Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Ben Sargent was arrested in 1998 ” and subsequently convicted of public lewdness stemming from an incident at an Austin adult bookstore near the University of Texas.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
USHCN station – Port Angeles, WA.
Update – I originally spotted this one surfing through the reports at the site. Reader “Johnlee” advises that it received particular attention from Steve McIntyre. Worth the read, especially if you’re new here and unaware of the significance of the photos I’ve been sharing.
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
Welcome to the I-don’t-care-azoic Period ;
[F]or the media ponderers there’s a more troubling issue than the restoration of trust. It’s the possibility that too many people now simply don’t much care about the major media anymore. Normally the great media combines would overcome periods of lassitude by forming up focus groups to tell them what to do next. Hah! They want “Survivor”! Alas, living as we do now in a world of seemingly infinite choice, it is possible not to care for a seeming infinity of reasons, which is why the established media are having such a hard time knowing what to do.
Lorne Calvert: Give Me 4 Beers
“…to reach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”*
(Heh – Sask Gov’t proposes changes to liquor act… “if your organization is caught serving minors under 19 years of age, it may face fines as high as $10,000 compared with the old maximum fine of $2,500, according to the new rules.”)
Reader Tips
Tips thread.
Viterra – Not Your Grandfather’s Window And Shutter Company
One thing you could always say about the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool – nobody else wanted the name;
I’ve already found an energy services company, a semi-conductor distributor, a window and shutter supplier and a pet food company with the same name. Yet another great moment in corporate rebranding.
Great Moments In Liberal Oratory, II
“We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less. Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada.” – Pierre Trudeau
“Of all our dreams today there is none more important – or so hard to realise – than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.” – Lester B. Pearson
“They lay one egg. They put their excrement in one place. They hide their excrement. … They flap their wings very hard and they work like hell. This seems to me a symbol for what our party should be.” – Michael Ignatieff
“Running games are still allowed”
… as long as students don’t chase each other.
Back in my day we chased each other and we yelled “BANG!”.
Sometimes we even carried scissors.
Great Moments In Liberal Oratory
“We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less. Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada.” – Pierre Trudeau
“Of all our dreams today there is none more important – or so hard to realise – than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.” – Lester B. Pearson
“Well, come on people! These guys are still terrible! We can do better than that. Where is the improvement? In fact, over the summer, the government got even worse!” – Stephane Dion
“How hard is it to count to 8?”
Use your fingers for God’s sake! Do their lips move when they read too? Can they read at all?
Aren’t these the guys who are supposed to be keeping track of Iranian uranium enrichment? How many bombs do the North Koreans have?
It’s the UN. You have to ask?
The Sound Of Settled Science
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus.
[…]
In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
Read on.
h/t “Bolshevik”, in the comments.
The Calvert Manifesto
In retrospect, I should have counted. Last night I watched 2 hours of CTV on the local affiliate (from 8 pm – 10 pm). Fully half of the advertising consisted of happy, shiny people spots bought and paid for by various departments of the Saskatchewan Government – your tax dollars.
These included health worker “recruitment” ads. That’s right – a department that claims to be short of funds and even shorter of workers, thinks their recruiting budget is best spent within the province.
Sure, they do.
As I said, I should have counted. But considering the number of commercial breaks over two hours of prime time, and that there were two – three in each break, there had to be at least twenty of these ads.
And that’s not all – here’s what’s going on behind the scenes;
My husband is a physician in Saskatoon. He received a packet from the
government today. The cover letter was signed by Lorne Calvert and details
what he calls “my government” has used our taxpayer dollars to fund. The
letter was accompanied by a poster about “Building Futures” and approximately 20 copies of a brochure printed on nice, heavy stock. The brochure is at
[this link].
And I would be happy to fax the letter.
Yet another example of the NDP using tax dollars to buy votes and campaign.
And this time they are surreptitiously asking physicians to aid in their campaign.
The letter is on the Premier’s letterhead;
The Government of Saskatchewan has made significant enhancements to programs and services that support young families. We want to ensure Saskatchewan is the best place for young people to live, work and build strong futures.
We all want our children to get the best start in life, and one factor in the success of young families is access to quality early learning and child care. This is why my Government has made improvements such as increased licensed child care spaces by 2000 in the past five years, increasing child care subsidies for parents, and improving wages and training opportunities for child care providers. We have expanded the number of prekindergartens, and we will soon be opening parent resource centres across the province.
The rest of the letter goes on in this vein, with a one paragraph reference to “ensuring Saskatchewan families have access to high quality health care in a timely manner” being a “priority” for the Government, before going on to cover their efforts in family poverty, housing, the Graduate Tax Exemption, the Building Communities Program, sport, culture, recreation, lotteries, etc. The last sentence reads;
Thank you for working with us to build better futures.
