Caught on tape: a “Saddam’s links to terrorism” denier.
Via Drudge
Small Splattered Animal
We would be remiss in our duties here at the Roadkill Diaries if we failed to mention this incident at the Canadian Grand Prix:
Briton Anthony Davidson blamed a collision with a beaver for costing him a possible first Formula One points finish in Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix.
The Super Aguri driver hit the animal while in third place behind the safety car at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
He finished 11th after making an unscheduled pitstop to replace a damaged front wing.
Hitting a rodent on the pit straight with a Formula 1 car yields one highly splattered animal. But as others have noted, it’s highly unlikely the animal was a beaver – a groundhog is much more likely.
Right After You Paint All Your Freeways White
“Clean up your snow to fight global warming, Canada urged”;
A team of U.S. scientists has found that “dirty snow” is a surprisingly significant contributor to global warming, and is urging Canada — as “custodian” of a vast, snowbound nation — to lead an international cleanup effort.
The researchers have measured, in the first comprehensive study of its kind, how snowy landscapes tainted by carbon particles from inefficiently burned fuels and forest fires are absorbing more of the sun’s heat than the less sooty snow cover of centuries past.
“Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smokestacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground,” the team explains. “Soot-infused snow is darker than natural snow. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space and cause cooling.”
Even a slightly darkened surface impairs the natural reflective properties of snow crystals, say the scientists, who calculated that dirty snow accounts for a startling one-third of rising temperatures in the Arctic over the past two centuries.
[…]
“Just as Brazil is the custodian of the Amazon, a world resource whose deforestation has all sorts of negative consequences, so is Canada a custodian of an important swath of snow-covered land that helps to cool the planet,” said Mr. Zender.
He also raised a red flag about increased ship traffic through the Northwest Passage — widely viewed as a potential economic boon for Canada in the coming decades — as a result of the melting Arctic ice pack.
“One implication,” Mr. Zender said of his team’s research, “is that any increase in shipping through the Arctic Ocean — for example, the Northwest Passage — is likely to exacerbate these effects by putting soot emissions right in the middle of the remaining snow and sea ice. We must think very carefully about this.”
Reader Tips
I just arrived home from Dallas an hour or so ago. My day began at 2:30 am yesterday, and while I was back in Minot well before noon – a dog that was supposed to meet me there didn’t arrive for another 7 hours. I’ve only had about 6 hours sleep in the past 48.
At any rate, you’ll have to entertain yourselves with this thread for a while. I have a lot to get caught up on around here – after a nap.
Artist?
Or ape?.
I scored 100% on this one. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Canadian Gorecasting Corporation
Via reader Ian, who writes;
We, (the Canadian taxpayer) are funding and producing anti-bush, anti-war propoganda for the Democrat Party OUTSIDE the rules of US Campaign Finance Law.
CBC (May 4);
Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore is one of the new owners of 24-hour television channel Newsworld International.
Gore is buying the channel with entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, a former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee.
The sale price for the channel was not disclosed, although the Wall Street Journal reported last October that Gore’s group was negotiating to buy it for about $70 million US.
Started by CBC in 1994, and most recently owned by Vivendi Universal, Newsworld International is available in about 17 million U.S. homes. The channel has had several owners since it was started. U.S. cable mogul Barry Diller bought it about three years ago and later sold out to Vivendi.
The article goes on to quote Gore (who will serve as board chairman and devote most of his time to the channel) as saying “This will not be a political network.”
Yet the same report states programming on the channel “will continue to be provided by CBC”.
So, which is it?
The Sopranos – The End
How do you end the greatest show in the history of television?
You don’t. Or rather, you can’t…
After my initial anger and dismay at the ending last night, I came to the realization that this is the only way you could have ended the series. There was no other way.
Any other ending would have degraded the series.
David Chase is absolutely brilliant.
Chase has made this series great by changing our expectations; expectations that have been formed by years of watching 90 minute movies and 60 minute television programs in which the plot conflict appears early and is fully satisfied by the end of the program.
But real life isn’t like that. In real life, Red doesn’t always walk up the beach to see Andy sanding a boat in Mexico. Sometimes important issues in our lives just don’t get resolved.
Furio just doesn’t come back. The Russian could be either dead or back in Moscow. Syl may or may not make it. We just won’t ever know.
The cynical element in me tells me that we need Tony and the family to make an appearance in a movie or in a spin-off. David Chase needs to make more money. But I’ve been programmed to think that by producers convincing investors they can make the magic happen again. Example; Sister Act or Look Who’s Talking Too!
Chase is smarter than that.
He knows that the Sopranos were the best thing to ever happen to television… It has changed the way we will forever be judging the programs that follow.
Television has now become a legitimate medium for art.
I know that he wouldn’t degrade his art to a cheezy “Paulie’s Place” sitcom in which Paulie runs his own own diner in Topeka after entering the witness protection program. (When the lady says “Kiss my grits”, you better f***ing kiss her grits!)
Tony and Carmella will die, but only Chase knows whether that will be by the hand of an assassin, or in a home like Uncle Junior probably will.
The same goes for the rest of us in real life. Most of us aren’t going to know. And if we were given the chance, would we want to know?
Would we be happier this morning seeing Tony’s brain matter splattered all over the inside of that diner with Steve Perry belting out “Don’t Stop Believin”? I don’t think so. Somehow, although that would have been something we have been programmed to expect by lesser programs, it just wouldn’t have been the proper ending to this series.
Chase has changed television forever, and for the better. He set the bar higher than we could ever imagine.
And I am one fan who thinks he got this one right.
And for that Mr. Chase, I thank you…
“when Socialism wasn’t just something people laughed at”
More Sarkozy
Via No-Pasaran;
TF1 is announcing the following results for the French parliamentary election:
UMP & Presidential majority (Right) : 405-455 seats
Mouvement pour la Démocratie (Eunuch Centrist) : 1-4 seats
Socialist Party and other Left : 120-160
Run-off elections continue next Sunday.
More;
The outcome is likely to leave Sarkozy with substantial political control, much like the sweeping powers Charles de Gaulle enjoyed with his hallmark strong presidency.
“I’m depressed – I voted for the Socialists purely because the right is going to win,” said Geraldine Gourbe, a 30-year-old philosophy professor, on her way out of a polling station in northern Paris.
“I voted for them to be effective, but I’d rather have voted for the Greens or the Communist Revolutionary League,” she said, concerned that those parties’ candidates stood less of a chance of gaining seats.
The composition of Sarkozy’s Cabinet and its ability to push through legislation is tied to the number of seats the mainstream right holds.
Labor unions and student groups are ready to mount strikes and protests if they deem that Sarkozy wants to go too far in trying to trim France’s welfare state protections.
Reader Tips
Open thread for tips.
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and Iran and the Sudan find friends in low places;
A British company has been closed down after being caught in an apparent attempt to sell black-market weapons-grade uranium to Iran and Sudan, The Observer can reveal.
Anti-terrorist officers and MI6 are now investigating a wider British-based plot allegedly to supply Iran with material for use in a nuclear weapons programme. One person has already been charged with attempting to proliferate ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Not Quite As Good As Being Hung By The Ankles Over A Shark Tank
But, it’ll do.
Cuz nothing says “peace” like exploding statues of Buddha…
Taliban Jack defends “peace advocate” who excused the Taliban’s wanton destruction of another religion’s symbols — when he wasn’t embracing Louis Farrakhan.
