Inside the Humane Society of the United States;

Last night in Los Angeles, Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) president Wayne Pacelle showed why he’s been able to turn a group that sounds as if it’s all about protecting puppies and kittens into an animal-rights lobbying force with talons. He’s looking to sink those talons into people who have the audacity to eat or sell meat, wear leather, go to circuses, or enjoy hunting and fishing – in other words, 99 percent of America.
In front of a hand-picked crowd of HSUS supporters who attended last night’s “town hall meeting” at the Ebell of Los Angeles, Pacelle rallied the troops with a fight song:
“We have to create a clamor for change … You can get further with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.”
He attributed the latter quote to notorious gangster Al Capone, who seems like an odd inspiration for a supposedly peaceful movement. But animal-rights extremists are far from peaceful. One of Pacelle’s own staffers, Josh Balk, told the HSUS-sponsored “Taking Action For Animals” that “there are very few instances that companies just refuse to move with a friendly conversation … The animals can’t wait for people to come to a revelation themselves. Sometimes it does take force.”
HSUS sounds more and more like PETA and the terrorist Animal Liberation Front every day.
It’s been well documented that HSUS spends only a tiny fraction – less than four percent – of its budget directly funding animal shelters. If you’re wondering how it spends the other roughly $100 million in its budget every year, you might consider the cost of renting out the posh Wilshire Ebell Theatre, providing the supporters-only crowd with a catered coffee service, and hiring four burly security guards to keep out the riff-raff.
Sorry, Wayne. We got in anyway.

“Although they can operate at zero fuel costs, windmills are expensive to build — about as expensive as nuclear — and only last about 15-20 years, as opposed to 60 years or more for current reactors.”

Quick, someone call the Sierra Club!

h/t Gerald

And why is he installing his own wood burning stove?

Again, I have a choice, do I spend the $5,200 I was quoted by the fireplace installation outfit? Or do I drop $1,500 on materials and do it myself? Sure, it took a week to properly install the flue, but in the end I saved myself $3,700 in labor therefore denying the governments the opportunity to tax that $3,700.

There’s another word for people like this – they’re called “farmers”.

Via Two Wrongs

Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune;

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing William Tucker speak at a conference in Washington, DC. His explanation of E = mc2 was the best I had ever heard. Even better, Tucker explained how Einstein’s equation applied to renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro. His lecture was a revelation. It showed that the limits of renewable energy have nothing to do with politics or research dollars, but rather with simple mathematics. During a later exchange of emails with Tucker, I praised his lecture and suggested he write an article that explained E = mc2 and its corollary, E = mv2.
To my delight, he informed me that he’d already written such an essay and he agreed that we could publish it in Energy Tribune.
I love this essay. And I’m proud that Tucker has allowed us to run it.

Continue reading Understanding E = mc2, and then send it to everyone you know.

The Australian;

THE Rudd government’s $480 million “national solar schools” program was quietly suspended yesterday afternoon via a notice posted on the popular scheme’s website.

h/t

Matt Welch;

On August 23, 1989, officials from the newly reformed and soon-to-be-renamed Communist Party of Hungary ceased policing the country’s militarized border with Austria. Some 13,000 East Germans, many of whom had been vacationing at nearby Lake Balaton, fled across the frontier to the free world. It was the largest breach of the Iron Curtain in a generation, and it kicked off a remarkable chain of events that ended 11 weeks later with the righteous citizen dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

h/t pacemakerdoug

California dreamin’, with onions and fries:

King Burger

Via Arts & Letters Daily, X-posted.

Update: For American readers, the Canadian meaning; we’re now invading.

Denis Coderre resigned as Liberal national defence critic on Monday, Sept. 28. While M. Coderre is no loss in the job, it may be an indication of his party’s priorities that as of Friday, Oct. 2, 1730 hours no replacement has been named.

Paul Martin and Keefdhafi:

…

Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail..

Led by the Chinese…

… but including intelligence officers from at least 20 nations including allies, the book says, the infiltrators are stealing an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion annually worth of cutting-edge research in products and technologies, other scientific, business and military know-how and political secrets.
[…]
Over 371 pages, the pair expose an astonishing parade of spy-vs.-spy and espionage stories, from Tretiak and other Russian post-Cold War escapades to allegations of India’s suspected involvement in the 1985 Air India disaster.
They reveal the hidden hand of Chinese intelligence in getting the House of Commons in 2007 to shame China’s old enemy Japan for its treatment of foreign women during the Second World War, allege political assassinations within Canada’s ethnic diaspora and explain how reductions to CSIS’s counter-intelligence budget mean some of the service’s elite agents, assigned to monitor suspected foreigners, no longer work weekends in Canada’s big cities.
But their chief message is denouncing “the silence and inaction” of a succession of federal governments more interested in trade and diplomatic relations than crime and punishment, demoralizing the relatively few CSIS and RCMP managers and counter- espionage agents who haven’t been re-assigned to post-9/11 counter-terrorism duties.

Available at Harper Collins

From the comments;

Is China going to make good on its recent threat to repudiate derivatives? Well, if you were going to make good on that threat, you would want to be sure that the counterparty was not holding on to your stash of bullion. Getting your thousand-year-old ducks in a row would probably include moving your gold out of London to Hong Kong.

More here.
h/t Joe B.

Because, if it saves one life…
h/t Shippedout

Market Watch (July 20th);

Brazil and Canada were among big sellers of Treasurys in the latest month for which data is available and the previous year, catching analysts off guard and raising speculation that quieter nations may be concerned about investing in the U.S.

h/t Erik Larsen

Is “layers” (pdf)…

We warned the ladies of Chicago they had three weeks of summer left and that was in late June and we had previously suggested a cooler and wetter bias to summer in our February 2009 outlook for the growing season. Now that the coolness is here we can breathe again. It is not easy living on the edge of a cliff or far out on a limb by oneself in the weather business.
Now that we all know that luck has come our way, let us explain why the cold will not go away for any great length of time in the next few weeks.

Drew Lerner is one of the most respected weather forecasters in agricultural circles;

For a year like this those, frost and freeze events may show themselves earlier than usual. Already in the past ten days there have been bouts of soft frost in Canada’s prairie. No crop damage has come from it, but they occurred in the heart of summer during one of the usually warmest weeks of the year. What will happen later in August when hemispheric cooling begins and the same bias for cooler than usual conditions exists? It just might get cold enough to cause some problems for crops.

World Weather website

A one stop aggregator for all the news unfit for print.

… reports emerged Wednesday that the office of Canada’s privacy commissioner has been used in a brazen scheme that paid department employees for time spent on Facebook … developing…

Pop Quiz! The difference in GHG emissions between the best conventional light crude and the worst oil sands is… ? (mp3)
(More Eric Anderson goodies here)

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
WSJ, July 13th – Japan’s government raised its overall economic assessment for the third straight month in July […] The upgrade gives embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso grounds to claim his government’s fiscal stimulus measures have helped the recession-stricken economy turn a corner ahead of general elections …
Bloomberg, July 13th – Default rates on loans underlying Japanese commercial mortgage-backed securities rose to an “unprecedented high” of 53 percent in the first half, Fitch Ratings said. […] A total of 58.6 billion yen ($635 million) of 92.3 billion in CMBS-related loans maturing in the six months to June 30 didn’t repay when due, Fitch said in the statement. For its analysis, Fitch is assuming all CMBS-related loans maturing in the next 12 months will default, it said.

(h/t Sean)
Meanwhile, Japan’s armies of the unemployed continue to rust….