Reader Tips
Tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips is a scene from Young Frankenstein where Herr Doktor learns that he can dress his creation up, but he can’t take him out.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Above the Killing Fields of the Galilee
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to return the Golan in 2000,
…but Syria’s Assad said no. Most Middle Eastern political analysts assume Assad never wanted a deal, that he merely went through the motions because it suited him at the time. Syria’s secular non-Muslim Alawite-dominated government needs a permanent state of war with Israel to survive in a country with a hostile Sunni majority. Resistance temporarily lends the regime the legitimacy it would otherwise lack. Assad needed an excuse, though, to say no when the Israeli government agreed to return the Golan for peace. And his excuse was that Israel would not give him the eastern shore of the sea.
A long and interesting piece by Michael Totten.
They May Want To Rethink That
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Washington Times, Sept.7, 2010 – Democrats refuse to purge dead voters.
Rome News Wire, Sept.8, 2010 – The family [of Mr. Donald Charles Unsworth, age 78 of Rome] respectfully asked in lieu of flowers that memorial contributions be made to the American Cancer Society or to the campaign of whoever is running against President Barack Obama in 2012.
Related – “Obama’s electoral coalition is crumbling”
(Via)
Lars Vilks In Canada
Lars Vilks, of Sweden, is an academically trained art theorist having earned a PhD in art history from Lund University in 1987. In 1988 he moved to Norway and worked at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts until 1993. From 1997 to 2003, he was a professor in art theory at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. A self-taught artist and mostly an outsider in the Swedish art scene, he creates various types of art ranging from sculptures and paintings to drawings. When his work is discussed by media and art world insiders, it is seen as deliberately provocative.
He has described himself as an equal opportunity critic of religion having criticized all religions in one way or another in his work but in 2007, he crossed the rubicon when he produced a series of drawings depicting the prophet Mohammad as a roundabout dog.
He’ll be speaking in Philadelphia, Ottawa, Toronto, and Boston Sept.30 – Oct.4. Details at the International Free Press Society website.
The First American Prime Minister: Not Reconnected Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
CBC, July 13th, 2010 – Michael Ignatieff says the Liberals must “reconnect to Canadians” over the summer […] the Liberal leader also dismissed polls that suggest many Canadians perceive the author and former academic as arrogant.
Toronto Sun, Sept 12th, 2010 – Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s former chief of staff, Ian Davey, hit Sun Media readers below the belt Sunday, saying they’re all illiterate.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
And apparently now, neither do they.
According to the latest Wind Turbine Price Index, produced by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, world prices for new wind turbines are down by 15 per cent on their 2008 peak amid a sharp slump in European and global demand. William Young, manager of Bloomberg’s Wind Insight Service, says: “Expectations for turbine prices have never been so low, and the current market oversupply will continue for quite a while longer.”
But it is in Denmark, the great windfarm pioneer, where some of the most interesting changes are taking shape. In 1980, the Danish government was Europe’s first to bring in large-scale subsidies – on which, just as in Britain, the wind industry depends.
The results have been dramatic. According to the Danish Wind Energy Association, there are more than four thousand onshore turbines – two-thirds more than Britain – in a country a fifth the size. Nowhere else has more turbines per head, and Denmark is also a global centre of wind turbine manufacturing – with Vestas, the world’s leading turbine firm, based in the country.
Unfortunately, Danish electricity bills have been almost as dramatically affected as the Danish landscape. Thanks in part to the windfarm subsidies, Danes pay some of Europe’s highest energy tariffs – on average, more than twice those in Britain. Under public pressure, Denmark’s ruling Left Party is curbing the handouts to the wind industry.
If only there were some sort of technology that could carry information from Europe to our own provincial Energy Minister.
They Deserve Each Other
I can’t decide who’s the more incompetent in this story: the city of Vancouver?
The controversial city-owned rental units at Vancouver’s Olympic village have been sitting empty since the Games ended in March – and they’ll continue that way for at least two more months.
Or the fools still hanging around trying to get in on the deal.
Non-profit organizations considering whether to bid to operate one or all of the city’s three buildings say they’ve been taken aback by city demands that they turn over any surpluses they might generate.
h/t allan
Reader Tips
In tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould perches over the piano as he plays Prelude and Fugue No. 22 in B Flat Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, who clearly had nimble fingers for a big man.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Free Geert Wilders!
Or, If He Climbed Stairs Like Everyone Else
You might never have heard of him.
