Reader Tips

Reader Tips 43 Comments

We’re going to kick off this year’s Christmas music selections with our annual presentation – let’s call it a tradition – of a surprising musical performance that raises the spirits by all but erasing, for a magical moment, the distance between quotidian reality and the transcendent.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

43 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  3. Dennis Miller’s show was interesting today. Some callers were advocating for a national referendum on gun control. Then another person said, “Fine, let’s have a national referendum whether to repeal the 2nd Amendment. But, at the same time, let’s also have a referendum about whether we should outlaw abortion.”
    One can only speculate how many pushing the first would agree to let the majority decide on the second.

  5. Today on the cbc site,this headline;
    ” Fraud means 6 election wins must be thrown out, court told ”
    A billion bucks does not get you much.
    And then there’s ;
    ” Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, said some people don’t read newspapers or watch TV news, and just don’t know they may have gotten a misleading call.”
    That says it all.
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/12/17/pol-election-robocalls-federal-court-day-six.html

  11. The Swiss make it mandatory to have every household armed and yet have the lowest gun related murder rate in the free world. They do put a emphasis on nut control though. They didn’t empty their nut houses in the name of political correctness and don’t consider every life special. Takes stellar thinking to disarm all the law abiding citizens to insure that only the human garbage is armed.

  13. Meet Brandon Bryant
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-17/guest-post-meet-brandon-bryant-drone-operator-who-quit-after-killing-child
    Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
    “Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
    “Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
    “Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
    Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
    They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

  15. Education Today: Violence, Narcissism, Chaos, Disintegration.
    The natural end result of left-liberalism.
    …-
    “As Ontario teachers hold biggest walkout, union warns of more action”
    “Voices for U.S. gun control growing louder, but still face almost impossible fight”
    “Tears, kindness as Newtown begins saying goodbye to its children”
    “Quebec universities strike back in wake of funding cuts”
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

  16. The Right to Bear Arms
    Did the millions of Chinese murdered by Mao Tse Tung have the right to bear arms? No
    Did the millions who were murdered under the iron fisted rulers of the Soviet Union have the right to bear arms? No.
    Did the tens of thousands of ‘disappeared’ murdered people of Argentina, a few short years ago, have the right to bear arms? No.
    All these countries had previously disarmed their populations in the name of safety..
    All of recent history’s truly large mass murders had one thing in common. It was the defenceless land owners, business people, and the educated that were murdered.
    And yet, in the USA, every tragedy is seen as one more example of the need to disarm a free people.
    We have a century of hard evidence showing what happens when the people’s arms are confiscated by a presumed benevolent central bureaucracy. 60 million deaths as evidence.
    What happened last week is a reminder that evil is with us, as it always has been. Evil must to be addressed. Making good citizens defenceless is not the way to address it
    Freedom has always come at a terribly steep price.
    Those who would give up a little freedom, for a little security, deserve neither, and will inevitably lose both. “Ben Franklin”

  17. O’s “gun reform”/Mohammed’s “shot dead”.
    Left-liberalism/Mohammedanism.
    …-
    “Newtown shootings: Obama seeks ‘complex’ gun reform
    BBC News”
    “Five women immunizing children against polio shot dead in Pakistan
    Globe and Mail”

  18. I vote for the Huron Carol, the true Canadian Christmas hymn (‘Twas in the Moon of Wintertime). It has lyrics in English, French and Huron. Hardly hear it any more on the radio or in school performances.
    Of course Jean De Brébeuf who wrote the lyrics was tortured and martyred later on by the Iroquois, but still…

  19. I vote for the Huron Carol, the true Canadian Christmas hymn (‘Twas in the Moon of Wintertime). It has lyrics in English, French and Huron. Hardly hear it any more on the radio or in school performances.
    Of course Jean De Brébeuf who wrote the lyrics was tortured and martyred later on by the Iroquois, but still…

  20. Gun Controls.
    Yeah! Well!
    Timothy McVeigh killed 149 adults,
    19 nursery children with a truckload of sh1t,
    fertilizer..
    We need to ban Sh1t!

