Energy and “the relentless application of logic”;

In the most reader-friendly and engaging way possible, Bryce provides the reader with data — the inescapable, remorseless facts about our current use of energy and our future energy needs. For instance, he points out that a single coal mine in western Kentucky – the 35th largest in America — produces the equivalent of 75 percent of all the raw energy produced by every wind turbine and solar panel and solar cell in the country on a daily basis.

More on Power Hungry here.

Find a snake pit of murderous anti-Semites.

Fenton Communications, which has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, signed two contracts last year with Qatar to develop “a communications action plan for an 18-month campaign” aimed at delegitimizing Israel and generating international support for the Hamas-run Gaza strip, documents filed with the Department of Justice show. The campaign, known as the “Al Fakhoora Project,” has a very visible Web presence that boasts of rallying 10,000 activists “against the blockade on Gaza.”
[…]
Testimony one of the commandos released later described how the “activists” shot this commanding officer in the leg and stabbed him in the stomach before tossing him off the deck. Other “activists” on the lower deck then dragged the officer inside, taking a knife to expand the wound in his stomach. “They cut his ab muscles horizontally and by hand spilled his guts out,” the soldier said. “When they finished, they raised him up and walked him on the deck outside. He was conscious the whole time…. ”

Glenn:

“They’re calling … they’re calling for him to actually be a dictator or acts like a dictator. No thank you. No thank you,” … “I get in hot water for showing how we are expanding government so much that if a wrong guy gets in, we will have a dictator. But MSNBC can literally demand that the president start being a dictator and there’s nothing.”

… scratch a progressive …

John Oakley is seriously entertaining the question of whether Canadian judges should give those who commit “honour” killings a break because they have different “cultural practices” and may not be aware of our norms and laws; defence attorney Lawrence Ben-Eliezer thinks judges should take these differences into consideration because we have “multiculturalism”.

… read on.
Speaking of cultural sensitivity … an oldie.
Update: Cultural sensivity in Progressia is never a two-way-street.
Update 2: Wente

… nostalgia for the good old days of Katrina is about to kick in:

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.
“It’s the most frustrating thing,” the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. “Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges.”

Observers were nonplused when a South Carolina man named Alvin Green was elected as the Democratic Party’s nominee in the US Senate election held last week. The unemployed Greene, who lives with his mother, hadn’t made any campaign appearances, for one thing, but more disconcertingly, his mental capabilities appear to be in doubt; in some interviews, he looks like a cross between a proverbial deer-in-the-headlights and a chrysanthemum.
Prominent Democrats are suggesting he’s another kind of plant – a Republican one. Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn speculated that Greene might be a Republican operative – presumably, the Republicans are in possession of a super-secret mind-control device that they can use on Democrat voters – and even Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod, who described Greene’s victory as a “big mystery,” said his win “doesn’t appear” legitimate.
It’s all such a super-mysterious mystery. Ann Coulter:

“Yes, how could a young African-American man with strange origins, suspicious funding, shady associations, no experience, no qualifications, and no demonstrable work history come out of nowhere and win an election?”

Last time they complained that he had his finger on the trigger:

Lindsay Blackett holds a mirror to Canadian television:

“I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce, and if we’re honest with ourselves … I look at it and say, ‘Why do I produce so much shit? Why do I fund so much crap?'” Blackett told the panel, to ripples of laughter.

“Why do the broadcasters not pick up more Canadian content? Because the Canadian content isn’t what it should be,” he continued.

The beauty of this is that it anticipates one of those rare instances of the Canadian arts community condemning the use of swearing. (Paul Gross–who is normally not an ass, and who has no illusions about the ill effects of subsidizing the arts–does so here.)
Colby Cosh, however, discovers an even more interesting response:

Kirstine Stewart, the general manager of CBC’s English television operations, reacted in the Globe to Blackett’s comments by saying “Nobody can ever question the quality of what we do here in Canada, creatively or otherwise.” Surely this is a much more revealing and intriguing comment than Blackett’s. Does she mean that questioning the quality of Canadian television and film is literally impossible? Or just that criticism is inherently objectionable, a malum in se? And at the risk of appearing to take sides, I must ask: which attitude ultimately seems more healthy and likely to encourage improvement—Blackett’s, or Stewart’s?

It makes one proud to be a standout:

“When it comes to wait times, Canadians are selling themselves short,” the report reads.
“Canadians deserve timely access to health care and accurate information on how long they can expect to wait for a consultation, test or procedure. Unfortunately, Canada is one of the few developed countries with universal health care systems where patients face long waits for necessary care.”

… on the Canadian prairies, have intesified … right on schedule:

The wettest spring on record is getting wetter.
A heavy rainfall warning from Environment Canada is calling for parts of the province to be doused with as much as 75 millimetres of rain by Friday. The warning first issued Wednesday afternoon is still in effect this morning.

As predicted by climate models, droughts are now a constant, forcing governments to step in and assist rain starved farms:

Eight to 12 million acres of land is unseeded across the prairies, according to the Canadian Wheat Board’s crop report released Friday.
The area of seeded wheat crops is the lowest it has been in almost 40 years, officials said.
Seeding across the prairies is about 78 per cent complete.
Manitoba fields have been flooded during recent rains. According to the report, rains have put areas of Saskatchewan in worse shape than Manitoba.
Bruce Burnett, director of weather and market analysis with the Canadian Wheat Board, said the board has never seen so much precipitation before.

… doesn’t seem that dirty anymore:

A record of success in the Alberta oil sands and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are expected to whet investors’ appetite for a $1.25-billion initial public offering from MEG Energy Corp., the latest in a series of mega-deals from Canada’s oil patch.
After a decade of raising private money from blue-chip backers in Britain and China, along with his family and friends, MEG founder and chief executive officer William McCaffrey plans to take his company public this summer. MEG needs money to pay for a $1.4-billion expansion of its properties over the next two years that is expected to more than double the company’s oil production to 60,000 barrels a day.

Just think how inviting those vast shoals of tar will be if the hyperbole at The Drum turns out to be true:

First of all…set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc….forget that, it won’t be happening..it’s done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.
So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?…there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It’s really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do…you will see the “sense” behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
The well bore structure is compromised “Down hole”.
That is something which is a “Worst nightmare” conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have “said” a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place.
[…}
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
[…]
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens…

… keep reading.
Update: Counter argument to the worst case above.

Okay…halal sausage is okay.

Paris police on Tuesday banned a controversial ‘pork sausage and wine’ street party planned by extremist groups to combat what they saw as the ‘Islamisation’ of a city neighbourhood.

The event was planned for Friday evening at a time when the district’s streets are usually jammed with Muslims coming out of mosques and just before Algeria were due to play England in the football World Cup.

But police banned the event and any rival gatherings in the Goutte d’Or area of northern Paris’ 18th arrondissement, or district, saying in a statement that it was likely to cause ‘serious risks to public order.’

Ponder that last statement for a minute: a group of French people announce that they’re going to eat French food in public, in France, and it’s deemed a “serious risk to public order” – a provocation, in effect.
Interesting times:

“A French government minister of Algerian descent…condemned the planned party as ‘hateful, racist and xenophobic.'”