Reader Tips

Reader Tips 37 Comments

Television personality Dick Clark is famous for being unflaggingly, conscientiously anodyne, and for always knowing what side his bread is buttered on. In tonight’s tippity amusement he fully hits the mark on both counts, as he comes to the defence of ‘the kids’ in his Open Letter To The Older Generation.
Hey, gotta clear the bookmarks once in a while.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

37 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Andrew Coyne:
    “When the Liberal government of Paul Martin introduced the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act in November of 2005, it received comparatively little attention. As the columnist Thomas Walkom described it in the Toronto Star, the bill would require Internet and telephone companies ‘to install equipment that would allow the state to monitor all of their customers… [I]t would give police … the power to demand, without the need for court warrants, any information that [these] companies keep on their customers — including addresses, passwords and credit card information.’ The public safety minister at the time, Anne McLellan, was quoted to the effect that the police needed the new powers to go after terrorists and child pornographers.
    “In other words, more or less the same legislation, supported by more or less the same arguments, as Bill C-30, whose purported horrors have convulsed the nation this past week. Yet it caused nothing like the same fuss…”
    The whole thing here.

  2. Cross-posted on yesterday’s (still today!) Reader Tips:
    Seeing as it’s Ash Wednesday (I had a palm-cinder cross imposed on my forehead at Mass earlier today), here’s a sad illustration of just how the mighty have fallen in Great — no longer — Britain, from Peter Hitchens, at least as articulate as his late sibling, Christopher:
    The Abolition of England
    http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
    And here’s the John O’Sullivan article about Peter Hitchen’s brother Christopher:
    Hitchens Observed: How Christopher Hitchens learned to love old England.
    http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291480/hitchens-observed-john-o-sullivan

  9. Thanks for that batb, but a boor is always a boor, and a slovenly one at that. You can call him brilliant, but when John’s sister had to inform him that the F word in mixed company is ignorant, you begin to wonder how to judge brilliance. He will not be missed in this household. I forgot to have pancakes yesterday, dammit!

  13. Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield), “When Positive and Negative Rights Collide”:
    “The birth control battle is another reminder that entitlements and freedoms do not coexist well, even if we set aside the economic issues, because entitlements end up intruding into the spaces of freedoms. As the United States undergoes the process that replaces the negative right to be left alone with the positive right to be taken care of in every way possible, these conflicts will only worsen.
    “Americans are getting a taste of life in Europe where social benefits trump individual freedoms, where artificial rights to various government administered benefits and subsidies, along with the protection of national values and social harmony, serve to eliminate most of what Americans have traditionally considered freedom.
    “While negative rights create safe spaces from outside intervention, positive rights offer a privilege that is overseen by the government. Positive rights are inevitably concerned with social welfare and harmony. They offer universal benefits at the cost of individual liberties.”
    (…)
    “The Catholic Church is strongly in favor of health care for all, it does not however agree on the nature of what health care is with value systems to the left of it. The current controversy is a clash of value systems. Such a clash is easily resolved in a system built around negative rights that leaves all the parties free not to enter into agreements or obligations that they don’t want to enter into. However in a system based on positive rights, a clash of values ends with the government compelling one side to abandon its values…”
    The whole thing here.
    Highly recommended.

  15. Re: the recently launched “Women for Obama” gatherings, Emily at Naked D.C. brings the funny:

    I cannot think of a better punishment for my sins than being forced to sit with a group of self-important ‘professional’ white women dressed in Lululemon athletic wear, munching on vegan snacks and talking about how important it is that we be compassionate to the poor while planning their first-class European vacations. The smug alone would be enough to kill me. But it wouldn’t kill me because this is Hell and I must have done something truly horrible to deserve this…

    That last bit in particular is almost Mamba-esque.
    h/t American Digest

  17. I hear Section 13 is going to be repealed. Welcome back to the realm of free speech – from your Murkin friend in Sunny San Diego. Cheers!

  19. National Post, Wednesday, Feb. 22. Barbara Kay (who had produced much of the ink on the topic previously) weighs in on the Supreme Court’s dismal ruling on Quebec’s ERC indoctrination course:
    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/02/22/barbara-kay-the-states-new-place-in-the-souls-of-the-nation/
    And a letter in the Globe on the topic, on Monday, Feb. 20:
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/feb-20-letters-to-the-editor/article2343452/
    “The government is not inculcating an ideology in this but attempting to both foster tolerance and moderate the effects of religious brain-washing.”
    Some very pernicious ideologies are centred on a particular interpretation of “tolerance”.
    “It seems the Canadian Civil Liberties Society has no objections to the enormous psychological power of religious institutions supported by parents set against the sensitive psyches of children.”
    No institution has the enormous psychological power of the government.
    “There is a logical contradiction here somewhere.”
    Yes, and I just found two of them in your fatuous letter.

  20. larben: “I forgot to have pancakes yesterday, dammit!”
    Hey, there’s always next year — or breakfast on Easter Sunday!
    As for Christopher Hitchens: There’s something about him that I liked — his support, for instance, for the Iraq War when all about him the Leftards were agin’ it — but it’s pretty clear that he was a deeply insecure man and a knee-jerk anti-Christian.
    Given his mother’s dalliance with an Anglican clergyman and their double suicide in Athens when he was in his early twenties, I can understand his animus. But to hold that grudge for as long as he did because of the actions of one, obviously deeply disturbed clergyman, reveals an adolescent inability to rise above his own narcissistic view of the world.

