Time Announces “Blog Of The Year”

Blogging No Comments

From Time (on newstands tomorrow);

The story of how three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium challenged a network news legend and won has many, many game-changing angles to it. One of the strangest and most radical is that the key information in “The 61st Minute” came from Power Line’s readers, not its ostensible writers. The Power Liners are quick, even eager, to point this out. “What this story shows more than anything is the power of the medium,” Hinderaker says. “The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn’t any practical way to put it together.”
Now there is.

Congratulations to Powerline!

Homo Respect-us

Genetics No Comments

Over the past year or so, debate has waxed and waned about issues of political interference in the field of human genetics – stem cell research, bans on cloning. I covered it in March with these thoughts prompted by criticism of Bush appointments to the President’s Council on Bioethics.
A William Saletin column from Friday, in Slate, provides sobering evidence that there may be a very real need for checks and balances, if this commentary is representative of some of the mindsets in the research community.

Eric Juengst, a jovial bioethicist with a puffy white beard, takes the stage after lunch. He looks like Santa Claus and sounds like an elf. But the gift he brings isn’t for children. It’s a caustic wit aimed at anti-biotech hysteria. Juengst says human nature has been changing all along and will keep changing. He calls up a picture of an imaginary creature, half human and half cheetah. “Cheetah Man,” he jokes�or as the creature’s track-meet competitors might call him, “Cheater Man.” Next comes a drawing of a half-ape humanoid designed to fight wars, followed by a Weekly Standard article warning that the cloning of pigs to grow organs for humans will lead to “pig-men.” Juengst reads from the article in the hammed-up voice of a guy narrating a horror-movie trailer. The whole audience laughs.
Well, almost the whole audience. After Juengst finishes, Richard Hayes, the director of the Center for Genetics and Society, rebukes his “mocking, sarcastic” dismissal of people’s fears. Juengst replies that the pig-man article is funny. Hayes says it isn’t. The next questioner, biotech enthusiast Lee Silver of Princeton University, agrees with Juengst that humanity is always evolving. He asks whether popular belief in the sanctity of our species is religious and irrational. He cites the argument of his Princeton colleague, Peter Singer, that humans aren’t much more valuable than chimps.

Read it all.

Sell Out Indian

What He Said 1 Comment

Raskolnikov, from Times of Winnipeg:

I have met many indian artists. Although most are not as radical as Eh, many, if not all, of them, seem very limited in outlook. They can paint one hell of an eagle and their headresses bow before no one; when I ask them, however, as artists, how they feel towards, say, Leonardo and his use of sfumato, a key technique that I often see in indian painting and it’s use of bold color and transitional shadowing/lighting, I often get no reply, or a simple grunt of dissmissal. The vibe I get is that these artists either have no idea who Leonardo, Raphael, Giotto et all are, or else they do know and don’t care, these foreign artists and the connotation of being representatives of oppressive colonial countries rendering them irrelevant. (Not that Italy handed over many pox-infected blankets, but maybe I’m just splitting hairs)

Good stuff.

Embrace Hollywood

Embrace Hollywood 8 Comments

“Democrats need to embrace Hollywood because this is where they need to come to learn how to tell a story.” – Michael Moore*

September 23rd, 2004 – My Journal
I am a full-blown Democrat. I always have been. I did visit President George Bush Sr. and his wife when they were in the White House. However I feel their son is in there without truly having won the election. I think he is a C minus President. Don’t you have to have straight A’s to be valedictorian of a college class? How is it possible that we, the great country of America, have become so deaf, dumb and blind to the obvious? I am voting for John Kerry because I think he is his own man. He is extremely intelligent and has a heart of gold. I have met his wife and she is extremely bright and charismatic. I believe he should be our next President. And if Bush is actually voted in this time, I hope we hold him accountable for 911 and for this disastrous war in Iraq. I am pissed!!
Please vote for John Kerry.
Lots of Love
Melanie [Griffith]
PS- Also if you want to know about what really happened on 9/11 please read
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin
This book will blow your mind!

From Afghanistan

Military 1 Comment

A friend who is serving in the Canadian Armed Forces is currently in Afghanistan and sends this photo of Camp Julien.

Lots of stories to tell. I have used two disposable camera. I did not want to bring my digital camera here, since I had heard so many stories. Next time. I am going to download a disk of pictures the guys took here. The sights are unbelievable. How the people live. We are situated between the King’s and Queen’s palaces. “

update – This panoramic view was sent by another reader. Very cool. (And very wide)

New Google Tools

stuff 1 Comment

Via Boyd, at Texas Native these Google Labs projects;
Google Suggest provides a list of suggested search terms as you type. (Though it may not work on older browsers.) Even more useful (to me, at least) , is Google Scholar – which provides hits on published scientific articles.
It’s indeed fortunate that I have no life, or I just wouldn’t have the time to devote to this stuff.

Dishonest Reporting Awards

Media 6 Comments

Honest Reporting hosts their “fourth annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.

Not surprisingly, Gwynne Dyer and CBC conspiracy theorist Neil MacDonald are featured.

Operation Receive

Military No Comments

A little Iraqi girl with a teddy bear stops a US Marine convoy in its tracks.
Via 2Slick. More on Operation Give here .

Stone Apologizes

Insufferable Twits 3 Comments

Oliver Stone has regrets about Midnight Express.

Visiting Turkey for the first time since the movie was released in 1978, Stone admitted “over-dramatising” the screenplay, which he wrote. It was one of his early forays into cinematography for a film that was directed by Alan Parker.

Stone overdramatize? Say it isn’t so.

The script, which won Stone an Oscar in 1979, was based exclusively on interviews with Billy Hayes, the American sentenced to 30 years in prison for smuggling drugs into Turkey.
In the film, Mr Hayes, who was played by the actor Brad Davis, eventually escapes.
“It’s true I over-dramatised the script,” Stone told reporters in Istanbul before holding talks with Turkey’s culture and tourism minister, Erkan Mumcu. “But the reality of Turkish prisons at the time was also referred to … by various human rights associations.”
Stone said he had been fearful of visiting Turkey for a long time because of the effect the hard-hitting movie had had on the country. “For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me and I didn’t feel safe there,” he told the mass selling Millyet daily.
“The culture ministry gave me a guarantee that I would be safe, so I feel comfortable now,” said the American, who went on to direct Born on the 4th of July, Platoon, Evita and, most recently, Alexander.
Echoing the view of diplomats who said that, if anything, foreigners were often treated better than locals in Turkish jails, Stone said that the country had improved greatly since 1974, when a brief visit to Istanbul had given him the impression of being in a “very Ottoman” place.

No word yet on when he’s extending his “mea culpa” to the CIA and family of the late Lyndon Johnson.

“All The Way From Goose Bay”

Insufferable Twits 2 Comments

I sent a strongly worded email to CBC last week, after making the unfortunate decision to turn the dial from CKOM infomercial to their “pop culture” program Definitely Not The Opera.
On good days, DNTO is insipid, snickering and self-absorbed, but last week’s interview with octogenarian Labrador trapper Horace Goudie went far beyond that to offensive – even by CBC standards. Part of the piece involved a telephone coversation in which Goudy was introduced to one Grant Lawrence (in Toronto?), who proceeded to openly ridicule the elderly trapper, at one point asking if he’d ever “eaten beaver”.
It looks like I wasn’t alone.

From: cbcinput1@toronto.cbc.ca
Dear Kate McMillan:
Thank you very much for your email regarding the recent Definitely Not The Opera broadcast from Goose Bay, Labrador. We have been in contact with the producer, who has asked us to share this
message with you.
We received a lot of feedback on the special show from Goose Bay in general, and on Grant Lawrence’s conversation with Horace Goudie in particular.
Grant Lawrence is a regular contributor to the show, and he sometimes exaggerates his inner ignorant urbanite for satirical effect. In this case, his comments were intended to satirize urban dwellers who fail to appreciate and respect the rich culture of Goose Bay Labrador; we certainly had no desire to insult Mr. Goudie, who is of course an institution in the community and a lovely gentle man, and in hindsight, made the wrong decision by putting those comments to air.
I want to assure you that we have nothing but respect for Mr. Goudie, and we’ll apologize for the conversation on next week’s show.
Thanks again for your email. We are always happy to hear from passionate Canadians!
Regards,
Iris Yudai
Producer / Definitely Not The Opera

That’s it?
If the show had been on a private network, and featured a “satirical” Baptist minister from Calgary sneeringly asking a gay couple if they’d served “raw ham” at their wedding, there would have been warnings from the Heritage Minister and broadcast license suspensions.

Rocky Raccoon Resurfaces

Penis News 1 Comment

…in the most unlikely of places.

Now the doctor came in stinking of gin
And proceeded to lie on the table
He said Rocky you met your match
And Rocky said,
Doc it’s only a scratch
And I’ll be better I’ll be better doc as soon as I am able.

It has a happy ending.

