The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult climategate Moonbats 13 Comments

Delingpole;

After Watermelons, I really didn’t want to write another book about environmentalism. But once you’ve begun to appreciate the grotesque scale of the problem – which extends far far beyond climate change to issues like the misguided green campaigns against silviculture, GM crops, cattle grazing, and so on – you end up feeling so angry and disgusted you want to speak out and warn the rest of the world just how many terrible, counterproductive, dishonest, destructive campaigns are being conducted behind a cloak of environmental righteousness. As I argued in Watermelons – and as I amplify in the books mentioned below – these have rather less to do with saving the planet than they do with the ongoing war by a shrill but powerful and scarily influential minority on Western Civilisation.

h/t EBD

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Alternative Subsidy 9 Comments

The Guardian;

I have spent two years traipsing Britain in search of the finest views. It is hard to convey the devastating impact of the turbines to those who have not seen them, especially a political elite that never leaves the south-east except for abroad. Fields of these structures are now rising almost everywhere. They are sited irrespective of the wind, since subsidy is paid irrespective of supply, even if there is none. It makes EU agricultural policy a paragon of sanity.
Turbines are to surround Cornwall and stretch along the north Devon coast. They will form a wall off the Dorset shore. They will line Offa’s Dyke from Gwent to Shropshire, with a single giant on Clyro Hill looking down the Wye Valley like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer. The once desolate Cambrian Mountains are on the way to being an estate of 840 turbines filling views in every direction.

Not A Muslim

Religion Of Submission The One 16 Comments

NOOoonononono…

When Hezbollah fighters joined the Lebanese army in battling the Sunni Islamist followers of Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir in the Lebanese town of Sidon in June this year, the U.S. backed the army and made no reference to the key role played by Hezbollah fighters in the action. Similarly, the U.S. condemnation of the recent al-Qaeda linked bombing at the Iranian embassy in Beirut did not contain any reference to the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters in Syria.
All this, it must be said, is deeply bizarre.

Bill C-13’s Legislative Bullying

Freespeechers 11 Comments

Solomon Friedman;

Remember those “lawful access” provisions, much touted by former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews of “stand with us or with the child pornographers” fame?
Those were the proposed police powers that caused a virtual revolt in both the Conservative caucus and the government’s principal constituency. The possibility of unfettered and warrantless access to sensitive personal information inflamed the embers of the fundamental libertarian values that once guided the Reform party.
Well, lawful access is back. This time embedded in Bill C-13, with a few superficial changes, intended to mollify the Conservative base which soundly rejected the last attempt at imposing such measures.
Canadians weren’t fooled by Vic Toews and they shouldn’t be fooled by Peter MacKay either.
Indeed, two insurmountable problems remain with the “lawful access” laws as presently proposed in Bill C-13.
First of all, while Minister MacKay has stressed that judicial authorization — that is, a judge’s order — is now required for police to obtain sensitive and identifying information about Internet users, he is only telling half the story…

Death By Nannystate

Children R Our Future 33 Comments

Ontario schools should allow students with asthma to carry puffers with them in case of emergencies, says the mother of a 12-year-old boy who died when no one could get his inhaler in time because it was locked in the principal’s office.

As outrageous as this story is, the school isn’t the problem. That we have an entire generation of parents who will stand passively aside while a school confiscates a child’s life-saving medication is the problem.

5 Facts That Most People Don’t Know But Should

Uncategorized 8 Comments

Permit me to get right to it. Did you know:
1) The total amount of margin debt has risen by 50 percent since January 2012 and it is now at the highest level ever recorded. (The last two times that margin debt skyrocketed like this were just before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and just before the financial crisis of 2008.)
2) In the United States, Google searches for the term “stock bubble” are at the highest level since November 2007.
3) Facebook is trading at a valuation that is equivalent to approximately 100 years of earnings, and it is currently supposedly worth about 115 billion dollars.
4) Issuance of bonds linked to loans for the shakiest borrowers hit $17.2 billion this year, more than double the amount sold during the same period in 2010. (Deutsche Bank)
5) The proportion of so-called “cov-lite” loans (loans that are made to borrowers without the normal protections for the lenders) is twice as high as the period immediately preceding the credit meltdown in 2007/2008.
….a little more analysis HERE (be warned, there is also an advertisement)

Renegade Regulator

CSA 18 Comments

Game changer.

On November 28th, the Federal Industry Minister, James Moore, responded to the following question:
“Does the SCC believe that the CSA owns any portion of Canadian law”
Minister Moore’s declaration in response to this question before Parliament included three distinct and formal determinations. First, the Minister ruled that the materials developed by CSA are “voluntary standards” rather than laws; Second, the Minister ruled that notwithstanding the determinations or Orders in Council of provincial legislatures, the Federal Government does not consider any portions of Provincial law which contain CSA developed material as legitimate or enforceable Provincial laws, and; Third, the Minister ruled that because legal statutes containing CSA developed material are not considered by the Federal Government to be legitimate or enforceable law, the CSA may remain the rightful owner of “the intellectual property and copyright” of their developed materials. [the full ruling by the Minister is at page bottom]
In essence, Minister Moore has stated that CSA developed materials incorporated into provincial laws are merely “voluntary standards” whose character as independent of the law is unchanged by inclusion within the law. The Minister’s determination is that CSA materials are “referenced in regulations,” but they are not part of regulations per se. Or more simply, CSA standards are not enforceable as laws.

But read it all.

Havana

Uncategorized 37 Comments

Communist paradise;

“Havana” Theodore Dalrymple wrote in City Journal, “is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.” Actually, it’s worse even than that. Beirut pulses with energy. Parts of it are justifiably even a little bit snobbish like Paris. Even its poorest neighborhoods, the ones controlled by Hezbollah, aren’t as gruesome as most of Havana.

Good read. And also – don’t go there.

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