“International Burn a Koran Day”
Related.
h/t Atlantic Jim
Heh.
When we got to the correct shelf, there was, indeed, a single hard-cover copy of the Koran. We both immediately noticed some slight damage to the spine of the dust cover, which he began to apologize for. He pulled it off the shelf, and stopped in horror as he saw that someone had, quite obviously and deliberately, cut a large X across the front of the book, through the dust cover and well into the hard cover itself.
(With palpable shock in his voice): ”Someone…someone committed a hate crime…in my store…I don’t believe this…”
I gently took the book from his hands, put my most reassuring face on, and calmly said, “That’s OK. I don’t mind…..”
We Don’t Need No Stinking Marxist Billionaires
Business Insider suggests “12 Places To Go If The World Goes To Hell” (and you’ve miraculously managed to hold onto your private jet): Chiang Mai, Tristan da Cunha, Guam, Denver, Bern, Puncak Jaya, Capetown, Necker Island, Rio de Janeiro, Kansas City, Tierra del Fuego, Yukon.
Whew, that was close.
h/t
” When I was first tipped off to Heather Mallick’s column…”
“… where she wrote about Fox News, Sun TV News and her connection to both of them I was seriously worried that I would learn that Ms. Mallick had slept with someone in my office.”
Related, indeed. The Mallicks in media seem to think the Canadians they smear don’t read newspapers. (Courtesy Jeremy).
Politicians, too.
Reader Tips
The Avengers
 Mrs. Peel & Mr. Steed |
Update, Sunday afternoon: There are now 26 episodes there.
… that Americans are war-mongers. By now most will have heard about Quebec City and the CPC Quebec caucus demanding federal funding for an arena to house a non-existent NHL team. Two hundred million is the number I’ve seen. Needless to say that’s a ridiculous number and if the bots in the PMO approve it they should all be recycled and that includes the head guy.
Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, says of those who with heartbreaking bravery went into the towers: “We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting.” Meanwhile, in a CNN interview; … Rauf indicated that the movement of the GZM away from Ground Zero must be rejected: Even if done out of a sense of propriety and sensitivity, he said, it would be perceived by “extremists” as an attack on Islam and therefore result in a spate of violence worse than the rioting over the Danish cartoons, threatening “our national security.”
“So you’re a Canadian who believes…”
Raw
Offside, CPC. Ten yard penalty, repeat second down.
Here in Sask we’ve been talking about a new “multi-purpose facility” (read: stadium for the Riders) in Regina. The previously mentioned head guy was in Saskatoon the other day and explicitly remarked that monies would not be going to sports teams. Thus the Newspeak framing by Saskatchewan politicos of the proposal as a “multi-purpose facility”. Our number is around the $400M mark or so.
Regina will probably apply for several federal infrastructure grants, use those to get loans, find several private partners, sign over a significant amount of municipal taxes, and get the Province to dump a pile in. The federal monies I’ve heard talked about by realists is around the $25-30M mark when all is said and done. There are a lot of pie-in-the-sky kooks who would rather the Feds go whole-hog for a third but there is no-way that happens and quite honestly, if in this Province, at this time, we can’t fund it ourselves then we don’t deserve to have it and it’s too expensive anyway.
If the bots in the PMO follow the advice of the Quebec caucus and go whole hog in Quebec then history had better not repeat itself like a certain CF-18 maintenance contract.
I think it would be far wiser if we all just went Dutch today, eh.
Cheers,
lance
Related – Bernier slams Quebec arena proposition
“a test of how far America can be pushed”
Mr. Mayor, the firemen, the police, the EMTs and the paramedics who rushed into those buildings, many of them knowing that they would die there, did not do so to protect constitutional rights. They went often knowingly to their deaths to protect what the Constitution itself protects: people, flesh and blood, men and women, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers. Although you yourself may not know this, they did.
The choice is not between abandoning them or abandoning the Constitution, for although the liberties the Constitution guarantees sometimes put us at a disadvantage even of self-preservation, they also make it possible for 300 million Americans to prevail—reasonably, peacefully, and within the limits of the law—against provocations such as this.
They make it possible to prevent the construction of the mosque at this general location—with no objection whatsoever to, but rather warm encouragement of, its construction elsewhere—not by force or decree but by argument, persuasion, and peaceable assembly. These are rights that the Constitution guarantees as well, and clearly it is one’s constitutional right to oppose the mosque, not to participate in the building of it, and to convince others of the same.