Interview Request
A couple of weeks ago, I received a brief email from a host at 580 CFRA (Ottawa), requesting an interview. There was a mention that they had “stumbled on my website” when researching and that the leader of the Alberta Separation Party had been a former guest. After a few more exchanges, it was decided I’d be a guest late the next Thursday evening.
Wanting to be prepared, I then asked what the topic was, assuming it was on blogging or “western alienation” or something.
Heh. Not quite.
The Glow Of Tusks In The Headlights
Oh, just what we need in Saskatchewan – bigger roadkill.
H/T Saskdesk
My Daddy, The Youth Center
When I worked for United Way, some group was always coming up with a new “solution” to the problem of Jamaican/Somali violence. Each brilliant new innovative program featured: a) basketball, b) rap music or c) basketball & rap music.
Yep, just what these kids need: more false hopes about making it big in ball, and more immersion in degraded black pop culture!
And this is a cultural problem. US blacks make up 8% of the population, but commit almost half the violent crime [We don’t keep race based stats up here]. Black kids from upper class families score lower on standardized tests than white lower class kids. Being a “baby momma” is now a badge of honour, (and I still love Fantasia, ok?) not something to be ashamed of and discouraged.
Blaming this stuff on “slavery” is like a Canadian kid of Irish descent saying he dropped out of school because of the Orange Lodge and the Potato Famine.
Earlier this year, a 26-year-old black mother of four was shot at a club at 3 in the morning. What is a 26-year-old doing with four kids, and why is at a speakeasy when decent people are home in bed?
She quotes Kateland on the “elephants in the room”;
Let me tell you a fact of life living in black community in the downtown east side of the inner city. There are a multitude of programs for youth to keep them off the streets. There are probably more community centers and not-for-profit programs run in this area than in any other part of the city. They are all easily accessible to all youths � even for those whose families are on welfare or have very limited financial means. Guess what? The children, on a whole, don�t show up. To participate and take advantage of any of these programs requires a certain amount of discipline to show up every Monday or Wednesday or Friday or Sunday and that is what these children lack because their families are so fractured and their parents have failed in their first duties to their children.”
But be warned – whether discussing cultural and parental failure at the root of black gang warfare in Toronto or aboriginal gang violence in Western Canada, lancing the purulent��pachyderm will rouse the wrath of the parasite class that fattens both ego and wallet in a victimization industry fueled by blaming everyone but.
Queueing The Dragon
Gateway Pundit on gas shortages in China;
The Chinese government has sent thousands of police to petrol stations in the southern city of Guangzhou to prevent social unrest as drivers scramble to fill their tanks, the Hong Kong Economic Times reported on Thursday.
The paper said authorities had sent a large number of public security officers as well as paramilitary police to fuel stations amid fears that the latest fuel shortage could spark social instability.
“Several thousand public security officers and paramilitary police have been stationed at the 547 filling stations across Guangzhou in recent days,” the paper said.
Via Instapundit
Background: “Fueling The Dragon”
Reader Tips
A few links I’ve collected over the past few days;
A blog by a Canadian reservist (just home) from Afghanistan.
I guess there will always be those who don’t really want to see what is really going on around them.� When I went to the orphanage this morning and dropped off $600 US for the director to purchase a washing machine, some carpets, a couple of fans and a couple of hundred dollars worth of food, I really didn’t feel that I was “bombing the children.”� After lunch, when I went to the 6 room school house that we have built with money raised by and from the soldiers of Camp Julien and their families, I didn’t really feel like I had “bombed the schools.”� And in a couple of days, when I drop off at a needy mosque the brand new generator that was donated by a thoughtful citizen back in Canada, I probably won’t feel as if I have “bombed the holy places.”� When I see the Engineers risk their lives to go out and collect up hundreds of kilograms of mines, RPG 7 rounds, and various other lethal munitions and blow them up, I don’t feel as if we are holding this country back.� When the MP’s here on the camp go to the local police stations and provide training on proper search and arrest procedures, I don’t see that as contributing to the problems here.� When the Health Services people here go out and provide cross training to the medical staff at the medical facilities near the camp…again I fail to see how we’re the problem.
Peaktalk on the lax TBS-clinics in Holland and the escape of Todd Cameron Smith he who can no longer be named.
They come in peace.
Someone tipped me off to John The Mad, with a note about how good a blog it is. Agreed.
A Jawa Report survey comparing military service in the “left” and “right” blogosphere.
The mayor of Toronto wants law-abiding residents to store their guns in a central armoury[1] so that, apparently, drug dealers and gang members can have a free field of fire with the illegal ones. But set that aside for the time being – nothing flushes away the stench of warm blood on hot streets more effectively than noticing that the shooters are black!
[1] That didn’t take long. Now – aren’t you glad you forgot to register yours?
(Add your own in the comments.)
Terror And Liberalism
Nick Cohen is a author, a columnist for The Observer, The New Statesman and has written for The Guardian. He explains how he came to realize he was looking at the world “through the wrong end of the telescope”;
Terror and Liberalism is an essay rather than a history and its arguments come from the almost forgotten tradition of the anti-totalitarian left. Its central point is that Islamism and Baathism are continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points – founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Baath Party were admirers of Hitler and Franco – but in their fundamentals. Once again we had the promise of earthly paradise, but now the paradise wouldn’t be the paradise of unexploited labour or the paradise of an Aryan Europe, but the paradise of the early days of the prophet or a reunified Arab nation, pure and free. Once again there were great leaders who were semi-divine as they led the faithful into cosmic struggles. And once again their programmes were insane.
