Last week a 61-year old named James Sikes, who filed for bankruptcy several years ago, found himself unable to stop his 2008 Toyota Prius as it raced along the highway at over 90 miles per hour. The 911 dispatcher “repeatedly pleaded with Sikes to shift into neutral. He simply refused…..”
Fun fact: the gear shift in the 2008 Toyota Prius is conveniently mounted so that one can shift while keeping both hands on the wheel.

“I thought about” shifting into neutral, Sikes said at a televised press conference the day after the incident. But “I had never played with this kind of a transmission, especially when you’re driving, and I was actually afraid to do that.”

Might there be more going on behind the scenes of this whole “Toyota scandal” than the average MSM-watcher is aware of? Theodore H. Frank, in the Washington Examiner:

We went through this a generation ago with the Audi 5000 and other autos accused of sudden acceleration, and, again, mysterious unknowable car components were supposedly at fault….Back then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)…found that sudden acceleration was several times more likely among elderly drivers than young drivers…”

We’re seeing the same pattern again today. Initial reports of a problem, followed by dozens of new reports “coming to light” as people seek to blame their earlier accidents on sudden acceleration.

(…)

In the 24 (Toyota) cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89—and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.

Hmmm. Clearly, it’s time for a class-action age-discrimination lawsuit against foreign car manufacturer Toyota. Their customers’ lives, after all, “can suddenly become hell-on-wheels.”

… in this case though, a sniff of common sense has taken hold:

TWO government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.
The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.
The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.
It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising.

… a cavalry charge in Bollywood, of course:

Back country sledding is great fun, but this year the event ended badly. Godspeed to the rescue crews.

For a taste of how dirty the climate cabal can be, have a read of Benny Peiser’s detailed piece:

On Aug. 31, Tom Wigley (a former CRU director) emailed Jones to notify him that he believed Keenan’s paper raised a valid issue: “Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect. Whether or not this makes a difference is not the issue here.” Jones was now in possession of authoritative information that undermined his claims about the integrity of CRU data products for which he is responsible. Confronted with the evidence from Keenan, and, most importantly, Wigley’s advice that Keenan appeared to have a point, Jones should have been insistent on getting the data and facts out rather than keeping them secret.

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… take your pick … either way, it’s a mess:

Perhaps we need to go back to first principles?
Rule # 1:
In Science, the raw data is sacrosanct.
Rule # 2:
Corrections to raw data to compensate for known anomalies are always kept in a separate data set or adjustment algorithms
Rule # 3
The corrected data produced from applying Rule 2 is also sacrosanct.
Rule # 4
You never throw anything away.
How hard can it be for the climate “science” crowd to understand this?
It is beyond being funny any more.

Luckily, team-climate has lots of pristine data sets … right?

Everyone knows the details already, but the basic facts are essential here: former MP Rahim Jaffer was charged last year with drunk driving and drug possession. Several days ago, under an agreement reached between his lawyer and an Ontario provincial Crown prosecutor, Jaffer pleaded guilty to lesser charges. The provincial prosecutor said there was no reasonable prospect of a conviction on the more serious charges; according to this report, police sources said that “a rookie OPP officer failed to follow proper procedures during a strip search of Jaffer.”
Now, keeping in mind that at the time he was charged Jaffer was neither a Conservative MP nor working for the Conservatives in any capacity whatsoever (they had long since elbowed him out of the nomination race in his riding), and that his plea deal was reached with the Crown prosecutor, not the judge, in a provincial jurisdiction that the federal government absolutely has no say in, take a look at a sampling of what various media and opposition members had to say:
David Akin: “Turns out the judge in the case, Doug Maund, is a long-time Tory.” Jane Taber: “Stephen Harper’s tough-on-crime Conservatives were accused of being not-so-tough when it comes to one of their own…” Akin, again: “Jaffer’s former caucus colleagues immediately tried to distance themselves from the (Crown prosecutor’s) decision.” Peter Mansbridge, introducing the top story on The National: “As a Conservative Member of Parliament Rahim Jaffer was known for his tough stand on crime. Now, the opposition says he’s a Tory example of another kind: hypocrisy!” Liberal MP Anita Neville, seen bellowing in the HOC on The National: “The Conservatives are conspicuously silent…when the law is being flouted by one of their own.” Toronto Lawyer Russell Silverstein, on The National: “You know, when the public sees somebody charged with drunk driving and possession of cocaine who’s politically connected…” Unidentified man-on-the-street, on The National: “Ex-Conservative MP, married to the Minister of State for Women’s Affairs – I mean obviously they’re going to drop the charges, they had no choice.” (all emph. mine)
The attempts to attach Jaffer’s actions to the Conservative government (“one of their own“) were pure partisan ridiculousness, and almost laughable; what was not even slightly laughable, in those several days of coverage, were the efforts of various media and opposition members to raise, in a sideways fashion – i.e., without being accountable for it – a constant insinuation that the Conservative government interfered behind the scenes in a decision made by a provincial crown prosecutor. For two days and nights, a serious allegation which there was no evidence for became unmistakably threaded into the subtext of the coverage of what was, unaccountably, the biggest news story in the country.
While various other media members also joined in, it was once again the CBC who led the charge, displaying a perfected reversal of the sort of coverage they gave the Liberals. When in 1996 Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien was ordered by a judge to answer a charge of assault, and Quebec’s Justice Minister announced a few hours later that he would not allow the case to proceed, there were no insinuations that there had been any political interference. When Jean Chretien’s son Michel was charged in 2002 with sexual assault, illegal confinement, and sodomy, the mother of the victim stated that she had been pressured by a sitting Liberal MP to not press criminal charges. She said the MP told her –