Sgroed, Blewed and Tattooed

Roadkill 2 Comments

It’s not just “exotic dancers” getting the fast track.
CTV news;

The RCMP has charged five people, among them an Immigration Canada official, with corruption and fraud after several morning raids in Ottawa Thursday morning.
The RCMP are alleging the group received up to $25,000 in fees from at least a dozen Arab immigrants seeking permanent resident status.
The arrests are the culmination of an investigation that began in January. There will likely be more arrests, the RCMP said.
RCMP Cpl. Nathalie Deschenes told CJOH’s Anna-Karina Tabunar that the suspects were allegedly approaching immigrants and promising that their applications would be fast-tracked for fees ranging from $4,000 to $25,000.
One of the five suspects is the 34-year-old operations manager at the Ottawa branch of Citizenship and Immigration.
[…]
These arrests will likely sharpen the focus on Immigration Minister Judy Sgro, whose resignation opposition critics have been demanding in recent weeks.
She is currently the subject of an investigation by the federal ethics commissioner, prompted by allegations she received an improper election donation.
Critics have also lambasted Sgro for her office’s decision to extend a residence permit to a Romanian stripper who worked on her re-election campaign; and over Ottawa’s controversial program to allow foreign strippers to get special work visas.

When the stripper story broke, my first reaction was that Sgro’s department has been infiltrated by someone with associations to organized crime. The connections to the sex trade are too well known and too obvious for even the dimmest beaurocrat to feign ignorance. In this case, it appears the corruption was well established and well supported. That tells us it’s been in place for a long time.

Tools Of Misrepresentation

What He Said 3 Comments

Thomas Lifson at the American Thinker, covers a topic that’s been sticking in my craw for a while now – the hijacking of the word “progressive” to repackage failed and/or subversive leftist ideologies.

Buried in the term “progressive” (as the left uses it) is the assumption that history is moving inexorably, even if by fits and starts, in a certain direction, one that is understandable to those who possess the secret decoder ring. This is why government is so necessary. It alone can bring order to the chaos and messiness which individuals, left to their own devices, impose on their masters, and on the intellectuals who see so clearly what the rest of us cannot perceive.

Marrying My Sister

Little Known Facts 13 Comments

Back in February I wrote the following on the topic of same-sex marriage;

I have not found an argument to support the extension of legal marriage to include same-sex couples that I could not use in equal measure to demand the right to marry my sister.
Being of the same gender, society’s interest in the health of potential offspring is nullified – though it can also be argued that removing the ability to procreate as a defining property of marriage opens the door pretty wide. I don’t know how you can arbitrarily set aside something as fundamental as procreation to broaden the definition of marriage to include homosexual relationships, but stick it back in to narrow that same definition to exclude incestuous ones.
If it is discriminatory to deny persons the right to legally marry on the basis of same-sex orientation (be it choice or chance), is it not equally discriminatory to deny persons the right to marry on the basis of sexual ambivilance? Being homosexual or heterosexual is not a product of having sex with a person of the same or opposite gender, or having sex at all! Celibacy, whether voluntary or involuntary, does not affect orientation.
[…]
This is not a frivolous suggestion. It’s not uncommon for siblings to live their entire adult lives together, to share incomes, property, to support, comfort, care for, love and commit to each other. Why should such a couple be denied the societal benefits afforded to other such couples – pension benefits, spousal deductions. That they may or may not be having sex is no one’s business but their own.

Today, Colby Cosh points out that Alberta is proposing new legislation that accomplishes just that.

Alberta: enemy of “traditional marriage”? In today’s National Post I assess an odd claim made earlier this week by Premier Ralph Klein that Canada’s stubborn right-wing province has “probably the most advanced and forward-thinking legislation in the country as it affects gays and lesbians”. Hey, even I can only be so contrarian–the statement is a clear exaggeration if you take “advanced and forward-thinking” in its typical formal meaning (“liberals like it”). But there’s a little-known fact here, squatting in the background of the national gay-marriage debate: Alberta’s mysteriously obscure new law creating civil- union-type arrangements is, in one important respect, more radical than proposed federal law–it extends access to “spousal” benefits to non-conjugal life partners, including unmarried relatives living together. Same-sex activists actually dislike this because it’s too inclusive–its effect is to lump them in with single people in platonic cohabitation. In that sense, they’re serving as defenders of “traditional marriage”, amended so as to cover them, against the country’s broadest regime of practical access to spousal privileges. You can find the details on page A21 of today’s paper.

Good on Ralphie. Serve up the “inclusiveness” they’ve been clamouring for and then stand back and watch the demands for exclusivity roll out.
Nobody does hypocrisy like the left.

Launch Failed?

Military 5 Comments

Against the backdrop of Paul Martin squelching hope in the cattle industry, the MSM has been reporting a “failed” test of the missile defense shield. From Powerline this background information;

The Reuters report by Jim Wolf of a failed missile defense test last night is flawed by either intent or ignorance.

The first test in nearly two years of a multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile shield failed on Wednesday when the interceptor missile shut down as it prepared to launch in the central Pacific, the Pentagon said.

The interceptor missile did not shut down because of some malfunction, it was shut down intentionally because of inability to monitor performance of a boost stage rocket detected during pre-launch system checks. The boost stage might have been set to work properly or it might not have, but a test of this magnitude and expense demands ability to monitor all mission critical systems so that all necessary data is available for post-mission review. When it became clear that this would not be the case, the mission was scrubbed, not failed.
[…]
The MSM will continue to denounce missile defense as impossible–I think they’ve given up on the argument that it would be “destabilizing”–right up to the moment when it is successfully deployed.

That’s the usual pattern.

Embrace Hollywood

Embrace Hollywood 12 Comments

“Democrats need to embrace Hollywood because this is where they need to come to learn how to tell a story.” – Michael Moore*

I recognize your face
Standing in precisely the same place
Mouthing the same hypocrisy
About preserving democracy
And keeping the people safe.
So four million killed in Korea and
Two million more in the Vietnam war
We feel so secure
Let’s keep our bloodlines pure.
I recognize your face
And I recall your name,
Your daddy killed for oil
And you did the same,
Then you used my country’s flag
To wipe your greasy hands
Wrapped in stars and stripes you dropped
Million dollar bombs on distant lands.
Now we feel so secure
Let’s keep our bloodlines pure.
I have often wondered how
Hitler played his game
Attacking other nations but always in the name
Of security,
eradicating evil and impurity
Fear is the greatest fascist tool,
The bigger the lie the more people you fool.
But how did Hitler hypnotize a nation?
Like the moral back bone of a population
Took an untimely vacation…
The answer is simple, though still an awful shock
Hitler had his Goering
You have clear channel and Murdoch
And all the moral Lepers
Who white wash mass murder for oil
are every bit as responsible
For the blood spilled on their soil
Maybe if you looked you’d recognize our face
Standing in precisely the same place where Jesus stood
with Gandhi and Martin Luther King
Lifting our voices above the den of your drums we sing:
“From your corporate grip we shall be released
How long? Not long!
We are the people united and strong
And all of us want peace,
All of us want peace!”
— Woody Harrelson

Reader Tips

December 15, 2004

Reader Tips No Comments

I spent much of the day in the paint booth, working hard on a headache – due more to ingestion of chocolates and Christmas cookies than inhalation of solvents. Not a lot of energy for blogging, so I’ll pass along these reader tips.
A round up of links on the Spirit of America tour featuring Iraqi bloggers Mohammed and Omar Fadhil. Lots of new stuff.
Toronto Sun;

A VETERAN Toronto cop blasted Canada’s immigration system yesterday after the weekend arrest of a twice-deported career criminal. “To me, the fact this guy should have been deported from this country a long time ago says a lot,” Det.-Sgt. Wilf Townley said. “This isn’t the only (case). There’s lots of other ones.
“They should be getting rid of these people. How does somebody get out on a bond who’s committed 27 criminal offences in this country?

Rand: “Ways to Cut Support for Radical Islam and Terrorism”. Charles MacDonald notes, “As always, the problem will be telling the moderates from the closet suicide bombers.”
A laundry list of geopolitical predictions from the Washington Times.
Also;

This, of course, is the sad situation in which we now live. A huge majority of Americans and our legislators believe that the federal government may legislate on any topic, at any time, for any reason, period — so long as the legislation does not offend the Bill of Rights. We used to have all the rights contained in the Bill of Rights, plus untold scores of others. Now, as the framers predicted, we have only those rights contained in the Bill of Rights. This is a disaster, not a blessing.

In Canada, it was the intent.
While Chretien fiddled, subs rusted. “Total bullshit news. Total bullshit.” cries the forlorn vestigial twin. He’s also been asked by the Post to write “1,000 words on Chr�tien’s amazing legacy. “ None of them “sponsorship”, as it turns out.
Thanks to Charles Macdonald, Craig Bett, King Richard the Rednec, and others.

Parody Under Threat

December 15, 2004

Moonbats 5 Comments

Global warming is threatening the future of parody.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) – Severe weather caused by global warming can pose greater physical danger to women than men, a Canadian attending a UN conference on climate change said Friday.
“For instance, often women don’t know how to swim, so in a flood situation that can lead to a higher instance of death or injury,” Angie Daze, a program manager with a Canadian group called Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change, said.

Angie Daze? Figures.
Via Craig Brett.

Ignoring China

December 14, 2004