[…]
To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world’s liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.
The Non-Partisan Governor General Of The Liberal Party Of Canada
If Michaelle Jean’s appointment as Governor General is as “non-partisan” as Paul Martin would have us believe, then why is her statement on the Liberal Party webpage?
Plus.. Angry notices something about the French version.
update… it’s been yanked.
More, from Andrew Coyne.
Update II Conservative Hipster has a Screenshot. Nicely done.
Humpty Gorelick Sat On A Wall
Via Powerline (where there is more extensive quoting and commentary);
President Bill Clinton’s team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was “very dangerous” and could have “deadly results,” according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.
Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.
Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading – because White’s team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.
“This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities,” wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.
“The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism…can have deadly results.”
She added: “We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous.”
White must have felt like Cassandra, foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton’s Justice Department would listen. Team Clinton put up the “wall” in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9/11 attacks.
And one wonders, why on earth would Clinton want to obstruct communcation between the CIA and FBI?
A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.
…
It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react.
Further down her Post column, Deborah Orin connects the dots.
Equally troubling is that the 9/11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9/11, got White’s stunning memo and several related documents – and deep-sixed all of them.
The commission’s report skips lightly over the wall in three brief pages (out of 567). It makes no mention at all of White’s passionate and prescient warnings. Yet warnings that went ignored are just what the commission was supposed to examine.
So it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White’s memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick. (White has declined to discuss the matter, and Gorelick didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
It seems strange to associate the context of Canada with that of Iraq, but a closer look at the arguments used to reassure the demonstrating women in both countries reveals the similar ordeals that Muslim women in both countries must go through to secure their rights. It shows how their legitimate and serious worries are trivialized, and how vulnerable and alone they are. It shows how the Free World led by the U.S. went to war in Iraq, allegedly to bring liberty to Iraqis, and is compromising the basic rights of women in order to meet a random date. It shows how the theory of multiculturalism in Western liberal democracies is working against women in ethnic and religious minorities with misogynist practices. It shows the tenacity of many imams, mullahs and self-made Muslim radicals to subjugate women in the name of God. Most of all, it shows how many of those who consider themselves liberal or left-wing see their energy levels rise when it comes to Bush-bashing, but lose their voice when women’s rights are threatened by religious obscurantism.
Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali is protected by bodyguards due to threats by Islamic extremists.
My Dear Michaelle Jean
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Silencing The Whistles
From the government that ordered the Sidewinder report on Chinese espionage in Canada destroyed;
“A federal government plan to permanently muzzle current and former employees of 14 entities with access to national security information is an affront to press freedom, the Canadian Newspaper Association warns.”
Press freedom is the least of our concerns. Via Frost Hits The Rhubarb who comments;
Then there is the whistleblower legislation designed to protect government, not whistleblowers. Search this site for articles on “whistleblower legislation” — there are good excerpts from Hansard with evidence from whistleblowers. Note that the RCMP will not be covered by this legislation so when they know something explosive, well, guess what? Find out what agencies are NOT allowed to whistleblow. Then you’ll know where to check for more evidence of the kind of thing found in the Gomery Inquiry.
Overview on Sidewinder here.
Gaza Photo Log
At Little Green Footballs and here.
Deja SARS, Update
Another heads up on “pig fever” . The Chinese are cracking down on press coverage;
The disease Communist China insists is Streptococcosis Suis (�Pig fever�) �has now spread to 10 cities, with at least 200 infections and dozens of fatalities� (Radio Free Asia via Epoch Times). The cadres have responded by going into full SARS-redux cover-up mode, with an order that �forbids local press from sending reporters to the infected areas or hospitals,� according to Ming Pao (cited by RFA). The World Health Organization has also been barred from examining the disease, which many believe could be a bird flu and at least one doctor diagnosed as Ebola (fourth item). Meanwhile, according to Boxun, the disease may have hit Shenzhen, the city next door to Hong Kong.
Previous post.
(That’s not the only E-Lobby item worth catching today, so keep scrolling – they’re sniffing around at Canadian energy projects from PetroKaz to Newfoundland hydropower.)
Reader Tips
Mark Steyn is to the United Nations what a can of Raid is to – well, the United Nations.
Ezra Levant picks up on something I wrote about last week.
Stephen Taylor discovers wildcat *.html files are joining the CBC lockout. Plus – is this sign of a takeover by Fox News?
James has a point. This probably calls for a charter flight.
Another installment of good news from Iraq, via Chrenkoff. From the cloistered universe of the MSM – a glimmer of recognition that “there’s a perception that we’re not telling the whole story”. You don’t say.
Add your own in the comments.
New for 2006
The Samand
Options: Air, Cruise, Semtex*.
Honsho, Japan
If you check the seismic map, there has been a 7.2 mag earthquake near Honsho, Japan just over an hour ago.
Active map is here.
Google news has reports trickling in about injuries and a tsunami warning, but nothing over the local radio news at the moment.
James Cogan
James Cogan of Primeminister.ca was a guest on the Stirling Faux show last weekend. He was doing such a good job in the interview I decided to call in. He has a post up now about one of the topics touched on – the pros and cons of blog advertising.
Note to media types – add James to your list. He’s eloquent, he knows the topic well and has a good voice for radio.
Martyr’s Oath
A new book by Stewart Bell, author of Cold Terror.
Curing Literacy
Overheard on a CNN “Ask the Doctor” segment just now;
“I am 48 years old and have recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. I am devastated. My doctor says it’s “localized” – a medical term that I can’t understand. What are the odds that I’ll recover and go back to my life as a teacher?”