new bigotry to charge them with.
Read the whole essay, "Uncivil Rights", here.
Wrong Rights
More government bureaucracy, and a culture of genuflecting to special interests:
Commissar Sebelius says that she is trying to “strike the appropriate balance.” But these two things — a core, bedrock, constitutional principle, and Section 47(e)viii of Micro-Regulation Four Bazillion and One issued by Leviathan’s Bureau of Compliance — are not equal, and you can only “balance” them by massively increasing state power and massively diminishing the citizen’s. Or, to put it more benignly, by “leaving it up to the government to make good decisions.”
Taken by Storm
Chapter 1 of Taken By Storm - Dr. Christopher Essex & Dr. Ross McKitrick, (2002), Key Porter Books Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, opens with a description of a thunderstorm and the inability of science to understand the forces involved in that storm.
Science has published a study based on satellite estimates of global rainfall. Then calculating the frictional drag on the raindrops.
From Nature:
All the same, the total global total rate of energy dissipation from precipitation is around 10^15 watts, about 100 times the rate at which humans consume energy worldwide.
Science is getting closer to understanding that thunderstorm.
Slowly, Inexorably, Crumbling
From science ... to bad science ... to fraud:
The real story in this Fakegate scandal is how the global warming movement is desperate, delusional, and collapsing as global warming fails to live up to alarmist predictions. People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad. Also, people who are so desperate as to forge documents in an attempt to frame their rivals are clearly not above forging scientific data, studies, and facts to similarly further their cause. It is both striking and telling how global warming activists have failed to condemn the acts of forgery in the Fakegate scandal.
While a growing number of American politicians take the side of the skeptics or in the least remain neutral, in Canada virtually every single politician from every party mouths Global Warming platitudes.
Cjunk asks, when will it end?
* For those unfamiliar with Fakegate.
Reader Tips
Hank the nonpareil, still wafting across the ether 61 years later, says Hey, Good Lookin'.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 25, 2012
Oh, Frack
No direct connection has been found between hydraulic fracturing and reports of groundwater contamination, according to a study released Thursday by the Energy Institute at The University of Texas of Austin.
Never fear. They'll keep studying until they get it right.
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
EJW-Mercatus Symposium Contributors On a Potential U.S. Debt Crisis
The liberal Jackboot
The wing-nuts questioned why firearm enthusiasts hated the registry?
Not that the Tories are going to do anything about the warrant-less search and seizure parts of C68. Oh, no. You have no rights when there may be the tinkling of an idea that a firearm may be somehow involved. Even if, you know, one isn't.
Where are last weeks defenders of warrant requirements now?
I truly hope this 'free' and law-abiding citizen sues the pants off of everyone involved. Then I hope that they are left destitute and lose what-ever certifications these social scientists had.
Oh, but it's alright though, it's for the children, “Our community would have an expectation if comments are made about a gun in a house, we’d be obligated to investigate that to ensure everything is safe.”
Cause, you know, if you aren't with them, you're with the child pornographers, or something like that.
Update: Ezra: h/t Occam
Reader Tips
Dead men can't speak, but they sure can sing: From the 2004 album Real Gone, here's Tom Waits' poignant trans-corporeal dispatch Green Grass. Think "Danny Boy" a couple of octaves drunker.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 24, 2012
CWB: "We shall fight them on the benches..."
It ain't over till it's .... uh oh...
Justice Shane Perlmutter of Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench on Friday dismissed the eight ex-directors’ motion, filed in December, for an injunction against federal Bill C-18, the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act.
h/t The Glengarrian
The OPEC of Ballroom Dancing
Some lighter fair (fare?) for the weekend. Boys, pay attention. Some wise words here:
"Why buy the ballroom dancer, when the dancing is for free?"
Canadian Taxpayers Federation Needs Your Help
Via email;
The CTF’s annual waste recognition event – the Teddy Waste Awards – are approaching and we need your help.This is the biggest media event of the year that blows the whistle on government waste. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And nothing will change unless we put wastrels in the spotlight and demand better from those charged with managing our tax dollars.
The worst wrongdoers - the most specious spendthrifts at the local, provincial and federal level - are singled out for a Teddy - the golden sow, a handsome gilded symbol of government waste and extravagance of the highest order.
And that’s where we need your help. Have you heard of a local, provincial or national story of government waste that you think deserves to be nominated for a Teddy?
If you have a great nominee please email us at: research@taxpayer.com
Brick for brains
Saving the baby polar bears one sucker at a time:
If (the Tesla's) battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss…
Those Moderate Muslims!
A state judge in Pennsylvania has dismissed an assault and harrassment case against a Muslim defendant who admitted attacking the victim. Magistrate Judge Mark Martin, a veteran of the war in Iraq and a convert to Islam, ruled that Talag Elbayomy’s sharia defense — what he claimed was his obligation to strike out against any insult against the prophet Mohammed — trumped the First Amendment free speech rights of the victim.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Y2Kyoto: Soylent Swim Club
Sir George Young, leader of the House of Commons, said the proposal to warm a Worcestershire leisure centre with heat from a nearby crematorium was a “groundbreaking scheme”.
He said the Government is considering whether the plan could be duplicated elsewhere in Britain.
(Related! update via Kathy Shaidle.)
The moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow...
…and more Americans started packing heat:
Last fall, I wrote about a surprising trend: gun sales have skyrocketed since Barack Obama became president. During that time, the stock of gunmaker Sturm Ruger (RGR) has outperformed gold. Analysts aren’t quite sure what’s causing the trend…
Probably just an outbreak of clingy bitterness.
Read Joshua Green's "Barack Obama, 'Greatest Gun Salesman in America'" here.
Reader Tips
In tonight's amusement en route to the Tips, from the 1933 Samuel Goldwyn musical comedy Roman Sandals, vaudeville legend Eddie Cantor sings Put A Tax On Love.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
February 23, 2012
"Welcome to Canada!"
"Now, let me tell you a bit about your shitty new country…"
February 13 was the official launch of "People's Citizenship Guide: a response to conservative canada." Written by a group of progressive scholars with the intention of providing a "more honest alternative" to the official citizenship Guide, the People's Citizenship Guide encourage new immigrants to join the ranks of the leftist grievance-mongers:
"The Canadian economy forms part of an unequal global economic system, a system which, shape by the legacies of colonialism, continues to privilege industrialized nations over those of the global south."
Sun TV host Brian Lilley and guest John Robson spotlighted several other notable passages from The People's Citizenship Guide on yesterday's edition of The Byline:
"Canada has a long history of repression, exclusion, and exploitation."
The unjust "exclusion" continues to this day:
"You must apply to become a Canadian "citizen" to vote in any election in Canada. This means waiting several years after arriving in Canada to become eligible, paying a significant application fee per person, passing a written exam in French or English, and swearing allegiance - perhaps in front of a military official - to the British Queen, who leads a Christian church. For many people, this process is a barrier to exercising their democratic rights."
(emph. mine)
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
America gets its Volkswagen.
The memo, sent to employees of GE Healthcare Americas team explains that all sedan, crossover, and minivan purchases in 2012 will be replaced by the Chevy Volt. Only field engineers are exempt from having to drive a company Volt.
GE will offer estimates for installation Level 2 Charging Stations, though all-gas use will be allowed when there is no electric option. Any employees who opt out of the Volt program will not be compensated for their expenses. Those who do choose to drive the Volt will be reimbursed for public charging and home charging costs, in addition to gas uses.
What We Need is a Ministry of Coddling
During the Occupy Toronto movement, I met with a lot of young adults, who did not meet the typical stereotype of the left-leaning protester. Many told stories of having always followed the best advice of people they trusted — parents, teachers, guidance counsellors — only to find themselves overeducated, underexperienced, with no job prospects and mounting bills. They felt betrayed, and that was driving their anger.
Seen In California Yesterday
At least this one didn't explode while in front of me!
How Multiculturalism Saves Money
... "progressives" don't have to travel abroad to feel smug:
She did not look at, nor speak to the other boys and the game went on for at least half an hour. She'd chat with her girl friends ... then head to her brother's table ... after she left, he'd chat to his friends about what she had just said. It appeared as if she were taking verbal messages back and forth between the two groups ...
Those Moderate Muslims!
"Mostafa's ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel," Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told FNA on Tuesday.Bolouri Kashani also underlined that her spouse loved any resistance figure in his life who was willing to fight the Zionist regime and supported the rights of the oppressed Palestinian nation.
Iran's 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, a chemistry professor and a deputy director of commerce at Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was assassinated during the morning rush-hour in the capital early January. His driver was also killed in the terrorist attack.
This Is Not Your Grandma's Humane Society
It's never a random Hell's Angel....
An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal authorities said...
Wealth creators not welcome
Fred L. Smith on the anti-business policy agenda of the left:
Ignored (in the storm about the Heartland documents), however, (is) a larger and even more serious issue – the growing effort to drive the market (and market-friendly voices) from the marketplace of ideas. The left has found that their statist alliances – trial lawyers and environmentalists, unionists and consumer groups – have been powerful in advancing their agenda. They’re not eager to see economic liberals do the same.Note their systematic ideological-cleansing program: no one with any business links serving on a government policy advisory group; no one with a business background to serving in government; pejorative labeling in academic journals of any business-funded research; banning academics funding by business; passing stockholder resolutions against companies assisting pro-market policy allies..
If these efforts succeed, then the only legitimate voices in the policy debates will be crony capitalists and statist intellectuals. A serious threat and one that the Heartland incident should alert us to.
Reader Tips
Television personality Dick Clark is famous for being unflaggingly, conscientiously anodyne, and for always knowing what side his bread is buttered on. In tonight's tippity amusement he fully hits the mark on both counts, as he comes to the defence of 'the kids' in his Open Letter To The Older Generation.
