From the party that considers “cowboy” an insult;
“[Mr. Harper] is a politician formed and shaped in the radical conservative ideological world of Calgary…”
Reader Tips
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first of three special Apollo 11 editions of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to that singular time in history forty years ago, here is the original Launch Sequence ¤ video (9:55), as you would have seen it, live, on television, starting at T minus six minutes and counting, on July 16, 1969, at 09:26 EDT. Over three hundred and sixty feet tall ~ a thirty story building. Almost eight million pounds of thrust. Mere words are inadequate.
And here are some things you might not have seen before: here is live footage from a number of the high-speed cameras ¤ involved in the Apollo 11 launch (3:16), and footage from the high-speed engine cameras ¤ of Apollo 8, 11, and 12 (3:48, no audio).
If everything works out as planned, knock on wood, we have some, I think, fine shows in the can for next Sunday night, when we’re on the moon, over two hundred thousand miles away, and a week Thursday night, when we return to Earth. We went a long way from home, folks, in space, in time, in technology, and in the history of our species.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
The Czech point of view on those Visas
Here’s Lubus Motls: Canadian Bastards reintroduce Visas:
A few TV programs on Czech TV stations that were aired after the Velvet Revolution and that showed happy gypsies in Canada – who don’t have to work too much but who have everything they want (it’s partly true because of the Canadian welfare system) – has created a special atmosphere in the community of the Czech gypsies. Many of them just decided to move on. Canada has become their new dreamland.
In average, this ethnic group is demonstrably less attached to the land, the culture, the political institutions, and the general economy than the “majority” white population. The minority’s unemployment rate is around 70%, an order of magnitude above the current 8% unemployment rate in Czechia (and it was lower a year ago). The crime rate is high.
Ten years ago, instead of introducing the visas, the Canadians placed some bureaucrats at the Prague International Airport who were doing the mostly racial profiling, to cap the inflow of the gypsies to Canada. This was of course a more convenient system for the “white” Czechs than the visa requirements. But it was a dirty system, too, especially if you combine it with the absurd Canadian proclamations about their treating everyone in the same way.
An interesting point of view, especially this little nugget:
Canada should understand – and publicly admit – that the high number of applications that follow a similar logic is mainly a result of their asylum system’s being too inviting and provoking people to profitably write similar stuff. The right solution is to adjust their asylum mechanisms so that the impact of this “loophole” is reduced (for example, by making the asylum applications of this kind more expensive, or by reducing welfare for fresh migrants).
This is the main point. There would be no reason to cause this diplomatic incident with a European ally if our refugee system could just reject these bogus claims out of hand. Since the end of communism the Czech republic has been a free and democratic country, not to mention an ally that fights with us in Afghanistan. Any claim to refugee status from a democratic European country is risible and should be dismissed with utter contempt. But our refugee system doesn’t do that – they actually grant many of these claims and the rest get dragged out for years.
That’s the part that should be fixed, not imposing visas on Czechs.
Y2Kyoto: An Informed Denier Is An Effective Denier!
Former Restaurant Critic Tries Hand At Politics
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Warren Kinsella’s Spin Machine – “…we’d like a Minister of Immigration who isn’t a xenophobic mouth-breather…[imposing visa restrictions on the Czech Republic is] taking Canada back to the days when it closed the door to Jewish migrants trying to flee Nazi Europe.”
Paul Wells Wayback Machine – “[The Chretien government] reinstated visa restrictions on the Czech Republic [in 1997] in hopes of discouraging immigration by Czech Gypsies, or Roma, after more than 1,200 arrived this year seeking protection as refugees.”
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Today’s presidential tracking poll is brought to by baseball fans in St. Louis.
He’d Rather Crawl On Broken Glass Than Vote Liberal
Friends In Low Places
Since nobody else seems willing to stick up for them;
A North African offshoot of al-Qaeda has China in its crosshairs because of its treatment of Muslim rioters in Urumqi last week.
A group called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQM) is threatening attacks on the 50,000 Chinese workers in Algeria, according to a report prepared by international risk consultants Sterling Assynt and revealed in the South China Morning Post Tuesday.
The Chinese government is taking its first threat from Osama bin Laden’s deadly network seriously. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters: “We will keep a close eye on developments and make joint efforts with relevant countries to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of overseas Chinese institutions and people.”
Via Andrew Keyes, (who’s waiting for a reaction from the left that will never come).
Reader Tips
Welcome to the day-early Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s featured song is from Tom Lehrer, a math professor and part-time musical satirist whose musical success happened almost by accident: while attending Harvard, where he first arrived to study math at age 15, Lehrer wrote “Fight Fiercely Harvard” — “hurl that spheroid down the field” — and put it, along with eleven other original songs, on a record he recorded in one hour for $15. His intention had been simply to sell a few records on campus, but the word of mouth on Songs by Tom Lehrer soon led to mail-order requests from across the country, and within a few years he became a — somewhat reluctant — international success.
For a year or so after Lehrer stopped touring in the early 1960’s he performed satiric, topical songs like Werner Von Braun and National Brotherhood Week on the American version of the (originally) British TV program That Was The Week That Was. Tonight’s musical selection, from an album of his songs from the show called That Was the Year That Was, was written about the then-topical subject matter of the forward-looking Second Vatican Council. Lehrer: “There’s been a great deal of ferment in the Roman Catholic Church lately, involving certain reforms which are taking place. For one thing, they are allowing the use of native languages to replace Latin in portions of the mass…also, they are permitting the use of secular music in portions of the liturgy; I thought it would be a nice idea to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have chosen the ragtime form….”
