At Auschwitz the Nazis would render the fat of their victims to make soap. The hair would be used to stuff pillows and sofa cushions. We now live in a more high-tech age, and the fascists of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have improved on the methods of the Nazis. They understand there is more money to be made in selling corneas and kidneys than soap. That the market for hearts and livers is more expensive than that for hair.

Background

The Frontier Post has uncovered another sinister plot hatched by the Whitehouse;

“The government and media should play their role in creating awareness among the masses regarding this international conspiracy against this country’s poultry industry,” implored Dr. Saeed, president of the Poultry Doctors Association at the Peshawar Press Club.
He was flanked by the president of the Poultry Farm Association, Fazal-e-Malik. “The rumors of bird flu are being spread by an American company owned by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to boost U.S. sales of costly medicines,” the two said.
They said that the price per tablet of anti-bird flu virus was 1500 rupees [$25].
“They spread these rumors not only in Pakistan but across the world, to sale the medicines of this company. And the money generated through the sales of these medicines is used to make the latest weapons being used against Muslims,” they claimed. A large number of poultry farm owners and doctors were present on the occasion. They ate chicken and offered meals to the media men, saying that no bird flu virus has been detected in the province.

Photographic evidence;

Via Watching America;

There’s nothing quite so sad as a President without a legacy…

President Clinton joins us for his first public forum in Saskatchewan to discuss important issues affecting the Canadian American relationship.

Ah, nostalgia. It takes me back to my favourite quote about the man – from the now defunct Politically Incorrect with (the equally defunked) Bill Maher;

Heidi Mark: But why doesn’t the Republicans learn to stay the hell out of other people’s bedrooms? If my accountant — if my accountant was to screw around on his wife, as long as he’s taking care of my money, I don’t care. I don’t want to know.
Clint Black: But if he’ll screw over his own family, what do you think he’ll do to you?

Quite.
Update: In the comments, someone mentioned that Clinton “built up” the US military. Not exactly;

As a result of the relentless cutting, year after year cuts, by the Clinton-Gore White House, America�s defense forces are now missing 709,000 regular (active duty) service personnel and 293,000 reserve troops. These include eight standing Army divisions, 20 Air Force and Navy air wings with 2,000 combat aircraft and 232 strategic bombers, 13 strategic ballistic missile submarines with 3,114 nuclear warheads, 500 ICBMs, four aircraft carriers, 121 surface combat ships and submarines, plus all the support bases, shipyards and logistical assets needed to sustain such a force.

But, it’s not unusual to hear someone relate complete fabrications about the Clinton administration as fact – it’s common practice in both US and Canadian media. It reminds me of another quote;

“President Clinton was able to ride out his impeachment not merely because he has the conscience of a slot machine, but because he and his partisans managed to convince the nation that the matter at issue was not truth but power. Virtually all his arguments were founded upon lies. It was a lie that he did not perjure himself. It was a lie that he did not conceal evidence. It was a lie that he did not conspire to intimidate witnesses. It was a lie that all these things were personal mistakes. It was a lie that the assemblage of raw FBI files on 900 Republicans was not for the purposes of blackmail. It was a lie that these files came to the White House by mistake. It was a lie that Mrs. Clinton did not benefit from guaranteed transactions in commodities trading. It was a lie that this was not a bribe. It was a lie that the president did not receive millions of campaign dollars from China. It was a lie that he did not personally intervene to aid the transfer to China of military technology that China intends for potential use against the United States. It was a lie that these two actions were unconnected. It was a lie that the grounds for impeachment were not mystifyingly narrow. It was a lie that the Senate could not try on political rather than legal grounds. There were so many lies that they were like sand in a sandstorm. They got into everything. You could not see the ground in front of you for all the lies that swirled in the air like brown dust.” – Mark Helprin

“Sigh. I remember when this contest was launched. Just about every cup won something – a free coffee, a donut or cookie – something.”

Education in Bush’s Amerikkka.

George Will in WaPo;

A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier than liberals — in all income groups. While 34 percent of all Americans call themselves “very happy,” only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared with 47 percent of conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily self-reinforcing: It depresses liberals.

The cure? Fast cars.

