Author: Kate

Distinguished Lecture, Documentary & Interview Symposia

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This week, for your delectation, here is Israeli conductor Itay Talgam presenting his TED talk Lead Like the Great Conductors ¤ (23:24). Personally, I think that there are probably lessons for each and every one of us, and for all of us, in Maestro Talgam’s talk.

NB: This is not Reader Tips. The topic here is Maestro Talgam’s talk.

As Goes Illinois

Police Cars Repossessed Due To Falling Tax Revenues

To say that Cairo, the seat of Alexander County, Ill., has seen better days is a cruel understatement. […] The situation got so bad this month that the bank repossessed five of his seven cruisers. Four of them sit in the bank parking lot now, shorn of their emergency lights, antennas and seals. In addition to losing his cruisers, the sheriff lost three-fourths of his staff, most of them deputies, to budget cuts.

Wait, there’s more…

At its peak, the staff had 29 full and part timers.
cairo_illinois.jpg

It’s hard to see how they ran out of money.
(h/t Tom)

‘The “bizarre disconnect between the here-and-now reality of Afghan detainee transfers in the real world, in Kandahar…

…and the “Afghan detainee” preoccupations of certain media personalities embedded in the Ottawa press gallery…’
This should be the end of the Afghan detainee issue as something, er, serious. But, given Canadian blinkers and self-referential obsession, it will not be. At the end of the year this is the one thing about Canada in Afstan, and related politics, that you should read–and very carefully. A post by Terry Glavin, following on this one by Kate.
Update: “Dr Goebbels on the line”–that’s the conclusion of this post at The Torch:

Afstan: The odd view of our media about their sources

A New Years Eve Prisoner Swap

Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?

Today, New Year’s Eve, while everyone’s attention is understandably on family and friends, we learn (thanks to the ever alert Bill Roggio, reporting on the Standard’s blog) that the administration has now released Qais Qazali, Laith’s brother, who is the head of the Iran-backed terror network, in addition to a hundred other terrorists. In violation of the long-standing, commonsense policy against capitulating to kidnappers and terrorists because it just encourages more hostage-taking and murder, the terrorists were released in exchange for a British hostage and the remains of his three contract guards (whom the terrorists had murdered).

Canadian Conservative Oasis

Tired of maintaining your own blog?

Rather than worrying about posting enough quality information to maintain traffic to your site why not become a contributing editor to an entire conservative community. Post blog entries, upload videos and photos, create polls and events, and even add news items. Simply by becoming a member of “Canadian Conservatives” you have the ability to do all of this and more quickly and easily. Help make “Canadian Conservatives” the Canadian conservative portal. It’s free and easy.

Check it out.

Rex Murphy Interviews Terry Glavin

Excerpts courtesy EBD;

“It’s a disgrace, if you ask me, it’s a complete disgrace that we’re running around playing this sort of ‘gotcha’ journalism in Ottawa while we’ve got all of these soldiers engaged in this epochal struggle here, and treating – by the way – Taliban prisoners with kid gloves.”
Later…
“Well, this is the funny thing – and we’ve all struggled with this here – I’ve talked to a number of journalists about this who are with me, and the journalists that are here, and we’re all scratching are heads and wondering what is the story here, exactly? You tell me. What’s news? How is it possible that any editor in his right mind could think that Peter MacKay conceding that we’ve known that some of these drooling brigands that are apprehended by the Afghan national army get their ears boxed a little bit from time to time? That’s the way it was, that isn’t the way it works now, by the way, not since 2007. The process is meticulous, it is squeaky-clean, it is public, it involves corrections Canada, the international Red Cross, the military police, the Afghan security and intelligence group, NATO – all of these detainees, and there’s hardly any, by the way, we rarely turn anyone over to the Afghans any more. By the way, if an insurgent who kills a Canadian soldier gets apprehended on the battlefield, and puts his eye out or something like that, he goes into the same triage system as Canadian soldiers do, and if he’s hurt a little bit more than a Canadian soldier is, he gets priority.
“All of this is old news. I’m sorry, (but) I mean, I spent fifteen years working for the dailies, and I’ve done a lot of sort of book writing and magazine writing ever since, and I’m not one of these embittered and cynical old journalists, but this is a bunch of reporters embedded at the Darcy McGhee pub in Ottawa trying to make a nuisance of themselves.”

Listen to it here: MP3

Anarchists Of The World, Unite!

Anarchism never was the sort of closed totalitarian system that Marxism aspired to be.”

Update – EBD claims to have found the Youtube version.

I’m starting to get a little ticked off with the left’s habit of ruining perfectly good words – starting with “left”.
After the communists began racking up failed states and mass graves, the left appropriated “liberal”. Not content with that, they screwed over “progressive”. (And don’t get me started on “gay”.)
And “green” – for God’s sake, it’s a colour. Have they no shame?
Now, like water claiming ownership of “dry”, the crazier among them have declared themselves “anarchists”. Anarchists!
After all, these aren’t difficult concepts.
This is an anarchist.
You are not anarchists.
You know, for as troublesome as anarchy might be in practical application, it’s still preferable to Marxism. In a time of galloping nanny-statism, the prospect of a society purged of bureaucracy seems less threat than romance.

Reader Tips

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s selection artfully juxtaposes a (lyrically) austere, Old Testament-inspired song with selected scenes from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (also austere) 1964 film The Gospel According To St. Mathew. The combination is not, as one might expect, doubly austere, but rather lyrical and rapturous, and almost transcendent.
Like other neorealist directors Pasolini used non-professional actors almost exclusively, and in The Gospel According to St. Mathew he took this approach a step further: many of the seemingly endless cast aren’t actors at all, amateur or otherwise, and don’t act, or speak, or perform any actions at all; rather, their faces, and the hardship and concerns written on them, as seen in seemingly endless, lingering close-ups, are used to serve the – biblical, in this case – narrative.
Serves tonight’s song too, as it turns out. This one won’t be to everyone’s taste – what is, really? – but I like it, and you never know how long a particular video will be available, so here it is: an interesting visual treatment of Bob Dylan’s When He Returns.
Your Reader Tips are welcome, as always, in the comments.

The Yemeni Front


Andrew Marcus;

This report is interesting because even as it parrots the Jihad narrative, it provides more in depth background information and perspective on American, Saudi, and Iranian involvement in Yemen than anything we have seen from just about any US “news” outlet.
What a sad comment on the state of US/Western media, that “Jihad TV” is a better source of information pertinent to this aspect of the world war we are engaged in.

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