Hey, gotta clear the bookmarks once in a while.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 22, 2012
The Left's Rights: a case study
In a column at Time Magazine's website, college administrator and early childhood educator Erika Christakis argues that Christians who oppose the Obama administration's decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:
"Let’s see what our society would look like if we all had the luxury of imposing our unfettered will."
This vaguely dystopian inversion of the truth – that it is progressive, secular champions of central-planning such as herself, and not Christians, who are imposing their "unfettered will" – informs her entire column. Her will, she will have you understand, isn't unfettered or selfish, but an expression of rights: those who don't want to pay for other people's abortifacients, she says, are "unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy."
You read that right: being disinclined to pay for the nominal - and presumably infrequent - expense of your neighbour's abortifacients is an infringement upon your neighbour's rights.
As for those recalcitrant Christians who are just too thick to understand that the beliefs of the proponents of big-state, enforced-secular leftism trump their own deeply-held spiritual belief that abortion is murder,
"At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children. Or perhaps they’d be willing to spend some time in jail in protest. At my taxpaying expense, of course..."
"Luxury of imposing their unfettered will" indeed.
Now Is The Time At SDA When We Juxtapose!
Even as a significant percentage of Americans falsely believe Obama is Muslim, the president has spoken of his Christian faith with increasing fervor during his three years in the White House.
It was just revealed two days ago that FBI Director Mueller secretly met on February 8 at FBI headquarters with a coalition of groups including various Islamist and militant Arabic groups who in the past have defended Hamas and Hizballah and have also issued blatantly anti-Semitic statements. At this meeting, the FBI revealed that it had removed more than 1000 presentations and curricula on Islam from FBI offices around the country that was deemed “offensive.” The FBI did not reveal what criteria was used to determine why material was considered “offensive” but knowledgeable law enforcement sources have told the IPT that it was these radical groups who made that determination.
But Things Are Different In La Belle Province
And not just for the NDP as Publius elucidates:
As The Dipper Panders...
In the ROC Medicare is not a social program, it's a totem of national identity. What it means to be Canadian in modern Canada is the divine right to die on a publicly funded waiting list. Unless you die in a hospital bed, at which point the hospital will nickel and dime your family and estate...
The Quebecois are not so emotionally attached to Tommy Douglas' brain child. It's a nice freebie and all, one of many financed through the largess of the less kleptocratic jurisdictions in the country, but it ain't anything special. Quebec is Quebec and the Quebecois are pretty sure of who and what they are. That whole neurotic obsession with national identity is very much a WASP thing. No self respecting Francophone nationalist is going to stay awake at nights wondering how he is different from the Americans...
Y2Kyoto: Made up models; made up memos
I don't know if anyone has been following the Peter Gleick controversy or not, but it's hilarious.
Powerline does an excellent deconstruction of the memo at the heart of the controversy and as always, you can keep up-to-date with Anthony.
When Did Social Studies Become Socialist Studies?
h/t Matt from Mississauga
Is Ontario Headed Towards a New Future of Prosperity?
Randy Hillier has a suggestion to help the McGuinty lead province turn around their almost certain trajectory towards bankruptcy.
Kathy Shaidle: Get Rid of Section 13!
h/t Matt from Mississauga
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin
US Supreme Court to revisit 2003 decision that race-based discrimination is legal.
Should be interesting.
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music, relatively unknown Irish songbird Sinéad Lohan brings her lovely voice to a treatment of Bob Dylan's To Ramona.
The comments are open, as always, to your Reader Tips.
February 21, 2012
The Big Idea people
In the post "Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats", David Foster of Chicago Boyz excerpts a couple of timely passages from Eric Hoffer's essay The Ordeal of Change, published about fifty years ago:
The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…
Hoffer was referring at the time, Foster notes, to "underdeveloped countries" and not to the modern west, but his description is an apt portrayal of our modern-day would-be central planners: bureaucrats, politicians, big-picture leftist pundits, and the chattering class of so-called progressive voters:
…there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them.
Has Modern Catholicism Become Intertwined with Big Government?
Paul Rahe has recently published two important columns, here and here. Some in the Catholic church are very annoyed. If I were a Leftist Catholic, I would be too.
h/t Nick
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
There is a cliché in Washington. There are two things you do not want to see made: sausage and laws. To those we may add a third: Barack Obama's decisions.
Ron Suskind's book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America. For example, when Obama's experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was "surprisingly aloof in the conversation" and seemed "disconnected and less in control." His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as "There needs to be more inspiration here!" and "What about more smart grids" and -- one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate -- "we need more moon shot".
Even "Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes."
Suskind writes:
Members of the team were perplexed...for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was.
Maybe President Obama is...
...actually a closet Monophysite, pace the Rev. Franklin Graham (with video).
Didn't They Use to Hang Traitors?
In the old days, you know, when the words "right" & "wrong" actually meant something, there was an important part of Canada's Criminal Code known as Section 46 that carried some weight with the citizenry. It describes "High treason" and "Treason".
If foreign terrorists from another large oil producing nation were to destroy the oil production facilities in Northern Alberta, it would be reasonable to conclude that they would be criminally charged. If some Canadians conspired with them, one can only speculate if Section 46 would be used to charge them.
One is left to wonder if Canadians accepting vast sums of money from foreign sources to shut down Canada's oil production via non-violent means is unethical and possibly unlawful?
h/t SDA commenter 'G'
Related Update: In this video Ezra Levant describes the paralyzed hearings in Northern B.C. - h/t Sammy
When 95% Just Ain't Enough
Why bother being a uniter when the good 'ol divider schtick works even better.
Dr. Jack Frost (PhD ) Issues Warning
Warnings though, are meant to be ignored:
I used to mention that even a marginal increase in summer frosts, or shortening of growing seasons could spell disaster ... but no, these guano-for-brains bots of the "green" movement were more concerned about propagating the mythical phenomenon of rising sea levels or increased hurricanes.
Rising sea levels? You mean that people still believe that?
Word was just issued this week in Vancouver that, as an interim guideline, all builders are being told they should raise the level of their land by a metre.
Update: Myths so desperately clung to that trade war may be around the corner.
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music the late June Carter Cash, wife of Johnny, and daughter of Country Music legend Mother Maybelle Carter, gets her giddy-up going as she gets ready for those Big Balls In Nashville.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 20, 2012
"Hello, mate! Where're you from?"
A seven-year-old Brit named Elliot Dearlove recently asked a five-year-old boy on a playground if his skin was brown because he was from Africa.
His mother, Hayley White, 29...received a phone call last month to say her son had been at the centre of a ‘racist incident’…."I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation…"
Elliot: "I was just asking a question. I didn't mean it to be nasty."
Nice try, kid. You're on file now.
Photo of the depraved perp at the link.
Whose teachers? Whose kids?
From a school textbook ("a comprehensive introduction to the study of Geography") used by Grade 8 students in NSW, Australia:
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming, there are still people who deny that is a result of human activity. The most vocal of these deniers are conservative political thinktanks (sic) and the right-wing radio 'shock jocks.' (emph. mine)
Why, it's almost as if unionized teachers are using Geography classes to brainwash kids with politically-partisan propaganda:
Fortunately, a new generation of world leaders is taking global warming seriously. In the United States of America, President Barack Obama is working to reduce America's reliance on fossil fuels and is providing leadership in international efforts to reduce CO2 emissions…In Australia, the Rudd Labor Government is legislating for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme….
The Muddled Thinking of the Left: Example #1
Feb 14, 2012 - One of the Left's heroes, Keith Olbermann insists that no rapes occurred at the various Occupy protests, even though there is well documented evidence to the contrary.
Feb 16, 2012 - An Ottawa born writer named Dahlia Lithwick, constantly trying to develop more 'cred' with her Komrades in Amerika, insists that pregnancy related medical procedures in a doctor's office, including non-invasive ultrasound, is equivalent to rape. Some dare to disagree.
Note: This is not the first time Ms. Lithwick has embarrassed herself.
Sustainable Conventional Energy: the New Tautology
There was a time not that long ago where the expression "sustainable conventional energy" was considered an oxymoron.
I wonder, does hundreds of years of conventional energy in abundance change it to a tautology?
“The message is quite clear, you can produce gas hydrates using conventional techniques,” says Scott Dallimore, a senior scientist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the project in the Mackenzie Delta. Over two winters the researchers drilled down more than a kilometre into a 150-metre-thick layer on the edge of the Beaufort Sea at Mallik — the most concentrated known deposit of the frozen fuel in the world.
A Government Agency with Nothing To Do
Your tax dollars "at work":
A federal agency created by the Conservative government to mediate complaints about Canadian mining operations abroad has spent more than $1.1 million in the past two years, but has yet to mediate anything.At the same time, the agency — the Office of the Extractive Sector Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor — has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel, entertainment, training, meetings, reports and other expenses, documents obtained by CBC News show. Renovations to a federal government office to accommodate the agency's three employees alone cost Canadian taxpayers $189,000.
Are Canadians Really a Free People?
In a fascinating new column, George Jonas ponders why Canada is exporting democracy but importing tyranny.
In the narcosis of “progress,” the liberal state clings to its dogmas, sacrileges, holy things and taboos. It guards them as jealously and enforces them as rigidly as the Taliban guards and enforces its version of Islam. Maybe it doesn’t enforce them as cruelly — maybe.Exaggeration? You decide. In the year 1300, a period we call the Dark Ages, a pig was tried for blasphemy in France. In the year 2000, 200 years into the Age of Enlightenment, on the threshold of the 21st century, in the United States of America, the authorities charged a six-year-old boy with sexual harassment for kissing a six-year-old girl.
Those Moderate Muslims!
They don't hate our "freedoms". They hate our guts.
