Tonight’s Tips music selection features American songwriter Aimee Mann in a live radio station performance of the nostalgic and melancholy Whatever Happened To Christmas?
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Au Revoir Socialists
Gerard Depardieu looked at the socialists now ruining his country . . . and shrugged.
Video here
h/t Xiat
David Cameron’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch, and “More tea, Vicar?”
The Libranos
Unless Mark Carney can swiftly and convincingly demonstrate that he responded to those Liberals’ overtures with a quick and unequivocal refusal, we shouldn’t be surprised if non-Liberals start looking through his recent speeches through the corrosive, distorted lens of partisan politics. Was his speech to the Canadian Auto Workers simply a play for union support? Was his dismantlement of the Dutch Disease talking point simply a tactic to put the NDP off-balance? For me, these are rhetorical questions written with a sense of sickening dread; others will doubtlessly repeat them in earnest and with angry, partisan vigour.
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
YOU were there. YOU, with your enormous video cameras. YOU, with your microphones poking into the bubble of grief that grew bigger as we waited for our parents to find us. YOU, with your horrible questions about what had happened, had we known Mike, had we seen anything? No parents there yet, just children. No teachers, just children. And you.
Some of us screamed at you to leave us alone. Some of us answered your sick questions, because you were the grown-ups, and we were the kids. I don’t even know how you got there so fast, before our parents, before anyone else could swoop us back inside and ask you to leave. But there you were, with your vans and your lights, asking us how it felt to know that another child had been killed. How it felt to be scared. How it felt to wonder about the names of everyone else, to be desperately hoping for more information, while feeling terrified about what the truth would really be.
I remember you. I remember your names. I remember what channel you were from. I remember that you filled the parking lot at Mike’s funeral. You stood in a line outside of the door, devouring the footage of crying football players running away from the service, like rabid hungry wolves. You replayed the video of Mike being loaded into the ambulance, over and over and over again, even when people wrote to you and asked you to stop.
And you were there today, in Newtown. Asking children who can barely spell their names what it felt like to have the trajectory of their life changed in a single morning.
How the fuck do you think it feels?
Related – “The media should be ashamed of its Connecticut coverage”
h/t JoanOfArgghh
Reader Tips
Tonight’s music en route to the Tips is a true rarity: a pop song about the importance of family, and of making proper use of your time on earth while you’re still here. From 1989, here are Mike & The Mechanics performing their worldwide number one hit The Living Years.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Benghazi Nursery Rhymes
Humpty Clinton sat on a wall
Humpty Clinton had a great fall.
Because “sleeping with my biographer” was already used.
Good News for Canada … If You Wish to See It
Andrew Coyne takes a sober look at the economic state of Canadians today and concludes that overall we’re doing pretty darn good. Of course, this reality doesn’t sit well with the members of the “Poverty Industry”, whose very livelihoods depend upon people remaining poor … or perceived to remain poor.
Imagine if a new drug were invented that instantly cured all cancers. While that would be a great thing for those inflicted with the disease, it would be terrible for the economic livelihoods of the millions of people around the world who work in the Cancer Fundraising & Research industries.
A similar predicament faces those employed by the Poverty Industry. While undoubtedly most have big hearts and want to help people on an individual, micro-level, it’s actually not in their own best interest for things to improve on a larger-scale, macro-level. For eventually they’d help too many of their clients and then their own jobs would be at risk.
It’s likely not too big of a leap to intuit that many who get jobs in Canada’s Poverty Industry were probably part of the “Math is Hard” crowd back in high school. So they must be forgiven if they find it difficult to understand the statistics that Coyne has clearly presented. Also, anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of them tend to lean Left, sometimes Far Left, in their political views. This means, by definition that they are anti-capitalist, pro-socialist, which further means that they are more in favour of equal outcomes than equal opportunities. This line of thinking has consistently proven itself throughout history to be disastrous for the poor.
Sadly, those employed in the Poverty Industry seem incapable of realizing that their own socialist beliefs actually hurt their clients in the long run, rather than help them. But along the way they take great pride in fighting “the rich” and believing every morning they wake up that they are better, more nobler people than the “suits” they rail against. What they don’t spend much time thinking about is where the money to pay their own salaries comes from … you know, the money from the taxes that those “horrific” rich people pay. Selective ignorance is truly bliss.
h/t ET
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
The agency determined that the Hemingway Home was subject to USDA regulation because it both exhibited the cats for an admission fee and used the cats in promotional advertising.
Even though the museum retains a veterinarian to care for the cats, the USDA demanded that the museum ”… obtain an exhibitor’s license; contain and cage the cats in individual shelters at night, or alternatively, construct a higher fence or an electric wire atop the existing brick wall, or alternatively, hire a night watchman to monitor the cats; tag each cat for identification purposes; construct additional elevated resting surfaces for the cats within their existing enclosures; and pay fines for the Museum’s non-compliance with the AWA.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Via WUWT: IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing
I participated in “expert review” of the Second Order Draft of AR5 (the next IPCC report), Working Group 1 (“The Scientific Basis”), and am now making the full draft available to the public. I believe that the leaking of this draft is entirely legal, that the taxpayer funded report report is properly in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act, and that making it available to the public is in any case protected by established legal and ethical standards, but web hosting companies are not in the business of making such determinations so interested readers are encouraged to please download copies of the report for further dissemination in case this content is removed as a possible terms-of-service violation. My reasons for leaking the report are explained below. Here are the chapters…
The real IPCC bombshell…
Because we’re fair and balanced: IPCC statement on leak.
h/t TrueNorthist
Reader Tips
The Beast In Me, by Nick Lowe.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
YNoKyoto
Canada has officially withdrawn from the Kyoto climate agreement.
The death notice comes years after the Stephen Harper government made clear it rejected the terms that were negotiated by the Jean Chretien government in 1997.
According to the agreement, Canada would reduce its greenhouse gases 6% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Environment Minister Peter Kent pointed to the fact the United States and China – the two largest carbon emitters – never signed on as reason to abandon the agreement. And one year ago Canada officially announced its repudiation of it, becoming the first country in the world to do so.
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
Supporting Terrorism: Take That!
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not get you off the hook; good on the SCOC this time:
…
In their unanimous rulings, the court affirmed that a key clause requiring the Crown to prove that defendants were motivated to further the aims of terrorism.
It said that the so-called “motive” clause was carefully constructed to protect those with innocent motivations or who had no genuine awareness that their actions or support could be manipulated by terrorist forces.
“The impugned provision is clearly drafted in a manner respectful of diversity, as it allows for the non-violent expression of political, religious and ideological views,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote for the court.
“Only individuals who go well beyond the legitimate expression of a political, religious or ideological thought, belief or opinion and instead engage in one of the serious forms of violence – or threaten one of the serious forms of violence – listed in the (section) need fear liability under the terrorism provisions of the Criminal Code,” she said…
Connecticut Shooting
Forward!
I remember a time when government eavesdropping was a bad thing.
Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.
The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.
Of course, that was “a time” when the President was Republican.
Spreading the Left’s Values Far and Wide
Feminist women’s groups must be so proud! 🙁
NAMBLA definitely is.
“I need a bigger white board”
At RCP: Rick Santelli Explains Difference Between A Democracy And A Republic. And more.
Reader Tips
Tonight we head overseas for a tale of battles glorious and deeds victorious, as the late Andy Stewart sings A Scottish Soldier.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.