Via Mostly Water, viewer reaction to a CBC interview of Louise Arbour includes this dissenting opinion;

Louise Arbour is a war criminal and it is time the Canadian people were made aware of the truth about this corrupt woman.
The CBC knows the truth about her but hides this truth from the Canadian people.
Arbour is responsible for covering up the murder of the President of Rwanda, the President of Burundi and many other persons who were assassinated on April 6th, 1994 by the Rwanda Patriotic Front with the assistance of the UN, the US, Canada and Belgium. As Chief Prosecutor for the Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal, she ordered an investigation into the shoot down of the presidential plane carrying those people. In 1997 she was informed by her chief of investigations, Michael Hourigan, an Australian lawyer and his team, including FBI agent Jim Lyons and Canadian police officers assigned to their unit that it was the RPF who had shot down the plane and massacred all those people. The murder of a head of state during war is a war crime. That massacre was the first massacre in Rwanda in 1994. Hourigan informed Arbour of this. But instead of indicting Paul Kagame and the RPF men who had murdered all those people she ordered Hourigan to come to The Hague where she told him to kill the investigation and to burn his notes. This makes her an accessory to mass murder and a war criminal. She did this on the instructions of the US government in violation of her oath to be independent as prosecutor. Once she proved her reliablity to the Americans, that is that she was corrupt and willing to cover up those responsible for mass murder, she was then used to lay false war crimes charges against Milosevic in order to prolong the war against Yugoslavia.
Since then she has remained silent about the human rights abuses committed by the Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and their use of torture and secret prisons around the world.
Louise Arbour is a criminal, corrupt, a shame to all Canadians. The sooner she is indicted and thrown in prison the better.
Wake up people. You are all being fooled.
Christopher Black
Barrister
Lead Counsel
Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal

The National Bureau of Economic Research has unveiled new research on the “only thing standing in the way” phenomenon;

“A country whose autocrat is assassinated is 13 percentage points more likely to move toward democracy in the following year than a country where the assassination attempt on the autocrat failed.”

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The news remains as bad as ever…

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Well, is the economy slowing? Well, yeah it is. But call me crazy, is it as bad as this? This week, the Associated Press claiming Americans are being subjected to, and I quote “economic water torture.” And then this little ditty item on the GDP, “The economy nearly sputtered out at the end of the year.” We were up at the end of the year. Why someone here says this is all part of the media’s plan to get a Democrat in the White House. Is it?…First to Ben Stein, and Ben, your reaction to this idea that we’re going to hell in a hand-basket.
BEN STEIN: Well, the media has been selling us on fear and recession for months maybe years now. Even before there was and really seriously bad news they were selling, selling, selling fear. They have been shouting “FIRE” in a crowded theatre now for months, quarters, I’d say probably over a year. The actual economic conditions are not that bad. I think if we have a recession, if we have a serious recession, a great deal will lie at the media’s feet. And I don’t know why they’re doing it. They’re the ones that are going to lose their jobs.

Via Brutally Honest.
More – Hold the Hysteria (For Now)

And a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.

(note: US poll)

Related: Don’t tell Dion, but McGuinty figured it out.

“But just in case you’re still running into the sophomores in college who with their professor-instilled new-found knowledge are going to continue to tell you that it’s all a conspiracy man and the oil companies are working together to keep us down, here is another little tidbit that should help you quelch those little brats up…”

What is the difference?

… between the cost of current petroleum-powered transportation, heating, and cooling, compared to the equivalent cost of providing such energy via solar panels? In order to provide a mechanism for exploring the question, I have prepared:
A Model of the Cost of Solar Power v. Oil
This is an interactive model: you can change the input values, and the calculated values are automatically recomputed as you go.

A little geek candy for a quiet Sunday evening. Feedback and corrections are invited at the link provided.

Has anything you’ve seen reported by Canadian media on Afghanistan in the past couple of years even hinted at the possibility that a single Afghan citizen might enjoy the luxury of television?

The [Afghan Pop Idol] programme has become a sensation in Afghanistan where it is estimated that 11m viewers, or over one-third of the population, regularly tuned in.

Much less 11 million of them?
All that time wasted with Lisa Laflamme, when we could have tuned in to Simon Cowell.

