33 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Gosh, but I miss the interesting, varied, always compelling music selections.
    The twins be cute, but…..
    ….not, really. ….Lady in Red

  3. I found this very touching, with hope for humanity.
    Via Anchoress
    Exquisite and Excruciating: The Life of Married Love
    Loving someone until death is as hard as it is beautiful. It is sacrifice, but also a well of deep, refreshing joy.
    Like many survivors of breast cancer, I have some serious battle scars. My un-bandaged body after breast cancer certainly made for some interesting pillow talk between my husband and myself.
    http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Exquisite-and-Excruciating-Pat-Gohn-09-22-2011.html

  4. Thanks for your kind words of advice, Lady in Red (10:05 pm). While some people such as yourself enjoy the musical selections, others bitch and moan as if it’s the only show in town and they had to pay to get in.
    It’s literally impossible to please everyone. Opinions on what constitutes a suitable Reader Tip amusement are like Frampton Comes Alive albums in the seventies – everybody’s got one – so I try to mix it up a bit. Some weeks there’s more music, other weeks there’s more general interest oddities. At the end of the day the Reader Tips, submitted by commenters, are the star attraction anyway.
    Can’t please everyone. Fortunately, cash refunds are available at the main gate.
    Reader Tip:
    “26,000 Tunisians and 28,000 people of other nationalities from Libya” flood (video) the tiny (8 square miles) Italian island of Lampedusa; Italy “vows to transfer all migrants off Lampedusa after riots.”

  7. I came across this just before calling it a night.
    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/09/obama-gaffe-jobs-act-speech-brent-spence-bridge-ohio.html
    ——-
    “We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad,” Barack Obama.
    That’s what the president of the United States flat-out said Thursday during what was supposed to be a photo op to sell his jobs plan next to an allegedly deteriorating highway bridge.
    A railroad between continents? A railroad from, say, New York City all the way across the Atlantic to France? Now, THAT would be a bridge!
    It’s yet another humorous gaffe by the Harvard graduate, overlooked by most media for whatever reason.

  8. They really are trying to kill us all, aren’t they?:
    http://www.imperfectparent.com/topics/2011/09/24/fda-banning-primatene-mist-inhalers-for-asthma/
    “People who use Primatene Mist to control their asthama symptoms may want to build a stockpile of the over-the-counter medicine now or start looking for other treatments.
    The FDA issued a reminder that the drug will no longer be available after Dec. 31 due to the fact that the inhaler it uses as a delivery system uses chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Those compounds have been shown to damage the ozone layer and are being banned as part of an international agreement, the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer.”
    (BTW, the ozone layer hasn’t been fashionable in over a decade now, like acid rain. I guess they’re recycling memes.)

  11. More cuts to the left-liberal warmistas’ arts.
    Of Nowhereisland and Erewhon.
    …-
    “Olympic Arctic art project deserves to sink”
    “Spending £500,000 – and considerable energy – on Nowhereisland to drag six tonnes of Arctic rock to the UK for the Olympics is wrong”
    “Just what was the Arts Council thinking when it agreed back in 2009 to hand over £500,000 to the artist Alex Hartley in order for him and 18 volunteers to create Nowhereisland?
    The creative idea itself is actually rather captivating: find an Arctic island that has recently been exposed by melting ice and then break off some rocks to form a new “island nation” which can then be transported to the waters off the UK in time for the 2012 Olympics.
    During its conception, Hartley billed it as a “travelling embassy” intended to highlight issues such as climate change and land ownership. Here’s how his website explains it:”
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/22/olympic-arctic-art
    …-
    “Erewhon by Samuel Butler (England, 1872)”
    “Erewhon (an anagram of ‘nowhere’, the literal translation of ‘utopia’) is a remote kingdom, not on any map, which the narrator claims to have discovered in his travels. In many respects, life there is not dissimilar to contemporary Western civilization – there is a monarchy, lawyers, judges, prisons, money, rich and poor – and at first sight the inhabitants appear healthy and contented.
    However, it soon becomes apparent that duplicity is rife, and there are in actual fact two conflicting religions, two banking systems, etc. Illness is treated as a crime and criminal behaviour treated with sympathy.
    Their once sophisticated industrial know-how has been deliberately abandoned in favour of very basic machinery. As it becomes clear that their bizarre rule are just exaggerations of common Western practices, the book becomes a dystopia of biting satire against contemporary mores.”
    http://www.utopianfiction.com/19th.html

