Since the story is about ignorance at a bar, I feel compelled to mandate you pour yourself a nice drink before reading.
I prefer a Fat Dachshund; 3 parts vodka, 1 part Baileys, 1 part white creme de cocoa. Trust me, it’s really good.
Reagan Vs Obama
A related piece by Michael Ledeen – We Are All Fascists Now
h/t Joe Molnar
Bruce the Australian
A year ago last June an unidentified woman showed up at a Senior Frogs in Puerto Vallarta and proceeded to party with the tourists; by the time she left, seven men were without their wallets and, in two cases, without their watches. This woman with a vaguely eastern European accent went by the name “Jane from Saskatchewan.” I mention this incident only because it raises serious, unanswered questions: is Kate McMillan complicit in the thefts? Was “Jane” sent to Mexico with Kate’s authority, or was “Jane” only pretending to be from Saskatchewan? The lawyers for the men who lost their wallets say either scenario presents a problem for McMillan, who has so far not responded to repeated requests for answers.
A strikingly similar story was reported on the February 5th broadcast of The National. “Who…” intoned Mansbridge, “is ‘Sarah the Canadian’? The story, he explained, “centers on the last British resident held at Guantanamo Bay. Was he brutally tortured, and did a Canadian play a role in the mistreatment alleged to have taken place? Adrienne Arsenault reports.”
Photo of a bearded man. Arsenault: “Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident held at Guantanomo Bay. There are serious questions here about the torture he says he endured in US custody. Americans have the answers, and won’t share, threatening to withhold future intelligence from Britain if evidence about his treatment is released here.” A British MP is shown expressing his concern, and then Arsenault gets to the point of the story: “But is Canada complicit too? Mohamed claims that when he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 he was flown to Morocco and interrogated. After refusing to talk to the Americans, he said they brought in a third-party intermediary, someone who said she was ‘Sarah the Canadian.'”
Mohammed’s lawyer (“who spoke to CBC News exclusively“) is shown reading from Mohammed’s diary: “On August 6, 2002, Sarah said ‘if you don’t talk to me, then the Americans are getting ready to torture you, to carry out the torture. They’re going to electrocute you, beat you, and rape you.'” A jumble of words, including “American,” “Moroccan” and “interrogation” shift about onscreen, as Arsenault says “Binyam Mohamed says ‘Sarah’ the ‘Canadian’ returned repeatedly, warning him to talk, then left him to be tortured…” (now most of the words onscreen fade out, as “Sarah the Canadian” and “the Canadian” swell into the foreground) “…that included hundreds of cuts on his genitals…”
Darn those pseudonymous, unidentified women abroad of unknown nationality who reflect so poorly on our current government. And yet, there *was* one wee little detail left out of the report: Binyam Mohamed says he doesn’t believe the woman was actually a Canadian.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performing one you all know, the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Symphony No.40, K.550, Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt-Unverzagt conducting, at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo (2006, 8:16).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Junior Dragster
As promised, starting with the before shot, in primer –
And a couple of afters. (It’s a girl’s car, and she likes horses.)
This is what they look like fully assembled and at the track. Don’t let the scaled down size fool you – they’re fast!
Conservative Alberta Conspiracy
In what can only be described as a conspiracy hatched within the darkest corridors of conservative “think tanks”, Albertans have launched a devious plan to rule the world. Clearly, having forced most Albertans to read America Alone, by Mark Steyn, the puppet masters have triggered a wave of conservative dalliances the breadth and width of the province.
The result is shocking.
… or as one commenter put it, “progressives” will only be able to pass on their world view to their cat and canary.
crossposted@Cjunk
Donating Blood Is A Definite No-No
A few selected online community responses to the Victoria brushfires.
US Economy Saved
With not a moment to spare.
The push to get the bill through before the holiday weekend was so frantic, members of Congress didn’t have a chance to read all 1,071 pages of the document before they could vote.
The Savior will sign it after he gets back from his three day weekend.
Blog Notes
Blogging the past couple of days has taken a back seat to a junior dragster paint job. Photos when I get them – I left it in the paint booth at 11 pm last night ready for clear. After 14 straight hours standing on concrete yesterday (minus one 10 minute lunch break), today’s going to be a slow one too, while I rest up and tend to some other work.
Tomorrow we hit the road for the Home of Hope, City of The Pretty, Metropolis of Changeopolis – the Chicago that brought you Blago! OK,. I’ll stop now. We have five days of dog shows, plus two days driving time each way. I should have net access in the evenings, but for the most part I’ll be leaving the joint in the hands of the trusty guest bloggers. Please help make their job easier – respect the rules, and ignore any trolling drive-bys.
Thanks for your patience – and wish us luck.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is Daniel Dennett, Austin Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, presenting his talk: Can We Know Our Own Minds? (23:45).
Last week, Jeff Hawkins stood on the shoulders of our previous physics and genetics shows and started taking a look at our neo-cortex and how the modern human brain works. Now hold on to your seats: in tonight’s talk, Dan notes that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us. As Dan says: “Your consciousness is not quite as marvelous as you may have thought it is […] consciousness is a bag of tricks”. Of course, tonight’s show wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t at least slightly disagree with Dan, in the sense that I think said bag of tricks is, indeed, marvelous.
Your Reader Tricks, er, Tips, are, as always, welcome in the comments.
(note from Kate – for some reason, Vit’s post didn’t auto-publish last night as scheduled. I’m republishing it now, for your morning enjoymen.)
Pharma Supply Chain In Trouble
While your national networks have been breaking the latest developments on Octomom and Joaquin Phoenix, transportation and profitability problems are beginning to create commodity shortages in the pharmaceutical industry;
Last week a Wegmans pharmacy in upstate New York ran out of OxyContin® and several other prescription medicines. Customers were told that Wegmans’ supplier did not have the ingredients to make several medicines and did not know when they would have them. Wegmans isn’t a mom-and-pop corner store with no buying power. It’s a 71-store chain on the east coast, is one of the largest private companies in the US and had sales of $4.8 billion in 2008.
Tasmania and India are the largest producers of thebaine, the active ingredient of OxyContin®, which is one of 20 alkaloid compounds derived from the opium poppy. Alkaloids cannot be stored by law, so each year’s crop size is limited by the expected sales. However, it’s only February so the shortage in the US is not due to exporters’ supplies having run out.
There is a worldwide shortage of acetonitrile, a critical chemical ingredient used in the purification of pharmaceutical compounds. Acetonitrile is a by-product of the automotive industry and is in short supply due to the worldwide slowdown in that industry, which, in turn, has caused chemical production facilities to close.
Another drug in critical short supply is leucovorin, a generic used in the treatment of colon cancer. Its shortage, too, is due to “manufacturing” delays, according to the suppliers. In an interview with Forbes, Michael Katz, chair of a committee of patients that advises the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, said, “I’ve never heard of anything like it.” The ECOG group of doctors, who have played a key role in testing new cancer medicines, recently started hearing from hospitals that they were almost out of leucovorin. There is a fear that shortages will occur more frequently with generic drugs because the margins are so thin. Even worse, many of the most important cancer drugs have gone off patent, according to Katz. Further, he wonders why there is no system to catch these shortages before they harm patients or halt clinical trials. The shortage is so acute in Florida that many cancer patients are receiving lower-than-prescribed dosages or none at all.
h/t Shaken.
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes hop about, unmolested…
h/t Me No Dhimmi
Influential Muslim Beheads Wife In Rijadh
Just kidding!
It was in Buffalo.
What Would We Do Without Artist Renditions?
CTV.ca – Thousands of satellite fragments, some the size of Paraguay, are in orbit around the earth.
The First American Prime Minister In Waiting
If only Jim Flaherty had listened to professor Ignatieff …
… and had brought in a magic budget where, by simply announcing its passage, $1,000 bills freshly plucked from the money tree would fly in flocks so vast that they would blacken the skies before coming home to nest in the wallets of workers.
If only Harry Potter were the prime minister!
No, Ignatieff is absolutely correct, what this country really needs is easy and magical answers.
I know something Monte Solberg doesn’t!
Casually and, almost, with pride, Michael Ignatieff declared he owned no stocks. He never owned a single stock in his entire life. No mutual funds, nothing.
That’s right, the future would-be king has no personal experience of making a single decision around investing in companies. Not even with his banker to decide whether to put RRSP contributions into a dividend fund or index fund. He wouldn’t know the difference. Or, if at best, he understood the notional difference, he had no experience of the difference.
And therein lies the beauty of the Liberal economic master plan.
When Michael Ignatieff becomes Prime Minister, he’ll just send every Canadian to teach at Harvard, and no one will ever have to worry about silly things like mutual funds and RRSP’s.
Nothing magic about it.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, we have a very special show for you. Pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime detective show, to St. Valentine’s Day, 2009, and to eighty years ago today, here is the delightful Mr. Dickie Goodman performing:
The Touchables, running 2:04, was originally released by Goodman on February 26, 1961, on Rori Music’s Mark-X Records, pressing 8009. The B side of the 45-rpm single contains Goodman’s Martian Melodies, which is a 33 1/3-rpm version of the same recording as the normal speed version of Martian Melody that was issued as Luniverse 105 on July 13, 1957. The copy of this disk that I have here in the studios lists Glazer and Aricin along with Goodman, but I have as yet not been able to find reference to either them in the Interwebothique.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
“Not One Member Has Read This Bill”
Last week President Obama held his first news conference. Of the handful of reporters pre-selected to introduce his 13 minute “answers”, not one asked him if he had personally read the trillion dollar “porkulus” bill he’s been campaigning to have passed.
I call that journalistic malpractice. But then, what’s new?
Seven Democrats joined every Republican in voting against it. Now, there’s that bipartisanship they promised!
I Looked High And Low For The Firearms Safety Course
And it just isn’t in there!
h/t Nicholas.
“Rusty” Isn’t The Word I’d Use
I’d call it “impotent”.