The usual Sunday-Morning-talk-show explanation for this is that Pakistan is hedging its strategic bets: Pakistani military leaders doubt the United States military can tame Afghanistan before American combat forces’ scheduled exit in 2013. And rather than see the country degenerate into absolute chaos (as occurred in the early 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet departure), Pakistani military leaders want to be in position to turn Afghanistan into a semi-orderly Pashtun-dominated client state that provides Islamabad with “strategic depth” against India. And the only way for them to do this is to co-opt the Taliban.This elaborate Great Game theorizing all makes sense. But there is another, simpler explanation: Most ordinary Pakistanis loathe America — indeed, not only America, but the whole of the non-Muslim world — and are only too happy to support jihad against the NATO forces next door in Afghanistan.
h/t Kevin
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips video we watch a couple of Okanagan-based veterinarians dealing with a variety of challenges on a daily basis, in Saskatchewan-born filmmaker Eugene "Jeep" Boyko's 1977 NFB documentary Canaries to Clydesdales.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 19, 2012
Featured Comment
Long time reader "Shaken", via email;
As our journalists continue to cast themselves under a self-made asteroid, hundreds of thousands of small investors find themselves on a ledge, wondering which version of The Truth is the one that will inform their retirement or educational fund management decisions. Reporting in the mainstream financial press of late has been at best like a ride on the vomit comet: Greece soon to default; ECB funds a bailout; oops not quite - actually China is our white knight; not so fast - the Greeks cannot agree to terms... On and on it goes.
Can anyone be surprised then when the Al Gore's invention glows red hot with rumor and speculation as a worried public experiences daily cognitive disconnects while trying to reconcile what their lying eyes see and or read from the professional financial journalists?
Is it any wonder, then, that in such a climate of fear, deliberate disinformation, misdirection, obfuscation and even plain lying that blog posts such as this one become viral within hours of publication?
When one reads through this blog post, pieces seem to fall into place, and otherwise paradoxical events and statements begin to form into a cohesive and logical pattern. Believability ensues. Caring relationships ensure rapid dissemination.
Millions of people around the globe stand ready to do what our professional journalists have forgotten to do, or have otherwise been convinced not to do: be one of us looking out for each other.
Perhaps the blog post to which this note refers is merely the speculation if an intelligent and well meaning individual that has been swept up in the milieu of anxiety which grips us all ever tighter each day, but that us beside the point. The point is, this post went viral as though cycled in a Swiss particle accelerator, evidencing the appetite of the public for reliable information, an appetite no longer satisfied by journalists.
The veracity of the rumor will soon be established or dismissed. Reading it through, one cannot but help sense that there may just be a tinge of truth to the rumor, especially as it has a large degree of congruence with the latest musings at established and credible blogs such as Mish's and Zerohedge.
If this rumor turns out to be true, and the MSM has once more been scooped by the humble blogosphere, it will be perhaps the nearest of the near misses - the biggest story in the lives of many today, unreported, either by malfeasance, or incompetence. Or both.
Related - Among European nations, debt-ridden Greece is most exposed to Iranian oil disruption.
Does Justin Trudeau's Canada Tolerate Mockery?
Lorrie Goldstein is at his very best with this hilarious piece about Canada's Prince of Self, Justin Trudeau.
... Sometimes I think my mouth isn’t big enough for my brain, sort of like the Brain in Pinky and the Brain.This is a burden I, Justin Trudeau, must bear — for the sake of the starving children of Africa, who look up to me — so that I can make life better for everyone … who is not Justin Trudeau. (That’s me.) ...
h/t 'batb'
Related: The first hour of Roy Green's show today was devoted entirely to the Lil' Pony's outburst. There were some absolutely hilarious callers and one particularly annoying Leftist. You can listen to it here, beginning at 6:00.
Grandpa ... What are Those Towers?
"They are eco-ruins, Sarah."
"What's an eco-ruin Grandpa?"
Well my little darling, let me tell you a story:
I don't think I'll mind Eco-ruins. It will be fun to point them out on hikes with kids and explain what it was like back in the late 1900's. "The best part kids, is that they thought they were smarter than everyone else. They would get so mad if anyone said different. Look at their big schemes now. Every time you pay the government, just remember that its to pay for these rusting monuments."
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
Brokest Nation In History Fusses Instead About Sex
Memo to Canada's Human Rights' Masters
Update: Commenter 'doowleb' posted this gem: "Give me Liberty or Give me death has been replaced with Give me."
So, what did you learn in school today, Billy?
"Well, mommy, I learned that Stephen Harper is a…"
Two of Canada's largest unions paid to bus hundreds of school kids to Parliament Hill on Tuesday to rally against what they call government inaction on First Nations education.Officials with the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Canadian Union of Public Employees denied the elementary school students were enlisted as props in the unions' ongoing public battle against Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.
Lisa Howell, a teacher at Pierre Elliot Trudeau School, deadpanned –
"I don't feel like we're advancing an agenda."
Of course not. Don Moran, a senior officer with CUPE:
"We sponsored the bus to bring them...CUPE and PSAC. We kind of had a joint venture to bring them down so that all the voices could be heard here…I think (the kids) are speaking from their hearts. I don't think there's any brainwashing."
h/t ET
Reader Tips
I think Lucinda Williams has Lost It. Let her know if you come across it.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 18, 2012
Free Booze for Alcoholics: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
In their never-ending march down the path of stupidity, the "intelligentsia" in Vancouver is now offering free booze to alcoholics. And of course, they have an endless number of "studies" to "prove" that this is a good idea.
David Berner disagrees.
In this video, John Robson & Barbara Kay discuss the insanity that has become reality.
The Future of Education?
An interesting fellow named Alex Lindsay recently wrote a piece called "The Future of Education". It's well worth a read as he presents some very interesting ideas.
Open Question: If something like his vision were to come to fruition in Canada, what changes would have to occur?
Brave, brave Sir Robinson
When danger reared it's ugly head*…
Destroying Memorials
When you elected the Conservative Party of Canada, I bet you didn't expect them to be destroying memorials in Quebec. Isn't that a crime?
Jeff Larivee, whose wife was killed in the 1989 Montreal massacre, is a spokesman for the Coalition for Gun Control. He said he and many other Quebecers feel outrage at the Harper government’s determination to dismantle laws that, for many, serve as a memorial.
Standing Up Against Obama's Pravda Comrades
If one didn't know better, you might conclude that the entire script of Charlie Rose was written by the Obama regime:
Hopefully all Republican candidates have learned what John McCain failed to.
The World Still Has Too Many "Science" Journalists
Why the World Needs Better Science Journalism
Sure, knowing whether cows line up with the Earth’s magnetic field will probably not change your life, but climate change and electric vehicles will.
Related... (h/t Manny)
Eat It
Earlier this month a Catholic charity in Wisconsin received a call from abortion provider Planned Parenthood asking them to come pick up some food donations. According to one of the charity workers,
"I politely explained to (the) callers that although we are non-denominational in regards to those we serve, we are a Catholic organization who shares a board of directors with our sister organization, St. Vincent de Paul. We adhere to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and to the Rule of St. Vincent de Paul. I also explained our Gift Acceptance Policy and how acceptance of the donation would compromise our core values and possibly damage the reputation of Paul’s Pantry."
Welcome to the progressive bullies' no-faith zone –
"Within 20 minutes I was getting phone calls and emails calling us [names]. The calls that day came from the Milwaukee area, where Planned Parenthood is headquartered. We have caller ID…"
– where thou shalt:
Then Daily Kos got in on the action and bashed the pantry, then listed the phone number and the employee names and told people to call in protest…
h/t Black Mamba
Reader Tips
Tonight's Tips music selection is one of those magic songs that almost makes you fall in love, or at least brings back the feeling, just for a moment, of what it was like. From 1946, here's Jo Stafford's exquisitely beautiful rendition of Moonlight in Vermont.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 17, 2012
For Tat
James Harper, a Colorado student who recently quit his high school choir rather than sing an Islamic song with the words "There is no other truth except Allah", provides our quote of the week:
"I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir (sing) 'Jesus Christ is the only truth.'"
He's wrong, of course. There'd be tears of joy, and Muslim and Christian students would exchange hugs and kisses, and they'd dance and laugh and play with gumdrop smiles…
Its Out!
The CFL 2012 season schedule!.
The free agency period has been cause for celebration.
A few good-byes to long standing Riders. Thank you Wes and Gene.
And a couple of surprises, see ya Stuuuu and Andy all the best except when you play the Riders!
Two things. The OLine signings mean that whomever wins the starting running back position is going to have some excellent lanes opening up. They also mean that Darian is going to have a bit more time to make decisions.
I love the signings and GM Taman deserves accolades for his yoeman work. Last year showed our weaknesses and on paper GM Taman has addressed those issues. Now it's up to our new coaching staff to bring the excellence we know wears Rider Green to the field.
How many months till training camp again?
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
"The real threat is the sophisticated forces of Islamism, which have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security but to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy."
President Romney a Disaster for America's Conservatives?
Is James Delingpole wrong?
Is the Danish Gravy Train Running on Empty?
In Denmark, the Welfare State and Freedom seem to be more & more incompatible. Jacob Mchangama explains why.
A Brief History of Mississauga's Palestine House
Feb 15, 2012: The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui refers to Jason Kenney's decision to cut $1 Million of annual subsidies to Mississauga's Palestine House as "scandalous".
Jul 22, 2006: Elias Hazineh, a member of the board of directors of Palestine House, speaks at an anti-Israel rally in Toronto. The photos captured at that event are most interesting.
Jan 11, 2009: Nabil Nassar, a member of the board of directors of Palestine House, is interviewed by CTV News at an anti-Israel rally in Toronto, where this video was shot.
