Like health care, eh?;
Last week, the Oscar winning director announced that he’d decided to stash a copy of “Sicko” in Canada, in case the federal government decided to impound it over an apparently unauthorized trip to Cuba made during its filming. As it turns out, the hard part won’t be getting the film released, but getting audiences to pay to see it now that its available for free.
And we know that’s exactly how Michael “I don’t agree with the copyright laws” Moore would want it.
h/t
How bad was he? Well, instead of running his union, he was creating assinine blogspot sites, trolling for complaints.
“Clean up your snow to fight global warming, Canada urged”;
A team of U.S. scientists has found that “dirty snow” is a surprisingly significant contributor to global warming, and is urging Canada — as “custodian” of a vast, snowbound nation — to lead an international cleanup effort.
The researchers have measured, in the first comprehensive study of its kind, how snowy landscapes tainted by carbon particles from inefficiently burned fuels and forest fires are absorbing more of the sun’s heat than the less sooty snow cover of centuries past.
“Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smokestacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground,” the team explains. “Soot-infused snow is darker than natural snow. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space and cause cooling.”
Even a slightly darkened surface impairs the natural reflective properties of snow crystals, say the scientists, who calculated that dirty snow accounts for a startling one-third of rising temperatures in the Arctic over the past two centuries.
[…]
“Just as Brazil is the custodian of the Amazon, a world resource whose deforestation has all sorts of negative consequences, so is Canada a custodian of an important swath of snow-covered land that helps to cool the planet,” said Mr. Zender.
He also raised a red flag about increased ship traffic through the Northwest Passage — widely viewed as a potential economic boon for Canada in the coming decades — as a result of the melting Arctic ice pack.
“One implication,” Mr. Zender said of his team’s research, “is that any increase in shipping through the Arctic Ocean — for example, the Northwest Passage — is likely to exacerbate these effects by putting soot emissions right in the middle of the remaining snow and sea ice. We must think very carefully about this.”
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Related – WARNING: DISTURBING IMAGES
Hissy Fit Update.
“Sometimes you flip, sometimes you flop“.
While a new generation of greenies proselytize the religion of “sustainability” to farmers who have successfully cropped land for over a hundred years, those “knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing*” landowners are – as usual – expected to take the hit for Ontario’s Endangered Species Act;
The reason for the May 8 demonstration is that control of my land’s management is being ripped from my hands by our government. My ancestors left conditions like this (Scotland 200 years ago) to carve a new future, here in Canada. I still awe at the stones that they moved with brute strength fuelled by passion for freedom and ownership, to clear fields, build homes and to produce food and wealth through hard labour and dedicated industry. That spirit resides in my heart and it is what our soldiers have fought and died for in past and present wars.
The issue here is not about environmentalism. It is about freedom and justice. Anne-Marie Flanagan (MNR) said “If a certain area is deemed as a habitat, a farmer could, for example, create a habitat on a different section of the property.” So to put that in urbanese, if there is a public interest in your living room, but you really want to retain usage of your living room, we’re flexible. We’ll take your kitchen or bedroom instead.
As for Minister David Ramsay and “not . . . make it difficult for them to use their land,” I have a lifetime of experience with restrictions imposed by the MNR, and they have made it impossible to grow crops on nearly 200 acres of our land or use it for any other productive purpose. The consequential property devaluation of a 6,000-foot St. Lawrence River water-frontage has destroyed my family’s hard-earned financial equity. His much-touted $18 million stewardship fund (the term compensation is always assiduously avoided) wouldn’t cover the opportunity cost between lots 10 through 20 on the first concession of Lancaster Township. Furthermore, I’m sure I heard that the associated bureaucracy will cost at least 10 times that amount (that information is more difficult to find).
If you think that it’s a good idea to give land up to MNR management, consider the 30-meter buffer strip of our Point Mouillee waterfront, which was surveyed and confiscated in 1980. It is long gone because we were not allowed to protect it with stone – and still can’t. If farmland erodes, it is evidence of a farmer’s irresponsibility, but if the MNR/RRCA decided that land should erode, it’s OK; after all, it’s not really their waterfront, is it? When you get something at no cost, what does it matter?
If the public wants our land, conservation agencies can buy it or rent it, based on its true and intrinsic value, which is a function of unobstructed land-use opportunity. We have always been, and are still quite willing to cooperate to achieve sensible environmental goals. Landowners simply refuse to carry the billion-dollar cost of society’s environmental whims while the extent of an urban citizen’s consideration of the environment involves buying a hybrid car rather than an SUV!
Robbing us of the land’s utility and value is undeniably wrong. Our land is our RSP, pension, or whatever other people do to secure and grow their savings, and its fiduciary value is equity that we’ve been conscientiously investing in for generations. We thought for a while that if we co-operated and gave conservation agencies what they wanted, they would champion our efforts and leave us alone. It doesn’t work that way. Allowing land to be taken without significant resistance only inspires them to take it all. Pay attention everyone. You may not feel that this affects you, but carefully consider Hosea’s warning of “the whirlwind.”
The full text at the link.
This is no isolated conflict of interests – ask rural municpalities and farmers in Saskatchewan about the Department of Fisheries and Oceans never ending efforts to assume stewardship of “fish habitat” in dry creek beds, gravel pits and flooded stubble.
There exists in our society a certain class of progressive that uses the word “cowboy” as an insult.
Unless, of course, they’re in the company of cowboys.
So, when they use terms like “red neck” to ridicule and marginalize the values and lifestyles of rural Canada, it isn’t really news.
