For thousands of years, ambitious men have always taken advantage of crisis, social turmoil, and economic downturns to solidify their positions and take control (Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin & Hitler come to mind).
People in desperation have almost invariably turned to a single individual who promised them better times. Or as billionaire Jim Rogers simply identifies, the current “Man on a The White Horse”.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Did a massive dragon just wash ashore along England’s Jurassic coast?
Soweto USA
… comes complete with 49.7% of all American murders:
“No doubt, the inclination is to boycott Florida, stop conventions, to isolate Florida as a kind of apartheid state…”
… Says Jesse, who claims to speak for 13% of Americans.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Breaking News: Detroit Files for Bankruptcy http://t.co/rh0sOgfIVg
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 18, 2013
Why Is There Always A Big Screen TV?
The cost of caring for the evacuees has ballooned to just over $80 million so far. Officials say it takes about $1.5 million a month to care for First Nations residents, who are still unable to return to their homes following severe spring flooding in 2011. The evacuees, scattered around Winnipeg and the province, live in hotels and rental accommodation while officials search for permanent homes.
h/t Bob H.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Dr Clive AM FRSA is an Australian public intellectual, according to his own website and a host of other sources, including his publisher Allen & Unwin.
As a global warming alarmist, he is part of the Weber-barbecue-like tripod of Australian public intellectuals, the other two kettle legs being of course Dr Tim Flannery and Professor Robert Manne. I wondered, re Clive, who ‘public intellectuals’ were. I guess Jean Paul Sartre’s definition, “the moral conscience of their age” seems the best fit. After all, Clive stood for the Greens in 2009 and his “AM” is a clear-cut 2009 honor for his service to the Left on climate-change policy, sustainability and societal trends.
But what’s with that “FRSA”? It looks a bit like that top science gong, “Fellow of the Royal Society” but actually stands for “Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts”, a different UK body. Being an FRSA seems like something special, since it always seems to be tagged to Clive’s profiles.
[…]
Last March I put in a test application for an FRSA, for convenience using the name Kim Jong Un, of Pyongyang. The RSA website promised a confirmation within 12 working days.
More – Once again, people described as “leading scientists” turn out to be economists, UN officials, and those with links to activist organizations.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
India threatens Wind farms with fines;
The intermittent power of wind towers plays havoc with electricity grids. Power black outs in India are so bad, they cut off the supply to 600 million or so people for two days last year. To make the grid more stable, an official somewhere decided it would help to have at least one day’s warning of how much electricity will flow from those towers. (Why not two days I say?)
“A directive took effect this week ordering wind farms with a capacity of 10 megawatts or more to forecast their generation in 15-minute blocks for the following day. ”
To put some perspective on this, here is what 7000 wind turbines across Northern Europe (between the North sea, the Baltic Sea and the Austrian-Swiss border) produced in 2004.
h/t pkuster
Billion Dollar Fact Checking
Zimmerman’s lawyers argued that he had acted in self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, because he believed his life to be in immediate danger. After 16 hours of deliberations, the jury accepted that argument.
(Granted, the story’s hosted on the “/strombo” subdirectory, so a CBC designated Journalistic Standards Free Zone.)
Update: SDA gets results!
Correction: An earlier version of this post contained an inaccurate statement about the defense mounted by George Zimmerman’s legal team. The reference has been removed.
Related: Uppity rednecks.
Oh, Shiny Pony!
Well, this didn’t take long.
(Courtesy No Guff)
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”
“What [Issa] said to me today was make sure to watch tomorrow’s hearing because he’s going to present the evidence to prove it…. That he can get it right up all the way into the White House before it was all revealed.”
Update: Top IRS officials in Washington, D.C. planned and oversaw the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups, according to the 72-year old retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday before the House Oversight Committee
This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society
Meat Is Murder. Not murder murder. Meat Murder.
Reader Tips
Tonight, from “The Lost Concert” of 1964 (apparently someone found it) The Beach Boys give an early live performance of Fun, Fun, Fun.
The comments thread is open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Nobody Likes a Traitor
… but after some 5000 years of human history where governments turn on their own people, why would anyone be surprised when their own government proves not to be a friend.
“Snowden, I don’t like him at all, but we would never have known what happened if he hadn’t told us.”
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
Now, it’s all designed to blow our minds
But our minds won’t really be blown
Like the blow that’ll get ya when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone *
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
The pain in Spain cannot be sustained. That’s the conclusion of the Spanish government, which is slashing its subsidies for wind power and other renewable energy as part of a deficit-fighting move. Spain is the latest European country to cut subsidies for clean energy — following similar moves in the U.K., Germany and Italy — because they’re driving up costs for consumers.
Power companies decried the elimination of the subsidies, which will cost them an estimated $3.5 billion. The government will absorb another $1.2 billion or so.
It’s a sad end for a program once heralded as a model by the Obama administration for its own renewables initiative. Yet it’s also not a surprising one. Despite its promise, wind energy has struggled to overcome economic barriers. Without government subsidies, it simply isn’t a viable business.
Why, a thought just occurred to me! Brad Wall may not know about this!
h/t Maz2
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”
A government watchdog has found for the first time that confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly scrutinized by government officials, but the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the cases.
Its investigators also are probing two allegations that the Internal Revenue Service “targeted for audit candidates for public office,” the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, has privately told Sen. Chuck Grassley.
h/t EBD
It’s Probably Nothing
According to the Daily Treasury Statement for July 12, which the U.S. Treasury released this afternoon, the federal debt that is currently subject to a legal limit of $16,699,421,095,673.60 has stood at exactly $16,699,396,000,000.00 for 56 straight days.
That means that for 56 straight days the federal debt has remained approximately $25 million below the legal limit.
Even though the portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit has not changed in almost two months, the Treasury has continued to sell bills, notes and bonds at a value that exceeds the value of the bills, notes and bonds it has been redeeming.
Alex Colville, 1920 – 2013
Reader Tips
Tonight we look at newsreel footage of the 1965 Watts Race Riot, when “a 46-square-mile swatch of Los Angeles (was) transformed into a combat zone (over) six days.”
The comments thread is open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Oh, Shiny Pony!
In way over his head: Last Friday Trudeau was the guest at an Islamic Society of North America event. The organization and its Canadian branch endorse polygamy and support Sharia law in Canada.