A living tribute:

A Russian businessman who set up a museum dedicated to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was electrocuted and bludgeoned to death on Friday, media reported.

Riot Sightseeing.

Those who thought Greece’s problem was that they didn’t have enough debt can rejoice! They’ve generously agreed accept a 120 billion Euro “rescue package”. This should work about as well as IMF involvement in Argentina in the 1990s, after which they concluded:

The IMF should refrain from entering or maintaining a program relationship with a member country when there is no immediate balance of payments need and there are serious political obstacles to needed policy adjustment or structural reform.

Greece hasn’t even begun to balance their budget and they show no inclination to accept the changes really needed. If Greece can’t face their current debt why would anyone think pushing the problem down the road three years and making it bigger would be a solution? Madness.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s Small Dead Animals distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This afternoon, for your delectation, here is Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology & public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, presenting his Charles & Martha Hitchcock Explorations of the Mind lecture, Intuition: The Marvels and The Flaws ¤ in 2007 (56:00).

On the Sunday, April 18th edition of The National, the teaser for an upcoming story consisted entirely of these twelve words:

At the end of the day: Rahim Jaffer, Ms. Guergis – Cocaine? Hookers?

I’m not a fan of the CBC, obviously, but that is a good one. They’ve taken the sort of blithe, craven, entitled, almost joyous unaccountability that we associate with the Liberal remora of the Adscam years and applied it to journalism, and they’ve maintained this approach even as it all slowly unravels. Anyone who got all his news from The National could be forgiven for thinking that Canada had been on the right track under the Liberals, but that our government has been plagued by a series of mini-scandals and outrages ever since the Conservatives took power. The truth – that a solid, scandal-free government has taken us through an unprecedented international financial storm and left us in the best shape of any country in the world – would be supplanted by the CBC’s hammering, partisan narrative that the Conservatives’ reign has amounted to a tireless litany of fabricated scandals, of “damning evidence” and “new and explosive allegations” and “political firestorms.”
Defenders of the CBC continue to say there’s no bias; what’s unsettling is that they always say it with a straight face. Anyone who has actually watched the National over the last fifteen years – as opposed to just talking nonstop about how unbiased it is, or saying “naw, I don’t watch it, there’s too much Liberal bias” – knows full well that if a Shawinigate were to occur tomorrow, but with Stephen Harper in Jean Chretien’s role, it would be a top-of-the-hour outrage for months, if not years. If you doubt it, ask yourself this: if the actions of a blowhard former Conservative MP, turfed years ago by his own party, who bragged about his ability to access government money in an attempt to make himself appear important, but in the end *received no money whatsoever* from the government, warrants speculative, innuendo-driven, top-of-the-hour, five-alarm, government-scandal coverage for weeks on end, how would The National even begin to cover a Conservative version of Shawinigate or Adscam? It’s hard to even imagine. They’d surely need three new channels, twenty new reporters, an eighty-trailer mobile war room, and nightly special reports – “A nation in crisis! How did we get to this point?”
Now that the Conservatives are belatedly taking on the CBC, by focusing, as a start, on the CBC’s presentation of EKOS pollster Frank Graves as a putatively unbiased, non-partisan expert on the Canadian political scene, the straight-faced crowd who defend the CBC are pretending – because that’s what it is, pretending – that the Conservatives are only unhappy with Frank Graves’ CBC appearances because he’s a partisan:

Continue reading →

Your Daily Downer in Video:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

I thought they had remote cutoff systems:

As work crews try to contain an oil well that is pumping thousands of barrels of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, many businesses are bracing for the worst.
Much is at stake. BP [BP 51.58 -0.98 (-1.86%)], owner of operator of the well, has already had its image dented by recent accidents. This event will likely cause its image further harm—not to mention the millions in costs associated with containing the spill and drilling a new well.
But the fallout stretches well beyond that. The oil industry is fresh from a victory over President Obama’s decision to open up parts of the Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico to offshore drilling.

How can “Drill Baby Drill” go ahead, when government doesn’t require the industry to use the most modern safety equipment available:

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., sent President Obama a letter Thursday reminding him that in 2000 the Interior Department insisted “oil companies have ‘reliable backup systems’ in the event of a rig blowout.”
By 2003, the plan was scrapped.
“This could be one of the world’s greatest nightmare scenarios of an oil gusher,” Nelson said.
The backup systems are supposed to act when an oil rig fails and starts leaking. Then, a valve deep under the water where the drill pipe meets the ocean floor is supposed to choke off the flow of oil. In the case of BP’s platform, either the valve wasn’t activated or didn’t work, possibly because of the explosion.
But there is another line of defense this oil platform did not have, a so-called acoustic switch. It can be activated by remote control sending acoustic pulses through the water to trigger the blowout preventer even if the rig is damaged or evacuated.
Acoustic switches are used in Norway and Brazil after those oil producing countries suffered spills. The U.S. considered requiring them, but drilling companies questioned the $500,000 cost and whether the devices even work.

Update: From the Comments … ht: LC Bennett

A Virginia NASCAR fan’s vanity license plate was recalled by the state’s DMV after “motorists and Muslims groups complained that his Virginia vanity license plate…was really code for neo-Nazi, white supremacist sentiments.”
Douglas Story says his plate, 14CV88, was “an homage to the car numbers of his favourite NASCAR drivers: Tony Stewart, who drives car No. 14, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who drives No. 88,” and that CV is common shorthand for “Sons of Confederate Veterans.”
Not so, according to Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, who said “his group looked into the meaning of the numbers 14 and 88 after receiving complaints about Story’s license plates. He said the group found that among neo-Nazis, 88 refers to ‘Heil Hitler,’ because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.”
Okay. So what about the 14?

White supremacists sometimes use the number 14, Hooper said, as shorthand for the 14-word motto, ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’

Story, who had a large anti-Islam sticker on the back of his Ford F-150 until he removed it, says “There is absolutely no way I’d have anything to do with Hitler or Nazis….My sister-in-law and my niece are Jewish. I went to my niece’s bat mitzvah when she turned thirteen three years ago…”
Three years ago?
Hmm….

The Revenge of the Brands

… [M]uch of No Logo is devoted to documenting the ways small groups of committed activists retaliated by turning the power of the brand back on itself. But 10 years later, the rule of the brand is more entrenched than ever, largely thanks to lessons learned from a close reading of No Logo.

The book devotes a great deal of attention to the various strategies of anti-brand activism that were coming into play at the time. Joining the old-school consumer boycott were newfangled techniques such as guerrilla marketing, culture jamming (ad parodies, basically), and Reclaim the Streets initiatives aimed at reversing the “commodification and criminalization of street culture.”

However edgy or subversive these strategies once might have seemed, every single one is now a standard part of the tool kit of every advertising agency and brand manager. You think culture jamming is subversive? Kenneth Cole has been jamming its own advertising for years, embroidering its campaigns with slogans and quotations addressing topics such as AIDS, homelessness, gun control, and same-sex marriage. Guerrilla marketing might once have been a cool way of getting attention for your alternative band or performance-art installation, but today, thanks to the viral capabilities of Twitter and YouTube, the technique is used to sell everything from fried chicken to the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

via Full Pundit