Feb 1, 2010: A 3-year investigation by the RCMP revealed that of 1,800 people who had submitted fraudulent immigrations applications to Canada 300 of them claimed the address of Palestine House as where they were living.
Apr 2, 2010: A young man related to Palestine House screams out "You need another Holocaust".
Nov 16, 2010: Sobhi Salhia, the President of Palestine House, travels with his daughter, Yasmene, to the West Bank. In her blog entry about this trip, she posts a photo of her father and refers to the founding of Israel as "the catastrophe".
Feb 16, 2012: Michael Coren & Brian Lilley disagree with the aforementioned Mr. Siddiqui.
Many thanks & praise are owed to Blazing Cat Fur & Mississauga Matt for their tremendous writing & videos over the years on this file.
Rex Murphy on Canada's Newest Separatist, Justin Trudeau
h/t Sammy, with much thanks to Mississauga Matt for uploading the video
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music we go all international-like to watch Neapolitan pianist and singer Renato Carosone and the boys sing Tu Vuò Fa' L'Americano.
THe comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 16, 2012
Tales from the no dissent zone
Former "Daily Kos" contributor Eric Allen Bell was a filmmaker who had a POV entirely in keeping with that of typical west-coast progressives. In 2010, after leaving Hollywood for a quieter life in Murfreesbo,Tennessee, he saw American-flag-waving Evangelicals in his new hometown protesting against the proposed construction of a mega mosque, and decided to make a feature-length documentary about the controversy: "I saw this as something of a David vs. Golliath story - with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslims population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without their being trouble."
He returned to California to show a short version of the documentary to his backers and received the go-ahead. "It was decided", he writes, "that the focus would be on 'the enemy at home', that being what we were calling 'Apocalyptic Christianity'", and America's "religious lunatic fringe." But "something kept nagging at me on a gut level." He saw the Arab Spring "degenerate into the Islamist Winter", and read about women in Pakistan facing execution for being raped, and Indonesians being arrested for atheism; he met a cab driver, a Coptic Christian, who expressed concern about his relatives in Egypt, and then "saw that cab driver's worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamist mobs."
Now more informed, he told his backers that the documentary they were making wasn't entirely honest, and suggested a more balanced view:
"I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, 'Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe.…'"
The accusation was more than a warning shot: he was banned from Daily Kos, and personally denounced in articles published there; his photo was disseminated online with the appellation "Loon at Large", and even his progressive friends and acquaintances vilified him a hatemonger and an Islamophobe. Read about Bell's unpleasant experience with dogmatic forces of the Left in The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam. Highly recommended.
Back to the Future
Thomas Sowell outlines a peculiar time in American political history that saw the rise of the Progressive Party. Much of what happened back then seems like the blueprint for Obama's regime now.
Because Greece is so far away
Most with any recollection with recognize the name Don Drummond. No enemy of Liberals, he. Well, maybe now.
The Full Report.
You broke it, voters of Ontario, you buy it.
A Surefire Way to Make Liberal Heads Explode
I purchased Mark Levin's latest book at a Costco in Seattle earlier this week:
The looks I received from the pair of hipsters working at the checkout was less than positive when they saw it. So I got to thinking, now that I'm back in Vancouver, what reaction would I get carrying that book wearing my red Canada mittens through the more Lefty infested stomping grounds of Vancouver? I might even opt to read it outside at a Starbucks with the cover prominently shown! :-)
The Sound Of Settled Science
Why do most people today, scientists included, believe that small doses of radiation are harmful to human health when no proof for this theory exists, and when mountains of evidence show the opposite — that small amounts of radiation actually promote health? After years of sleuthing into historical records, a scientist at the University of Massachusetts has found a smoking gun, involving a scientific scam in 1946 at the very highest echelons — the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.
In an august Nobel hall one year after the end of the Second World War, the scientific world was knowingly misled by Hermann J. Muller, winner that year of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. This is the verdict from a forensic review entitled Muller’s Nobel Prize Lecture: When Ideology Prevailed Over Science, just published by the Society of Toxicology in the Oxford University Press’s Toxicological Sciences. Had Muller spoken the truth and revealed the existence of contradictory research in the world’s most prominent scientific gathering, we might today have an entirely different view of radiation and its effects, preventing immense human suffering and the loss of countless lives.
Hubert Lacroix: How Dare Anyone Criticize Me or the CBC!
Some Workers Are More Equal Than Others
The $474,000 GM job
Update: Plus:
The strange budget priorities of Obama: Subsidizing car purchases for the 1% over poor children and airline safety
Meanwhile non-luxury Euro car makers are in trouble, especially Fiat (the proud owner of Chrysler which is in effect saving the Italian parent); VW--“slightly premium”--is however doing well, Ford is surprisingly not mentioned:
Too many cars, too few buyers
Nice charts. And note that Peugeot...
...is also worryingly dependent on selling cars in kit form to Iran, which account for 13% of Peugeot’s sales (compared with around 6% for Renault), and which would be vulnerable to any conflict over Iran’s nuclear programme...
Great Moments In Socialism
A "living wage" ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors.
A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average.
A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members.
Other government employee unions that do the same A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.
Bill C-51: An End to Privacy or a Necessary Tool?
The problem with Crying Wolf or, in a modern Canadian context, declaring everything the Harper government does as the End of the World, is that people stop listening to you altogether. This seems to be the case with the Left-of-Centre political & media class in Canada.
Now the Tories are bringing in Bill C-51 aka the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. Its possible infringements into the privacy of Canadians does offer some legitimate pause for concern. Lorrie Goldstein offers a fairly balanced appraisal of the changes.
What say you?
h/t Several SDA commenters
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips video, from an old episode of the Outdoor Channel's program The Huntress, Heidi Wilson shows us – good shot, Justin! – how to fix up some tasty and inexpensive Squirrel Melts.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
February 15, 2012
Belt Parkway Community College Medical School
Nothing heals old racial wounds like affirmative action surgery:
For students applying to medical school with slightly below average GPAs of 3.20-3.39 and slightly below average MCAT scores of 24-26 (first column in the table), black applicants were more than 8 times as likely to be admitted as Asians (67.3% vs. 7.7%), and more than 5 times as likely as whites...
The Sound Of Settled Science
Last week I postulated that the El Niño/El Niña effect was not due to solar or atmospheric conditions, but actually caused by underwater volcanic activity along ocean ridges off the West coast of South America. To see whether my theory held water I decided to look into the Argo Float data to see if there it was showing a warm upwelling of water in this region. I apparently was correct.
My initial assessment was that the frigid Humbult Current that comes north from the Antarctic region along the west coast of South America (the mirror image of the current that drops down from the Arctic along the west coast of North America) could not be warmed so drastically in such a short time by sun and air alone. This is due to the physics of ocean currents and the massive amount of heat required to warm tons of cold water moving northward per second...
h/t Melinda Romanoff
QOTW
(What IS in the water in Massachusetts? Besides Mary Jo Kopechne, I mean.)
We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors
Energy Conversion Devices files for bankruptcy as solar energy lagsIn the latest setback for the solar energy industry, Auburn Hills-based Energy Conversion Devices said today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and intends to sell its assets, including its main subsidiary United Solar Ovonic.
h/t Revnant Dream
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
Department of Home-Lunch Security
Free Melissa Firth!
In overturning the 2010 decision of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to award $2,000 to each man for “violation of their inherent right to be free from discrimination and for injury to their dignity, feelings and self-respect,” the Divisional Court instead ordered them and the tribunal to pay legal costs of $20,000 to the librarian and to the Peel Law Association, which runs the library.The three-judge panel found that tribunal vice-chairman Eric Whist unfairly reversed the onus of proof from the complainant to the respondent, and “placed [the librarian] in the difficult position of trying to prove a negative, namely, that her conduct in the performance of her routine duties was not motivated by race and colour.” It also criticized the tribunal’s “misconceived” comparison of the librarian’s conduct to racial profiling by police.
h/t Rita
The Post Hockey Riot Investigation
A whole lot has been going on behind the scenes in the aftermath of last year's riot in Vancouver, including but not limited to the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) utilizing a special Homeland Security facility in Indianapolis. In this video, David Berner interviews the VPD's Howard Chow:
This Is Not Your Grandma's Humane Society
Remember, these are the same people who hang around schoolyards;
"This is Jessica," the narrator, Kevin Nealon, says. "She suffers from 'BWVAKTBOOM,' 'Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked the Bottom Out of Me,' a painful condition that occurs when boyfriends go vegan and can suddenly bring it like a tantric porn star."
h/t Adrian
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music, dedicated to swashbuckling Liberal dreamboat Justin Trudeau, monochromatic chanteuse Gale Garnett, who is perhaps most famous for being just another notch in Pierre Elliot Trudeau's bedpost, trudges her way through Where Do You Go To Go Away?
I believe she's referring to a sovereign Quebec, but I'm not completely sure about that.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 14, 2012
Justin, Son Of Margaret
Stirring words, by Canada's best known member of the Lucky Y-Chromosome Club.
We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Out of the blue last November, Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) began the (non-union labour) construction of an industrial wind turbine on the grounds of its Family Education Centre, a facility designed to "encourage...people ...to discuss their problems and debate the major issues of the times."
Despite all the places CAW could have located the mammoth structure, it picked Port Elgin, "considered -- one of the leading recreational playgrounds in Ontario" for an industrial wind turbine. CAW's vacant 128-acre property nearby was deemed too environmentally sensitive. Besides, the land had just been subdivided and its lots stood to rake in $2 million. The FEC's densely-populated neighbourhood didn't have such sensitivities.
Life Might Be a Beach, But No Longer in California
California has passed a new milestone on its way to becoming a Totalitarian State of the Idiotic Kind. Adam Carolla has a few things to say about the new restrictions on using frisbees and footballs at the beach (language warning) :
UofR Student Union
Dipsticks.
