In tonight’s Tips music, from 1929, an unknown British dance band’s unidentified vocalist asks Is Everybody Happy Now?
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
What Would We Do Without Headline Writers?
National Post, Jan.3rd…
h/t John W.
So You Think You Can Diplomacy?
…builds on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of “smart power” diplomacy. It embraces the full use of diplomatic tools, in this case dance, to engage people and create opportunities for greater understanding.
· Rennie Harris Puremovement, a hip-hop dance company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, will tour in Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories from March 9 – April 6;
· Seán Curran Company, a contemporary dance company based in New York, New York, will tour in Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Turkmenistan from April 5 – May 3;
· Jazz Tap Ensemble, based in Los Angeles, California, will tour in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe from April 9 – May 7 …
The Tolerant Left
[I]t tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.
We Don’t Need No Stinking French Fry Grease
Now is the time at SDA that they were warned!
AJC.com;
The failed Range Fuels wood-to-ethanol factory in southeastern Georgia that sucked up $65 million in federal and state tax dollars was sold Tuesday for pennies on the dollar to another bio-fuel maker with equally grand plans to transform the alternative energy world.
From the archives of Steven Den Beste;
One of the biggest advantages of coal and oil is that they are high-energy, but also extremely concentrated. A relatively small capital investment in a single area can harvest a great deal of useful end-product. A big open-pit coal mine can justify hundreds of millions of dollars spent on big shovels and huge dump trucks, because the shovel can dig more than a ton of coal on each bite, and each dump truck can carry several tons of coal out of the mine. The coal can be carried by rail point-to-point from the mine to a big power plant to be burned, or to a nearby harbor where it will be loaded on barges or ocean-going bulk carriers. All of this can be done big because huge amounts of coal come from one place, and go to a small number of destinations. Since petroleum is liquid, it is even easier to transport via pipelines or ships.
Coal would be a lot less valuable if it was found as a layer one centimeter thick spread over an area the size of the states of Iowa and Nebraska; the collection process would defeat the purpose. How difficult would it be to gather it all? How much equipment would be needed? Would it make sense economically to buy it all, given that each piece of equipment could only collect a relatively small amount of coal? Unfortunately, it wouldn’t.
But that’s exactly what the situation is when you’re talking about any kind of biomass as a source of fuel; it grows on the ground, and though you may get a lot of it, it’s spread over an immense area and you can’t do anything until you pick it all up first and collect it.
Of course, if one is only interested in harvesting tax dollars…
Ethical Oil Vs Blood Banana
SDA gets results! Chiquita won’t join bunch boycotting Alberta oilsands products
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
The claim that the military made up the tale of her battlefield heroics is seriously misstated. And more than faintly ironic, given that it was the Washington Post that reported Lynch had “gone down firing,” that she had fought ferociously in the ambush of her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, in southern Iraq in MaPostrch 2003.
It was the Post — citing otherwise anonymous “U.S. officials” — that claimed Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers” in the ambush.
It was the Post that said Lynch “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her” in the fighting.
It was the Post that placed the electrifying heroic-warrior tale about Lynch on its front page of April 3, 2003, beneath a headline that read:
“‘She was fighting to the death.’”
It was the Post — alone — that placed the story into the public domain.
And none of it was true.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Y2Kyoto: This Is Awkward
After I showed the original press release contained not one mention of “global warming” or “climate change”, one of our readers decided to ask the researcher about this statement attributed to to Jessica Morgan in that Business Insider story…
They Took All The Rights, Put ‘Em In A Social Infrastructure
What is “social infrastructure”? Just a big, fat pipeline through which tax dollars hurtle into the abyss.
Reader Tips
Have you ever been in the midst of a thoroughly pleasant social night out only to run into, say, a belligerent Obama supporter who harangues you with a scattershot salvo of “everybody knows” fake statistics and pseudo-facts the minutiae of which, given your convivial mood, you have neither the interest nor the motivation to counter point-by-point?
