There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finding an internet site somewhere that contradicts what your family doctor is telling you.
The Oceans Began To Recede…
and the US just got a bit bigger.
Sex Found to Cause Economic Growth!
It’s true!
Now start making with the “bam bam!”
Y2Kyoto: Pay No Attention To That Snowman Behind The Curtain
Two thirds into 2008, climate experts make a confident prediction;
“We can expect with high probability this year will be cooler than the previous five years,” said Omar Baddour, responsible for climate data and monitoring at the WMO.
Stop the presses.
Vomit Alert
Here’s what you get when you cross a hippie with a not-so-closet Communist:
“Our aggressive military activities in Afghanistan are foolish and wrong,”
[…]
“The Pashtun (people) have extremely different values than ours, values we may not agree with in any case, but it’s not our business to try and teach them lessons with weapons,”
[…]
“Because, in fact, they’ll be the ones teaching us lessons.
“We’re going to have to leave the place or there’ll be nothing left of us or of whatever we’ve done, except the blood we’ve lost there after we leave. So it’s better we leave now.”
Personally, I prefer Patton:
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
RAWLCO asks us what we think should be done … poll in right sidebar.
SUV LUV
Has the increase in fuel costs dampened your love affair?
However many SUVs there are to choose from, our love affair with these mighty vehicles is in danger. Soaring gas prices threaten to eliminate any vehicle posting less than 12 gallons per mile. Moreover, Darwinian Law dictates that a vehicle unable to corner at speeds over 17 MPH may indeed succumb to natural selection. Nevertheless, however shaky the future of the SUV may look, we can rest assured knowing that at least one French inventor is spinning in his grave as he looks over what has become of his cherished creation.
Whatever happened to ‘if it ain’t broke’?
This has New Coke written all over it.
Politics Hath Charms To Soothe The Savage Comedian
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
What’s The Opposite Of Diversity?
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here from the musical South Pacific is There is Nothing like a Dame (1949. 5:26).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Blogging Notes
I’m off for the weekend, and unlikely to have much net access. I’ve a few posts scheduled for auto-publishing, and the guest bloggers are, as always, invited to contribute if they wish.
Otherwise, it’s one of the last weekends of the summer – so do like me, and get out and enjoy it.
Might, Will, and Sacrifice
3 Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan today. What caught my attention was that the last several Canadian deaths have involved soldiers on their third rotations to Afghanistan. Being somewhat familiar with the way things work in the CF, I know that not a single Canuck serving in Afghanistan is there against his or her will. In fact, Canadian soldiers are lined up to go in numbers too great to accommodate … there are that many who want a chance at the mission.
What amazes me more than the heroism and willingness of our soldiers, is the continued view by some that soldiers are either victims or felons. I suppose it’s a natural reaction for those who can’t fathom the fact that there are those among us who rush in when most flee … and who stand fast when most recoil.
For Canadian soldiers though, the mission has long ago ceased being just about 911 … and has instead become about helping the people of Afghanistan. That is, without a doubt, the single most common theme expressed by those who have been “over there“.
Junker @ Cjunk contemplates the issues in Might, Will, and Sacrifice:
So where does the tally of might, will, and sacrifice leave us? To be sure, might is most visible, and leans heavily in the west’s favor, even though eastern asymmetrical warfare has dealt deadly blows in the past. A mere 60 years ago western societies had the will to see through the bloodiest conflict in history, whether or not they could do it again today is uncertain. Most worrying of all is the modern day West’s threshold for sacrifice. Can a society willing to give up so little overcome another that is destined to be much more numerous, and willing to give up so much more? Only time will tell.
Slowly, But Surely
Raphael Alexander is finding his inner Liberal.
“…if Kathy’s a conservative, I don’t want to be one.”
It was stuck to the bottom of his inner reading miscomprehension.
We Come Not To Praise Clement, But To Bury Him
Sayeth our old friends – “CTV News Staff”.
Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health is crediting the system put in place following SARS with detecting the current listeriosis outbreak.
Dr. David C. Williams says a pattern began to emerge from health units across southern Ontario and when more cases than expected began to appear, officials were able to link them to one strain of the disease.
