Last time they complained that he had his finger on the trigger:

Lindsay Blackett holds a mirror to Canadian television:

“I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce, and if we’re honest with ourselves … I look at it and say, ‘Why do I produce so much shit? Why do I fund so much crap?'” Blackett told the panel, to ripples of laughter.

“Why do the broadcasters not pick up more Canadian content? Because the Canadian content isn’t what it should be,” he continued.

The beauty of this is that it anticipates one of those rare instances of the Canadian arts community condemning the use of swearing. (Paul Gross–who is normally not an ass, and who has no illusions about the ill effects of subsidizing the arts–does so here.)
Colby Cosh, however, discovers an even more interesting response:

Kirstine Stewart, the general manager of CBC’s English television operations, reacted in the Globe to Blackett’s comments by saying “Nobody can ever question the quality of what we do here in Canada, creatively or otherwise.” Surely this is a much more revealing and intriguing comment than Blackett’s. Does she mean that questioning the quality of Canadian television and film is literally impossible? Or just that criticism is inherently objectionable, a malum in se? And at the risk of appearing to take sides, I must ask: which attitude ultimately seems more healthy and likely to encourage improvement—Blackett’s, or Stewart’s?

It makes one proud to be a standout:

“When it comes to wait times, Canadians are selling themselves short,” the report reads.
“Canadians deserve timely access to health care and accurate information on how long they can expect to wait for a consultation, test or procedure. Unfortunately, Canada is one of the few developed countries with universal health care systems where patients face long waits for necessary care.”

… on the Canadian prairies, have intesified … right on schedule:

The wettest spring on record is getting wetter.
A heavy rainfall warning from Environment Canada is calling for parts of the province to be doused with as much as 75 millimetres of rain by Friday. The warning first issued Wednesday afternoon is still in effect this morning.

As predicted by climate models, droughts are now a constant, forcing governments to step in and assist rain starved farms:

Eight to 12 million acres of land is unseeded across the prairies, according to the Canadian Wheat Board’s crop report released Friday.
The area of seeded wheat crops is the lowest it has been in almost 40 years, officials said.
Seeding across the prairies is about 78 per cent complete.
Manitoba fields have been flooded during recent rains. According to the report, rains have put areas of Saskatchewan in worse shape than Manitoba.
Bruce Burnett, director of weather and market analysis with the Canadian Wheat Board, said the board has never seen so much precipitation before.

… doesn’t seem that dirty anymore:

A record of success in the Alberta oil sands and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are expected to whet investors’ appetite for a $1.25-billion initial public offering from MEG Energy Corp., the latest in a series of mega-deals from Canada’s oil patch.
After a decade of raising private money from blue-chip backers in Britain and China, along with his family and friends, MEG founder and chief executive officer William McCaffrey plans to take his company public this summer. MEG needs money to pay for a $1.4-billion expansion of its properties over the next two years that is expected to more than double the company’s oil production to 60,000 barrels a day.

Just think how inviting those vast shoals of tar will be if the hyperbole at The Drum turns out to be true:

First of all…set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc….forget that, it won’t be happening..it’s done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.
So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?…there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It’s really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do…you will see the “sense” behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
The well bore structure is compromised “Down hole”.
That is something which is a “Worst nightmare” conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have “said” a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place.
[…}
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
[…]
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens…

… keep reading.
Update: Counter argument to the worst case above.

Okay…halal sausage is okay.

Paris police on Tuesday banned a controversial ‘pork sausage and wine’ street party planned by extremist groups to combat what they saw as the ‘Islamisation’ of a city neighbourhood.

The event was planned for Friday evening at a time when the district’s streets are usually jammed with Muslims coming out of mosques and just before Algeria were due to play England in the football World Cup.

But police banned the event and any rival gatherings in the Goutte d’Or area of northern Paris’ 18th arrondissement, or district, saying in a statement that it was likely to cause ‘serious risks to public order.’

Ponder that last statement for a minute: a group of French people announce that they’re going to eat French food in public, in France, and it’s deemed a “serious risk to public order” – a provocation, in effect.
Interesting times:

“A French government minister of Algerian descent…condemned the planned party as ‘hateful, racist and xenophobic.'”

Stanford political scientist Neil Malhotra and Columbia University’s Yotam Margalit recently conducted a study intended in part to “determine how anti-Semitic sentiments might relate to the ongoing financial crisis.” They asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” 24.6 percent of non-Jewish Americans “blamed ‘the Jews’ a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.”
Oh, those racist Tea par….

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.

On a related note, Democrats were found to be “less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame” on “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford.”

Like Hungry Wolves:

The unambiguous message from top executives of BP rivals Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell: It’s not drilling on the outer reaches of the continental shelf that’s a problem; it’s BP.
[…]
“We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” Exxon chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson bluntly told members of the House subcommittee.
For example, Exxon would have used a different cement to build the well casing, designed the well differently and responded more aggressively to early signs of trouble, Mr. Tillerson said.
He pointed out that 14,000 deepwater wells have been drilled around the world, with few problems until now.
“It’s not a well that we would have drilled,” echoed Shell Oil president Marvin Odum.