  12. “Armed Troops Burn Down Homes, Kill Children To Evict Ugandans In Name Of Global Warming”
    “Neo-colonial land grabs carried out on behalf of World Bank-backed British company”
    “Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming,” a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism.”
    “The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the “carbon credits” on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers.
    The company claims residents of Kicucula left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner, and yet the people tell a story of terror and bloodshed.
    Villagers told of how armed “security forces” stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.
    “We were in church,” recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. “I heard bullets being shot into the air.”
    “Cars were coming with police,” Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. “They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.”
    “But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming,” reports the New York Times.
    An Oxfam report documents how the British outfit has worked with the Ugandan government to forcibly expel over 20,000 people from their homes using terror and violence as part of a lucrative scramble for arable land that can be used to satisfy the multi-billion dollar carbon trading ponzi scheme, which is worth $1.8 million a year to the company.”
    http://www.prisonplanet.com/armed-troops-burn-down-homes-kill-children-to-evict-ugandans-in-name-of-global-warming.html

  13. I wouldn’t want to be Justin and Jeremy’s kindergarten teacher! Double Trouble, for sure.
    (I really find it distasteful, tots making like adults, especially skanky adults. Sexualized dance moves look awful on five-year-olds.)
    (No reflection on you, EBD …)

  14. *O’narcissist: “they pay the price.”
    “Edward Blair, says he is “bewildered” by the president.”
    “high hopes” “dashed”.
    “*”The “small people”, the “rank and file”, the “loyal soldiers” of the narcissist – his flock, his nation, his employees – they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing.”
    …-
    “Small Donors Are Slow to Return to the Obama Fold”
    “They were once among President Obama’s most loyal supporters and a potent symbol of his political brand: voters of moderate means who dug deep for the candidate and his message of hope and change, sending him $10 or $25 or $50 every few weeks or months.
    But in recent months, the frustration and disillusionment that have dragged down Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have crept into the ranks of his vaunted small-donor army, underscoring the challenges he faces as he seeks to rekindle grass-roots enthusiasm for his re-election bid.
    In interviews with dozens of low-dollar contributors in the past two weeks, some said they were unhappy with what they viewed as Mr. Obama’s overly conciliatory approach to Congressional Republicans. Others cited what they saw as a lack of passion in the president, or said the sour economy had drained both their enthusiasm and their pocketbooks.
    For still others, high hopes that Mr. Obama would deliver a new kind of politics in his first term have been dashed by the emergence of something that, to them, more resembles politics as usual.
    “When I was pro-Obama in 2008, I was thinking of him as a leader who could face the challenges that we were tackling,” said Adnan Alasadi, who works in behavioral health in Mesa, Ariz. Mr. Alasadi contributed repeatedly to Mr. Obama during his first campaign but says he will not give the president — or anyone else — any more money.
    “Now I am seeing him as just an opportunistic politician,” Mr. Alasadi said.”
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/us/politics/small-donors-slow-to-return-to-obama-fold.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
    …-
    *O’narcissist: “they pay the price.”
    “*”The “small people”, the “rank and file”, the “loyal soldiers” of the narcissist – his flock, his nation, his employees – they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated – is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.”
    http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections

  15. O’narcissist: black demagogue “in a darkened Washington convention center.”
    “*They are the perfect hate figure. Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy.
    This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler, diagnosed by Erich Fromm – together with Stalin – as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human.”
    …-
    “Obama tells blacks to ‘stop complainin’ and fight”
    “In a fiery summons to an important voting bloc, President Barack Obama told blacks on Saturday to quit crying and complaining and “put on your marching shoes” to follow him into battle for jobs and opportunity.
    And though he didn’t say it directly, for a second term, too.
    Obama’s speech to the annual awards dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus was his answer to increasingly vocal griping from black leaders that he’s been giving away too much in talks with Republicans — and not doing enough to fight black unemployment, which is nearly double the national average at 16.7 percent.
    “It gets folks discouraged. I know. I listen to some of y’all,” Obama told an audience of some 3,000 in a darkened Washington convention center.
    But he said blacks need to have faith in the future — and understand that the fight won’t be won if they don’t rally to his side.
    “I need your help,” Obama said.
    The president will need black turnout to match its historic 2008 levels if he’s to have a shot at winning a second term, and Saturday’s speech was a chance to speak directly to inner-city concerns.
    He acknowledged blacks have suffered mightily because of the recession, and are frustrated that the downturn is taking so long to reverse. “So many people are still hurting. So many people are barely hanging on,” he said, then added: “And so many people in this city are fighting us every step of the way.””
    http://news.yahoo.com/obama-tells-blacks-stop-complainin-fight-015928905.html
    …-
    *O’narcissist:
    http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections

  16. Sorry, batb (7:34), but I must admit that at this early Sunday morning hour I am comprehensively unable to even begin to attempt to parse the sort of mindset that would see those kids’s guileless, fraternal, coordination-gymnastics as “skanky”.
    I don’t know. I’ll look at it later in the day…

  17. A suggestion, EBD:
    Do Musical Tips at midnight. Occasionally, as the mood suits, give us something else.
    I’ve enjoyed some of those, but, frankly, that sort of stuff is soooooooooo easy to find on so many blogs on the internet, not to mention just sent to your email by (un)thoughtful friends: “you *must* see this!”
    The wild music rides was *one* of the things that made SDA unique. I learned from that. Tom Waits….? Yep, I’d never heard of him. “Come up to my house…” Dolly Partin’s wonderful “Why’d you come in here loooking…”
    The powerful classical selections. Strange music from around the world.
    I loved it!
    So, whatever you have to do to accommodate The Others, do. But don’t stop the music.
    ….Lady in Red

  18. From the Musical Tips, I learned about Judee Sill and bought her CD. Love it.
    I look forward to each evening’s offering. Some don’t appeal to me, but often, I find myself fascinated, entertained, amazed and occasionally, my life is canted a degree toward a better direction. No-one has yet taken me up on my suggestion of Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merill’s Pearlfisher’s Duet, but I live in hope. Cheers.

  19. “Armed Troops Burn Down Homes, Kill Children To Evict Ugandans In Name Of Global Warming”
    “Neo-colonial land grabs carried out on behalf of World Bank-backed British company”
    -maz 7:08 am
    I was reading that article from the NYT via WUWT and the phrase ‘Saving the Earth one Ugandan village at a time’ came to mind.
    Is there such a thing as Ethical Carbon Credits? Not that it matters since carbon credits, like oil, are fungible so where they come from, how they are produced and who profits apparently doesn’t matter. At least that is what I am told by J.Kay and the rest of our moral and intellectual superiors. Its odd how speculative psuedo-sciences like eugenics, DDT bans and now CO2 centered climate change, that cause so much misery and death in their wake, are always supported by the MSM of the day – to make the world a better place in the future, of course. At least the NYT doesn’t completely ignore the abuses caused by the AGW industry. I have not heard the Cdn. media talk at all about politically created droughts in Cali, energy poverty in the UK, (suspected)damn mismanagement floods in Oz or AGW business refugees.
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/25/they-had-to-burn-the-village-to-save-it-from-global-warming/

  20. On a lighter note, these two guys need to talk.
    “It looks like something straight out of a James Bond film – but a British firm believes this floating building could be the future of life at sea.
    With 11 accommodation decks, a 360-degree observation area, four helipads, its own dock, several swimming pools and as much space as a cruise liner, it’s not so much a boat as a city. Although it certainly does not fit the mould of a yacht, the design, called ‘Project Utopia’, was unveiled to stunned onlookers at the glitzy Monaco Yacht Show.”
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2041639/Dream-home-The-floating-city-future-life-sea.html#ixzz1YysESsv4
    “It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050…”
    http://hotair.com/archives/2011/08/16/are-you-ready-for-floating-libertarian-city-states/
    Just think of it, a stylish libertarian utopia where people who begin to talk about socialism can simply be tossed overboard.

  21. Ron Paul and Herman Cain are shaping the debate – Michelle Bachman could have helped them if she had not smeared Rick Perry on Hannity. She was nasty, nasty…most people don’t like that low level of nasty…she cooked her goose. Ron Paul and Herman Cain are not ‘personal’; they answer the questions…Paul won the on-line pole, Cain won the straw pole. Baby boomers fear loosing their ‘entitlements’ with a libertarian, they fail to look at the positive side of ‘no nanny’. Many people here would cringe if the gument dropped the WHO mandate that allows gument to ban tobacco smoking in private businesses. Choice seems to be out of the vocabulary. Small, tiny gument without nanny would be a Ron Paul term; I would celebrate such a return to sanity and freedom but many would quake in fear because they would be set adrift without nanny help. Speaking of nanny help, many Americans want illegals to stay because of the almost free labour illegals provide; eg nanny, gardener, housekeeper, ….Ron Paul wold end all subsities to illegals and to their ’employers’ heh.
    Paul and Cain are setting he stage for freedom for the individual; it will be interesting to watch. It is my hope that Gov Perry picks up on this and changes his tune.

