I’ve never seen a bar clear out that quickly at 7:40AM in my life.
— Ryan Batty (@ryan_batty) February 23, 2014
(I amuse myself.)
So, About That First Nations Thing…
Despite general resistence, representatives of tribes in the US recently gave their blessing for DNA analysis of the remains of a Stone Age child. Research conducted on the boy’s genes indicate that Native Americans have European roots.
Well, if they didn’t then, they do now.
QOTW
Yes, maybe Yanukovych erred by not using chemical weapons on Maidan. Then he could have given them to Obama and Kerry to stay in power.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) February 22, 2014
Reader Tips
Tonight we put modern music in old clothes, as Croatian cellists Luka Sulic & Stjepan Hauser perform a song by Australian screech-rockers AC/DC in front of a scandalized – perhaps 18th century – audience: Here are 2Cellos sawing off a performance of Thunderstruck.
h/t Glen
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
A Brazen and Blatant Attack on the Freedom of Speech
And exposing the government’s desire to take over the MSM, AND the MSM’s dropping its panties and spreading of its legs in the form of silent acceptance is just a good of a starting point as any.
I strongly recommend downloading the radio episode that this relates to, not just for entertainment value but Joe Soucheray is really one of the last remaining true journalists.
Kiev Calmed
Ukraine’s parliament voted on Saturday to remove President Viktor Yanukovich, who abandoned his Kiev office to protesters and denounced what he described as a coup after a week of fighting in the streets of the capital.
Parliament also freed his arch-nemesis, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who walked free from the hospital where she had been jailed, completing a radical transformation in the former Soviet republic of 46 million people.
The apparent toppling of the pro-Russian leader, after bloodshed in Kiev that saw 82 people killed and the center of the capital transformed into an inferno, looks likely to pull Ukraine away from Moscow’s orbit and closer to Europe.
More headlines at Drudge. Now, if they can just escape the EU…
Plus, the lifestyles of Viktor Yanukovych
Yanukovich estate is so big, I walked around for two hours and didn't see this! pic.twitter.com/h74tZzN3q7
— Olaf Koens (@obk) February 22, 2014
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch, and meet the lucky winners of a new marine habitat!
Devastating evidence has now come to light not just that the floods covering 65 square miles of the Somerset Levels could have been prevented, but that they were deliberately engineered by Labour ministers in 2009, regardless of the property and human rights of the thousands of people whose homes and livelihoods would be affected. Furthermore, that wildly misleading Met Office forecast in November led the Environment Agency to take a step that has made the flooding infinitely more disastrous than it need have been.
The “smoking guns” begin with a policy decision announced in 2005 by Labour’s “floods minister” Elliot Morley, later to be jailed for fraudulently claiming more than £30,000 on his MP’s expenses. Under the heading “Saving wetland habitats: more money for key sites”, Morley directed that, to comply with the EU’s habitats directive and a part-EU-funded study involving the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the WWF and the Environment Agency, flooding in Somerset should be artificially promoted, because “wildlife will benefit from increased water levels”. The 13 local drainage boards, responsible for keeping the Levels properly managed, were all to be co-opted into implementing this policy.
Sensitivity test
Listen carefully and see if you can find the hidden reference to race.
This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society
The Humane Society of the United States attack on inoculating pigs against a new disease threat.
The Tolerant Left
Always and everywhere a pleasure to behold:
Ms Korn, the student who objects to academic freedom (for others, that is), lists her interests as “socialism, being angry about gender” and “occupying things.” She also tells us that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Though again, that’s her dissent, not yours. And so she asks the question, “Why should we put up with research that counters our goals?” You see, finding things out must be entirely subordinate to certain, rather fashionable political assumptions. Which is to say, her assumptions. It’s exactly the quality one hopes for in a modern intellectual.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Reader Tips
She’s a cute little dear / who can hold her beer / that Beer Drinking Mama of mine… ♪
The comments thread is open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
The Load
Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau…
Turn the corner, and come to daddy:
There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.
It’s all good.
h/t
Farmers’ Almanac more accurate than government climate scientists
Who could have predicted such a harsh winter? The Farmers Almanac did, according to a CBS News report from August 2013. The nearly 200-year old publication hit newsstands last summer and predicted that “a winter storm will hit the Northeast around the time the Super Bowl is played at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey,” and also predicted “a colder-than-normal winter for two-thirds of the country and heavy snowfall in the Midwest, Great Lakes and New England.”
It helps not to have an agenda.
“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”
“Administration Lawlessness? Executive Orders Aren’t the Half of It.”
Free Mark Steyn!
“If a distinguished scientist is capable of having his professional reputation damaged by a mere Shirley Temple fan, how much worse must the damage be when the scientist is defamed by a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and so-called Nobel Laureate?”
More at Bishop Hill. (link updated)
Kiev Burning
Kiev is a magnificent city, and it pains me to see it like this, but I should not be surprised. Almost every country I’ve ever written about is either in hell, has only recently recovered from hell, or is on its way to hell. I hoped when I visited Ukraine that it was on its way out, but I did not have a good feeling about it, as you’ll recall if you read my book.
I’m reluctant to wade in as an analyst, though, because I don’t know the country on an intimate nuts-and-bolts level. Let me instead outsource my analysis to my World Affairs colleague Alexander Motyl who writes about nothing else. I do know the country well enough to say that what he writes seems exactly right to me.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Plans for a huge expansion of the world’s largest windfarm, the London Array in the Thames Estuary, have been scrapped. The consortium running the project blame the abandonment of an additional 65 giant turbines on “various factors”, but especially the requirement for a 3-year study on the potential impact on birds. The Thames estuary site is a designated environmental Special Protection Area.
The decision represents a major blow to the coalition government’s renewable energy goals. Not least as it is the fifth major UK windfarm project to be scrapped or scaled back in just three months.
“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”
Start with the enemies list;
And, the senators write, “To dispel this sort of public perception that Mr. D’Souza may have been targeted because of his outspoken criticisms of the President, it is important for the FBI to be transparent regarding the precise origin of this investigation.”
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
It’s as though it was all prearranged;
As NLPC has documented extensively, Fisker burned through more than $1.4 billion, which included $193 million loaned from U.S. taxpayers and millions more from state and local governments. After selling the scraps of its loan to a Chinese businessman, Richard Li, DOE said the government would realize a $139 million loss. Now another Chinese-based company, Wanxiang Group, won the rights to Fisker’s assets with a $149.2 offer at the bankruptcy auction. U.S. taxpayers are none the better for it.
Wanxiang – China’s largest auto parts manufacturer – was also the company that bought electric vehicle battery maker A123 Systems, which also went bankrupt after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama green stimulus. American taxpayers were jilted in that deal, too, as Wanxiang bought the assets – including some valuable technology – on the cheap. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States allowed the transaction to go through despite vehement objections from former members of Congress and the military over giving away trade secrets and patents to a Communist foreign competitor.
h/t Kevin B