So at their AGM on the 8th the dumbasses got hijacked by anti-semites and ended up passing another Anti-Israel motion. (I know, quelle surprise, leftist university radicals hijacking a non-entity about Israel.)
I wonder if the student body at UofR understands just what "Commit to identifying and divesting from companies that support or profit from Israel..." means when you put it in the context of this.
Canola: Israel - April 2011 - 8.900k tonnes 2010-2011 16.2k tonnes
Soyabean: Israel - 2009-2010 - 22.6k tonnes
Wheat Flour: Israel - 1q 2011 - 30k tonnes
I guess this means that the wingnuts won't be going home to Dadda's farm anytime soon.
h/t JGL.
What We Really Need Is Democracy
With totalitarian kidnappers to vote for;
Egyptian judges have referred 16 Americans and 27 others linked to NGOs for trial, accusing them of using foreign funds to encourage disruptive protests. Among the targeted NGOs whose assets and funds have been seized are the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute.
Shocking! Appalling! Unprecedented!
Via Drudge
Y2Kyoto: The Final Solution
Now is the time at SDA when we juxatpose!
Adolf Hitler to Heinrich Himmler, 1942; - "The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world."
Petra Döll, German climate scientist, February 2012 - "Klimaskeptiker sind wie Viren".
h/t DN
The Tolerant Left
Looks like they came up empty;
A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.
“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”
“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”
What Frisch proceeded to suggest, however, went well beyond what legitimate presidential campaigns attempt. “We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” he wrote.
Related - US senator calls for News Corp probe and The curious link between Media Matters and the White House war on Fox
Remember, It's Starbucks Appreciation Day Today
Short version:
Starbucks is requested by anti-gun nanny nazi types to refuse service to people carrying guns.
Starbucks refuses and says it will continue to serve people carrying guns.
Anti-gun nanny nazis call for boycott.
Gun owners from across America and Canada today flood Starbucks to buy copious amount of foo-foo drinks even though we're not really the foo-foo latte type. (I plan on getting a mint mocha thing with lots of whipped cream.)
Will SDA get results!? Tune in next quarter when Starbucks CEO says,
"For some reason sales jumped across Canada on Valentines Day by $3.1 billion."
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips video, via Kate, we take a look one of the oldest domesticated dog breeds, the "living antiquity" known as the Saluki.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 13, 2012
We Don't Need No Stinking French Fry Grease
In its early years, biotech company Amyris described itself as a start-up “applying its proprietary breakthrough technologies to address major global health and energy challenges.”
Its originally planned to make an anti-malaria drug, as well as renewable diesel and jet fuel, by feeding sugar to genetically-engineered microorganisms. Having spun off the anti-malaria technology to another company in 2008, yesterday Amyris said it’s giving up making fuels too. Instead, it will to focus on higher value products, such as moisturizers for cosmetics.
The company learnt first hand just how difficult it is to achieve the kind of yields seen in lab tests in large-scale production. In an update call for investors, CEO John Melo said he is “humbled by the lessons we have learned.”
Pharma Shrugs
Supply of a Cancer Drug May Run Out Within Weeks. “A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.
[...]
Thank goodness President Obama is on the case, issuing executive orders! But the existence of any kind of shortage in a market-driven economy should make one’s nose twinkle. One drug shortage might be some kind of freakish anomaly, but 180 crucial drug shortages?
Manning Centre Networking Conference
Canada's largest conservative event of its kind. March 8 - 10th in Ottawa.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
Now, the Obama Administration has, by executive fiat, determined that a private company must give away its services to a class of people it ("The Administration") has determined should get these services.
Going back to our California example, what is to stop the Federal Department of Energy from requiring auto insurers to provide no-cost insurance to anyone driving a car running on electricity, natural gas, or bio-diesel - to promote the use of those vehicles.
For that matter, what's to prevent the U.S. Government from telling GM (which still owes us about $25 billion) they need to provide small, fuel efficient cars to people who cannot otherwise afford them, but live in areas that have limited public transportation?
I don't understand where that authority comes from. But it worries me, very much.
This occurred to me, too - It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first.
h/t Dave
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
Inside Media Matters: Sources, memos reveal erratic behavior, close coordination with White House and news organizations
Support Greenpeace. For The Children.
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry;
Reader Tips
Tonight we take a three-minute-and-nine-second respite from anger, violence, uncertainty, strife, and woe, as we listen to Alabama-born gospel powerhouse Dorothy Love Coates belting out the uplifting All Over This World.
Okay, time's up. The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 12, 2012
Now is the Time at SDA When We Juxtapose
1984-01-22 - Apple releases it's infamous '1984' TV advertisement
2012-01-16 - Michigan elementary school students receive their Obama indoctrination
I Miss W.
"So wait, that can’t mean Bush was right when he basically said Bin Laden wasn’t that important anymore, right?”
Those Moderate Muslims!
Police in Kuala Lumpur said Hamza Kashgari, 23, was detained at the airport "following a request made to us by Interpol" the international police cooperation agency, on behalf of the Saudi authorities.
Kashgari, a newspaper columnist, fled Saudi Arabia after posting a tweet on the prophet's birthday that sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats. The posting, which was later deleted, read: "I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you … I will not pray for you."
More than 13,000 people joined a Facebook page titled "The Saudi People Demand the Execution of Hamza Kashgari".
By Special Request
Hey dhimmi, keep it down:
A Muslim activist group with links to the Muslim Brotherhood has asked the British government to restrict the way the British media reports about Muslims and Islam…
Yeah, right, as if that would ever hap….
Lord Justice Leveson expressed sympathy for Bunglawala's plea and said that any government regulation of the British media would have to extend to the Internet and include blogs, so as to ensure a "level playing field" between print and online media.Lord Hunt, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body which deals with complaints about the editorial content of newspapers and magazines, recently said he is looking into the idea of regulating bloggers and online publications. According to him, "at the moment, it [the Internet] is like the Wild West out there. We need to appoint a sheriff."
Lord Hunt would invite bloggers on current affairs to voluntarily agree to regulation. They would receive a seal-of-approval rating…
The article at the Stonegate Institute notes that Inayat Bunglawala, the Muslim activist who testified in favour of press restrictions, and who "strongly objects to the use of the phrase 'Islamic terrorism'", once described Osama bin Laden as a "freedom fighter for…Muslims in Britain" and praised the courage of Omar Abdul-Rahman, the ringleader of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Reader Tips
Years ago my brother and I were riding in the back seat of our dad's car listening to a local radio station when a comedy routine about a pitch-and-tempo-challenged singer giving it the old college try made us laugh ourselves sick. It wasn't until years later that we realized that what we'd thought was a world-class piece of comedic satire was in fact an actual hit song, recorded by a reluctant and insecure young non-singer who had been plucked off the streets of Philadelphia and thrust into the spotlight by talent scouts searching for an attractive teen idol, vocal talent be damned. Here it is, for your weekend listening pleasure: Fabian's 1959 smash hit Turn Me Loose.
I know, it's not that bad, but it still makes me laugh.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 11, 2012
A North Carolina Father Responds to His Ungrateful Daughter
Tommy Jordan, a North Carolina father of a 15 year old daughter, was not pleased with what she had to say on Facebook. So he made a video (mild language warning but well worth watching) :
Full text of the Facebook message from Jordan's ungrateful 15 year-old:
To my parents, I'm not your damn slave. It's not my responsibility to clean up your shit. We have a cleaning lady for a reason--her name is Linda, not Hannah. If you want coffee, get off your ass and make it yourself. If you want a garden, shovel the fertiliser yourself. Don't sit back on your ass and watch me do it. If you walk into the house and get mud all over the floor that I just cleaned, be my guest. But clean it up after you're done getting shit everywhere. I'm tired of picking up after you. You tell me at least once a day that I need to get a job. You could just pay me for all the shit that I do around the house. Every day when I get home from school, I have to do dishes, clean the counter tops, all the floors, make all the beds, do the laundry and get the trash. I'm not even going to mention all the work I do around your clinic. And if I don't do all that every day, I get grounded. Do you know how hard it is to keep up with chores and schoolwork? It's freaking crazy! I go to sleep at 10 every night because I'm too tired to stay up any longer to do anything else. I have to get up at 5 every morning to get ready for school. On the weekends I have to sleep with my door locked so my little brother won't come get me up at 6. This is all true. And I'm tired of this bullshit. Next time I have to pour a cup of coffee, I'm gonna flip shit. I have no idea how I have a life. I'm gonna hate to see the day when you get too old to wipe your ass and you call me asking for help. I won't be there.(Signed)
Your Pissed Kid,
Hannah
Ethical Oil VS Forest Ethics
"Please try to use your own words to make sure the panel considers each comment individually."
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
"The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance."
So Long, Alberta
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
SDA Editorial Board, December 11th, 2011 - Let this serve as a warning to conservative parties everywhere: that which the left cannot defeat, they will infiltrate.
National Post Editorial Board, February 10th, 2012 - Alberta’s first NDP budget
The Sound Of Settled Science
Harmonic climate model versus the IPCC general circulation climate models
The main results of this new paper are summarized in the paper’s highlights:
1) The IPCC (CMIP3) climate models fail in reproducing observed decadal and multidecadal limate cycles.
2) Equivalent cycles are found among the major oscillations of the solar system.
3) A correction for the projected anthropogenic warming for the 21st century is proposed.
4) A full empirical model is developed for forecasting climate change for a few decades since 2000.
5) The climate will likely stay steady until 2030/2040 and may warm by about 0.3-1.2 °C by 2100.
Price Tag Of The Entitlement Generation
99 percenters for Obama!
Protesters at Friday’s “Occupy CPAC” event, organized by AFL-CIO and the Occupy DC movement, told The Daily Caller that they were paid “sixty bucks a head” to protest outside the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.
