Newly declassified photos here. (h/t Joe)
Irony Thicker Than a Barrel of Oil
For the Patron’s Saint Name of Frick
It’s Probably Nothing
Via John Mauldin (free subscription);
“We are monitoring the BROAD rise in Youth Unemployment Rates, across the EU (this March, versus March of last year):
— Bulgaria … 32.8% … up from 26.7%
— Portugal … 36.1% … up from 27.6%
— Denmark … 15.1% … up from 13.7%
— Ireland … 30.3% … up from 28.7%
— Cyprus … 28.8% … up from 18.8%
— Hungary … 28.8% … up from 25.4%
— Netherlands … 9.3% … up from 6.9%
— Poland … 26.7% … up from 25.7%
— Slovenia … 16.5% … up from 16.3%
Related; Our cultured cousins, the Europeans — role models for higher Dems — hate math. So last weekend they voted against it.
Marketing Campaigns Of The Apocalypse
…. who will read the printed version before election day, they’ll be reminded to consider taking an HIV test and learning their sero-status.
Via Ed Driscoll
Speaking Truth To Power
“SNL cuts sketch critical of Obama, replaces it with Fox News parody.”
This Is My Brother Mohammed, And This Is My Other Brother Mohammed
Remember back in 2008, when Iran Photoshopped an extra missile into a photograph of its missile test? Turns out, bad habits die hard. The Atlantic Wire has caught Iran’s semi-official Mehrs News Agency (MNA) using another digitally-altered image to depict its missile program. Only this time, the image is even more egregiously Photoshopped.
On the homepage of its website today, the image appears next to a story downplaying the threat of Iran’s ballistic missile program. It’s a small image but upon closer inspection, you can see that something is amiss.
We Could Give Them Separate Entrances!
Their own drinking fountains! And special seats on buses!
A reader writes;
I was at the Toronto District School Board “Futures” conference on Equity the last 2 days and it was every bit as frightening as you would imagine. 300 teachers gave race huckster Tim Wise a standing ovation after he concluded his idiotic rant (via Skype because his flight was fogged in) about how al the ills in the education system are caused by “white privilege” and we need to focus on and accommodate non-whites the way we do disabled people.
Update – The Toronto District School Board is putting the “cult” back in multiculturalism
Reader Tips
Whicker’s World was a hugely popular documentary TV show in Britain (so popular that the onscreen ubiquity of host Alan Whicker would later be parodied by the Python gang) that ran for almost 30 years starting in the late fifties. Tonight we look at an extract from a 1967 episode that focused on San Francisco’s so-called Love Generation — or, if you prefer, proto-Democrats.
h/t
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Uh oh.
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
Democrats: They’ll do for America what they’ve done for Detroit.
The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into the ground bemused, involves a real estate firm which gave the felonious mayor massages, golf outings, trips in chartered jets and other perks as this enemy of the people went about his hypocritical business of pretending to care about the poor while robbing them blind. The firm, apparently run by a sleazy low class crook named by the reprehensible Kilpatrick to be the Treasurer of what was left of Detroit’s finances, used Detroit pension funds to buy a couple of California strip malls. Title to the properties was never transferred to the pension funds, and they seem to be out $3.1 million.
French Voters Choose the Road to Greece
The voters of France have elected a devout socialist by the name of Francois Hollande to lead them … perhaps on a direct path to where Greece is today.
When economic realities meet socialist delusions, we’ve all seen which one wins:
Paris has a strange atmosphere right now. It is hard to get a table at the bistros of Saint-Germain, yet people have a sense of foreboding.
They know austerity has hardly begun. The press is full of stories that the biggest property bubble ever known in France has begun to deflate. Yet the party goes on. Perhaps this is what it felt like in May 1931, avant le déluge.
Germany took its medicine with the Hartz IV labour reforms eight years ago – under a Social Democrat, nota bene – when the world was humming and EMU competitors were merrily inflating their way into varying degrees of fixed exchange rate Hell.
France will have to take its medicine in less propitious times, somehow clawing back 20pc in unit labour competitiveness against an austere Germany.
It is not easy to see how France can pull this off. Little has been done so far beyond repeal of the infamous 35-hour week. Labour rigidities – employment protection, high tax wedge and minimum wage (SMIC), etc – are among the most entrenched in the OECD club. The unreformed French state takes 55pc of GDP.
Y2Kyoto: State Of Aneroxia Envirosa
May every one of these bastards freeze in the dark.
About a dozen protesters, including one of Canada’s leading energy-environment economists, were arrested Saturday after setting up a blockade on train tracks in White Rock, B.C., aimed at stopping U.S. coal trains from reaching local ports.
h/t Edward
Things You’ll Never See On The CBC
Marc writes – You speak of this bridge plot by Occupy Cleveland members. Are you sure this actually happened? I did a thorough search on the CBC and there seems to be no evidence that is took place.
It’s Probably Nothing
h/t EBD
Children Of The Pod
Never has a little good news been so utterly depressing.
Risk has famously been banned from Canadian school playgrounds, so the Winnipeg playground marked a small victory for the growing movement of educators, parents, designers and physicians who argue that it makes for boring, barren spaces that children just don’t want to play on.
This doesn’t mean all those merry-go-rounds, jungle gyms and teeter totters are being reinstalled. But a new breed of nature-oriented playground featuring rough materials, including some that offer the opportunity for a fall from some height, are being built with more than just safety in mind. […]
Their call is boosted by a growing body of research that is discovering the benefits of a little bit of risk in child development...
They needed research for this?
I’ve just arrived at a numbing realization. These researchers, academics, and career bureaucrats in control of education cannot recall their own childhoods.
The world is not being run by “crazy people”, after all.
The world is being run by aliens.
h/t Anthony
Related: Amish farm kids remarkably immune to allergies: study
Reader Tips
In tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips, from the 1935 MGM film A Night At the Opera, Chico and Harpo Marx – the uncles you wish you had – provide a little light musical entertainment.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
A Taiwanese View of the Quebec Riots
If you want to see a complete mischaracterization of what’s going on in Quebec, watch this ridiculous animation:
One obvious question is, “What on earth do the protests have to do with TD Bank?” One wonders if the aforementioned financial institution will soon be contacting its lawyers re a libel suit against NMA?
Take Me, Dear Leader
And now, the Life Of Brian.
This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society
The researchers gave study subjects pork containing androstenone and separated them into two groups — those who found the smell offensive and those who didn’t. Genetic analysis of the subjects revealed that those who didn’t like the smell had two copies of a specific form of a gene known as OR7D4. The others had only one copy of the gene.
But, it turns out, most people don’t even notice the smell of androstenone.“In North America and Europe, pigs are castrated, so the concentration of androstenone is quite low,” said Hiroaki Matsunami, a co-author and associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University Medical Center. “The only time you find a high concentration of androsteone is when you eat wild boar meat.”
That could soon change, however. The researchers noted that the European Union is considering a ban on castration because of concerns over animal welfare, and this debate has rekindled interest in how humans perceive the smell of pork and why two people may smell it differently.
The European financial collapse cannot come quickly enough.