SubPar! Better, but still subpar!

Reader Gord Tulk points to the SSE Composite Index;

The grossly under-reported story of the year is that the Shanghai Composite is off more than 50% from the high it hit in Nov/07 … When the US coughs, China gets pneumonia.

“… had ordered a gay activist to apologize to a Catholic priest, and then to write a public renunciation of his gay lifestyle in a newspaper. It’s unthinkable.”

Related: I’ve been thinking for a while that the time has come to give a heads-up to Tony Merchant. (All you politically incorrect would-be HRC complainants – keep those rejection slips!)

You have to go to the NY Sun to find it;

The leader of the tribal confederation that has fought to expel Al Qaeda from most of Iraq’s Anbar province is offering his men to help gin up a rebellion against Osama bin Laden’s organization along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
In an interview, Sheik Ahmad al-Rishawi told The New York Sun that in April he prepared a 47-page study on Afghanistan and its tribes for the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Kabul, Christopher Dell. When asked if he would send military advisers to Afghanistan to assist American troops fighting there, he said: “I have no problem with this; if they ask me, I will do it.”
The success of the Anbari tribal rebellion known as the awakening spurred Multinational Forces Iraq to try to emulate the model throughout Iraq, including with the predominately Shiite tribes in the south of the country. Today, the tribe-based militias formed to protect Anbaris from Al Qaeda are forming a political alliance poised to unseat the confessional Sunni parties currently in parliament in the provincial elections scheduled for the fall and the federal ones scheduled for 2009.

(Related: More on “exporting Anbar” at the Torch.)
In an alternate journalistic universe, the bomb-a-day coverage we were subjected to two years ago would have been replaced by now with reports such as this – for they are many.
But this is Canada, where “Weather is the new News” (providing negotiations over a sports program theme song doesn’t bump it down the lineup). Progress in Iraq? The defeat of Al Qaeda? That doesn’t make the cut.
Just think – this week in boardrooms across the industry, media executives are meeting with media experts to hash out yet another strategy, and yet more innovations to address their falling fortunes, every last one of them invested in the unshakable belief that the internet is burying them because it’s faster .
As though the only difference between shit and sunshine is the speed at which they travel.

The economy grew at a faster pace than originally estimated in the first quarter,

… the government said on Thursday, but the nation remained on track for its most stagnant period of growth in five years.
Gross domestic product, a measure of overall economic growth, expanded at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the first three months of the year, according to the Commerce Department. That was an uptick from the initial estimate, released a month ago, which put the growth rate at 0.6 percent.

“…most stagnant period of growth” is a nice touch, no? Never let good news get in the way of negative spin. Meanwhile, Canada’s economy unexpectedly shrank in the first quarter,

… dragged down by lower automobile exports, giving the Bank of Canada more reason to cut borrowing costs again next month.
Gross domestic product contracted at a 0.3 percent annualized rate in the first quarter to C$1.33 trillion ($1.34 trillion), the first drop in almost five years, Statistics Canada said today in Ottawa. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg said the growth rate would slow to 0.4 percent from 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter. None of the 22 predicted a contraction.

h/t 650CKOM’s Paul Martin

Planet Gore

A new report by Cambridge Energy Research Associates finds that “rising materials costs, engineering challenges, and installation snags threaten European goals to dramatically expand wind power.” The report assesses as unlikely the European Union’s goal of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020 without massive new government subsidies.
An article in the New Zealand Herald is blunt: “How to meet the lofty target is a puzzle. Clean renewables are still in their infancy yet will be required to deliver gigawatts of power when many fossil-fuel and nuclear power stations are at the end of their operational life.”
In Sweden, of course, all nukes are at the end of their life thanks to the government’s nearly 30-year ban. In the face of this blunder, Sweden’s government has postponed its 2010 deadline as it scrambles to find a solution to its aging utility infrastructure and emissions ceiling.

Rodney A. Clifton;

As a young student, Mr. Ignatieff attended Toronto’s Upper Canada College, arguably the top private “residential school” in the country. At the time, he probably did not know that employees of other Canadian residential schools received little pay and many sleepless nights for their labour. But, as an intellectual and as an MP, he should have searched harder for the available evidence. In Stringer Hall, for example, I was responsible for 85 senior boys between the ages of 12 and 21 for 22 hours a day, six days a week. The work was difficult, even for a strong 21-year-old.
Yet today, the reward for former residential school employees is denigration in the national press by people such as Mr. Ignatieff — and, more surprisingly, by the churches they served. I pray that the Commission will hear a variety of perspectives.
Unfortunately, I do not think this will happen because of the hostile climate that now exists. Few former school employees — both non-aboriginal and aboriginal — will acknowledge that they worked in residential schools, and even fewer will appear before the Commission. They already know that the “truth” has been pre-determined, and that “reconciliation” means financial compensation, which is already being distributed in any event. Few people will praise the residential schools — their administrators, their teachers or their supervisors. Fewer still will dare publicly admit that their residential-school experiences were positive.