Here then, without further ado, part-time humorist and piano player Tom Lehrer sings The Vatican Rag.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
California: Not Broke Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
San Francisco Chronicle – California will report its June job totals later this month. Thursday’s bleak federal numbers suggest that the state unemployment rate, already at 11.5 percent, could head higher.
Business Wire – “A new study released today found that small businesses in California will pay an additional $49,691 as a result of the California Air Resources Board’s implementation of AB 32.”
It’s not a recession. It’s suicide.
The Sound Of Settled Science
[A] remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the “consensus” bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing “cap and trade” scheme, which would devastate Australia’s economy, it being 80 per cent dependent on coal. The bill still has to pass the Senate, which is so precisely divided that the decisive vote next month may be cast by an independent Senator, Stephen Fielding. So crucial is his vote that the climate change minister, Penny Wong, agreed to see him with his four advisers, all leading Australian scientists.
Fielding put to the minister three questions. How, since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?
The written answers produced by the minister’s own scientific advisers proved so woolly and full of elementary errors that Fielding’s team have now published a 50-page, fully-referenced “Due Diligence” paper tearing them apart. In light of the inadequacy of the Government’s reply, the Senator has announced that he will be voting against the bill.
The wider significance of this episode is that it is the first time a Western government has allowed itself to be drawn into debating the science behind the global warming scare with expert scientists representing the “counter consensus” – and the “consensus” lost hands down.
Unprecedented!
Keep your eyes on the face of CNN’s Don Lemon…
Via Michelle Malkin, h/t Soccermom
Japan, Stimulated
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
WSJ, July 13th – Japan’s government raised its overall economic assessment for the third straight month in July […] The upgrade gives embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso grounds to claim his government’s fiscal stimulus measures have helped the recession-stricken economy turn a corner ahead of general elections …
Bloomberg, July 13th – Default rates on loans underlying Japanese commercial mortgage-backed securities rose to an “unprecedented high” of 53 percent in the first half, Fitch Ratings said. […] A total of 58.6 billion yen ($635 million) of 92.3 billion in CMBS-related loans maturing in the six months to June 30 didn’t repay when due, Fitch said in the statement. For its analysis, Fitch is assuming all CMBS-related loans maturing in the next 12 months will default, it said.
(h/t Sean)
Meanwhile, Japan’s armies of the unemployed continue to rust….
Among The 200 Best Golfers In Washington
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is the great John Scott Whiteley performing Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Wedge Fugue in E minor, BWV 548 (8:24), on the Zacharias Hildebrandt organ in the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg, Germany (which Bach played and probably helped design).
The Wenzelskirche organ was Hildebrandt’s largest, featuring three manuals and pedal, fifty-three stops, and a thirty-two foot Posaunenbass pipe with a principal harmonic frequency of sixteen hertz. It was built in 1746 and restored from 1993 to 2000.
There a multiple cameras located inside the organ in this performance, some good shots of the thousands of pipes hidden inside the organ, and some, how shall we say, interesting visual wedge effects. Mmm, mmm; thanks, John.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
The Scientist; (free registration required)
Two researchers conducting animal studies on immunosuppression lied about experimental methodologies and falsified data in 16 papers and several grants produced over the past 8 years, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
The scientists, Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras, formerly at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), falsely reported that they performed double kidney removals on several rhesus macaques in experiments designed to test the effectiveness of two immune suppressing drugs — Immunotoxin FN18-CRM9 and 15-deoxyspergualin (15-DSG) — in preventing rejection of the a single transplanted kidney.
The experimental protocol was to remove one intrinsic kidney, replacing it with a transplant and starting the monkeys on immunosuppresants, and then remove the other intrinsic kidney a month later, according to Richard Marchase, UAB’s vice president of research. “What occurred in a good number of these animals was that [Contreras and Thomas] never performed the second surgery,” Marchase told The Scientist. In a statement emailed to The Scientist Marchase called the misconduct “a very serious offense.”
Thomas’s and Contreras’s research was funded with more than $23 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health. UAB officials learned that Contreras and Thomas had left one native kidney intact in at least 32 animals — which allowed those animals to live and inflated the apparent effectiveness of the drugs — on January 27, 2006, when Thomas reported that she found an experimental monkey with one of its native kidneys intact and blamed Contreras for the mistake.
Had they only had the good sense to channel their energies into climate research, all of this unfortunate “research integrity” wiffle piffle might have been avoided…
Y2Kyoto: Once Upon A Time
It was the colour of money…
People briefed on its plans say [General Motors] is looking into changing the background color of its corporate logo from blue to green in an effort to show consumers that it is leaner and greener, more focused on fuel efficiency and better able to make quick decisions.
CIA Head Kills Secret Plot To Kill Bin Laden
Jules Crittenden examines the explosive revelation;
So killing al-Qaeda leaders is not only a big controversial hush-hush secret, it’s also wrong.
OK, I’m confused. I thought that was what they were supposed to be doing. I’m pretty sure that’s what Bill Clinton had in mind when he was lobbing cruise missiles onto assorted patches of desert and rocky crags in Afghanistan. I know that is pretty much was George Bush was talking about with his “dead or alive” speech. In fact, when the U.S. military blew up Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the CIA started lobbing Hellfires into Yemen and Waziristan, I thought that was the basic idea. Kill al-Qaeda leaders.
What Was Their First Clue?
Montreal investment adviser vanishes…
Brook Hamilton said his mother, who lives in Beaconsfield, west of Montreal, has invested about $350,000 and even refinanced her home after Jones persuaded her to do so.
Kim Jong, ill.
Faster, please.