Author: Kate

The Greenback Tribe

Heist on a cracker

An American Indian tribe sued some of the world’s largest beer makers Thursday, claiming they knowingly contributed to devastating alcohol-related problems on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota said it is demanding $500 million in damages for the cost of health care, social services and child rehabilitation caused by chronic alcoholism on the reservation….

The Oglala Tribe’s unfrozen caveman lawyer Tom White:

“You cannot sell 4.9 million 12-ounce cans of beer and wash your hands like Pontius Pilate…”

h/t

Free Ray Honeyford!

[… Ray Honeyford] taught in a variety of inner-city schools before taking over at Drummond in 1981. Honeyford’s experience of running a largely Asian school gave him a special insight into the iniquities of multiculturalism, the official doctrine that had held sway in state education since the 1970s.
According to this policy, ethnic minority children were encouraged to cling on to their cultures, customs, even languages, while the concept of a shared British identity was treated with contempt. Honeyford thought this approach was deeply damaging.
He feared that it promoted division, hindered integration and undermined pupils’ opportunities to succeed in wider British society.
He voiced his concerns by writing an article in the obscure conservative political magazine The Salisbury Review, which was then edited by the distinguished philosopher Roger Scruton.
In it, Honeyford stated that white children constituted the ‘ethnic minority’ in many urban schools: ‘It is very difficult to write honestly and openly of my experiences and the reflections they evoke,’ he wrote, ‘since the race lobby is extremely powerful in the State education service.
‘The term racism functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought.’
The race lobby had become so powerful, he added, that ‘decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are even uncertain of their right to think those thoughts.

h/t EBD

Reader Tips

Tonight we present a couple of video amusements forwarded by SDA readers: first, via Adrian, place your bets on the success or catastrophic failure of the not-so-little Vodka Burner That Could. I say “not a chance.” And via Dave S., it’s man versus table saw, as an intrepid gentleman puts one of his wee body parts on the line in an attempt to prove that his remarkable new safety device actually works as advertised. Yikes.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes

These excerpts are from a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, one of the few great remaining journals in the Anglosphere. The observations I find telling:

… The Filipino nurse looked frightened and ran off to get Leon from Ghana to have another go. I said, “Hello, you must be Leon”, and he stared at me without a word. If it weren’t for putting the needles in, which often goes wrong, causing an alarm to go off, I could easily get used to having a four-hour rest in hospital every other day…
…Nurses no longer wear white, so everyone looks like a cleaner, although some have transparent face guards like welding shields, to protect them from flying spit. The only white members of staff are the cleaners from Romania, including two pretty girls who bring tea and biscuits…

Will there always be an England? Or a non-RoC Canada? The whole piece follows.

Continue reading

Those Moderate Muslims!

For the crime of committing “prayer meeting”;

Saudi officials strip-searched all the women and subjected them to an abusive body-cavity search, and assaulted the men. In a remarkable prison interview with the Voice of America’s Amharic-language service, one of the women, who contracted an infection from the search, attested: “We are traumatized by the strip search. They treated us like dogs because of our Christian faith. While talking about me during a recent visit to the prison medical center, I overheard a nurse telling a doctor ‘if she dies, we will put her in a trash bin.’”

Cash For Clunkers

Heh.

The gas-guzzling, earth-pawing 2005 Chrysler 300C Hemi that Barack Obama owned when he ripped Detroit automakers in 2007 for not making more fuel-sipping hybrids failed to sell on eBay this week for its minimum $1 million asking price.

Reader Tips

In 1997 Long Island public television station WLIW debuted Visions, a unique documentary series featuring high definition aerial footage of various world destinations. The voice-over narration is occasionally cliché, or delivered in a cloying, fake-sounding accent, but it’s mostly intermittent and unobtrusive, and at least somewhat informative; the real pleasure, in any case, lies in the almost ethereal birds-eye perspective that provides a unique sense of the lay of the land and allows viewers to survey significant landmarks, churches, and ruins in their historic and geographical context. Tonight, for your viewing pleasure, here’s the visually gorgeous Visions Of Sicily.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

The Sound Of Settled Science

From the noted denier website known as The Guardian;

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: “The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero.”

Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?

Go ahead. Make my car. (new link)

If the U.S. president told the bank holding your mortgage to cancel your debt and hand you the house free, it wouldn’t make you more productive or efficient. It just screwed someone you owed money to. And clearer than ever is that GM could have survived the Lehman episode with a simple bridge loan. America’s biggest auto maker could have returned to the slog without dishonoring billions of dollars in obligations to bondholders and other creditors.
But the most egregious aspect of the Obama bailout is its annexation of the auto sector to the administration’s green energy schemes. It’s no exaggeration to say the auto industry is being used to fulfill a throwaway line in an Obama speech calling for one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Bye, bye blackbird…

The situation, Petrie says, is that some areas where turbine developments are being constructed and planned are, as he says, “the worst possible places to put a wind power project.” He says that avian and bat mortality rates at improperly placed wind farms are unacceptable. He also says that wind turbine developers and the government have ignored the fact that there will be cumulative ecological impacts associated with placing thousands of wind turbines on the landscape and in the lakes. As a Waterfowl Ecologist, Petrie is particularly concerned that wind turbines are being placed within critically important habitats and on migratory routes with no regard for avian displacement. “When you place a turbine in or very close to critical habitats, and birds subsequently avoid those areas, it is tantamount to habitat loss, and we have already lost 85 per cent of our Great Lake’s coastal wetlands.”

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