I’ve seen this one mostly from people outside the immediate realm of drug discovery, well-meaning people who just can’t believe that this is how it works. The harm comes when these well-meaning folks decide that the problem is that the industry is just behind the times, and that we wouldn’t have to do it this way if we’d just adopt some modern management techniques – ISO whatever-thousand, umpteem-sigma, Quality Assurance Tiger Team Circle Continuous Improvement Metrics, or what have you. Harm generally ensues.

h/t

That is, the “Camelot” of a post-assassination exercise in myth creation. Placing the man who brought us the Cuban missile crisis in the context of a new generation who believes he’s worth emulating;

JFK had repeated Chamberlain’s key mistake at Munich. He sent a signal of abject weakness to an aggressor held back only by fear. He walked into shark-infested water bleeding and ringing the dinner bell. And although the US was overwhelmingly stronger than Khruschev’s Soviet Union, the wily old Bolshevik judged it safe to hustle the “very inexperienced, even immature” Leader of the Free World. The Soviet strongman struck while the going seemed good.

Jackie didn’t quite “rescue” him from “the bitter old men who write history”, but she came very close.
h/t Maz2 (and others)

The top secret flying saucer program of the Third Reich.

“Last year she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, eventually won by Al Gore.”

Construction starts on new U.S. homes

… rose by a surprisingly strong 8.2 percent in April and applications for new building permits turned up for the first time in five months, the Commerce Department said on Friday in a report showing that the hard-hit housing sector still had some spring vigor.
Starts in April ran at a 1.032-million-unit annual rate, up from a revised 954,000-unit rate in March, while permits gained 4.9 percent to 978,000 a year from a revised 932,000 in March.
That was a significantly stronger performance than anticipated by economists surveyed by Reuters who had forecast April starts at a 940,000-unit rate and permits at 920,000 a year.

h/t maz2

I miss the polar ice caps.

We were trying to keep this plot secret, but the Wall Street Journal has figured it out:

Think about it. Canadian officials send women across the border, smuggling in “anchor babies” cleverly disguised as clumps of tissue. The women give birth inside the U.S., which means their Canadian offspring are entitled to U.S. citizenship. As these “children” grow and mature, they receive instructions from their masters in Ottawa about how to undermine American culture.
Before you know it, your kids are stuffing themselves with litres of back bacon, downing kilogram after kilogram of Crown Royal and Labatt Blue, and belting out “God Save the Queen” as they watch hockey on TV.

Okay, so now they know. But do they dare stop us? They seem to leave the Mexicans alone, why pick on us?

Bill Ardolino’s first report for The Long War Journal;

Above all, Hassan and his neighborhood watchmen do not like the Mahdi Army.
“Originally, the Jaish al Mahdi [Mahdi Army] in our area used to deceive people by using the name of the religion to do their purposes,” said Dhia, Hassan’s executive officer. “They were all corrupted. They have history in crime, robberies, murders, rapes, and all kinds of bad things. They even reached the level of kidnapping people and demanding ransoms just because they have money. It didn’t matter if he is Shia or Sunni; just because he has money. They gave a bad reputation for Islam.”
American officials assert that the final factor that has improved security is the citizenry’s fatigue with violence and the militias.
“They’re still intimidated by [the Mahdi Army], but they’re tired of them,” said Thornburg.

Courtesy Weber Commodities. Download PDF

h/t Flea.

Intercepted al-Qaida Letter Reveals Tactics, Strategy

Page 8 of the document focuses on instigating fights between coalition forces and Iraqi groups, especially Sunnis who have rejected foreign extremism and terrorism in droves in what has been referred to as “Awakening Groups.” Safyan suggested infiltrating the Sunni cadres before planting and detonating mines “in their villages and streets.”
Bergner said the author’s call for violence against the Awakening movement typifies the kind of extremism many Iraqis have turned against. The confiscated document also reveals the threat such groups present to terrorists, he added.
“These writings are further examples of the corrupt ideology that Iraqis are broadly rejecting,” he said. “We have seen about 100,000 men choose a different path and join local volunteer groups like the Sons of Iraq instead.”
Later in the briefing, Bergner told reporters that coalition forces had captured or killed 53 al-Qaida in Iraq leaders since his most recent news conference early this month.

They all remember the good old days under Bill.

Related – Two cartoons that juxtapose nicely.