Then, they came for Tom And Jerry.

Edward Willett revisits a 500 year old physics question – why do curling rocks curl?
(And I thought the issue had been settled decades ago over bar tables using glasses of rye and coke.)

I’ve had several readers send me links to items referencing moderate Muslims. One offered that posting them would serve as response to “the defamers who vilify SDA as anti-Muslim racist”.
While it’s charitable to think that SDA critics might be influenced by actual SDA content, I’ve come to accept that when it comes to those who are motivated by hatred of all things conservative, it doesn’t much matter what I write, or don’t write – someone will find a way to misrepresent it.
But while I was mulling it over, I chanced upon this post at CJunk that that pretty much strips the argument bare;

�Very few people were true Nazis� he said, �but, many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.�
We are told again and again by �experts� and �talking heads� that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the �peaceful majority� is the �silent majority� and it is cowed and extraneous.

During these debates, I’m often reminded* of a chapter in James Gray’s The Winter Years – a series of recollections of the depression on the Canadian prairies. Gray spent many of those years at the Winnipeg Free Press. He tells the story of Paul Ausborn;

Paul Ausborn was a man who heard voices, a sea captain who had sailed the Baltic for the Kaiser in the First World War. After the war, he sold his ship and bought an apartment block in Kiel and served the Weimar Republic in a small way by teaching navigation to German youth. It was while teaching navigation in 1926 that the voices told him that Adolf Hitler was coming to power in Germany and would lead the world to war.

Ausborn sold his property and moved his family to Manitoba. However, he hadn’t escaped the Nazis.

Through his old connections with the Social Democrats in exile, Ausborn obtained a large collection of pictures of the atrocites being committed by the Nazis in Germany. He rented a store on Logan Avenue to show his gallery of infamy to Winnipeg. Nazi sympathizers wrecked his exhibit. He started over and put another exhibition together. at the same time, he scoured the German-Canadian community for supporters and could find only a handful. […] Ausborn was overwhelmed again and again by the force that the Nazis were exerting on the German population of western Canada, and by the lack of interest in his work on the part of other Canadians. He was beaten up by Bundists, and harried by city policeman who saw nothing wrong in Hitler, because the only people Hitler was bothering were Jews and Communists.
As an indication of Ausborn’s physical courage, he and two young friends once invaded a huge pro-Nazi picnic and distributed 6,000 anti-Nazi pamphlets and miraculously escaped unharmed. But in his efforts to rouse the city to the menace of Naziism, he lost every battle, every skirmish even. Nazi agents, on the other hand, infiltrated the university, the schools, the churches, and every other part of the German community. Ausborn was ostracized by the other Germans, most of his family deserted him and with his money gone, he was reduced to living on relief.
[…]
One day early in 1937 he came in to see me in a state of near-collapse. He had received word of the death of an old friend at the hands of the Nazis, and announced he was going to enlist in the International Brigade and fight in Spain. At fifty he was too old to fight, so he drove an ambulance on the Madrid front that summer. He came home to Winnipeg in the fall to give the organization of another anti-Nazi front a whirl. His Spanish interlude made him complete non grata with the city police, but most of us on the Free Press had read Mein Kampf by then and were taking both Ausborn and Hitler seriously. But until the very outbreak of the war, anti-Naziism was a lost cause in Winnipeg and the boisterous rejection of appeasement by the Free Press won it few plaudits.

While the “vast majority” of moderate German Canadians (my mother’s family among them) were peaceful, hard working citizens who held no Nazi sympathies, and would have recoiled at the notion of gassing hundreds of thousands of children in the name of racial purity – in the end, it mattered not a whit. What mattered were the extremists bent on attaining the power to transform a perverse ideology into reality, and the weaponry to export it – and the majority who just sat back and let it all happen.

(related. Read this one too.)

New photos out of Abu Ghraib, via Cox and Forkum.(click that link, too).
Someone has more time on their hands than I do. That’s a frightening thought. (language warning).

Apparently, I’m a “Millennium Falcon” from Star Wars.

The world around you is at war. Fortunately you know how to handle that with the greatest of ease. You are one of the best at what you do and no one needs to tell you that. Now if only the droids could be quiet for five seconds.

