September 30, 2005
Disengaged?
Mark Steyn agrees with David Frum that Israel's recent Gaza disengagement had something to do with "[Sharon] calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states[.] By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth."
I propose that the disengagement had more to do with nukes. "Israel "will not live under the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb.": Washington Times
Israel is facing an imminent existential threat from Teheran. Palestinian statehood be damned - Hostilities with Iran and its axis is looming, given the likelihood that Israel won't blithely stand by as Iran assembles a nuclear arsenal. Iranians have talked openly about burning Tel Aviv. Nigh time to circle the wagons. Preemptively attacking Iran's facilities may mean being drawn into full war with Iran's scion Islamic Jihad (right next door) and who knows whom else.
Was the 'disengagement' about flipping the bird to Chirac and Hussein? Dunno. Perhaps the 'disengagement' was a tactical withdrawal of vulnerable Jewish elements from the line of fire. Israel will also need every ounce of credibility and good will it can muster from the US; not Europe, and definitely not Abbas. That's why the 'disengagement' is so critical at this juncture. Yankees may well need to come to Israel's aid with troops and materiel: An Administration that can point to unilateral good deeds and sacrifice from Jerusalem is more likely to deliver.
Unless, of course, Iran can be convinced that it's in its long term best interest to end its nuclear programme. Or... Israel simply stands down its guard.
... and we'll raid his fridge while he's off!
Dan, there's a twofour of stout in here!
People... While Damian is away, we mice will play. If you've a great link you'd like posted, send it to us at this address: daimnation@ranopt.net
Hearty thanks to Damian for his trust and generosity.
Cheers!
Preserved Killick (AKA Ran)
I'm gone, but my blog isn't
I'm taking yet another trip to Halifax to see Carla this weekend, and then I have to travel up the Northern Peninsula for some court appearances. So I likely won't be able to post again until Thursday at the earliest.
But this time, instead of letting the site lie fallow for a week, I've invited some friends, readers and bloggers to guest-post here while I'm gone. If Andrew Sullivan and InstaPundit can do it, why not me? See you next week.
Who misses the CBC?
Claire Hoy, who once co-hosted a Newsworld version of Crossfire with Judy Rebick, doesn't:
Heritage Minister Liza Frulla, a CBC cheerleader - and you thought the CBC had an “arm’s length relationship” with the government (hah!) – told a rally of about 500 locked out CBC workers from Toronto, Sudbury and Ottawa on Parliament Hill that cabinet ministers are definitely feeling the heat from the “public” to demand a negotiated end to the lockout.
Nonsense. From certain elites, yes. But ask yourself: has the CBC lockout really changed your life? Or have you, like most Canadians, barely noticed?
If there is any real urgency in getting the thing settled, it has nothing to do with all the exaggerated rhetoric about the importance of the CBC to Canada’s psyche, and everything to do with the fact that the NHL is about to restart after missing an entire season.
As much as the elites want you to believe that we couldn’t survive as a country without this publicly-funded network, the one program which Canadians do watch in huge numbers is Hockey Night in Canada.
Personally, I find myself missing CBC Radio One, which features a lot of news programming (especially The World at Six, As it Happens and my local morning show) to which I listen quite often. But the lockout hasn't affected my TV viewing habits one bit.
Week 4
Will I break the .500 mark this week? Here goes nuthin':
Buffalo at New Orleans
Denver at Jacksonville
Detroit at Tampa Bay - upset special. Joey Harrington knows his job depends on a decent performance in this one.
Houston at Cincinnati
Indianapolis at Tennessee
San Diego at New England - you don't bet against a dynasty.
Seattle at Washington
St. Louis at N.Y. Giants
N.Y. Jets at Baltimore - as a Bears fan, I can relate to a team losing its starting QB to injury every freakin' year.
Dallas at Oakland
Minnesota at Atlanta
Philadelphia at Kansas City
San Francisco at Arizona
Green Bay at Carolina
Laptops for the poor
This sounds pretty neat:
The world’s least sophisticated laptop computer was announced yesterday — and it runs by clockwork.
The machine, which will cost less than $100 (£56), is not aimed at the cutting edge of corporate calculation but instead is destined for the poor of the planet.
The inventor of the robust laptop hopes to distribute it to tens of millions of children throughout the developing world, helping to bridge the information gap between rich and poor.