  23. I’m with Lady in Red on the musical selections topic. Some didn’t interest me, many were interesting and others were gems. I’m sure we could never agree which was which, but it did open new doors for us and took us to musical genres we may be unlikely to see without your help. thank you

  24. Dalton says:
    “Hudak opposed to building gas-fired power plant in Mississauga
    Globe and Mail -”
    Tim says:
    “Liberals back off plans for Mississauga power plant
    CTV.ca”
    …-
    Where is Chile?, Tim and Dalton ask.
    “Massive power blackout hits Chile
    A massive power blackout paralyzed crucial copper mines in Chile Saturday and darkened vast swaths of the country including the capital Santiago before energy was largely restored, officials said.”
    (googlenews)

  25. about the media hype over that satellite…wanna bet they ignore the second one because it’s not ‘original’ or an ‘interesting topic’ anymore…or blame it on global warming
    Second big satellite set to resist re-entry burn-up
    * 08:00 23 September 2011 by Paul Marks
    * For similar stories, visit the Spaceflight Topic Guide
    Even if NASA’s 6-tonne UARS satellite does not cause any injury or damage when it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere today, there is more space junk headed our way next month. A defunct German space telescope called ROSAT is set to hit the planet at the end of October – and it even is more likely than UARS to cause injury or damage in populated areas.
    No one yet knows where UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) will fall to earth. Although most of the craft’s mass will be reduced to an incandescent plasma, some 532 kilograms of it in 26 pieces are forecast to survive – including a 150-kilogram instrument mounting.
    NASA calculates a 1-in-3200 chance of UARS causing injury or damage. But at the end of October or beginning of November, ROSAT – a 2.4-tonne X-ray telescope built by the German aerospace lab DLR and launched by NASA in 1990 – will re-enter the atmosphere, presenting a 1 in 2000 chance of injury.
    The higher risk stems from the requirements of imaging X-rays in space, says DLR spokesperson Andreas Schütz. The spacecraft’s mirrors had to be heavily shielded from heat that could have wrecked its X-ray sensing operations during its eight-year working life. But this means those mirrors will be far more likely to survive a fiery re-entry.
    Broken mirror, bad luck
    On its ROSAT website, DLR estimates that “up to 30 individual debris items with a total mass of up to 1.6 tonnes might reach the surface of the Earth. The X-ray optical system, with its mirrors and a mechanical support structure made of carbon-fibre reinforced composite – or at least a part of it – could be the heaviest single component to reach the ground.”
    At the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, the head of the space debris office, Heiner Klinkrad, agrees that ROSAT’s design means more of it will hit the surface. “This is indeed because ROSAT has a large mirror structure that survives high re-entry temperatures,” he says.
    ROSAT was deactivated in 1999 and its orbit has been decaying since then. “ROSAT does not have a propulsion system on board which can be used to manoeuvre the satellite to allow a controlled re-entry,” says space industry lawyer Joanne Wheeler of London-based legal practice CMS Cameron McKenna. “And the time and position of ROSAT’s re-entry cannot be predicted with any precision due to fluctuations in solar activity, which affect atmospheric drag.”
    Solar swelling
    US Strategic Command tracks all space objects and the US-government-run Aerospace Corporation lists both upcoming and recent re-entries on its website. But ROSAT is not yet on the upcoming list because its re-entry time is far from certain.
    The moment a craft will re-enter is difficult to predict because it is determined by two main factors. First, the geometry of the tumbling satellite as it enters the upper atmosphere, which acts as a brake. Second, the behaviour of the upper atmosphere itself, which grows and shrinks with the amount of solar activity, says Hugh Lewis, a space debris specialist at the University of Southampton, UK.
    “Solar activity causes the atmosphere to expand upwards, causing more braking on space objects. The reason UARS is coming back sooner than expected is a sudden increase in solar activity. Indeed, we expect to see a higher rate of re-entries as we approach the solar maximum in 2013,” he says.
    But don’t expect it to be raining spaceships – what’s coming down is partly a legacy of 1990s space-flight activity. “Some of the re-entries we see today [with UARS and ROSAT] are a heritage of years with high launch rates, which were a factor of two higher than they are today,” says Klinkrad.
    “The trend is towards smaller satellites, with more dedicated payloads,” he says, rather than “all-in-one” satellite missions on giant craft like UARS. That means debris from future missions should be smaller.