I scored:
Millennium Falcon (from Star Wars) 94%
Serenity (from Firefly) 88%
SG-1 (from Stargate) 69%
Take the quiz here.

An item for the geeks in the audience;

My coverage of ICANN began with my attempt to report on what seemed a relatively straightforward story at the intersection of my interests in travel, the Internet, and consumer advocacy: the creation under ICANN’s supervision of top-level Internet domain names (TLD’s) restricted to the travel industry: “.aero” (for air transportation) and “travel” (originally proposed by the airline cartel IATA, but eventually approved for a wider range of the travel “industry”, although still to the exclusion of travellers).
The issues for travellers, and the public interest, remain as significant (if subtle, because almost no one is actually using “.aero” or “.travel” yet) as ever. While keeping top-level domains artificially scarce to enhance their value to the handful of companies given the franchise to control them, ICANN is allocating a huge proportion of this limited Internet “namespace” for the exclusive use of the industry that sells travel-related services — and is equating that “industry” with the entire concept of “travel”. What should be a public commons is being captured by corporate interests, travel is being reduced to the purchase of services, and travellers and the rest of the public are being reduced to “consumers”. “.Aero” and “travel” are the first industry-specific TLD’s, making travel the test case of the corporate enclosure of this virtual commons.

ICANN is the governing body of the Internet. The friend who sent this item along explains; “ICANN controls TLD’s. They broke their own rules involving the release of *.travel. Ed Hasbrouck then asked for a review of their handling, and they’re sandbagging him in the hopes that he’ll go away.”

“… .travel domain names for businesses in the travel “industry” are scheduled to go live beginning next Monday, 3 October 2005, despite my pending request for independent review of the (secret) manner in which ICANN approved “.travel” and delegated control of it to an insolvent sham front corporation, and my request for a stay of the “.travel launch while my request for independent review is pending…”

“Ed _is_ travel. He’s a great guy, a bit leftish, but his message on this issue is sound. ICANN’s pulling a Tricky Dick on *.travel domains.”
His main page is here.

“Dream City is only one massive construction site among hundreds. Reconstruction in Iraqi Kurdistan is absolutely explosive. These photos are only a miniscule sample of what�s going up right now as you read this.”

Or burn a token embassy or something.
Meanwhile, closer to home, the usual twit contingent is organizing;

Students angered by a Halifax university professor’s decision to post cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on his office door plan to march on Saint Mary’s University.
Organizers have condemned the actions of Dr. Peter March saying they show a lack of respect for the Islamic faith and are designed to be provocative and create a hatred of Muslims.
[…]
Organizers say the march will also honour the nine people worldwide who died protesting cartoons they saw as mocking their faith

Professor March should pull his cartoons down and replace them with photographs of the three Christian schoolgirls beheaded in Indonesia last fall. But something tells me that would also be protested as “hatred” towards Islam.
Bonus! The Muslim Public Affairs Council (UK) steals neo-Nazi material for their website.

According to Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish security services (S�po), in collusion with Foreign Minister Leila Freivalds, have forced the website SD-Kuriren offline for publishing the Jyllands-Posten cartoons (SD-Kuriren is the house organ of the hard-right Swedish Democrats).
�We think that this was the best decision after we were contacted by the Foreign Ministry and S�po,� Anna Larsson, vice president of hosting compant Levonline, told DN. Freivalds told DN that �it is terrible that a small group of extremists are exposing Swedes to danger [by reprinting the cartoons].�
Note: Freedom House�s 2005 survey ranks Sweden 9th in press freedom.
Note to S�po: This site is hosted in Sweden, on the servers of Loopia AB. You can find their contact information here. The Spectator calls on every Swedish blog�left, right and center�to reprint the Mohammad cartoons in solidarity with SD-Kuriren, however odious we find their political views. Freedom of the press doesn�t make exceptions for stupidity and provincialism.