… and then there’s losing your bedrock.
But wait, there’s more; the Doctor gives his diagnosis.
… followed by a delicious rant; something about a trifecta of morons.

A cautionary tale of badly-misfiring fake outrage.
In a post at Media Matters titled “Why does the Los Angeles Times hate Obama?”, Eric Boehlert writes “Some conservatives suffer from such an acute case of Obama Derangement Syndrome that they can’t even debate the issues of the day with out resorting to childish name-calling.” The descriptions which offended Boehlert, published in the blog posts of one of the Times‘ writers, included “ex-state senator” and “the nation’s top talker.” After asking “Why does one of the largest newspapers in the country allow its political writer to routinely disrespect the president in a casually insulting way?” Boehlert proceeded to, as Matt Welch aptly puts it, “duct-tape this ‘please kick me’ sign onto his rumpus”:

And I don’t even have to do a Google search to know for a fact that when President Bush was in office, there was nobody on staff at the Times, and certainly nobody writing off the opinion pages, who was allowed to so casually insult the office of the presidency on a regular basis.

Whoops. Enter Matt Welch:

As the Internet kidz like to say, let me Google that for you. There you’ll see a Bush-era L.A. Times columnist – one of the most consistently popular among the paper’s stable at the time – who used these phrases to describe (Bush)…”

The listed descriptions include “distracted and incompetent,” “homegrown authoritarian,” and “Torturer-in-Chief.” The columnist in question, Rosa Brooks (who now works in the Obama Pentagon) also said that Bush enabled “the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler,” and that America was “already well on the way” to having a “Latin American-style military junta.”
Things get even more embarrassing for the non-Googling Eric “I-know-for-a-fact” Boehlert: it appears that he personally cross-posted one of his own L.A. Times columns to a site called “The Smirking Chimp.” Boehlert, for his part, denies it, but Patterico went to the trouble – and it took some – to set up his own account there to see whether someone else could have posted it. The results don’t look good for Boehlert – judge for yourself.
h/t TheoSpark.net

Terry Glavin of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee
… tells us that we are uniquely trusted.
CLICK

My heart sank when I saw this … because there’s no way that I know of for home-gamers to short this sucker’s bet:

Carbon dioxide permits in the U.S. Northeast’s cap-and-trade program tumbled to a record low price at auction amid a surplus of the pollution rights and doubts that Congress will create a national emissions market this year.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sold 40.7 million permits for $1.88 each, 19 cents lower than the last auction held in March and 2 cents above the minimum allowable bid, the cap-and-trade program said on its website today. Each permit in the carbon trading program for power plants from Maryland to Maine represents one ton of carbon dioxide.
Those permits come from the regional carbon trading program’s first phase, or “control period,” from 2009 to 2011. This week’s auction, held June 9 with the results withheld until today, also offered 2.14 million permits from the 2012-to-2014 control period. They went for $1.86.
“Prices are a lot lower than expected,” Tim Cheung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York, said in a telephone interview. “Demand for power hasn’t increased with the economic recovery and that means there’s an oversupply of permits in the market.”

Brian Lilley:

“You’ll have to forgive me for not being over the moon at news that the Red Cross is training Taliban fighters in proper first aid and supplying them with kits.”

Hey, anything that keeps our enemies alive so they can get back on the battlefield:

“In the worldly eyes of the Red Cross there is nothing wrong with what they are doing, comparing training sessions for the Taliban to giving treatment to the wounded. That’s what comes from spending too much time in the finer salons of the world. There is a great deal of difference though between saving the life of someone who has been wounded in battle and training, as well as equipping, one side of that battle.”

“Can you imagine the Red Cross training the Irish Republican Army back in the 1970s and sending them off to the streets of Belfast with little first aid kits?…”

I couldn’t have imagined it back then, but times have changed.

Peter Singer, writing in the New York Times: “Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all….No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?”
Jim Jones, speaking in Jonestown, Guyana: “It’s been done by every tribe in history, every tribe facing annihilation. All the Indians in the Amazon are doing it right now. They refuse to bring any babies into the world. They kill every child that comes into the world, because they don’t want to live in this kind of a world.”
Peter Singer: “Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely.”
Jim Jones: “I don’t think it is what we want to do with our babies. I don’t think that’s what we had in mind to do with our babies. It was said by the greatest of prophets, from time immemorial, ‘No man takes my life from me, I lay my life down.'”
Peter Singer: “Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off…”
Jim Jones: “So my opinion is that we (must) be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to in ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act…”
Peter Singer: “Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?”
Jim Jones: “There’s no use, Christine, it’s just not worth living like this … not worth living like this…We had, we had some value…but now we don’t have any value…I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of…”

… baloney:

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

ht