  21. Liberal Party’s Carneyal Knowledge, Part V.
    …-
    “‘It’s horrible optics’: Mark Carney under fire for vacation at Liberal MP’s house”
    “‘He has brought the impartiality of the bank into question and the policy says that that is a violation,’ said Duff Conacher, founding director of Democracy Watch”
    “The Bank of Canada insists Mark Carney did not break conflict-of-interest rules when he visited the Liberal finance critic’s seaside home in Nova Scotia this summer, but critics are questioning the outgoing governor’s judgment as he moves to London to head the British central bank.
    Mr. Carney spent part of his vacation at the house owned by his long-time friend, Liberal MP Scott Brison, in Cheverie, N.S., the bank confirmed Monday.
    A spokesman said Mr. Carney did not discuss the invitation with the bank’s general counsel before the trip “because it was a personal visit in the context of a family vacation.” It was only after the bank started fielding questions about the holiday that the general counsel found the governor was in line with conflict of interest guidelines.”
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/12/17/mark-carney-did-not-break-conflict-of-interest-rules-when-he-vacationed-at-liberals-house-bank-of-canada/

  22. This suggestion of a conflict of interest for Mark Carney because he has friends who are Liberals is ridiculous.
    After all, Carney lives in Ottawa, and would naturally have friends there. They would be, by the way, probably also either directly in politics or working in government or have their own private political filiations.
    Does this mean that Carney is not allowed to have personal friends because all of them will also have some sort of political preference? Are his friends only allowed to be totally independent in their political ideology? To have never made up their minds whether they want decentralized small government or centralized big government? Never?

  23. EBD and peterj, thank you for the Christmas music. EBD, my wife and I have a personal connection with one of the fellows singing and wearing a yellow jacket, as he and his wife are friends of ours that live in the St. Catharines, Ontario area.
    Doowleb @ 5:49, well said and thanks for that.

  25. Hell has just frozen over!!! Check out Catsmeat’s
    editorial on Sun News website. He has just had a moment of clarity, however brief.

  26. I am concerned about the sloughing off to ‘mental illness’ the tragic school massacre and the concomitant belief that ‘it can be treated so as not to bother us’.
    What is the definition of a normal human being? What is the range of behaviour? Are all evil actions carried out only within ‘mental illness’? Was Timothy McVeigh mentally ill? Could he have been treated?
    Is Obama, with his narcissism, his antipathy towards success, work and wealth, and his personal selection of individual drone attacks, is he normal or mentally ill?
    Is evil carried out only by those who are mentally ill? Are they in that phase only during that moment, or, all the time? Is it obvious? Can we actually treat ‘those who are different’ and render them either ‘like us’ or not a bother to us?
    I think that we are in murky waters in this realm. We don’t know enough about the human psyche and we also assume that if we know, we can control it – and I don’t think it’s that simplistic and mechanical.

  28. Fearless Leader
    “We need to ban Sh1t!”
    Ammonium Nitrate, the main ingredient in the bomb in the Alfred P Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995, London’s Canary Wharf and the Omagh bombing, is in fact, banned in some countries like Peru, mainly due to the bombings .
    It is not banned in Canada because it is used mainly in the mining industry as an explosive. Its sale in Canada is restricted. Just try to make a large purchase, paying cash, not owning a farm, and you have a good chance to see the inside of a police station like this guy:
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/09/g20-canada-police-idUSN0917487420100609

  29. ET, exactly. Were the individuals of the SS camp staff, the Einsatzgruppen, the NKVD executioners, NKVD labour camp guards, Pol Pots executioners, Mao’s executioners, and sundry other similar groups mentally ill or evil or both? David Suzuki and Al Gore want to jail those who disagree with them, and so, are they mentally ill or evil? Other groups, for instance such as the radical Islamists, and the radical left want to impose their agenda and do away with those who oppose them. Radical earth muffins want to do away with 6 billion people, how, and are they evil or mentally ill, or both?
    This question could be endless.

  31. Ken (Kulak). Right. I find the assumption that IF ONLY we could pinpoint the exact causes of whatever we don’t like, THEN, we’ll be able to control and eliminate all problems. And, we’ll live in utopia.
    Life isn’t mechanical; we can’t take it apart, rebuild it and control it the way we can deal with our lawnmower.
    The notion that utopia, the Garden of Eden, could exist on this earth is in my view, utterly naive. We are material, finite beings; that means that we may be an ‘expression’ of that possible perfection we express in our art and music but we, as that finite entity, can never achieve it.
    We need some humility, some acknowledgement of our fallibility.
    Can we conquer disease? No. As soon as we deal with the plague and polio then AIDS appears. It will always be so because those bacteria, those viruses, exist with us on this planet.
    How, we can ask, could Germans, with their knowledge, their music, their science, how could they also have those concentration camps and deliberately massacre millions in them? Were they all mentally ill? Do we have the drugs to ‘cure’ them?
    What about the jihadists? What about those on this blog who want to ‘nuke all Muslims’?
    What about those who refuse to define life as existent in the womb and promote abortion? Are they mentally ill? Can we drug them?
    We cannot control all events. We cannot and must not define as ‘mental’ those who are strange or different or asocial or even, angry and emotional. We cannot live as Stepford Wives.

  32. One loose nut with guns kills many.
    How many distraught parents kill their children?
    don’t mention the “A”-word…….
    it’s CHOICE.