One of its most useful features, the clockwork hand-crank, is based on the wind-up radio invented in Britain by Trevor Baylis more than a decade ago.
Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, believes that his cheap learning aid will be virtually indestructible. The idea came to him after he visited Cambodia and saw the effect that donated computers had on children.
[...]
Professor Negroponte said that his computer’s retractable crank can be used to generate about ten minutes of power for every minute of winding.
Sponsors of the project include Google, the online search engine, which is working on software that can link several computers to the same central “brain”. Although $100 is a breakthrough price for a laptop, Professor Negroponte is aware that it will still be out of reach for some nations.
September 29, 2005
Roberts in, Hamm out
To no one's surprise, the U.S. Senate has confirmed John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (The margin was 78-22, with the Democrats about evenly split.) In terms of qualifications and intelligence, I've seen nothing which suggests Roberts was anything less than an exemplary nominee. And from a purely political perspective, it's probably the smartest move Bush has ever made - Roberts' opponents had plenty of time to "Bork" him, but they had nothing but fearmongering and innuendo to go with. (Podcast blogger Charlie Quidnunc, by the way, did an excellent job covering this story.)
Meanwhile, Nova Scotia premier John Hamm has announced his retirement after six years in office. The Atlantic Provinces Trial Lawyers Association, of which I am a member, is shedding no tears for his departure, because of the $2,500.00 cap his government placed on general damages for so-called "minor" injuries. Aside from that, I thought he did a pretty good job. Just balancing Nova Scotia's books was quite an achievement, as was running a relatively clean government in a province notorious for political corruption, even by Atlantic Canadian standards.
While in office, Hamm presided over a scandal-free government that frequently boasted about its prudent fiscal management.
On Wednesday, the province posted a $165-million surplus for the 2004-2005 budget year.
[...]
With his departure, Hamm becomes the first Nova Scotia premier in a generation to leave office without a cloud of controversy hanging over his head or angry voters pressing for change.
Liberal Russell MacLellan, Conservative Donald Cameron and Liberal Gerald Regan were all voted out of office.
Conservative John Buchanan was appointed to the Senate as scandal swamped his government. Liberal John Savage was ousted by his own party.
Dissent stifled
...at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania:
On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.
According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.
(When contacted, Ms. Owens did acknowledge that the meeting took place, but refused to answer any questions about what transpired. She did not deny the account of the students.)
Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.
Hunting terrorists, hunting terrorists, hunting terrorists, hunting terrorists. Am I being "offensive" now?
(via Andrew Sullivan)
Osama the asylum-seeker
In 1995, Osama bin Laden had his British followers look into whether he could move to the UK:
He claims to hate everything the West stands for. But yesterday it emerged that Osama bin Laden sought asylum in Britain even as he was planning the September 11 attacks on the US.
The al-Qaeda leader wanted to abandon his base in Sudan at the end of 1995 and asked some of his followers in London to sound out whether he would be able to move to Britain.
Michael Howard, who was then Home Secretary, recalls how his aides told him of the asylum request from the Saudi-born militant of whom the world knew little of ten years ago. A number of his brothers and other relatives, all members of the wealthy bin Laden construction empire, owned properties in London by the mid-1990s.
[...]
The astonishing approach to the British authorities happened only months after bin Laden had secretly organised a terror summit in Manila in January 1995 to begin planning how hijackers would turn passenger planes into flying bombs. He called it the “Bojinka plot”, which is Arabic slang for an explosion.
By this time bin Laden had also transferred some of his considerable personal fortune to London for his followers to establish terror cells here and across Europe.
This is my favorite part of the story:
The teenage bin Laden had reportedly toured Europe with his family and became an Arsenal fan, though there is no record of his ever having been to a match at Highbury. [emphasis added]
Power corrupts
Here in Canada, former Liberal MP David Dingwall has stepped down as president of the Royal Canadian Mint:
The man charged with minting Canada's pennies, dimes and loonies has resigned following accusations he was spending too much of that cash on lavish travel, fine dining and costly hospitality.
Opposition MPs were crowing victory after outing the expense reports that prompted former Liberal cabinet minister David Dingwall to step down yesterday as president of the Royal Canadian Mint. Documents indicate Dingwall and top aides racked up expenses of more than $740,000 last year.
Dingwall has also been embroiled in controversy over lobbying for a Toronto pharmaceutical firm.
[...]