His Wall Street cronies hold out for a lot more.
Update!
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music, brothers Jonny, Robbie, and Tommy Mizzone, aka the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys, gather in a bedroom in their parents's house to practice Ralph Stanley's How Mountain Girls Can Love.
Hey, you big show-offs, anybody can get through it once.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 10, 2012
The Greenback Tribe
Heist on a cracker...
An American Indian tribe sued some of the world's largest beer makers Thursday, claiming they knowingly contributed to devastating alcohol-related problems on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota said it is demanding $500 million in damages for the cost of health care, social services and child rehabilitation caused by chronic alcoholism on the reservation....
The Oglala Tribe's unfrozen caveman lawyer Tom White:
"You cannot sell 4.9 million 12-ounce cans of beer and wash your hands like Pontius Pilate..."
Angry Environmentalist Rant
An arrogant, angry, fact-deprived, righteous Leftist tries to school conservative talkshow host, Michael Graham, on how we all could give up gasoline tomorrow. He fails. Badly.
Note: At the time of this writing there is no absolute proof that the caller "Bill" and David Suzuki are not one and the same person.
QOTW
PS, when are these courageous white gays going to glitter bomb the anti-gay marriage black bigot in the White House? Or is he too scary because he's black?
Free Ray Honeyford!
[... Ray Honeyford] taught in a variety of inner-city schools before taking over at Drummond in 1981. Honeyford’s experience of running a largely Asian school gave him a special insight into the iniquities of multiculturalism, the official doctrine that had held sway in state education since the 1970s.According to this policy, ethnic minority children were encouraged to cling on to their cultures, customs, even languages, while the concept of a shared British identity was treated with contempt. Honeyford thought this approach was deeply damaging.
He feared that it promoted division, hindered integration and undermined pupils’ opportunities to succeed in wider British society.
He voiced his concerns by writing an article in the obscure conservative political magazine The Salisbury Review, which was then edited by the distinguished philosopher Roger Scruton.
In it, Honeyford stated that white children constituted the ‘ethnic minority’ in many urban schools: ‘It is very difficult to write honestly and openly of my experiences and the reflections they evoke,’ he wrote, ‘since the race lobby is extremely powerful in the State education service.
‘The term racism functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought.’
The race lobby had become so powerful, he added, that ‘decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are even uncertain of their right to think those thoughts.
h/t EBD
Reader Tips
Tonight we present a couple of video amusements forwarded by SDA readers: first, via Adrian, place your bets on the success or catastrophic failure of the not-so-little Vodka Burner That Could. I say "not a chance." And via Dave S., it's man versus table saw, as an intrepid gentleman puts one of his wee body parts on the line in an attempt to prove that his remarkable new safety device actually works as advertised. Yikes.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
February 9, 2012
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
These excerpts are from a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, one of the few great remaining journals in the Anglosphere. The observations I find telling:
... The Filipino nurse looked frightened and ran off to get Leon from Ghana to have another go. I said, "Hello, you must be Leon", and he stared at me without a word. If it weren't for putting the needles in, which often goes wrong, causing an alarm to go off, I could easily get used to having a four-hour rest in hospital every other day......Nurses no longer wear white, so everyone looks like a cleaner, although some have transparent face guards like welding shields, to protect them from flying spit. The only white members of staff are the cleaners from Romania, including two pretty girls who bring tea and biscuits...
Will there always be an England? Or a non-RoC Canada? The whole piece follows.
FREELANCE
HUGO WILLIAMS
FREELANCE
Published: 3 February 2012
W hen I went to see the NHS counsellor last year he told me that dialysis was "not everything", which seemed about as cheerful as you could get on the subject. I have now started the treatment and his words remain an aspiration.
Dialysis involves putting two needles into a specially prepared vein-cum-artery (fistula), a process which is the unspoken painful reality of the matter. The anaesthetic cream doesn't work, nor does the freezer spray. Your degree of pain is governed solely by which nurse you happen to get. I grade them according to their prowess on the needle. Their poor English - "Your name Bill?" (confusion of surname) makes you think their needle technique may also be struggling, but it seems to be hit or miss. My first needling was worse than I could have imagined. One of the needles pierced the side of the fistula, causing the artery to "blow". The Filipino nurse looked frightened and ran off to get Leon from Ghana to have another go. I said, "Hello, you must be Leon", and he stared at me without a word. If it weren't for putting the needles in, which often goes wrong, causing an alarm to go off, I could easily get used to having a four-hour rest in hospital every other day. But needling is all - think piercing a bruise - and taking them out isn't easy either.
We're in a ward of about twenty beds, each one attended by its Dalek-like dialyser. Coming out of the machines are transparent tubes full of blood, which bob and twitch in a lifelike manner, until something blocks or clots and the alarm goes off. Occasionally it plays a little classical dance tune which Juan says with a wink is called "Chinese Circus". There are no chairs. Only cry babies like me are allowed a visitor, who must get a chair from the waiting room and take it back there afterwards. Most of the beds are occupied by African or Asian patients, who seem to share a genetic weakness of the kidneys. Many of them arrive by ambulance, in wheelchairs, and have been doing so for years. They grunt hello to the African or Asian staff. One Buddhalike character sits chanting with his belly out. Another prays quietly. "Here comes the rabbi!" says a tall, hatted, vaguely Orthodox type. My favourite is Davey, a sort of ruined East End dandy with waistcoat and scarf, who hangs his cane on the curtain rail and makes everyone laugh by saying he is going to die today. When his ninety-yearold mother dies, he tells me, he is not going to bother coming any more, i.e. fade away. Have I considered this option myself? I say it's only my second week. He calls for "a cup of tea from Shangri-La!". I wish he wouldn't make everyone laugh when Juan is trying to put the needles into me.
Here the routine is long established, as in a milking shed or abattoir, everyone hooked up to their life-or-death machine. Except for periods of acceleration, things happen slowly, like the slow steps of the staff, coming and going between the handwash, the desk, the glove and apron dispenser and the waste bins where huge armfuls of bloody tubing are dumped after every treatment like the innards of some slaughtered beast. Leon is doing a twelve-hour stint. His trousers trail on the floor and his shoes look like used blotting paper. There is an air of hopelessness about the place, because dialysis is a life-support system, not a cure. If it alleviates symptoms, it produces others, itching, twitching, dizziness, weight loss, constipation, cramps. Dialysis is bad for you: bad for the heart, the bones. It is a kind of false health, like drug addiction; it sluices the system, but the toxins come back the next day: time for another shot.
There is no peace on the ward. One old man coughs with the full force of his vocal cords, as if he is used to being listened to. Another makes strange falsetto cries. A nurse asks him repeatedly not to make his funny noise, but he pays no attention until a male nurse threatens to send him to Accident and Emergency, the ward's ultimate sanction, also used for truants. Nurses no longer wear white, so everyone looks like a cleaner, although some have transparent face guards like welding shields, to protect them from flying spit. The only white members of staff are the cleaners from Romania, including two pretty girls who bring tea and biscuits.
As the nurses approach your bed, for needling and de-needling, you pray you will get one and not another. Juan might as well be skewering an aubergine. What they all want to know is "Are you still peeing?". Apparently it dries up. Dialysis is all about your "dry weight". Water builds up in your system, increasing your blood pressure.
I've lost two stone recently, but I have to lose a further litre of water during dialysis today. Dizziness ensues and a vice-like cramp grips my shin, which the machine doesn't register. I make a falsetto noise of my own.
During the second half of the session I start wondering if my bladder will hold. Two hours is my limit. I ask for a bottle, but they can't find one. Do I want to be taken off the machine? I say no. A papier mâché bottle is found and the curtains drawn. Leon comes back and takes the bottle, but half an hour later it is found by one of the cleaners, spilled under my bed, as if I have thrown it there. Much public mopping. I have earned my membership of the club.
Towards the end of the session some long-serving inmate shouts for a nurse by name, but she knows his ways. "I am doing something. You are no finish yet." Everyone must wait to come off his machine, just as he must wait to go on. It can take half an hour. We pack up slowly, dialysis headaches all round, then shuffle out, saluting here and there with a particular dead gesture, like vampire victims. I am on the waiting list for a kidney, but it's hard to imagine going through all this every other day for the next three years, which is the average waiting time.
My task is to own the illness, to find the good in dialysis, so that it gradually becomes "not everything". I can see I will have to invent a life, perhaps one in which little bits of present comfort take the place of the longer view on my days off. Every now and then the future presents itself vividly as someone else's life and I almost laugh at the impossibility of it. No doubt this is why they have a counsellor: to stop you laughing.
Poll Spotting!
Should you be able to defend your property with a gun?
What Would We Do Without Internet Experts?
Stick to your pay, pal - "What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of 'stuff' except helping people pay for it."
Those Moderate Muslims!
For the crime of committing "prayer meeting";
Saudi officials strip-searched all the women and subjected them to an abusive body-cavity search, and assaulted the men. In a remarkable prison interview with the Voice of America’s Amharic-language service, one of the women, who contracted an infection from the search, attested: “We are traumatized by the strip search. They treated us like dogs because of our Christian faith. While talking about me during a recent visit to the prison medical center, I overheard a nurse telling a doctor ‘if she dies, we will put her in a trash bin.’”
Cash For Clunkers
The gas-guzzling, earth-pawing 2005 Chrysler 300C Hemi that Barack Obama owned when he ripped Detroit automakers in 2007 for not making more fuel-sipping hybrids failed to sell on eBay this week for its minimum $1 million asking price.
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
The American public's dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation.