Maz2 provides the heads up;
MSM does not mention Conservative Minister Clement’s name in this report. While Ontario Minister of Health, Minister Clement set up the “SARS detection system”.
It’s not as though he’s been flying below the radar.
Unambiguous
Last week, the Taliban murdered civilian women in Kandahar who were there to deliver aid – and with it some degree of hope – to the Afghan people. They subsequently released an open letter to the Canadian people, threatening more such vile action if Canadian troops aren’t withdrawn from Afghanistan.
One of those troops, Col George Petrolekas, has replied with a letter of his own:
You purport to speak for Afghans and Afghanistan yet your only questionable legitimacy comes from the barrel of a gun, the slaughter and intimidation of innocents supported by the profits of the opium crop that you protect. You do not answer for the night letters you send, the people you behead, or the villages you hold hostage whose only crime is that they do not agree with your views.
And yet you dare say that we come to kill your innocent, equally forgetting the deaths of thousands of innocents committed by your fellow travellers in crime; so conveniently forgetting the slaughters of Bali, Madrid, London and New York City. Your words may sound high and mighty, but your actions and deeds betray the truth of what you are: a movement committed to the enslavement and servitude of those whose voices cannot be heard. You revile America forgetting that it gave you more food, flour and wheat than any other nation while you were in power; what did you do for the Afghan people?
That’s just the beginning. Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing.
One of the things I love about soldiers is that, while they understand nuance, they know instinctively that directness has its own virtues as well. Not only in words, either…
Gold
And redemption.
(I have a special place in my heart for this sport. The first horse I ever sat astride was “Leni”, one of my mother’s show jumpers.)
It’s Time To End The War On Drunk Driving
Because as everyone knows,
a) Alcoholism is a disease. You can’t cure a disease by throwing sick people in jail.
b) You can’t legislate morality!
Truly, drunk drivers need a better press agent. There’s no other way to explain how the same people who point to reductions in drunk driving rates through enforcement and stiffer sentencing, also argue that “jail is not the answer” for the criminal drug abuser.
Witness this odd defense of “safe injection sites” by Barbara Yaffe;
– Between June of 2007 and June of 2008, 222 users overdosed at the East Hastings clinic and received immediate intervention. Some of those users might otherwise have died in a back alley.
Just as drunks die, unmourned and unexcused, in alleys and ditches every day of the year. What’s so damned special about junkies that they merit the equivalent of a taxpayer funded drunk drivers’ lane with rescue teams at the ready?
“We’re just grateful he didn’t take anyone with him”.
Finally, glimmers of rational thought. Someone in government willing to voice the obvious – “It’s the crap they’re shooting directly into their veins, stupid.”
“The supervised injection site undercuts the ethic of medical practice and sets a debilitating example for all physicians and nurses, both present and future in Canada,” he scolded in an address to the Canadian Medical Association general council meeting in Montreal.
He called providing a safe injection site to drug addicts tantamount to offering palliative care to a patient with a treatable form of cancer. […]
“Is it true that supervised injections offer ‘positive health outcomes?’ I would not put it this way. Insite [Vancouver’s safe injection site] may slow the death spiral of a deadly drug habit, but it does not reverse it. I do not regard this as a positive health outcome.”
Indeed.
And fast forward 30 years to the moment when a Canadian Prime Minister stands before Parliament to issue an official apology – and restitution – to the “Survivors of Safe Injection Sites”. It will happen. One only hopes they bankrupt the Canadian Medical Association first.
And he’s not the only one. In Saskatchewan, SDA gets results!
I do believe, however, in compromise. Simply inform those doctors and junkie advocates so utterly convinced that projects such as Insite are worth funding, that the programs will continue – so long as the injection sites are relocated to their own primary residences.
Gated communities could benefit from a little social diversity, yes?
He Is The One
He’s been waiting for.
The Illinois senator mentions his brother in his autobiography, describing him in just one passing paragraph as a “beautiful boy with a rounded head”.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our regular jazz show, which has been rescheduled to Wednesday this week due to to the Olympics, here are Johnny Griffin, Wes Montgomery, Ronnie Ross, Hans Koller, et al performing Last of the Wine, in Hamburg (1965, 7:40).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