In an interview with CTV yesterday, Dingwall said that about half the mint's business is conducted abroad.
"You're not taking a canoe — you're not taking the train to Montreal here," he told CTV.
But the CTV interview ended when Dingwall was asked why — with his $277,000-a-year salary — he charged taxpayers $1.29 for a pack of gum. Dingwall, 53, first elected in 1980 to represent a Cape Breton riding, was defeated in the 1997 election. He then formed his own lobbyist firm before being appointed to the mint by outgoing prime minister Jean Chrétien in 2003.
And down in the States, as you've undoubtedly heard by now, Republican House Leader Tom DeLay has resigned his post following his indictment for alleged campaign financing offences:
Eyeing an opportunity to win back sorely missed congressional seats, Democrats will cast yesterday's indictment of a top Republican in the House of Representatives and the opening of a securities investigation into trading by the Republican majority leader of the Senate as symptoms of widespread corruption within a political party that controls the presidency and both houses of Congress.
A Texas grand jury yesterday indicted the Republican majority leader of the House, Rep. Thomas DeLay, of Texas, and two of his political associates on one count each of conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud. Mr. DeLay, who had been under investigation for a year, declared his innocence at a press conference with reporters and described the indictment as a witch hunt orchestrated by his political enemies on the left.
[...]
It was the second time in a day that a leader of the Republican Party had been tarnished by a cloud of wrongdoing. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday opened a formal investigation into a stock sale by Senator Frist, of Tennessee, according to a Bloomberg News report. Dr. Frist, a potential candidate for president in 2008, sold shares in the hospital operating company founded by his father, HCA Incorporated, one month before a slide in the stock's value. He has not been formally accused of illegal trading.
The Liberals and the Republicans don't have much in common except for the fact that they've both held power for a very, very long time - the Liberals since 1993, and the GOP (in Congress, at least) since 1994. Sadly, no matter how lofty its intentions when it's first elected, almost every political party in every nation succumbs to the temptations of office after a decade or so in power.
You know I believe Canada is long overdue for a new government - and as long as they can keep the Dean/Kos moonbat wing under control, I'll be shedding few tears if the Democrats win back the House and/or Senate in 2006.
IFC shelved
The so-called "International Freedom Center" will not be built at the World Trade Center site after all:
In a story first reported by NY1, Governor George Pataki has cancelled plans to build the controversial International Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site - and representatives of the center say the location change has forced the entire project to be scrapped.
The center had drawn criticism from some 9/11 victims' family members because it would not focus exclusively on the terror attacks. Family members also said the IFC could potentially contain exhibits that were anti-American.
Pataki said Wednesday that he's given the center a chance to clarify its intentions, but there's just too much opposition.
In a statement, Pataki said: “The creation of an institution that would show the world our unity and our resolve to preserve freedom in the wake of the horrific attacks is a noble pursuit. But freedom should unify us. This center has not.”
I have no problem, in principle, with a museum like the IFC. I just don't think Ground Zero, the site of a tragedy that shook America (and not just America) to its core, is the right place for it.
(Hat tip: Ranald Hay)
September 28, 2005
TSN.ca turns 10
The Canadian sports channel has set up a special site showing how TSN.ca has evolved over the years. It's really come a long way.
Big changes in Corner Brook
A comprehensive rundown of the Newfoundland municipal election results can be found here. Not surprisingly, Andy Wells was re-elected in St. John's by a 6-1 margin over Ray O'Neill. (As I noted yesterday, if even I would have voted for Wells, you know the election was going to be a blowout.)
Charles Pender, formerly a city councillor, won the mayoral race here in Corner Brook. Five of our six councillors will be new as well. If my snow clearing improves over the next term, I'll vote for all of 'em next time.
Update: Craig Welsh, Ed Hollett and Liam O'Brien have much more.
The SUV bubble bursts
Not surprisingly, expensive gas is making Americans trade in their large SUVs for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Equally unsurprisingly, the American automakers are stuck with lineups heavy on trucks and SUVs, and light on quality economy cars:
Nationally, Toyota Motor Corp. officials say the Corolla, one of the Japanese company's smallest and most fuel-efficient passenger cars, had 8.7 days' supply of inventory at the end of last week. In the industry, inventory of 50 to 60 days' supply is seen as adequate. Honda Motor Co. officials are struggling to keep up with demand for the Civic, of which there is nine days' supply. "Inventories are as low or lower than they've ever been for the Civic," said Sage Marie, a Honda spokesman. "They're basically being bought right off the truck."
