“The process – the precious, wonderful process – is dead. George Monbiot mourns.”
Public Service Announcement: Ottawa
Demonstration to Demand an End to the Long Gun Registry
In Ottawa today, 4:30 – 6:00 PM local time at the Eternal Flame in front of Parliament Hill. More details here.
I Miss W.
Your hopey-changy quote of the day;
“We can absorb a terrorist attack.”
What’s The Opposite Of “Diversity”?
Prof. Fred Gottheil told Front Page Magazine that he compiled a list of 675 email addresses from 900 signatures on a 2009 petition authored by Dr. David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California, urging the U.S. to abandon its ally, Israel. Prof. Gottheil discovered that six of the signers, who hailed from more than 150 college campuses, were members of his own faculty.
“Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians?” he wondered. “I felt it was worth a try.”
Or, you know – scratch a leftist…
h/t EBD
Reader Tips
Tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips comes in the form of some live blues music. Backed by English rock band Pink Floyd, here’s Russian Wolfhound Nobs singing the mournful self-tribute Mademoiselle Nobs.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Not Watching For The Asteroid
Another season of Lost – 739,000 network news viewers vanish…
Warm and Fuzzy
“But then, there is the “progressive” class … that aimless mass of Western humanity so burdened by cultural self-loathing that it is to Islam, as ungulates are to lions.” – Paul @ Cjunk
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.
My Editor Hates Me
Jeff McMahan, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University…
Our own form of predation is of course more refined than those of other meat-eaters, who must capture their prey and tear it apart as it struggles to escape. We instead employ professionals to breed our prey in captivity and prepare their bodies for us behind a veil of propriety, so that our sensibilities are spared the recognition that we too are predators, red in tooth if not in claw (though some of us, for reasons I have never understood, do go to the trouble to paint their vestigial claws a sanguinary hue). The reality behind the veil is, however, far worse than that in the natural world. Our factory farms, which supply most of the meat and eggs consumed in developed societies, inflict a lifetime of misery and torment on our prey, in contrast to the relatively brief agonies endured by the victims of predators in the wild. From the moral perspective, there is nothing that can plausibly be said in defense of this practice. To be entitled to regard ourselves as civilized, we must, like Isaiah’s morally reformed lion, eat straw like the ox, or at least the moral equivalent of straw.
But ought we to go further?
I won’t spoil the surprise by quoting further.
(h/t Black Mamba)
The Sound Of Settled Science
“I think the modern environmental movement has hijacked itself.”
More at WUWT.
Reader Tips
Lawrence Welk and his cast of performers were known for their safe, respectable, anodyne music. Occasionally, though, they would perform current hit songs in an attempt to attract younger viewers and keep the show up-to-date. In 1970, completely unaware of the meaning of one of the words in what he thought was a modern gospel song, he made a selection that created a bit of a controversy. Thirty years later, you can still hear the faint echoes of jaws dropping to the floor all across America: Here are Gail Farrell and Dick Dale singing One Toke Over The Line. Seriously.
(h/t exetaz)
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
But Glenn Beck Is The Crazy One
More here.
The Food Police Will Still Claim They Caught It At McDonalds
New research shows that kids infected by adenovirus 36 (AD36), which causes the common cold and slight stomach upset, are more likely to be heavier – much heavier — than children who hadn’t been infected with the bug.
And why not? There aren’t enough Big Macs on the planet to account for the increasing waistlines of children, but that hasn’t stopped them, either.
I Can See Another Presidential Vacation From My House
Fifty-two percent (52%) of Likely U.S. Voters say their own views are closer to Sarah Palin’s than they are to President Obama’s, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Another Letter Writing Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong
It’s a “WHAT ARE THEY AFRAID OF?” UPDATE!
The “edit your own message” template is now gone and only the Friends approved text remains …. odd, that!
(Original post continues below)
The Friends Of Canadian Broadcasting need our help again!
“Stephen Harper seems determined to beam into every home in Canada a new right wing TV news network modelled after the hate mongering, ultra-conservative U.S. Fox News Network.”
Step 1 – Provide your name and address.
Step 2: Your Message
Please feel free to edit the subject line and message to reflect your own perspective and opinion.
Friends will send you a confirmation email with .pdf file attached to prove your opinion has been forwarded to your MP and party leaders. Easy? Easy.
One thing puzzles me, however. Friends used to feature these mail campaigns on their front page. This time, there seems to be no mention of it.
Odd, that.
A CTV News Poll….
Today’s Question “Do you support the long-gun registry?” The “NO” are currently* leading by a 70 – 30% margin.
Scroll down the main page, you’ll find it on the right.
The Libranos: Not Organized Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
SDA, April 2004 (link fixed)
Linking your candidate to organized crime – what could possibly go wrong?
(Related grovelling. Oh, how the mediocre have fallen. I guess that’s what the experts call an “edgy, attention grabbing” strategy when the polls show the candidate just south of fringe status. )
Margaret Atwood’s American Style Politics
Avaaz: “The third party no one talks about”
during the past federal election, Avaaz, an internationally based liberal activist group, registered for the first time as a third party in Canada — meaning it raised and spent money on campaigning, but wasn’t an official party or candidate.
It spent tens of thousands of dollars aimed at defeating a handful of Conservative candidates, although the Elections Act puts a tight limit on that kind of targeted spending. It has lately been trying to influence the chairman of the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission.
[…]
The group is based in New York; archived copies of Avaaz’s website from as recently as last year read “we currently have staff based in Rio de Janeiro, Geneva, New York, London and Washington D.C.,” without mentioning any Canadian presence.
The group has no specific Canadian website. The Ottawa phone number listed on Avaaz’s third-party election advertising report is a cellphone number that doesn’t connect to the group; it currently belongs to a federal civil servant who says he was only recently assigned the number by his wireless provider.
Avaaz’s media relations office in New York did not return several messages left over the course of more than a week requesting clarification on this or other questions about the group’s participation in Canadian politics.
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
A reporter who helped write the first and positive New York Times story on the Ground Zero Mosque was trained by the group run by mosque leader Feisal Abdul Rauf, according to that group’s website.
Y2Kyoto: If You Can’t Be Right – Rewrite!
This just in, from the man who predicted a “a summer for wheat farmers, swimming in the lake and having a beer on the backyard patio”.
“It could still be warmer than normal… but it won’t be a non-winter like last year,” which saw the warmest and driest conditions on record, Phillips told CTV.ca earlier this week.
A NON winter? I don’t recall last year’s non-winter. But hold on. Forget those late, wet, frozen crops – it looks like we had that hot dry summer after all!
The summer’s hot and sunny weather has led many to worry that winter would be particularly harsh.
I wonder… is Dave Phillips using these thermometers?