“…(Chretien) is the Prime Minister, he has all the power and he will fight this case for Michel. Then she told me that ‘a lot of dirty things are going to come up about your past and the media will be there’…I almost changed my mind (about pressing charges) because of that.”

Remember the CBC’s top-of-the-hour news story on that? Well, me neither, because there wasn’t one. And yet somehow, in the last two days, a provincial crown prosecutor’s decision, in a case involving a former MP, now a private citizen, somehow managed to become attached, with great deal of hyperventilating outrage, to the Conservatives. How does that happen, exactly? Only Mansbridge’s hairdresser knows for sure, but consider, in isolation, the CBC’s decision to nationally broadcast, in their top-of-the-hour story, the following statement:

“Ex-Conservative MP, married to the Minister of State for Women’s affairs, I mean, obviously they’re going to drop the charges, they had no choice.”

Interesting. Suppose some non-taxpayer-funded news network – let’s call it Fox News Canada – aired an unidentified man-in-the-street’s assertion that Michael Ignatieff beats his wife if she leaves dirty dishes in the sink. The network, and the reporter, would surely be required to provide some evidence to back up the statement or else face very serious consequences. It wouldn’t t even begin to suffice, as either a legal or moral defense, one wouldn’t think, for the network – or the reporter or the producer – to say “hey, we didn’t say that at all, it was some guy in the street.” To the contrary, the only justification for airing such a statement would be if it was made by a known public figure, at which point there might be some justification for covering it, albeit without repeating the allegation, and only in the context of a story noting that politician X made a serious allegation about Ignatieff without any proof to back it up; there could certainly be no journalistic justification whatsoever for airing such a statement from some unidentified man in the street, and any broadcaster who aired such a serious accusation without proof would be liable for it, and held to account.
Someone at the CBC made a decision to broadcast, coast-to-coast, an unidentified individual’s statement that a particular provincial Crown prosecutor – someone who has a name, a professional reputation, and a family – rendered a decision based not on the law he’s been sworn to uphold but on political interference from someone outside his jurisdiction, and that our sitting government illegally interfered in a court case in a provincial jurisdiction – and all without one single shred of evidence.
Was it urgent, serious, and of public importance for the CBC to nationally broadcast a categorical, unproven allegation of serious wrongdoing made by an unidentified member of the public? Was the unidentified individual’s honest statement of opinion in any way based on fact? Has the CBC – would the CBC – ever broadcast an allegation of serious wrongdoing by a Liberal government that had absolutely no basis in fact?
No, no, and no.
Vile, unethical, unprofessional journalism – and it only costs us a billion dollars a year.
You know, there oughta be a law…

Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been living for years under mortal threat as a direct consequence of her criticism of fundamentalist Islam. Sadly, there’s no shortage of western intellectuals willing to criticize her for her views on Islam and skate disingenuously around the edges of blaming her for the situation she finds herself in.
In his essay Enlightenment fundamentalism, or racism of the anti-racists? Pascal Bruckner takes aim at the cultural mindset of such critics, focusing on two in particular: academic Timothy Garton Ash, who deemed Hirsi Ali irresponsible, and a “simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist,” and writer/academic Ian Buruma, who in a New York Times column titled Hard Luck for a Hard-Liner wrote the following statement, which perfectly exemplifies the – almost aggravating – willful blindness of so many in the west: “Ms. Hirsi Ali…had referred a few weeks ago to the ‘terror regime of political correctness ruling our nation.’ It was as though she were being punished in a timid country for being an outspoken critic of Islam.”
Bruckner:

Relativism demands that we see our values simply as the beliefs of the particular tribe we call the West. Multiculturalism is the result of this process. Born in Canada in 1971, its principle aim is to assure the peaceful cohabitation of populations of different ethnic or racial origins on the same territory. In multiculturalism, every human group has a singularity and legitimacy that form the basis of its right to exist, conditioning its interaction with others. The criteria of just and unjust, criminal and barbarian, disappear before the absolute criterion of respect for difference. There is no longer any eternal truth: the belief in this stems from naïve ethnocentrism.

Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief’s hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they’ve been parked in the ghetto of their particularity….This is the paradox of multiculturalism: it accords the same treatment to all communities, but not to the people who form them, denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions. Instead: recognition of the group, oppression of the individual…

In the putative name of respecting race, he notes, “individuals are imprisoned in an ethnic or racial definition.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for her part, clearly understands what’s going on far more than her critics do:

“Colonisation and slavery have created a sentiment of culpability in the West that leads people to adulate foreign traditions. This is a lazy, even racist attitude.”