  33. Bravo PM Harper!
    Stand With Israel.
    …-
    “Stephen Harper: Person of the Year”
    “Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been chosen as the Jewish Tribune’s inaugural Person of the Year for his outstanding leadership in defending and supporting the state of Israel and the Jewish people worldwide.
    At home and abroad, guided by Prime Minister Harper’s moral clarity, Canada leads the world in fighting against antisemitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism. In its steadfast support of Israel, the Harper government affirms its commitment to the Canadian values of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.”
    http://www.jewishtribune.ca/news/2012/12/18/stephen-harper-person-of-the-year

  34. Liberal Party’s Carneyal Knowledge, Part VII.
    “News of Carney’s near week-long stay at Liberal finance critic Scott Brison’s Nova Scotia home last summer jumped the pond early this week, with U.K. papers quoting MPs voicing concerns about the vacation.”
    …-
    “Carney faces grilling by UK parliamentary panel”
    “OTTAWA — Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will feel the heat at a “rigorous” grilling before a panel of U.K. parliamentarians in February.
    And Carney, who takes the helm of the Bank of England in July, should expect to tackle questions not just about economic policy but about the vacation he spent at the home of a Liberal MP.
    The all-party Treasury Select Committee is calling the central banker to testify as part of its regular vetting of people tapped for public office.
    “They will want a rigorous scrutiny,” committee press officer James Abbott said Tuesday. “The point of this is so Parliament has confidence in the new governor, so the new governor has the legitimacy provided by parliamentary scrutiny.”
    http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/politics/archives/2012/12/20121218-115729.html

  35. FOX news is suggesting that Adam Lanza might have emotionally snapped because his mother was apparently thinking of having him committed to an institution.
    He was very angry, very upset, very frightened by this agenda. He’s an adult and she was arranging the paperwork to have him committed against his will. This is from a local rumour in the community.

  36. Ken, I remember one section of Solzenitzen’s book The Gulag Archipelago where he discusses his torturers. He had an earlier chance to be an NKVD officer but turned it down. He was amazed at these men who could torture and kill people all day yet at the end of the day, almost like punching a time clock, just go home. To them it was just a job. Were they evil or just doing what they had to do to stay alive.

  37. “Were they evil or just doing what they had to do to stay alive.
    dave,I believe the psychiatric term is called ‘compartmentalization’.
    Most of us use it to get through life to some degree or other. Some use it bury what they do,some use it to bury what they desire to do.
    Right or wrong ,it exists and is a defence mechanism that separates us from animals.

  39. Et, dave and wallyj, I am currently reading Bloodlands and it is sickening. The author, Timothy Snyder, has a few minor facts wrong, but overall it compresses both murderous regimes in book. He starts with Stalin’s war on kulaks and follows Hitler and Stalin through the war and later.
    Last evening, in the pages I was reading, Snyder quotes from a letter by an Einsatzgruppe member to his wife. The fellow says that he felt queezy after shooting the first person, but it became easier later. He also quotes from the same fellow who told his wife that it was interesting throwing babies into the air and that the shooting would blow them apart.
    Stalin’s NKVD henchmen were the same.
    When you read some of the hateful comments on the web, mostly on the left, it is not hard to see that there are more than enough North Americans who would be willing to carry out similar cleansing efforts against Jews, or kulaks of whatever occupation.

  40. Bow-wow theorists say, Bow-wow.
    “He said it will take days to compile a list of all firearm holdings because the massive fund has a broad range of investments.”
    …-
    “California Teachers Invested In Cerberus Capital Management, Which Owns Gun Maker Linked To Sandy Hook Shooting”
    “SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The nation’s largest teachers’ pension fund announced Tuesday that it was reviewing its firearms holdings after determining that its investment in a gun maker was linked to one of the weapons used in last week’s Connecticut school massacre.
    The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which manages $155 billion in assets, was reviewing whether those investments comply with the fund’s own social and ethical standards.”
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/california-teacher-cerberus-capital_n_2325981.html

  41. Ken (Kulak), I agree. When one reads the hateful comments made by those on the left or by whomever, then it’s possible to see that the actions of those who murdered thousands and millions could be carried out by these same people.
    I’m concerned that we assume that we will be able to control and thus conquer all tragic events. They can try outlawing guns; Chicago has done that and it has one of the highest gun homicide rates in the US. Or by defining any who are asocial or different as ‘mentally ill’ and confining or drugging them. But we can’t control everything and I’m concerned about our attempt not merely to try but to believe that we should and can do so.

  43. Stunning photo of Mr. Rogers with a special needs child.
    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/12/fred-rogers-post-goes-viral.html
    Words of hope and healing from Mr. Rogers:
    “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”

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