Tonight we present a couple of video amusements forwarded by SDA readers: first, via Adrian, place your bets on the success or catastrophic failure of the not-so-little Vodka Burner That Could. I say “not a chance.” And via Dave S., it’s man versus table saw, as an intrepid gentleman puts one of his wee body parts on the line in an attempt to prove that his remarkable new safety device actually works as advertised. Yikes.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
These excerpts are from a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, one of the few great remaining journals in the Anglosphere. The observations I find telling:
… The Filipino nurse looked frightened and ran off to get Leon from Ghana to have another go. I said, “Hello, you must be Leon”, and he stared at me without a word. If it weren’t for putting the needles in, which often goes wrong, causing an alarm to go off, I could easily get used to having a four-hour rest in hospital every other day…
…Nurses no longer wear white, so everyone looks like a cleaner, although some have transparent face guards like welding shields, to protect them from flying spit. The only white members of staff are the cleaners from Romania, including two pretty girls who bring tea and biscuits…
Will there always be an England? Or a non-RoC Canada? The whole piece follows.
Poll Spotting!
Should you be able to defend your property with a gun?
The Tolerant Left
What Would We Do Without Internet Experts?
Stick to your pay, pal – “What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of ‘stuff’ except helping people pay for it.”
Those Moderate Muslims!
For the crime of committing “prayer meeting”;
Saudi officials strip-searched all the women and subjected them to an abusive body-cavity search, and assaulted the men. In a remarkable prison interview with the Voice of America’s Amharic-language service, one of the women, who contracted an infection from the search, attested: “We are traumatized by the strip search. They treated us like dogs because of our Christian faith. While talking about me during a recent visit to the prison medical center, I overheard a nurse telling a doctor ‘if she dies, we will put her in a trash bin.’”
Cash For Clunkers
The gas-guzzling, earth-pawing 2005 Chrysler 300C Hemi that Barack Obama owned when he ripped Detroit automakers in 2007 for not making more fuel-sipping hybrids failed to sell on eBay this week for its minimum $1 million asking price.
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
The American public’s dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Hear my prayer. (h/t Ed)
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
Washington Post offers buyouts for 5th time in recent years. (h/t EBD)
Reader Tips
In 1997 Long Island public television station WLIW debuted Visions, a unique documentary series featuring high definition aerial footage of various world destinations. The voice-over narration is occasionally cliché, or delivered in a cloying, fake-sounding accent, but it’s mostly intermittent and unobtrusive, and at least somewhat informative; the real pleasure, in any case, lies in the almost ethereal birds-eye perspective that provides a unique sense of the lay of the land and allows viewers to survey significant landmarks, churches, and ruins in their historic and geographical context. Tonight, for your viewing pleasure, here’s the visually gorgeous Visions Of Sicily.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
The NDP’s Claims of Compassion are Failing … Badly
The Calgary Herald’s Naomi Lakritz wrote a most interesting column yesterday about NDP MPs Pat Martin & Nycole Turmel stepping all over the wishes & legacy of Jack Layton:
What was it that Jack Layton wrote in his deathbed letter? “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So, let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
How quickly we forget. Or at least, how quickly NDP MP Pat Martin has forgotten. So has interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel, who, you’d think, would at least put on a facade of discipleship as Layton’s handpicked successor. Sadly, their reaction to Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu last week contained nothing loving, hopeful or optimistic in tone and message.
And Martin, who stooped to the disgusting act of calling the grieving Boisvenu a vulgar name, appears to think anger is way better than love. No world-changing agenda, there – except maybe to help civility, compassion and empathy follow the dinosaurs down the road to extinction.
Charles Adler & Lakritz discuss her column here. More from Adler here.
The Sound Of Settled Science
From the noted denier website known as The Guardian;
The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: “The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero.”
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Go ahead. Make my car. (new link)
If the U.S. president told the bank holding your mortgage to cancel your debt and hand you the house free, it wouldn’t make you more productive or efficient. It just screwed someone you owed money to. And clearer than ever is that GM could have survived the Lehman episode with a simple bridge loan. America’s biggest auto maker could have returned to the slog without dishonoring billions of dollars in obligations to bondholders and other creditors.
But the most egregious aspect of the Obama bailout is its annexation of the auto sector to the administration’s green energy schemes. It’s no exaggeration to say the auto industry is being used to fulfill a throwaway line in an Obama speech calling for one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Sparky Cars
Fisker Automotive, an electric car maker that received a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, said Monday that it has laid off workers in Delaware and California.
h/t Bluetech
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
The situation, Petrie says, is that some areas where turbine developments are being constructed and planned are, as he says, “the worst possible places to put a wind power project.” He says that avian and bat mortality rates at improperly placed wind farms are unacceptable. He also says that wind turbine developers and the government have ignored the fact that there will be cumulative ecological impacts associated with placing thousands of wind turbines on the landscape and in the lakes. As a Waterfowl Ecologist, Petrie is particularly concerned that wind turbines are being placed within critically important habitats and on migratory routes with no regard for avian displacement. “When you place a turbine in or very close to critical habitats, and birds subsequently avoid those areas, it is tantamount to habitat loss, and we have already lost 85 per cent of our Great Lake’s coastal wetlands.”
Those Moderate Muslims!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Not Mark Steyn, January 2008;
“We’re the ones who will change you . . . Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.”
Weekly Standard, February 2012;
Last month, German bank WestLB rolled out a new “Islam-compliant” investment product named the Islamic Strategy Index Certificate. The value of the certificate is based on the value of the WestLB Islamic Deutschland Index, consisting of shares of ten German firms “whose business activities are consistent with the ethical rules of Islam.” The WestLB product prospectus explains that the Islamic Strategy Index Certificates “are certified by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany as Islam-compliant [Islam konformes] investment.” The Central Council of Muslims in Germany is an umbrella group of twenty-two Muslim organizations.
It’s Probably Nothing
Forzanuova’s current cry is “Moneta di popolo!” As far as I can make it out, the communists are wanting that to be a fixed allocation to citizens of internal money, and Forzanuova isn’t even bothering to call for a national currency – it seems to want to issue local currencies. It sure looks like an increasing number of shopowners, farmers and those all-important truckers and cabdrivers are willing to go with it.
See, this is why you should not try to really collect taxes in Italy. If the local shopowners sign up and accept the script, that’s it. Game over. You]ve got small business against big business and rural against city, and they might well develop a dual monetary system. All those lovely policies about limiting cash transactions become ever so theoretical.
Chokin’ In The Boys Room
School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms…
h/t Jason
Reader Tips
In tonight’s Tips music old-time country warbler Kitty Wells asks her no-good, cheating, soon-to-be-divorced husband the solemn question, “Will Your Lawyer Talk To God?”
Well, no ma’am, not directly, but he will have a series of lunch meetings with God’s lawyer and bill your ex for it.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.