Up your opponent’s ante with Bob, your one-stop solution to unwanted political harassment. Simply invite him over to your table, buy him a drink, and voilà, your would-be interlocutors will be kept well and truly occupied All. Night. Long..
To get an approximate idea of the sort of services offered in Bob’s Platinum Plus package, which includes two of Bob’s friends, simply load all three videos and play them at once. Sweeet!
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Victims: “the judge has decided to punish Sam Gualtieri again for the crime of being non-aboriginal”
As Publius puts it:
…
There is certainly racism in modern Canada, it is mostly directed at those of European descent. It is a racism that has been devised and implemented overwhelmingly by people of European descent. White people hampering other white people to help non-whites. Think of it as a collectivism where one collective abnegates itself in favour of another collective. Altruistic collectivism in its purest form.
I use the word “help” in a relative way. At some level the self-hating white folks do think they are helping various minorities. Altruism, however, is not their primary motivation. As is often the case altruism is the justification for an irrational psychological need. In this case it is a desire to feel morally superior…
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
…when work is completed on the Nordsee Ost wind farm, some 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of the island of Helgoland in the North Sea, the sea air will be filled with a strong smell of fumes: diesel fumes.
The reason is as simple as it is surprising. The wind farm operator, German utility RWE, has to keep the sensitive equipment — the drives, hubs and rotor blades — in constant motion, and for now that requires diesel-powered generators.
It’s Probably Nothing
Governments of the world’s leading economies have more than $7.6 trillion of debt maturing this year, with most facing a rise in borrowing costs. (h/t Dan)
Daniel Hannan
Had Greece kept the drachma, it would never have got into its present mess: the markets would have stepped in and imposed a corrective years ago. It was the ludicrous idea that Greek and German debt were interchangeable that fuelled the artificial boom, and so made inevitable the ensuing slump. Yet, even now, Lucas Papademos, the Eurocrat who heads the Brussels-imposed junta national government in Athens, tells his subjects: ‘We must continue our efforts with decisiveness, to stay in the euro, to make sure we do not waste the sacrifices and do not turn the crisis into an uncontrolled and disastrous bankruptcy.’ Disastrous bankruptcy, eh, Lucas? As opposed to what you have now, you mean?
Pharma Shrugs
The dirty little secret of government interference in health care – nobody needs to be a drug manufacturer.
As the drug shortages worsen, so does their impact on patient care, particularly in hospitals. The inability to get crucial medicines has disrupted chemotherapy, surgery and care for patients with infections and pain. At least 15 deaths since 2010 have been blamed on the shortages, which have set a record high in each of the last five years.
[…]
Most of the drugs in short supply are sterile injected drugs that are the workhorses of hospitals and are normally inexpensive because they’ve long been available as generics.
The FDA says the main reason for the shortages is manufacturing deficiencies leading to production shutdowns. Other reasons include companies ending production of some drugs with tiny profit margins, consolidation in the generic drug industry and limited supplies of some ingredients.
Related slow learners.
Please Give Generously
Tomorrow, we launch a new charity.
Featured Comment
h/t Black Mamba
Reader Tips
In tonight’s Tippity amusement, an otherwise harmless-looking Swede named Olle Hemmingson destroys the environment for future generations by playing a medley of songs featuring himself on fiddle and guitar, and 230 Viktor on percussion.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Hashtag Of The Entitlement Generation
Despite the rhetoric employed, the current dominant idea in the United States seems to be not so much that the “rich” (and, in practice, the middle class) have to pay “their fair share” to those who are starving to death in rat-infested squatter camps (of whom there aren’t many), but that they must subsidize upper middle class people who are non-productive yet living very nice lives, often better lives than those who are hard-working and subsidizing them. Those to be subsidized include those who want to work in cushy, unproductive, useless but prestigious jobs but cannot find them, or those who want to work in cushy, unproductive, useless but prestigious jobs and do find them working directly or indirectly for the government, supposedly doing good things.
h/t Revnant Dream