Toyota dealers in the D.C. area say they also are seeing an uptick in demand for the smaller vehicles. But the trend isn't as pronounced as in truck-dominated Texas where people who have been buying trucks for years are rushing to get out of them. "Most of the time you come in here and you might have 80 Corollas to choose from," said Dave Reynolds, general sales manager of Jack Taylor's Alexandria Toyota. "Now you come in and you have 20 to choose from."
While small car sales are helping to lift the Japanese automakers, Detroit's General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. are sinking under the weight of large sport-utility vehicles, once the industry's cash cows. The two automakers have reported substantial slides in profits in their North American operations this year, and their bonds have junk status on Wall Street. The interest in small cars has caught the two automakers unprepared, said Dave Healy, an auto industry analyst at Burnham Securities Inc. in New York.
For the Big Three, Healy said, investment followed profit margins. "As long as the SUV segment was doing well, they poured money into that and neglected small cars," Healy said. "At that time you could have made a very good case that it was giving the public what it wants."
Over the next couple of years, look for automakers to bring in smaller vehicles already available in Europe and Japan, like the Ford Fiesta, VW Polo, Toyota Yaris (already sold in Canada as the Echo hatchback) and Mitsubishi Colt.
Sheehan meets a "warmonger"
Some people say Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protests would have been defused had President Bush simply met with her in Crawford (never mind the fact, of course, that he did meet with her the year before). But after her meeting with John McCain, I think it's fair to say she would have deemed the meeting "unsatisfactory" and continued protesting:
Peace mom Cindy Sheehan didn't change her opposition to the war in Iraq after meeting Tuesday with one of its supporters, Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam veteran whom she called "a warmonger."
Sheehan thanked McCain for meeting with her, but she came away disappointed.
"He tried to tell us what George Bush would have said," Sheehan, who protested at the president's Texas home over the summer, told reporters. "I don't believe he believes what he was telling me."
McCain, R-Ariz., also seemed disappointed in the meeting, which he said had been misrepresented as including some of his constituents. Only one person in her small delegation has ties to the state, and that person no longer lives there.
The two exchanged views about the war, and McCain described the conversation as "a rehash" of opinions already well known. He said he might not have met with Sheehan had he known none of his constituents was in the group.
[...]
"He is a warmonger, and I'm not," Sheehan said after meeting with McCain. "I believe this war is not keeping America safer."
"She's entitled to her opinion," McCain said. "We just have fundamental disagreements."
Nice work if you can get it
Former Liberal MP David Dingwall, now president of the Royal Canadian Mint, racked up office expenses of over $740,000.00 in 2004:
Included were over $130,000 in foreign and domestic travel, $14,000 in meals and $11,000 in hospitality. The mint also appears to have picked up a $1,400 tab for Dingwall's membership in an Ottawa-area golf club, and $1,500 in membership fees in the Nova Scotia barristers' society.
Documents outlining the spending were obtained under the Access to Information Act by Conservative MP Brian Pallister. He believes that Dingwall, a former Liberal cabinet minister, owes the public an explanation.
"It's kind of shocking," Pallister said in an interview Tuesday. "This is a continuation of an unfortunate trend among Liberal patronppointees to show relatively little respect for the people who pay their bills."
[...]
The total expenses of $747,000 for the president's office in 2004 include many items that are clearly routine and not tied directly to Dingwall.
Among them are freight charges, telephone bills, office supplies and promotional payments.
In other cases, however, the spending can be traced to Dingwall and two of his senior aides, Gloria McArter and Nancy Bleses.
Their bills for foreign travel ran over $91,000 last year, while domestic travel was pegged at over $39,000.
By contrast, the bills for meals eaten abroad were a relatively modest $3,300, compared to $11,100 for domestic restaurant bills.
Among the latter was a $5,300 tab that appeared to have been spent on a single sitting billed to McArter's name. No details were provided on how many people attended.
The golf membership was at the posh Rivermead club, just across the Ottawa River in Aylmer, Que., a favourite hangout for the capital's political and business elite.
September 27, 2005
Where the Stasi agents went
To Germany's fourth-largest political party:
Germany's new Left party, which could play a crucial role in deciding the next chancellor, faced acute embarrassment yesterday amid claims that at least seven of its MPs had collaborated with the Stasi, the East German secret police.
