The Party Is Being Run By Stupid People

Baiting the Right Drain The Swamp 55 Comments

CTV;

A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards.

“Conservative” Mayor John Tory…

Mayor John Tory acknowledged that the city estimate sounds “completely out of whack with reality” on Wednesday. However, he says that still doesn’t justify allowing private citizens to bypass city bylaws to build public structures themselves.
“I think everyone will understand that it will be more than $550,” he said on Wednesday. “We just can’t have people decide to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have.”

He actually said that.
He actually said that.
Pay attention, conservative politicians who wish to be re-elected. This is what a conservative politician is supposed to say under such circumstances;

“The city will send an engineer to certify these stairs, and if they are determined to be sound, will compensate Mr. Astl for his materials and time.
After which, I’ll be launching an internal investigation into how this small building project came to generate a $65,000 estimate, and terminate the employment and/or contracts of those responsible for the fiasco.”

You’re welcome.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Alternative Subsidy 13 Comments

California’s love affair with solar power…

… one of the key pieces of its drive to reduce its emissions–is producing unintended results. As the FT reports, a glut of solar power during parts of the day is overloading the state’s power grids and actually producing negative electricity prices […]
Note that these “negative” prices aren’t bringing down the average rates for consumers in the Golden state, which are still among the highest in America. No, these occasional negative rates are symptoms of renewables’ biggest deficiency–their intermittency–and this volatility in supply is as much of a problem when solar panels are producing too much electricity as it is when they’re producing too little.

The Cloud

Tech 13 Comments

Centralize your and your customers data with hard to learn API’s and confusing security options! Join now for just half the price of a good IT person!

The exposed data includes the names, addresses, account information, email addresses, and last four digits of credit card numbers of millions of subscribers to Dow Jones publications like The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. Also exposed in the cloud leak were the details of 1.6 million entries in a suite of databases known as Dow Jones Risk and Compliance, a set of subscription-only corporate intelligence programs used largely by financial institutions for compliance with anti-money laundering regulations.

CFL Picks, Week 5

CFL 9 Comments

Wed: Ottawa over Montreal
Thurs: Hamilton takes one against Edmonton
Fri: Winnipeg beats Lulay, err, I mean BC.
Sat: Rider’s spy-network bests Calagary’s
Mon: Ottawa spoils the Toronto party

The Sound Of Settled Science

Genetics Science Unsettled Science 7 Comments

We are all mutants now…

We are all mutants. The 3bn pieces of DNA that make us who we are were long thought to be constant, chiselled in granite like a classical monument, with only tiny changes made here and there. Scientists used to believe that DNA mutations were largely harmful.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the first sequences of the human genome came rolling in, researchers realised that their view of mutations was completely backwards. Instead of being rarities that almost inevitably harm health, mutations litter the human genome. The average human carries around 400 unique mutations, and most of us are none the worse because of them.
This challenged some basic tenets of genetics, as well as they ways that scientists and physicians interpreted genetic tests.

The “W” Word

Children R Our Future The "W" Word You Might Be A Liberal 28 Comments

A top UK university is to replace portraits of its founding fathers with a “wall of diversity” of scholars from different backgrounds following pressure from students.
Kings College London is planning to remove the portraits of former university staff from the main entrance wall and replace them with BME (Black and minority ethnic) scholars.
The proposal to exclude white scholars from the entrance wall follows criticism from students who claimed that the presence of such portraits is too “intimidating” for minorities, The Telegraph reported.

Caption Contest — Winner

stuff 90 Comments

Well, this was a tough one, made tougher by some of our readers mistaking Vladmir Putin for Robert Duvall. But in ascending order, my completely subjective choices for honourable mentions:
“Stay thirsty, my friends” – Terry Anderson
“The line up to drink the dirty covfefe dishwater stretched all through the CNN headquarters and out into the street.” — richfisher
And the free book goes to;

0714172205-00.jpg

“CNN Editorial Staff: We don’t always masturbate in the bath. But when we do….” – Lickmuffin


Shoot me an email there Lick, and we’ll set you up with a book.

Bacteria Found in Alzheimer’s Brains

Science Unsettled Science 19 Comments

This may turn out to be signficant;

Researchers in the UK have used DNA sequencing to examine bacteria in post-mortem brains from patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Their findings suggest increased bacterial populations and different proportions of specific bacteria in Alzheimer’s, compared with healthy brains. The findings may support evidence that bacterial infection and inflammation in the brain could contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

Stay tuned.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation