Life will not improve for Cubans under their current system of government. It will not improve by exchanging one dictator for another. It will not improve if we seek accommodation with a new tyranny in the interests of “stability.” America will have no part in giving oxygen to a criminal regime victimizing its own people. We will not support the old way with new faces, the old system held together by new chains. The operative word in our future dealings with Cuba is not “stability.” The operative word is “freedom.”
Milestones
Yesterday I was hoping to catch SDA’s 6,666,666th visitor, but things got busy around here and I missed it.
Then this morning, I realized a second milestone had also passed – our 200,000th comment! As best as I can determine, the honor goes to DrD – and it’s a pretty good one;
As an armchair economist it’s always amusing to hear people ranting on about “Big Oil” presumably vs those “mom and pop” offshore drilling and tar sand upgrader projects we all reminesce about. Since the tar sands belong to “the people” perhaps a compromise can be reached whereby for every 100lbs of tar sand mined by “Big Oil” a 100 lb bag of tar sand can be shipped to the home of every Canadian who wants one to do with as they please. As for being “exploited” by “Big Oil”, my brother, who works in the oil patch has in turn “exploited” “Big Oil” over the years to the tune of a two storey house, maintenance for a wife, four children and several dogs, cats and hamsters, cars, minivans, vacations and a pension. Numerous others have done the same. Given a choice between the exploitation and the bags of tar sand delivered to the basement, I as a low tax paying Albertan will take the exploitation thank you very much. The fastest way to kill the economy out here will be to morph overnight into another tin pot, business unfriendly jurisdiction in which contracts and government business agreements are worth less than the toilette paper in the washrooms. That’s not to say it won’t happen. I saw it before with the NEP. Only this time, I’ve got a wad of cash to clean up on some cheap foreclosed houses.
Thanks to everyone for your support.
Nobody Does Doorstep
The Big Nothing
The Baghdad Fictionalist
I haven’t been following the Scott Beauchamp – New Republic fabrication scandal before today – it seemed just a little too removed from my usual scope. Then I learned of the magazine’s Canadian connection;
The New Republic is currently owned by my old friends and compatriots, the Asper family. Back when I toiled for the company in Canada, David Asper publicly told one of his own newspapers to “put up or shut up”. He should have said the same months ago when The New Republic was bragging about its commitment to rigorous and open investigation of the matter. The magazine is unable to “put up”, so it has shut up, and hopes that its silence will help the story die in the shadows. Beauchamp’s 15 minutes are up. The issue now is the magazine’s conduct, and the Aspers should recognize that and act accordingly.
Click here if you aren’t familiar with the controversy – “How the New Republic got suckered”
Reader Tips
“Crusader bias” at Al Jazeera.
“A spectre is haunting the net but, outside of techie circles, nobody seems to be talking about it. “ The Storm worm.
Understanding the Santa Ana winds – “Another popular misconception that the winds are hot owing to their desert origin. Actually, the Santa Anas develop when the desert is cold, and are thus most common during the cool season stretching from October through March.”
Add yours in the comments.
It Was 21C In Saskatoon Today
Warmer winters, wetter summers, and now – deader rodents.
I’m failing to see the downside in this.
Update – Commentor Raphael Alexander; “You can’t on the one hand say it isn’t happening, and on the other say ‘but if it is… x’.”
Yes we can – because we’re smart enough to understand that no matter whether it’s happening or whether it’s not, no matter whether we’re causing it or whether we’re not – that the only folly more profound than the notion that mankind can “change the weather”, is the folly that argues that we can change it back.
Stelmach Address
Premier Ed Stelmach faces either his “finest hour or his final hour” beginning today as the Tory chief embarks on a strategy for Alberta’s oil and gas royalties, one of the most important public policy decisions confronting government in years.
It starts tonight when the rookie premier appears in his first recorded television address, laying out his vision for the province and briefly touching on the royalty review that has sparked an emotional debate across the province.
Stelmach will then unveil Thursday afternoon in Calgary the government’s much-anticipated royalties strategy, released more than a month after an expert panel proposed hiking royalties to ensure Albertans get a “fair share” from the development of publicly owned energy resources.
I’ll bet we have oil industry readers who have opinions/predictions/observations to share. They’re welcome in the comments.
To All Saskatoon Health Region Staff, Physicians and Volunteers:
Enjoy the taste of your Sask Health ordered election gag.
Also prohibited are:
Download full document (pdf) here.
h/t– 650 CKOM John Gormley Live, (who broke the story at 8:30 am this morning, and provided the docs.)
Looks like the perfect time to unveil this NDP campaign button gem!
(Button courtesy Saskboy.)
“YOU’D THINK THIS would be a big story.”
Iraq: Violence-related deaths drop ‘remarkably’, say authorities and UN;
According to [Adel Muhsin, the health ministry’s inspector-general], the average number of dead bodies sent to Baghdad’s main morgue just over a year ago was between 100 and 150 a day. Now, it is no more than 10 bodies a day, and about 50 percent of them are dying in normal circumstances.
[…]
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently said that September witnessed the lowest number of Iraqi casualties in any month this year. He added that there had been a decease in violence in general due to a cessation of attacks by the Mahdi Army, led by Shia religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who in August ordered a temporary freeze of his followers’ activities, including attacks on US troops.
As a result, Ban said he had strengthened the UN team in Iraq by increasing staff in Baghdad and Erbil from 65 to 85 and was considering the establishment of a small UN presence in Basra.
YOU’D THINK THIS would be a big story…
After all, the mainstream media makes such a show of “supporting the troops” at every turn, you’d think it would rush to report the amazing story of our soldiers accomplishing what many observers declared “impossible” and “unwinnable” not so long ago.
It hasn’t worked out that way. When General Ricardo Sanchez (ret.) addressed the situation in Iraq on October 11, he proclaimed that America was “living a nightmare with no end in sight.” Naturally, the “nightmare” quote wound up in the first paragraph of the New York Times report on Sanchez’s comments. What didn’t find its way into the Times’ report was any context of what’s going on in Iraq. The “nightmare” assessment would have been a whole lot more fitting when Sanchez was helping run the show in Iraq in 2006 than it is today.
[…]
The mainstream media’s failure to report what’s been happening in Iraq frustrates [Michael] Yon perhaps more than anyone. He has risked his life to tell that story, and the American media has yawned, apparently preferring the anachronistic pronouncements of a former general who hasn’t been in the theatre since the surge began. Earlier this week, Yon offered his dispatches free of charge to any paper willing to publish them. It will be interesting to see if he has any takers.
Emphasis mine. Because I don’t want my readers at The Star, The Globe, Macleans, and CBC to claim they didn’t know.
More from Jules Crittenden on a media Desperately Seeking Fly.
Reader Tips
…”won’t somebody think of the children?” — but that’s always canceled out by the fight against imaginary “racism”, especially if it involves a “persecuted” identity group that wants us all dead… so… carry the one…
Michael Yon and “Resistance is Futile”
“Individualism” – bad for co-operation.
Add yours in the comments.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Blunder down under…
D.B. Cooper
In Morris, Christiansen was waiting.
He is 77 years old, retired from the post office, and now works as an inventor and holds a few patents. Every day, he’d walk out to his mailbox hoping for a reply from Ephron. Nothing came. He sent Sherlock another letter, which Porteous had delivered. Weeks passed. No word. Did she know he was paying all this money to reach her? Finally, Christiansen wrote to Sherlock: “As you know, I have been trying to contact Nora Ephron, but for some reason she doesn’t answer my letters. Now I would like you to help me. I am sitting on the answer to a many decades mystery which has never been solved … No one was killed or injured in the caper but could easily have been … I hope you will think about this and let me know.”
Porteous was curious. He began to probe with e-mails. Christiansen would often type back late at night, he said, so his wife wouldn’t discover his secret relationship with D.B. Cooper. “Yes, I knew the culprit personally,” Lyle wrote one day. “He was my brother.”
Y2Kyoto: Another One Bites The Dust
Ministers are planning a U-turn on Britain’s pledges to combat climate change that “effectively abolishes” its targets to rapidly expand the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Gordon Brown will be advised today that the target Tony Blair signed up to this year for 20% of all European energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 is expensive and faces “severe practical difficulties”.
The things David Suzuki never told us…
They also reveal different priorities across government departments about how to get renewables to 20% of the electricity mix. Although Germany has increased its renewable energy share to 9% in six years, Britain’s share is only 2%, with its greenhouse gas emissions rising.
h/t National Newswatch
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and ONE AND TWO AND THREE AND TOUCH YOUR TOES…
Companies with more than 500 staff would have an ” exercise hour”. Employees would have to deliberately choose not to join in. The proposalsare the opposite of the Government’s approach which requires people to opt in to healthy lifestyles. Instead it would be up to them to make the unhealthy choice.
In his speech to the Royal Statistical Society last night the professor, a former aide to Tony Blair said: “It is not like banning something, it’s a softer form of paternalism.”
Tommy Douglas: Lions Fan
Frustrated while awaiting surgery on his damaged knee, Saskatchewan Roughriders receiver Matt Dominguez told a national TSN telecast about his unhappiness and inadvertently waded into a debate about universal health care. All this in a province approaching an election, in the birthplace of medicare, where surgical waiting times are always a hot-button topic.
“I went from being on the best team in the league, leading the league in receiving, to being on a list for surgery,” Dominguez said Monday after calling the Leader-Post to clarify his on-air comments.
“I’ve lived here for three years and I’m involved in the community, but not a week goes by that I don’t hear somebody complain about the health care system. Because I’m an American, I can’t talk about the health care system? You never hear people saying that the waiting lists are awesome. I never said I’m better than anyone or that I should be put ahead of anybody else. I’m not. I’m just saying that if I have to wait eight months (for surgery), that’s too long.”
There’s a reason that the Saskatchewan Roughriders have never won a Grey Cup with the NDP in office.
But what Tommy Douglas taketh away, Lorne Calvert can giveth!
Help Matt Jump The Wait Times Queue!
Telephone: (306) 787-9433
Facsimile: (306) 787-0885
premier@gov.sk.ca
Chi-llary
After the fundraising scandals of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, the dangers of vacuuming cash from a politically inexperienced immigrant community should have been obvious. But Ms. Clinton’s money machine seized on a new source of cash in Chinatown and environs. As the Times reported, a single Chinatown fundraiser in April brought in $380,000. By contrast, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry raised $24,000 from Chinatown in the course of his entire campaign.
Oh, it starts off very, very well. But by the end of the story, the Washington Post demonstrated its editorial-by-committee policy and allows Hillary to play the race card: The alternative, the campaign says, would be to prevent those with foreign-sounding names from participating in the political process.
Foreign names like “Charlie Trie”, a Chinese busboy from Little Rock;
[…] able to tap into millions of People’s Republic of China dollars for Clinton’s defense fund and even brought in a major Chinese arms dealer, Wang Jun, as a guest to the White House. Only four days before Wang Jun’s White House visit, the Clinton Administration granted an import permit for a Chinese military front company, Poly Technologies, to allow them to import over 100,000 semi-automatic weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition to a Detroit company, China Jiang An. China Jiang An also had close ties to the Chinese military.
More – Somebody’s trying to keep Hillary from winning the nomination. And it’s not a Republican.
Y2Kyoto: Saving The Planet From Emperor Qin Shihuangdi
Reader Tips
Open thread for tips.