  21. If your Job Searching, Dont rely on Service Canada’s Job Bank.
    They have been down now since Last Sat.(feb 18)(could be longer i was not on it thursday or friday).

  24. batb – Of course the suicide of his mother would have an effect on his entire life, but Peter seems to have come out relatively unscathed. There was also the attack on Oriana Falacci because she wouldn’t reveal what she and Benedict XVI had talked about in her final illness, and how his outlook on religion seemed to change after he found out about his mom being Jewish. His absolutely vicious attacks on Teresa showed his complete lack of charity, and it must be remembered that he was a lefty (some would say communist) long before he finally found his way. He did a lot of damage to other people’s reputations. Physically, he reminded me of our own Richler, always a drink in hand with seemingly dank, dirty, limp strands of hair falling over his face; I guess it was for affect. Did nothing for me.

  26. Waiting for the outrage/tweets/protests from the left-liberals/libertarian libertines/faux conservatives.
    “and could eventually give the government greater powers to police Internet firms such as Google Inc and Facebook. ”
    …-
    “White House unveils online privacy Bill of Rights”
    urlm.in/lgvb

  27. batb – I knew Hitch’s mother committed suicide in Greece when he was quite young, and that she’d run off with a boyfriend, but I didn’t know he was a clergyman. Hitch’s hatred of religion long predates that tragedy. Personally, I find his religious obsession the most annoying aspect of his writing (God is Not Great is unreadable, and I tried), but I do have some sense of how he needed it to power his world-view on pretty much everything. He was brilliant because of his combtiveness. Remember, he wrote about so many things. The insecurity of anyone (*cough* larben *cough*) who can see nothing beyond Hitch’s views on religion is terrible. I don’t understand a secure person feeling threatened by disagreement. Why? Life is full of disagreement.
    And larben, please not to be dissin’ Richler. I adore him, and have since I was a kid. The fact that he was Canadian does not explain my devotion; it would actually have tended to put me off him, if only ’cause I was subjected to so much CanLit Margaret Atwood boring awfulness when I was in school. Richler is the best novelist Canada has ever produced; and he’s excellent aside from that too. You call Richler a drunk? Evelyn Waugh was a drunk, and then some.

  28. “Breaking: EPA scrubs web site of Gleick grants?”
    “Gleick’s grants from EPA seem to have been Stalinized.
    Here’s the timeline:
    Yesterday at 11:41 am we reported that EPA has awarded Peter Glieck’s Pacific Institute $468,000 in grants.
    Later in the afternoon, the National Center for Public Policy Research issued a media release calling for Congressional hearings into the EPA grants to Gleick.
    Today, a JunkScience.com commenter Brian Carter reported that the links in our original post didn’t work.
    We confirmed Carter’s observation around 12:30pm today.
    Fortunately, we saved a PDF file of one of the EPA grants to Gleick. So unless JunkScience.com gets Stalinized…
    Click for:”.
    http://junkscience.com/2012/02/23/breaking-epa-scrubs-web-site-of-gleick-grants/
    …-
    Stalinized. H/T lberia.
    “Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the Soviet secret police, suffered a fate similar to that of Trotsky. For some time he was close to Stalin, staging the infamous Moscow frame-trials, where innocent people were forced to confess crimes against Stalin and the Soviet Union, and were consequently executed. In the photograph below, he can be seen walking together with Stalin.”
    “In the modified photograph below, it is as though he had never existed:”
    http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html

  30. Neo-AGW Progress Report.
    Feature: Gleick Watch.
    …-
    “Gleick cancels keynote speech to lawyers”
    “Maybe he could have gotten pro bono legal counsel during the Q&A?
    Greenwire reports:
    Scientist Peter Gleick canceled his planned appearance today at a water law conference here, days after he confessed to posing as someone else to obtain funding and strategy documents from a group that questions research showing the impact of man-made emissions on climate change.
    Gleick called Sunday night and suggested that he not attend or deliver a planned keynote speech at the American Bar Association Water Law Conference, event Vice Chairman Alf Brandt said.
    “He offered to withdraw based on what happened over the weekend,” said Brandt, who had invited Gleick to speak at the event. “After much consideration we decided to accept his offer”…”
    http://junkscience.com/2012/02/23/gleick-cancels-keynote-speech-to-lawyers/

  32. Cough* Black Mamba* cough* – Going to make a confession here (even should you find that offensive) but I have never read anything by Richler, it is just that I hate posers,and I will dislike anyone I like for whatever reason I want. Same as yourself!

  33. Michael Coren says that Obama is not hard left. (And he didn’t mean Zer0’s Marxist.)
    There’s something very weird about Coren.

  35. Lookout – just saw the piece with Coren and the American spokesperson, and they generally agree with each other. I think what set him off was the comments about Santorum. Don’t know if I would agree with Coren on that point. But it was the argument he had with the celebrity Rabbi he had on his show, that proves he was in a foul mood to start with, though I agreed with Coren on this, because the guy had his own biases, and Coren didn’t have him on just to help him in book sales!
    Boy, I bet we’re gonna hear about this one! Both me and Michael.

  37. @ Black Mamba : I love, love, love Mordecai Richler. I have a first edition of Barney’s Version – me and 50 000 other people – but it is one of my prized possessions and I’ll never give it up.

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