The head of Germany's state-held Stasi archive, Marianne Birthler, said she had documents to prove the MPs had worked as "inoffizielle mitarbeiter" (unofficial collaborators). The public had a right to know which MPs had collaborated, she said, adding: "It's a question of trust."
The revelation came as the Left party held its first meeting as a parliamentary group after Sunday's inconclusive general election. It is made up of members from the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to East Germany's Communist party, and a new west German leftwing alliance, the Workers and Social Justice party. It won 8.7% of the vote, coming second in eastern Germany.
Stephenville under siege
As if that town didn't already have enough problems these days, a State of Emergency has been declared because of heavy flooding.
I just hope everyone wasn't moved into the local arena (called the "Stephenville Dome", even though it isn't, strictly speaking, a dome).
Update: photos here.
Don Adams's final gift to gag writers
It's usually unbecoming to make light of someone's death, but many bloggers have been unable to resist jokes, puns, parodies and plenty of Get Smart and Inspector Gadget references in their posts on the death of Don Adams. I think Adams would have liked it, actually:
- "KAOS Won"
- "Sorry about that, Chief"
- "The Cone of Silence has descended"
- "The eternal cone of silence"
- "We'll Miss Him By THAT Much"
- "Go Go Gadget Grave"
- "86 is 86'd"
- "The originator of KAOS theory"
(all links found via Technorati, where "Don Adams" is the ninth most-popular search query)
Who can predict this crazy game?
My record for Week 3 of the NFL season: 7-7. Sadly, that's my best week yet.
How can anyone know what's really going to happen, in a league in which the Panthers can beat last year's champion and subsequently lose to last year's worst team?
America's Jenin, continued
In Jenin, the media's anti-Israel prejudices led to reports of a "massacre" where none existed. In New Orleans three years later - perhaps from a combination of sensationalism, latent anti-Black racism and not-so-latent Bush-hatred - the media got it completely wrong again:
Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.
The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports.
"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Bush said Monday of the Superdome.
His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified "rapes," and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of "scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."
Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
Unfortunately, just as many people continue to insist that thousands of Palestinians were butchered at Jenin, the most outrageous reports from Hurricane Katrina - that the levees were deliberately blown up, that babies were raped and bodies stacked in freezers at the Superdome, that victims resorted to cannibalism - may never really die. Believing the worst, especially when it fits your political belief system, seems to be human nature.
(That goes for bloggers from all over the political spectrum, including myself, as well. With a few brave exceptions, we didn't approach the Katrina reports with the skepticism we dedicated to, say, the Bush/National Guard story.)
Update: speaking of the Bush/National Guard story, Mary Mapes is still deep, deep in denial.
Election day
Municipal elections across Newfoundland are being held today. There are four candidiates for mayor here in Corner Brook - one of them, Neville Greeley, is an acquaintance of mine, so that's who I'll be voting for.
Craig Welsh, who I knew a little back in my university days, has a pretty good summary of the St. John's election. If I were still living back there, I'd probably have no choice but to hold my nose and vote to re-elect legendary asshole Andy Wells for mayor - partly because the city is doing pretty well these days, and partly because his only competitor, Ray O'Neill, is insane. Literally:
...I do wish I was back in town covering the St. John's City Council election. Because there is nothing more fun than an election when you're a journalist. And municipal elections tend to be the most fun of all because, as Rick Mercer once wisely pointed out, anyone who runs for town council is normally a bit touched in the head.
I mean that stuff with Ray O'Neill vandalizing the campaign posters of Doc O'Keefe? Priceless. Especially since:
A. He got caught. No one gets caught vandalizing campaign posters.
B. He's not running against O'Keefe
C. He spelt "liar" wrong.
Quote of the Day
Christopher Hitchens on this past weekend's "anti-war" protests:
Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh.
September 26, 2005
The 9/11 conspirozoids go to Washington
The Congressional Black Caucus hosted a panel featuring some of the more prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorists at its annual conference last week. No prizes for guessing who moderated it:
The terms "brain trust" and "Cynthia McKinney" do not roll off the tongue like "peanut butter and jelly." But that's how the press release advertised a series of "Brain Trust" panels moderated by Rep. McKinney this past weekend at the Congressional Black Caucus's annual legislative conference. The topic: "The 9/11 Omission: Did the Commission Get it Wrong?"