  26. Black Mamba and interested others (KevinB?): Why we’re reading Hayek again
    “Ridley reiterates the central Hayekian idea that I’ve been pounding into the heads of my students this semester in the course I’m teaching for the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University: ‘central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localized but connected knowledge.’ ”
    Me:
    Could be summarized more succinctly than that?! The author believes that Obama is the anti-Hayek.
    One of Hayek’s most seminal essays is The Uses of Knowledge which is probably available on the web.

  27. Michael Moore :
    Michael Moore defends Obamacare and healthcare programs similar to it around the world. Moore says the only “things you maybe have to wait for” are a knee replacement surgery or cataracts.
    “Things that are not life-threatening,” Moore said on HBO’s “Real Time” with host Bill Maher. “The reason why you have to wait sometimes in those countries is they let everybody in the line. We make 50 million people out of the line so the line is shorter, so sometimes you have to wait as long. If you are a patriotic American, you want every American to be covered the same as you. No, not ‘I’m going to get ahead because I have health insurance and they don’t,'” Michael Moore explained.
    Timely diagnostics and specialist care? In Canada? Really? So I guess all of those problems with waiting lists in Canada (including one Supreme Court judgment) and the substandard medical service in Britian’s NHS are also “lowest common denominator demagoguery” (see complete Maher video at link where Moore specifically mentions Canada and the UK).
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/24/michael_moore_patriotic_americans_will_wait_longer_for_healthcare.html

  28. someone should really put this to tune and to air…it’d go platinum in a week
    iggy learned the words the hard way, as did dijon before him and the way things are going, ‘bama et al will soon hear it as their dirge…
    I wish I’d written it, but I didn’t…
    credit to:www.nyrond.co.uk/songs/funny/tyrants.txt
    SONG OF THE TYRANTS
    A writer of note once remarked in a quote
    In a book which I lately re-read,
    How his work went to waste on a mob lacking taste:
    “You starve us. You starve us,” he said.
    For it seems all this time WE’D committed the crime
    Most heinous in everyone’s sight,
    Of wanting to read what we wanted to read
    And not what he wanted to write.
    CHORUS
    We wanted to read what we wanted to read
    And not what he wanted to write.
    Then my thoughts turned at whim to my old Uncle Jim
    A storekeeper of local repute
    Who dumped all his stocks of men’s trousers and socks
    And stocked up on old tea leaves and soot.
    To this day he can’t guess, though it gives him distress,
    The reason his sales went to hell:
    We wanted to buy what we wanted to buy
    And not what he wanted to sell.
    CHORUS
    We wanted to buy what we wanted to buy
    And not what he wanted to sell.
    Then I thought for the nonce about M. Alphonse,
    The award-winning chef de cuisine,
    Who decided one day that food was passe
    And served up a scrap metal terrine.
    He was fired on the spot and he howled “It’s a plot!”
    So we tried to explain–we said “Look,
    We wanted to eat what we wanted to eat
    And not what you wanted to cook.”
    CHORUS
    We wanted to eat what we wanted to eat
    And not what he wanted to cook.
    Oh you writers, beware, and, since I must be fair,
    Oh you artists and architects too.
    Let your muse guide you on, but remember anon,
    In the long run it’s we who pays you.
    Innovation is ace in its time and its place
    But the public will always backslide
    Into wanting to want what we wanted to want
    Not what you may want to provide.
    So in every new job, stay in touch with “the mob”,
    Don’t leave us behind in your flight,
    And you’ll find that we’ll read what you want us to read
    When you write what we want you to write.
    CHORUS
    You’ll find that we’ll read what you want us to read
    When you write what we want you to write!

  29. Mao Stlong* Lepolt.
    Who Hayek?
    ““We can’t just go save someone. We’re not saviors. We have to save ourselves,” said Gao Xiqing, president of China Investment Corp.”
    “Evil Ways”
    “Like a man cornered at a roaring waterfall in a movie, faced with a choice between jumping into the rocky water far below or turning to face a voracious T-Rex hot on his heels, Europe stands poised on the edge. What is at stake is not simply whether the world enters a depression or recession soon: it is whether the old order survives.”
    http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/09/25/evil-ways/#more-17432
    …-
    *Where is Liberal leader Bob Rae? asks Mo Strong, Bob’s Uncle.

  30. “remains of 1270” ? Mohammedans.
    …-
    “Human rights group urges Ottawa to investigate Cheney over torture
    Toronto Star”
    …-
    “Mass grave found in Libya with remains of 1270
    USA Today – Abdel Magid”

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