And so the Left continues its unrequited love affair with radical Islam…
Rules Of Journalism
Keep each of the following on speed dial:
… a wacko religious leader who believes that God loves all his children, except the ones who skip church once in awhile; a gun nut who put semiautomatic weapons on his baby registry; an anti-weapons nut who thinks there should be a 10-day waiting period before buying steak knives; a legendary, highly quotable politician who has not been sober past noon since 1991, and a self-designated leader of each of the following minority groups: African Americans, Asians, Latinos, American Indians, homosexuals, transsexuals, fat people, skinny people, people with absolutely no distinguishing physical attributes, and foot fetishists.
The German Brain Drain
Figures released by Germany’s Federal Statistics Office
… showed that the number of Germans emigrating rose to 155,290 last year – the highest number since the country’s reunification in 1990 – which equalled levels last experienced in the 1940s during the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War.
[…]
Stephanie Wahl, of the Institute for Economics, based in Bonn, said that those who are leaving Germany are mostly highly motivated and well educated. “Those coming in are mostly poor, untrained and hardly educated,” she added.
Fed up with comparatively poor job prospects at home – where unemployment is as high as 17 per cent in some regions – as well as high taxes and bureaucracy, thousands of Germans have upped sticks for Austria and Switzerland, or emigrated to the United States.
Yesterday, the country’swoes were underscored by a report which disclosed that areas of unemployment-wracked eastern Germany were populated by a “male-dominated underclass susceptible to far right ideology” because of a dramatic 25 per cent exodus of young women aged 18 to 29.
More than 18,000 Germans moved to Switzerland last year. The US was the second most popular destination with 13,245, followed by Austria with 9,309.
Switzerland already has a resident German population of 170,000. Its presence has even provoked a xenophobic backlash in the country’s tabloid press. Earlier this year, the Swiss newspaper Blick ran an anti-German campaign which spoke of a “German invasion” and quoted readers who claimed they found the German immigrants to be “arrogant and rude”. Many immigrants, however, say the benefits of lower taxes and pay up to three times higher than at home far outweigh the occasional xenophobic outburst.
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested , the government packs your school lunch, and nobody ever dies…
Reader Tips
Reader tips here.
“I steeled myself”
Doug Plummer’s change of heart.
Wikipedia’s gay thought police
“A Boston Globe article talks about crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, specifically a stalker she’s got, and the fact that earlier, she was sleeping with the wife of an FBI agent, and the FBI agent tried to kill his wife over the affair.
“I checked out the Patricia Cornwell article at Wikipedia, and found no mentioned of the FBI agent (Eugene Bennett) who tried to kill his wife / Patricia’s lover.
I found this odd, as I’d think that a crime writer having a murder plot against her lover would be noteworthy.
“So I checked the talk page, where I found that:
“This article is within the scope of WikiProject LGBT studies [ project ], which tries to ensure comprehensive and factual coverage of all LGBT related issues on Wikipedia.”
“Wow.
“So there’s self-acknowledged, organized spin, to make sure that certain bits of information go down the memory hole.
“Fascinating…”
Whiners
So the Premiers met what . . . four times? Their goal was to come to an agreement on Equalization (stealing from Peter to pay Paul). They couldn’t come to an agreement. The Finance Minister told them repeatedly that if they couldn’t, he would decide. So now you’ve got whiners in the Maritimes and whiners in Saskatchewan who for the first time in years are realizing that they have no choice but to get off the pogey from Alberta and Ontario.
What have we got? A lot of bickering over sharing the wealth. Excuse me?
The Maritimes and Saskatchewan have been on the dole for decades and now that there is some wealth they want to whine about how much goes to the other have-nots? I’m sorry Mr Williams and Mr. Calvert. You shouldn’t even have input. Pay your share and shut up already.
Wahh, “Promise” this, and Wahh, “Accord” that. Well deal with it you whiny, about to go into election, haves.
You didn’t hear Alberta complain about a measly 800 Million. Sure, maybe 8 BILLION.
Gods, here we are in the middle of the largest boom in Sask since early last century and these misers are afraid to share? Is there a disconnect between socialist theory and socialist policy? I thought sharing was the whole point?
Cheers,
lance