Lorne Calvert
Premier
And speaking of manifestos – on his show yesterday, John Gormley publicly commended the NDP for finally retiring the infamous Regina Manifesto. Not so fast. It was bouncing around the party website all day.
One would think that a media interested in exploring the historical allegations of Ku Klux Klan support for a Conservative party of 80 years ago would be at least as interested in the current governing party’s interest in clinging to a document that proclaims – “We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible.”
One would think.
Reader Tips
Thursday tips.
Y2Kyoto: Where Al Gore Is The Man And Sheep Are Nervous
At the 2007 Organic Expo (Australia)
In a nod to the world’s greenhouse woes, the [“The Al Gore”] dish is a concoction dreamed up by expo caterers Scott Kinnear and Gary Thomas. It’s an organic mix of chunked mutton and aromatic root vegetables to be sold at the expo’s humble kiosk near a life-sized cutout of climate change crusader, Al Gore, mouthing the words “conveniently good for you and the environment”.
As an additional enticement for more serious greenies, Kinnear and Thomas say no ingredient will have travelled more than 100 kilometres from production to plate. The idea is to highlight carbon-emission damage to the environment from food that travels far from its source.
Methane emissions from ruminant livestock are responsible for 45 % of New Zealand’s combined CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas inventory, and arise principally from sheep. Using a flock of 6-month old sheep (20 ha
1) grazing abundant pasture, we compare micrometeorological measurements of net methane emission rates with measurements from individual sheep based on a sulphur-hexafluoride tracer technique. Individual sheep emission rates were highly variable and averaged 19.5 ± 4.8 (SD) g CH4 sheep
It gets worse…
Kinnear owns Organic Wholefoods, a specialist organic retailer; he is also a spokesman for the Biological Farmers of Australia. In 2001, he organised a political dinner for 1000 Greens at Parliament House in Canberra. A later event – held in honour of environmentalist David Suzuki in Bendigo – meant feeding 700.
“It’s a lot of work because you have to source every ingredient,” Kinnear says.
The “David Suzuki” ingredient travelled over 12,500.
h/t.
Finally
A gun control campaign I can endorse.
Lorne Calvert’s Party of 5th Graders
I’ve met Brad Wall and listened to him speak, and detected no trace of any speech impediment.
Apparently, the Saskatchewan NDP think differently.
Apparently, they think that it’s appropriate to reference an established physical disability to ridicule a political opponent on their official party website.
Quite the little inside joke, that.
Or at least, it used to be.
Update: 5:50pm In an uncharacteristic mea culpa, the NDP has changed the photo and acknowledged their shame. The file name on the new one is “380_ashamedbradnews.jpg”
SDA gets results!
Viterra – Not Your Grandfather’s Wheat Pool
Larry Weber writes ;
“Some of the older farmers will be lamenting the fact that the cooperative name and philosophy is now a footnote in history. Truth be known, farmer’s lost control in 2003 during their restructure. On the positive side, the corporation is staying in Saskatchewan and will be an agriculture force with roots firmly established here. Seeds of change are everywhere – except at the Canadian Wheat Board.”
More at the National Post
Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wall?
Delisle Post Office, noon today.
Scratch A Socialist
And underneath you’ll find an anti-Semite;
Left-wing extremists and PA Arabs destroyed thousands of grape vines belonging to local Jews in Samaria Wednesday. Some one hundred Arabs and leftists, along with dozens of Arab TV crews certified by various news agencies, marched to a Jewish vineyard near the town of Dolev, northwest of Jerusalem, and proceed to systematically uproot and destroy thousands of young grapevines.
The PA- appointed mayor of Ramallah took part in the march. Though the police and army had been forewarned that the Arabs and leftists were planning a provocation, security forces arrived only after most of the vineyard had already been uprooted.
[…]
The phenomenon of left-wing extremists, from both Israel, Europe and the United States, destroying Jewish vineyards and orchards in Judea and Samaria, though widespread, has rarely been covered by Israel’s state-run media and has never appeared in foreign news agency reports.
“Why are all the Canadian soldiers being killed in Afghanistan white?”
Where are our new Canadians from China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and the rest of Asia?
Sixty four of the 66 Canadian military personnel killed in Afghanistan since the start of the mission in 2002 are white Canadians. The other two are black Canadians.
There is something not right with this picture.
Walk in downtown Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal and you will be greeted with a glorious mosaic of cultures, mingling and mixing, sharing and caring, fighting for and defending all things Canadian.
Look at the queue of soldiers heading into a Hercules transport bound for Afghanistan – it is overwhelmingly white and male.
This stark contrast clearly illustrates that visible minorities are vastly under-represented in the Canadian Armed Forces.