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
Washington Post offers buyouts for 5th time in recent years. (h/t EBD)
Reader Tips
In 1997 Long Island public television station WLIW debuted Visions, a unique documentary series featuring high definition aerial footage of various world destinations. The voice-over narration is occasionally cliché, or delivered in a cloying, fake-sounding accent, but it's mostly intermittent and unobtrusive, and at least somewhat informative; the real pleasure, in any case, lies in the almost ethereal birds-eye perspective that provides a unique sense of the lay of the land and allows viewers to survey significant landmarks, churches, and ruins in their historic and geographical context. Tonight, for your viewing pleasure, here's the visually gorgeous Visions Of Sicily.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 8, 2012
The NDP's Claims of Compassion are Failing ... Badly
The Calgary Herald's Naomi Lakritz wrote a most interesting column yesterday about NDP MPs Pat Martin & Nycole Turmel stepping all over the wishes & legacy of Jack Layton:
What was it that Jack Layton wrote in his deathbed letter? "Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So, let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."How quickly we forget. Or at least, how quickly NDP MP Pat Martin has forgotten. So has interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel, who, you'd think, would at least put on a facade of discipleship as Layton's handpicked successor. Sadly, their reaction to Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu last week contained nothing loving, hopeful or optimistic in tone and message.
And Martin, who stooped to the disgusting act of calling the grieving Boisvenu a vulgar name, appears to think anger is way better than love. No world-changing agenda, there - except maybe to help civility, compassion and empathy follow the dinosaurs down the road to extinction.
Charles Adler & Lakritz discuss her column here. More from Adler here.
The Sound Of Settled Science
From the noted denier website known as The Guardian;
The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
Go ahead. Make my car. (new link)
If the U.S. president told the bank holding your mortgage to cancel your debt and hand you the house free, it wouldn't make you more productive or efficient. It just screwed someone you owed money to. And clearer than ever is that GM could have survived the Lehman episode with a simple bridge loan. America's biggest auto maker could have returned to the slog without dishonoring billions of dollars in obligations to bondholders and other creditors.
But the most egregious aspect of the Obama bailout is its annexation of the auto sector to the administration's green energy schemes. It's no exaggeration to say the auto industry is being used to fulfill a throwaway line in an Obama speech calling for one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
We Don't Need No Stinking Sparky Cars
Fisker Automotive, an electric car maker that received a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, said Monday that it has laid off workers in Delaware and California.
h/t Bluetech
We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans
The situation, Petrie says, is that some areas where turbine developments are being constructed and planned are, as he says, “the worst possible places to put a wind power project.” He says that avian and bat mortality rates at improperly placed wind farms are unacceptable. He also says that wind turbine developers and the government have ignored the fact that there will be cumulative ecological impacts associated with placing thousands of wind turbines on the landscape and in the lakes. As a Waterfowl Ecologist, Petrie is particularly concerned that wind turbines are being placed within critically important habitats and on migratory routes with no regard for avian displacement. “When you place a turbine in or very close to critical habitats, and birds subsequently avoid those areas, it is tantamount to habitat loss, and we have already lost 85 per cent of our Great Lake’s coastal wetlands.”
Those Moderate Muslims!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
"We're the ones who will change you . . . Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children."
Weekly Standard, February 2012;
Last month, German bank WestLB rolled out a new “Islam-compliant” investment product named the Islamic Strategy Index Certificate. The value of the certificate is based on the value of the WestLB Islamic Deutschland Index, consisting of shares of ten German firms “whose business activities are consistent with the ethical rules of Islam.” The WestLB product prospectus explains that the Islamic Strategy Index Certificates “are certified by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany as Islam-compliant [Islam konformes] investment.” The Central Council of Muslims in Germany is an umbrella group of twenty-two Muslim organizations.
It's Probably Nothing
Forzanuova's current cry is "Moneta di popolo!" As far as I can make it out, the communists are wanting that to be a fixed allocation to citizens of internal money, and Forzanuova isn't even bothering to call for a national currency - it seems to want to issue local currencies. It sure looks like an increasing number of shopowners, farmers and those all-important truckers and cabdrivers are willing to go with it.
See, this is why you should not try to really collect taxes in Italy. If the local shopowners sign up and accept the script, that's it. Game over. You]ve got small business against big business and rural against city, and they might well develop a dual monetary system. All those lovely policies about limiting cash transactions become ever so theoretical.
Chokin' In The Boys Room
School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms...
h/t Jason
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music old-time country warbler Kitty Wells asks her no-good, cheating, soon-to-be-divorced husband the solemn question, "Will Your Lawyer Talk To God?"
Well, no ma'am, not directly, but he will have a series of lunch meetings with God's lawyer and bill your ex for it.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 7, 2012
Operation Fast and Furious
It's not the cover-up, it's the crime;
Operation Fast and Furious was specifically conceived so that “walked” guns would be recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Their serial numbers would be provided to the ATF by Mexican authorities for tracing. Regardless of motive, the entire operation was premised on weapons being recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, and law enforcement agencies are well aware that criminals primarily abandon weapons only after they’ve been used in serious felony crimes such as murder or attempted murder.
Operation Fast and Furious was conceived knowing that Mexican nationals would be sacrificed in significant numbers if the tracing operation had any chance of working.
Operation Fast and Furious allowed more than 2,000 weapons to “walk,” indicating that those in charge of the operation were willing to let thousands of Mexican nationals die in an effort to identify the ringleaders of a cartel’s weapon acquisition team.
And it could only happen under a Democratic administration, because only a Democratic administration could rely on a free pass by media.
Via Instapundit
We Don't Need No Stinking Sparky Cars
Related - It's Half Time, America! (Extended segment here.)
h/t Marc
Now is the Time at SDA When We Juxtapose
...for the most part, China has behaved responsibly in the World Trade Organization, G20 and climate-change negotiations...
...China tells Europe to take its carbon tax and blow it out a jet engineChina, which lectured everyone else about their responsibility to curb greenhouse gas emissions at the latest UN climate conference, says there’s no damn way its planes are paying the carbon tax that will be collected on all international flights in and out of European Union next year...
Before anyone starts screaming I not attacking the Chinese for being soft on global warming. I'm just pointing out how deluded many of our great and good are about the Dragon.
But Think Of The Museums!
“I would rather see Israel, a living Israel condemned, than a dying Israel receive the sympathy and condolences of the international community.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Germany has now plunged into raucous discord on the heated topic of climate change.
One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”
Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Well-connected to Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures.
The Problem With The Four Word Solution
A Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench justice has ruled the Public Service Essential Services Act to be unconstitutional.The decision by Justice Dennis Ball was released Monday in the case against two Saskatchewan labour laws. The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL) launched the constitutional challenge against The Public Service Essential Services Act and the Trade Union Amendment Act, two pieces of legislation passed shortly after the Saskatchewan Party first came to power in 2007.
Related Workers Rights! - Nobody needs to own a Caterpillar plant.
Update: Poll spotting!
Sanctimonius Prius Driver Extends Her Duties to Judge & Jury Too
h/t EBD
Reader Tips
Some people swear that Parisians are the world's most impatient and aggressive drivers, others say it's the Greeks. Tonight, we pull over to make a convincing case that it's The Chechens.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 6, 2012
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
A few months before last February’s citywide elections, Hal Baskin’s phone started ringing. And ringing. Most of the callers were candidates for Chicago City Council, seeking the kind of help Baskin was uniquely qualified to provide.
Baskin isn’t a slick campaign strategist. He’s a former gang leader and, for several decades, a community activist who now operates a neighborhood center that aims to keep kids off the streets. Baskin has deep contacts inside the South Side’s complex network of politicians, community organizations, and street gangs. as he recalls, the inquiring candidates wanted to know: “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”
h/t EBD
Dwain Lingenfelter: Just Visiting
From left, FMC’s Robert Simpson, QC, MRU’s Pam Simpson and Rubiela and Dwain Lingenfelter at Sien Lok Society of Calgary’s Chinese New Year Banquet.
(h/t Doug)
The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
The Thomas de Quincey school of Canadian gun control. (h/t Kevin)
Y2Kyoto: The $ierra Club
The Sierra Club disclosed Thursday that it received over $26 million from natural-gas giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. between 2007 and 2010 to help the group’s campaign against coal-fired power plants.
JDL Rally For Freedom
With Paul Weston from the New Freedom Party in England.
Following in the footsteps of *Geert Wilder’s *Freedom* Party* of the Netherlands, Mr. Weston’s goals are to counteract the spread of fundamentalist Islam in Britain.
Event will be Monday, February 20, 2012 in Toronto. More info here.
Great Moments In Socialism
As has been exhaustively explained everywhere, including this blog, Greece is currently running a primary deficit--meaning that even if they defaulted, their budget wouldn't balance. And since defaulting would cut off the flow of credit, they'd actually be worse off than with almost any of the austerity plans proposed by their creditors. So watching them threaten to walk away is somewhat reminiscent of that famous moment from Blazing Saddles.
Reader Tips
When the summer's over and the winds begin to blow, what do we want? Football.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
February 5, 2012
Simple Test to Determine if You're a Racist
Duluth, Minnesota Mayor Don Ness insists that there's now a simple test you can conduct to determine if you're a racist:
Step #1: Remove all face coverings, including but not necessarily limited to niqabs, goalie masks, and motorcycle helmets.
Step #2: In a well lighted room, stand in front of a mirror.
Step #3: Carefully look at your face.
If you determine yourself to be white aka Caucasian, honkey, cracker, gweilo, haole, hakujin, and/or macamba then YOU ARE A RACIST!!! It matters not what you think, nor how you treat others, you are forever guilty of racism!
QOTW
"The only thing that sets them apart from the Muslim extremists is that Sun Media will be charging you admission." - John Miller, the Jack Kevorkian of journalism.
One gets the sense that traffic there's a little slow.
Come back Luftwaffe, all is forgiven.*
Pranab Mukherjee and other Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
"There was a horrified silence."