Obamamania is either reaching new heights, or the mania has peaked and he’s now toast. I’m not sure which.

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Terrorists. The ones who murder children in front of their parents. The ones who take drugs and rape women and boys. The ones who blow up schools. The ones who have been forcibly evicted from places like Anbar Province, Baghdad and Baqubah by American and Iraqi forces. Terrorists are here now in Mosul. They call themselves al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI cannot win without Baghdad, and cannot survive without Mosul. The Battle for Mosul is evolving into AQI’s last great stand.
[…]
During the Jihad Shift, pilots use fewer precision weapons. They swoop in too low and too close to the enemy, whom they often don’t see until the enemy begins firing from nearly point-blank range on the Kiowas. Hellfires are useless that close.
Pilots are not supposed to fly under one hundred fifty feet but are often at more like twenty or thirty feet, though I have seen some fly much lower. In 2005, I photographed a Kiowa and could read the time on the pilot’s watch (without telephoto). I asked an infantry commander if he thought the pilot would get into trouble if that photo were published, and he suggested not to publish it, so I canned it. LTC Jamison leaves the altitude to the discretion of the pilot in charge, but generally they have to be either very high, or very low.
The quick and the dead: Truly

Another great piece by Michael Yon. Grab a coffee.

“A few of my friends joined al-Qaeda, and now they are dead or captured. I never did, and this gives me a chance to keep al-Qaeda from coming back.”

CBS and election years – never a good combination.

Related – A Globe poll! “Do you consider yourself a fan of the work David Suzuki is doing?”

Another installment in a series, from Bill Ardolino for The Long War Journal;

The first three installments of The Long War Journal’s series on Iraqi politics discussed the structure and progress of the executive branch and the composition of the legislative branch. This installment begins examination of progress on key legislation.

MaxedOutMama;

All those who scream about Hummers and wasteful consumers may be discussing their neighbors, but they aren’t discussing the US as a whole. For about 9 years gasoline consumption has been dropping, and in 2007 consumption was the lowest for ten years.
Gas consumption in the US is not price invariant at all. Sales of gas-efficient cars have been steadily increasing, and those fuel-efficient cars will stay on the road for years to come. It’s likely that this trend has multiple causes, among which are real declining incomes for a large section of the population, a growing number of retirees who are not forced to drive to work, home workers, and sincere efforts to conserve by a portion of the population. It may also reflect a shift in jobs toward major urban areas in which mass transport is a viable option for more workers.
Regardless, the idea that gas taxes need to be raised to force conservation is a stunningly stupid one. It appears that current gas prices are causing conservation, and that wasteful consumption is restricted to portions of the population that can frankly afford to pay higher taxes without changing their habits. It also appears that US efforts to conserve are not going to affect world trends much – the growth is coming from other areas.

(Emphasis mine.)

Canadian company Entrust provides internet security for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of the Interior:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made important strides in implementing security solutions as it continues to transition into an innovative, citizen-centric e-government. As a proactive step to help secure communication and access for the Ministry of Interior’s National Information Centre, the country standardized on Entrust, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENTU) and Entrust GetAccess, a key component of a layered security model.

I know Entrust is a fine company and pretty much everyone in high tech does business in Saudi Arabia. But there’s something a little creepy about this one. Explicitly helping out the Ministry of head-choppers and torturers with monitoring their citizens is something I’d rather have nothing to do with.

…he said to the Iraqis seated in front of him. He said that with a straight face. The Iraqis listened and kept straight faces of their own as if they were actually taking him seriously.

The Final Mission, Part III. Another report by Michael Totten.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to believe in the news;

Media misreporting of Tet passed into our collective memory. That picture gave antiwar activism an unwarranted credibility that persists today in Congress, and in the media reaction to the war in Iraq. The Tet experience provides a narrative model for those who wish to see all U.S. military successes — such as the Petraeus surge — minimized and glossed over.
In truth, the war in Vietnam was lost on the propaganda front, in great measure due to the press’s pervasive misreporting of the clear U.S. victory at Tet as a defeat. Forty years is long past time to set the historical record straight.

Thank God for greedy corporations;

In other words, just one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers, which is 65,000,000 people!

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