I received a call today from a Toronto reporter on the topic of publishing the cartoons, beginning with why I had chosen to do so. I had a few things to say about editors who have forgotten that their own press freedoms were paid for in blood by editors and reporters of decades past who gave limb and life to establish the right to offend.
Well, I actually had a lot to say. Don’t know how much will appear in print, but I’ll direct you there if it does.
update – continued…

John Bolton is president of the UN Security Council this month;

“At his first session last week, Bolton tried to impose fresh discipline and some new practices. First, he asked top U.N. staff to provide the council with daily briefings on the latest peacekeeping crises, irking council members who abhor changes and sparking groans from staff. Then, he proposed discussions on corruption in U.N. peacekeeping, which is proving unpopular — the issue’s not considered a threat to international peace and security by some. Most controversial of all, he insisted that all 15 Security Council members show up to meetings on time, at 10 a.m. Asked Thursday by a reporter whether he really thought he could start the council meetings on time, Bolton said he had failed. ‘I took a list of when they came in. We started just before 10:15. I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room, though.'”

Goldstein predicts;

“The next meeting will start precisely on time�or else at least one of those 15 Security Council members will wake up alongside a severed horse head�or perhaps a dead hooker, a bloody knife, and a fleet of AP photographers. If he hasn�t already done so.”

Feb. 6th would have been Ronald Reagan’s 95th birthday.
H/T to D.J. McGuire

Recall Paul Martins highly localized “freezing rain” plane delay in Vancouver on Tuesday? The same day that commercial air traffic remained unaffected?
Now, Angry’s got another sniff on this. A source passes this along;

“Reporters are telling me that the Libs will be stuck in Ottawa for most of the next two days because they have run out of cash to run the tour”

A reader wonders if a closed down CSL shipyard in Collingwood might be on the recipient list for Paul Martin’s election promise of $1billion to clean up the Great Lakes and waterways…

Sediment from only a small, localized portion of the harbour was found to be contaminated, mainly due to historical use of the harbour as a center for the repair and construction of Great Lakes vessels.
On August 9, 1983 citing federal government interference in the shipping industry, Martin stated: “then… they are going to come in with some grand and glorious package that will give the government control of the industry because they don’t understand private enterprise.”
By the mid-1980s, CSL’s only remaining shipyard (Collingwood) was undergoing financial difficulties and was closed on September 12, 1986 with the loss of 800 jobs. At the same time, CSL Group Inc.’s expansion outside of Canada was well underway. In November, 1988 President and CEO Paul Martin was elected as a Member of Parliament and stepped aside from directing the day-to-day operations of the company.
Shipyards, town working towards development agreement….Currently , CSL is completing remediation work on the soil, which should be completed by early spring, said Houghton . (Dec.9, 2005)

Hey, they’re entitled to their entitlements.

I shouldn’t really do this (especially as I still owe Kathy Shaidle on some other game of tag), but here goes;
“List five weird things about yourself, then tag five others to do the same”
1) My house has one interior door and no curtains.
2) I drive with my left foot against the dash most of the time – a habit acquired from cross continent suicide runs. I think it’s probably good for my lower back, but can’t prove it. It just feels right.
3) I eat breakfast cereal dry out of the bowl.
4) I refuse to drink anything you can squeeze from a cow. (See above)
5) And the big one- I can move my eyes independantly. In any direction I wish. This actually has a practical use – it weirds out toddlers in grocery carts in the cashier’s lineup. I give them the “googly eyes”, they reward me witih chortle of admiration. Works the same way on drunks and small boys.
Tagging:
BumfOnline
Catprint
Dawg (fertile territory there!)
Arcologist
CJunk
It’s an eclectic bunch.

A reader takes issue with David Frum’s claimIn a National Post article *“Canada’s crime rate now 50% higher than US”…

The Canadian survey reports a rate of property victimization of 248 per 1000 households, and a violent victimization rate of 106 per 1000 persons (age 15 or older). The US survey reports a rate of property victimization of 162 per 1000 households, and a violent victimization rate of 23 per 1000 persons (age 12 and older).
[…]
Anyway, if these numbers are really comparable, the jaw-dropping comparison is between the US violent victimization rate of 23 per 1000 versus the Canadian rate of 106 per 1000 – that’s more than a factor of 4 difference! For property crime alone, the Canadian rates are only 50% or so higher (248 per 1000 in Canada vs 162 in the US).

So there, Mr. Frum!