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley;
When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.
A Special Message From The Canadian Auto Workers
In a letter sent to the Premier of Ontario...
CAW Women's Program Director Julie White called on the provincial government to actively consider the establishment of a long gun registry and to take a "principled and public stand" against the Harper government's proposed legislation (Bill C-19) to dismantle the registry and demand the existing records be maintained.
Via James, who notes that you can thank CAW President Ken Lewenza here for their efforts to simplify your car shopping.
CHRYSLER
Dodge Caravan (minivan) Windsor, ON
Chrysler Town & Country Windsor, ON
Chrysler 300 Series (car) Brampton, ON
Dodge Challenger (car) Brampton, ON
Dodge Charger (sport sedan) Brampton, ON
FORD
Ford Edge Oakville, ON
Lincoln MKX Oakville, ON
Lincoln MKT Oakville, ON
Ford Flex Oakville, ON
Ford Crown Victoria (car) St. Thomas
Lincoln Town Car St. Thomas
GENERAL MOTORS
Chevrolet Impala (car) Oshawa, ON
Chevrolet Camaro (car) Oshawa, ON
Chevrolet Equinox (SUV) Ingersoll, ON
Buick Regal Oshawa, ON
GMC Terrain (SUV) Ingersoll, ON
INTERNATIONAL TRUCK
9200 Series Chatham, ON
LoneStar Heavy Duty Truck Chatham, ON
ProStar Heavy Duty Truck Chatham, ON
PACCAR
Kenworth Medium Duty Trucks Ste. Therese, QC
Peterbuilt Medium Duty Trucks Ste. Therese, QC
Reader Tips
Since 1895 London has been home to an annual series of summer concerts, spread out over the course of eight weeks from July to September, called the Proms. Originally staged in public spaces (promenades) with the intention of educating English commoners about the pleasures of classical music, the Proms have since become a more widespread cultural tradition. In tonight's selection, from the 2009 edition of the most popular concert in the series, the traditionally looser, almost giddy annual finale known as The Last Night of the Proms, throngs of jolly pink revelers join the rather impressively attired Sarah Connolly in a rousing performance of Rule Britannia.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 4, 2012
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Twenty cats in sinks. (h/t Mike)
This Is Awkward
Arab SPRING! - Libyan militia accused of torturing to death ambassador to France (h/t Adrian)
We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans
SDA gets results!
David Cameron has been hit by a major protest by Conservative MPs over the Government’s backing for wind farms, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
More Pavilions At Folkfest
Imams from across Canada and the U.S. have issued a moral ruling condemning honour killings, domestic violence and misogyny as "un-Islamic."
Because "illegal" just didn't carry enough weight.
Those Cuddly Chicoms!
Whew!
China says it does not intend to ‘buy’ Europe
As for the Canadian oil and gas sector...As for cuddly...
Things You See on America's Left Coast
But there are some nice sights too!
Wow, That Was Fast
Mark Steyn provides a clear picture of why so many Moderates and Center-Leftists are frightfully scared to ever deviate out of the role assigned to them by those on the Far Left.
The whole Susan G. Komen Foundation backtracking is discussed here by Dana Loesch.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Look at the people in the video below. Look at their self-satisfied little faces. These are the authors of the toxic sugar article. They are idiots. I do not say that to be insulting, but as a statement of fact. The woman on the right, in particular, should not be trusted with a pair of scissors. She calls herself a "medical sociologist" and works at UCSF. This should disqualify her from going anywhere near a scientific journal. She thinks that sugar is a poison because it is fermented to make alcohol. If you read the Daily Mail, alcohol is made by "distilling sugar". This is what we're up against: cretinous arguments made still more ludicrous by a woefully uneducated media.
Read the whole thing. Then send it to 3 random reporters.
Reader Tips
In tonight's amusement en route to the Tips we cross the Atlantic and then head north to watch Finnish babe magnet Tapani Kansa woo fellow vocalists Terhi Panula and Anu in a scorching Finnish TV performance of Pelkkää Tulta ("Pure Fire").
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 3, 2012
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.” While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.
Right To Die
Give the left enough rope, and they'll hang themselves.
Y2Kyoto: Is That An Icicle In Your Toga?
Or are ya just dying to see me?
Snow fell in Rome today for the first time in 26 years as freezing temperatures took the death toll across Europe to more than 150.
Related heat.
That's What You Get for Doing Business With Leftists
Hybrid car owners bite the hand that feeds them. Precisely what did large corporations think would happen when they started courting and targeting liberals and socialists?
ht to myself (my apologies to the eye-sensitive folk, I haven't changed the background yet)
Chicoms To The West Of Us, Marxist To The South
Here we are ....
Beijing-based PetroChina said it has completed the acquisition of a 20% stake in Shell's 100%-owned land and assets in Groundbirch, in northeastern British Columbia. PetroChina didn't disclose the value of the deal and Shell declined to comment.
h/t Adrian
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
If the economy is improving...
Church And State
"For God so loved the world, he gave you me..." *
Reader Tips
In tonight's Tips music Louisiana-born songwriter Lucinda Williams sings a bittersweet song from her 2003 album World Without Tears called Ventura.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 2, 2012
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Women Laughing Alone With Salad
Hashtag Of The Entitlement Generation
"My name is Paige Kezima..."
"The Voice of Students" is comprised of intelligent and eager students committed to advocating for the needs and wants of our students. Our platform is as follows:
- Lobby for a tuition freeze
- Increase funding to student groups and societies
- Review the locker tax
- Make more money available to student groups and societies
"My name is Paige Kezima... "
Consider yourself "juxtaposed".
h/t M. Couros
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Carol Platt Liebau, March 2009 - [W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.
Micky Kaus, February 2012 - The President’s decision-making method–at least as described in the [New Yorker] –seems to consist mainly of checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him.
Two Words Every Canadian Should Memorize
But back to my original question: Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage?
What's The Opposite Of Diversity?
[University of British Columbia sociology Prof. Neil Gross] and Solon Simmons of George Mason University surveyed more than 1,400 full-time professors at more than 900 American institutions. Only 19.7 percent of professors identified themselves as "any shade of conservative" (compared with 31.9 percent of the general population), while 62.2 percent identified themselves as some flavor of liberal (compared with 23.3 percent of Americans overall).
Gross found variation between disciplines. Social sciences and humanities contained the highest concentration of liberals. Conservatives were as numerous as liberals in business, health sciences, computer science and engineering.
Why so liberal? The most obvious explanation -- one favored by conservative activists -- is discrimination. Even some liberals buy it.
"This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity," proclaimed the not-especially-conservative social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at last year's Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting.
A show of hands had revealed three self-proclaimed conservatives in a gathering of 1,000 psychologists. Presented with such underrepresentation by gender or race, Haidt said, "our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation."
h/t Bemused
We Don't Need No Stinking Sparky Cars
The Guardian;
Nearly three years ago, the mayor of London told fellow international mayors in Seoul that he would ensure 100,000 electric vehicles were in London "as soon as possible". But the London assembly's environment committee found that since Johnson's announcement, only 588 extra electric cars were registered in London.
Clearly the word we Canadians pronounce as "journalist" means something quite different in English;
The more experienced London journalists have developed a naturally sceptical eye which they cast over untrustworthy mayoral press releases. For example, on the subject of electric charging point infrastructure, the media did a wonderful job of correction in response to a mayoral press release of 14th February 2011 announcing that there would be 1,300 electric charging points by the end of 2013.
This was actually the same 1,300 charging points from which the mayor achieved very positive coverage for when he announced the previous February that they would be built over the subsequent next twelve months – something which clearly didn’t happen.
h/t Maz2
Meanwhile, across the pond....
Radical Environmentalists & the CBC vs. Canada
h/t Paul in Calgary
Reader Tips
Stephen Low's engrossing 2004 IMAX film Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag (49 min.) is well worth your time. To get the full IMAX effect, spin around until you're mildly nauseous then press your face against the monitor.
h/t Michael M.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
February 1, 2012
Y2Kyoto: I'll Miss The Croatian Polar Bears
If it save just one island in the Maldives - "Britain to shiver in temperatures 'colder than the South Pole' as health chiefs say more than 1,500 people a week could die from killer freeze..."Parts of the Black Sea froze near the Romanian coastline and the rare snow fell on Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea. In Bulgaria, 16 towns recorded their lowest temperatures since records started 100 years ago as four more people were reported dead from hypothermia.
In central Serbia, choppers pulled out 12 people, including nine who went to a funeral but then could not get back over icy, snow-choked roads. Two more people froze to death in the snow and two others are missing, bringing that nation's death toll to five.
"The situation is dramatic, the snow is up to five meters (16 1/2 feet) high in some areas, you can only see rooftops," said Dr. Milorad Dramacanin, who participated in the helicopter evacuations.
h/t Maz2
Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?
CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas's leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris - who remain major funders - as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.
In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas's protector, it is necessary to consider not only the corrosive impact of Washington's relations with Turkey, but also the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
h/t Adrian
It's Probably Nothing
Data released Tuesday showed that seasonally adjusted housing prices have reached a post-bubble low, as the minor surge that began in 2009 fizzled, to be followed by the almost continuous slide of the past 18 months. |  |
Via
"You can't have a law for everything."
It's good to live in a province where the politicians still drive.
The Tolerant Left
Occupy Providence Protesters Dump Condoms OnCatholic Schoolgirls
It's Probably Nothing
"Trust me you DO NOT WANT TO REPOSSESS A SHIP!"
Word Of The Day
"Huffington" - a Greek word meaning "fool me twice."
Reader Tips
In tonight's musical amusement en route to the tips Virginia-born rockabilly performer and RCA recording artist Janis Martin sings her catchy little 1960 single Hard Times Ahead.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.