Vitruvius seems to be out on the town tonight.
So you get me, and that means no fancy musical link thingie. Just a plain vanilla tips thread and skateboarding schnauzer. Though, I’m proud to say, “I knew her when”.
“White House Drops Fox Thing, Goes After Cheney”
A bold new strategy from the people who surrendered to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.
h/t
Abdul Majid Tony Fares
One of these things is not like the other….
h/t Cal2
What Would We Do Without Norman Spector?
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Norm Spector, expertus emeritus – “Where’s Mr. Brown these days, you ask? Well, he isn’t anchoring the CBS Evening News, a job that is now held by Katie Couric. True, she got off to a rocky start, but she’s found her feet and is now thriving”.
Associated Press – Once again, Katie Couric’s evening newscast was watched by fewer people than any network newscast.
How’s That Working For You?
Now is the time at SDA when we juxatpose!
The Hill – After weeks of public feuding between the cable news channel and the president’s top aides, Obama seemed to agree with statements by his advisers that Fox is not a real “news station.”
Rasmussen Reports – For the first time during Obama’s time in office, the Approval Index has been in negative double digits for seven straight days.
Y2Kyoto: Let’s Kick Things Off With Some BBQ Cat
In a study published in New Scientist, [Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale] calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.
They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.
They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.
Professor Vale says the title of the book is meant to shock, but the couple, who do not have a cat or dog, believe the reintroduction of non-carnivorous pets into urban areas would help slow down global warming.
In related news: Now vindicated, opposition leader meets with top strategist to review environmental platform.
h/t Mark Steyn
The First American Prime Minister, Corrected
And by The Star – this has to sting;
“Ignatieff gets his facts wrong in Arar case”
To be fair, he was out of the country at the time.
The Star requested an interview to discuss Ignatieff’s statement, but his spokeswoman, Jill Fairbrother, declined the request.
“It’s clear and I don’t think he’ll have much to add if the subject is torture.”
When told that Ignatieff was wrong and asked if she could verify the quote, Fairbrother said she no longer had a tape recording of the interview.
Related – famed Ignatieff strategist relieved of total blame… developing….
Update from Montreal today…
(Photo courtesy Ezra Levant.)
And They’ll Claim They Never Saw It Coming
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
WSJ – Obama’s “Special Master for Compensation” orders 90% salary cut for execs at bailed out firms.
AP – Obama “to shift the massive bailout fund’s focus away from helping big financial institutions and toward homeowners and small businesses.”
More links at Drudgereport
Beware The Immoderate Loudmouth
Here are some interesting results from Ohio State University’s Research News:
People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study. The key is that the extremists have to believe that more people share their views than actually do, the research found.
“When people with extreme views have this false sense that they are in the majority, they are more willing to express themselves,” said Kimberly Rios Morrison, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.
[…]
How do people with extreme views believe they are in the majority? This can happen in groups that tend to lean moderately in one direction on an issue. Those that take the extreme version of their group’s viewpoint may believe that they actually represent the true views of their group, Morrison said.
[…]
Take as an example a community that tends to be moderate politically, but leans slightly liberal. People with more extreme liberal views in the community may be more likely than others to attend publicly visible protests and display bumper stickers espousing their liberal views, because they think the community supports them.
“Everyone else sees these extreme opinions being expressed on a regular basis and they may eventually come to believe their community is more liberal than it actually is,” Morrison said. “The same process could occur in moderately conservative communities.
“You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.”
A similar process may occur in groups such as political parties. Moderately conservative people who belong to the Republican Party, for example, may believe that people with extremely conservative views represent their party, because those are the opinions they hear most often. However, that may not be true.
[…]
H/T: WUWT. Background: The Pathology of the Blogosphere™.
Reader Tips
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Normally we select songs that are obscure, or at least not very familiar, as opposed to mass-marketed ones. I’m going to make an exception tonight; in light of the protesters who keep showing up at G.W. Bush’s Canadian speaking engagements, this one’s just too appropriate to pass up.
Here it is, then: comedian Andy Samberg, portraying a one man army of righteous political dissent, works himself into a lather with a musical denunciation of the “system” entitled I Threw It On The Ground.
Feel free to throw down your Reader Tips in the comments.
QOTW
From the “Conversation with George Bush” in Saskatoon this afternoon, revealing that his father agonized over the media criticism his son was receiving;
“He’d read the editorial pages, he’d watch the nightly news, and I didn’t. I mean, why watch the nightly news when you are the nightly news?”
(Honourable mention: “I was in Bucharest, Romania to give a speech to the Romanians…. obviously.”)
The First American Prime Minister, Left Waiting
…”the party’s spin-machine, Warren Kinsella, camped outside the door”.
Advice for Mr.Ignatieff – don’t bring a failed restaurant critic to a communications fight.
Related ass kicking developments! “It’s not all my fault!” Sheesh.
One Size Fitt All
I was pulling together my outfit for today, and found this.
Made in Vietnam. No, really.
Update: My apologies for the slow blog day. As soon as I got home, I had to head straight to work on a billboard.
I would like to publicly thank Kathy Shaidle for providing me the opportunity to render this particularly noxious fellow speechless for a full five seconds.
“If Bush is Hitler, how come you’re not a lampshade?”
(photo courtesy K. Stricker)
Reader Tips
| Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys performing Polka On The Banjo ¤. |  |
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
“Mr Wells, move to Afstan. And eat your own cleverness.”
The world needs no more Canadian attitude:
…
Hey look: Holbrooke’s getting a new temp
The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
People with outstanding warrants will be denied income assistance in British Columbia as soon as next year if legislation introduced yesterday is passed into law, said Rich Coleman, Minister of Housing and Social Development. “People who have outstanding warrants shouldn’t be getting welfare until they clean up the problem,” said Mr. Coleman, adding that to qualify, warrants must be for indictable offences such as murder, sexual assault and drug trafficking. But Mr. Coleman said the government will not run criminal background checks on welfare applicants to enforce the policy. Instead, it will rely on criminals to disclose their outstanding legal issues when they make an application.
h/t R. Black
I’ll Bet He’s Regretting That “Not Born In Kenya” Thing Now
CBC: “Backers of $5 million African leadership prize say they can’t find winner this year”
h/t Edward Teach
In The Mail
Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough
His is the ideological gift to the world that just keeps giving;
THE [British] National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.
More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.
Who do they think they are – politicians? With that in mind, here’s a poll question that should get people fired up.
(Via)
Update – in response to some of the comments posted here, this SDA flashback…
Y2Koto: Follow The Money
The professional profile for Dr. Mark Schoeberl is available under NASA’s “Who’s who” section, so I suspect he still works there;
Dr. Mark Schoeberl is an atmospheric scientist who specializes in stratospheric processes including wave dynamics, ozone depletion and trace gas transport. He has over 152 refereed publications and over 4200 citations in atmospheric science journals. Since the early 1980’s he has worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and is currently the Chief Scientist for the Earth Sciences Directorate and the Aura Project Scientist.
Dr. Schoeberl is past President of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He is the former Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS) Project Scientist. He was the Co-Project Scientist for the airborne VOTE/TOTE mission (1996) and was Co-Project Scientist for the airborne SOLVE I and II missions (2000). He is also a past member of the National Academy’s Board of Atmospheric Sciences.
Dr. Schoeberl is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1996), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1996), and the American Meteorological Society (1996). He was awarded Goddard’s William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Sciences (1998), NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1991), NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal (1996) and Distinguished Service Award (2000), the latter being NASA’s highest award of this type. Dr. Schoeberl grew up in Iowa, and received his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Illinois in 1976
On the other hand, they haven’t updated the page to include his felony conflict of interest conviction, so who knows?
h/t Phillip G. Shaw