And when these enlightened urban liberals choose descriptors like “mouth-breather” and “knuckle-dragger” to dehumanize that other class of Canadians who haul their goods, grow their food, build their homes, drill their oil – it isn’t news either.
However, when an individual who maintains a public media profile, who advises and lobbies politicians at the highest levels, who rubs elbows with the rich and wanna-be powerful, hurls cultural slurs towards a farm advocate and political candidate under the pretense of political criticism, it is.
“the Ontario Conservative Party’s red-necked, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing candidate in Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox” – Warren Kinsella.
That there are those who would provide space on their pages and time on the airwaves to any individual who so casually displays such intellectual laziness and cultural bigotry in a public forum is a Canadian media disgrace.
Update – Quite coincidentally, Mr Kinsella today has dusted off an old SDA incident for readers of the National Post – a reader’s comment that was deleted and for which he recieved a private apology from the writer.
So, let it be known that this is the same Warren Kinsella who then recommended to his readers a notoriously hateful Canadian blog site in which the (anonymous) writer had recently advised that I “hated Muslims”, linked to my contact information and advised that I was “not hard to find”.
But back to the National Post. It seems our serial traffic inflater has responded to being publicly suckered by a variation of Nigerian scam spam by penning a column that peels back a layer of ignorance that is simply jaw-dropping – by suggesting spammers could be controlled through legislation in Canadian parliament.
Does the NP not verify that their writers are qualified to write on topics that touch on the technical before they pay them to do so? I mean, this is a man whose internet street creds include a history of confusing “hits” with unique visits to falsely claim he draws more traffic than our national newspapers have subscribers. It’s the journalistic equivalent of a hiring a 15 year old with a learner’s licence to test drive Detroit’s 2008 new car lineup.
Postscript – some advice for this new media expert who recounts receiving “one particular bit of spam … Addressed to a rarely used corporate e-mail account, and received by no one else at the same firm…”
If Google can find it, then so can the spammer’s email harvesting robots. Someone – get this man some moron protection software before he hurts himself.
I’ll give up my right to vote, if I can take Sheila Copps with me.
You know, for a self-professed expert on blogging and all things new media, one would think Warren Kinsella would have learned how to run a quoted line of text through Google by now.
…from the comments – it’s a whole new business enterprise: Vanity death threats!
They’d have to invent him.
Another fine capture by No-Libs
UDPATE: Jack Layton’s office releases a statement late Friday – “THIS OUTRAGE CANNOT STAND AND THIS GOVERNMENT OF TORTURE MONKEYS IS NO BETTER THAN THE TALIBAN AND CONSERVATIVES ARE DESTROYING KILLING WARMONGER MACHINES SACRIFICING CHILDREN AND RUINING THE COUNTRY AND LOSING OUR NATION’S SOUL AND OH THE PEACEKEEPING! KILLING US ALL WITH THEIR GLOBAL WARMINGIST FOLLIES AND WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO STOP THESE NEOCONBUSHITLERCLONES SHORT OF DEFEATING THEM ON A CONFIDENCE MOTION AND GOING TO THE POLLS… ”
Courtesy Flaggman
Update – Cosh weighs in on the controversy, as predicted.
And digging….
Time to mobilize!
The Mammoth Carbon Assprint becomes animated.
To get that ticket in the fourth row. (Or 15, side by side, on the ninth.)
Memri has a sampling of Middle East reaction to Nancy Pelosi’s “peace through collaboration” mission.
Columnist Muhammad ‘Ali Boza wrote in the Syrian government daily Al-Thawra that Pelosi’s visit was “an important turning point in American public policy, on the level of the street and public opinion, which has begun to act as a pressure on [the government] and to understand – even if belatedly – the severity of the damage that the official policy of the new Republicans [sic] has caused…
“There is no doubt that the diplomacy of dialogue and negotiations with Syria, and listening to the Syrian position on the burning subjects and the numerous issues relating to the region and the conflict, are recognition of the importance and centrality of the Syrian role, and [recognition] that it is impossible to ignore it and leap over it, and that it would be absurd to put forward plans or solutions to which Syria does not agree, and which are not in keeping with Syria’s fundamental national and pan-Arab principles…”
Some are not so thrilled.
“The only result that Pelosi achieved in visiting Damascus, and in sitting down with the Syrian president and shaking his hand, was to deliver a blow to the liberal opposition in Syria and frustrate reformists’ hopes for change. By breaking through the ring of isolation [surrounding] Bashar Assad’s regime, Syria advanced [several] steps towards repression and despotism, and the march of reform and democracy fell behind.
“Is it any secret that the Syrian regime supports terrorism and is the prime suspect in being behind the… Hariri assassination and the assassinations of a number of other Lebanese journalists and politicians?
“Is it any secret that the Syrian regime is one of the most vicious of regimes, and one of the most repressive, in the region…?
“Perhaps Pelosi did not know… that during her visit to Damascus, this regime was specializing in torturing Syrian oppositionists – among them Kamal Al-Labwani, the founder of the Liberal Democratic Rally in Syria…
Considering the fury they unleashed over the case of Maher Arar, expect loud condemnation of Speaker Pelosi from members of the Canadian left – any day now.
Let us bask in the absurd magnificence of Dalton McGuinty’s latest argument against selling beer and wine – just wine and microbrews produced in-province, mind you – in Ontario convenience stores. He says, no word of a lie, that because some convenience store owners have been known to steal lottery tickets from unsuspecting punters, they can’t be entrusted with alcohol.