For the September 23rd meeting at the Washington Convention Center, McKinney assembled three teams of panelists to tackle issues related to "The Road to 9/11," "The Road Since 9/11," and "What the Commissioners Chose to Ignore." After each panelist addressed the 50 or 60 members of the audience, they were questioned by three experts from the "9/11 community," a group dedicated to exposing the government's malfeasance in regards to the terrorist attacks.
[...]
Wayne Madsen, author of the Wayne Madsen Report, was one of three questioners of the panelists. His hatred of all things George W. Bush, and love of all things conspiratorial, almost rises to self-parody. In a November, 2002 article in CounterPunch, a progressive newsletter, he had this convoluted analysis of Karl Rove's role in McKinney's reelection campaign:
Undoubtedly, Rove was also behind the campaign to "get" Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney who was the first nationally-known politician to question what Bush may have known beforehand about 9-11. She was defeated by a former Republican state judge who had supported the wacky Alan Keyes for President in 2000. Never mind, McKinney was "less with Bush" than Keyes, so it was more important to get McKinney who was "more against" Bush.
Michael Ruppert, the grand-daddy of all conspiracy theorists was also a questioner. Ruppert has long made waves in conspiracy theory circles, claiming, for instance, that the CIA was responsible for flooding America's inner cities with drugs in the 1970s and beyond. According to the biography supplied at the conference, he has spent the last several years as "the point man in breaking major stories involving government foreknowledge [of 9/11], corruption and violations of the Constitution."
The panelists were of a similar bent. One of the featured speakers was David Ray Griffin. He spent his allotted time informing the audience that the Twin Towers collapsed not because two planes loaded down with jet fuel smashed into them at hundreds of miles per hour. Rather, a series of timed detonations brought down the buildings. Detonations placed by the government. "Hmm," the crowd murmured knowingly.
Ward Churchill showed up, too.
It never ceases to amaze me, how America's eeeeeevil fascist Jew...er, Zionist-dominated government supposedly stifles all dissent but somehow can't prevent those who know the truth from speaking out through conferences, videos and countless websites. Only one logical conclusion can be drawn: McKinney, Ruppert and Griffin are actually government-sponsored disinformation specialists, programmed to throw independent thinkers off the trail of those who really run everything. (Namely, the Lizard Men.)
Agent 86, R.I.P.
Don Adams, star of Get Smart - a show that holds up astonishingly well over 30 years after it aired - has passed away at age 82.
A theatrical remake of Get Smart is set for release in 2006, starring Steve Carrell as Maxwell Smart. Carrell is a great comic actor - he's terrific in the U.S. version of The Office, a show that has improved considerably since its debut - but it's almost impossible to imagine anyone but Adams in the role.
TV Guide
- If the ratings are any indication, not many of you listened to my demand that you watch Arrested Development last Monday. You have another chance tonight. If you don't, I'm grounding you.
- last night's Simpsons wasn't the proverbial Worst Episode Ever, but you know things are getting pretty bad when Ralph Wiggum has been reduced to making poop jokes, and they're using pretty much the same plot - Homer and Marge separate - two weeks in a row. Is anyone else, like me, just watching this show out of pure habit right now? (Milhouse's dad did have one great line: "unlike the breakup, this is not your fault.")
- Jim Tracher noticed some important clues in the Lost season premiere:
Hello, fellow Lost nerds. So Desmond, the dude in That '70s Bunker, was doing a crazy painting on the wall with the number 108 several times...
4 + 8 + 15 + 16 + 23 + 42 = 108!
But it gets ever creepier:
Cost of Matthew Fox's flashback wig: $1.08
52 (Locke's age) + 56 (Kate's IQ) = 108
Evangeline Lilly's daily caloric intake: 108
Average number of lines given to the main characters other than Jack, Kate, and Locke: 1.08
Jack's dad's BAC%: .108
Number of seconds I spent writing this: 108
They get a little embarassed when this happens, right?
A revealing moment at an "anti-war" rally in San Diego:
JAMAL KANJ, a fiery Palestinian from a group called Al-Awda, takes the podium. “We Palestinians,” he begins, “have been subjected to GENOCIDE at the hands of the Israelis for generations." He rants on. "In 1948, they forced us out of our homes, and today we must DRIVE THE JEWS FROM PALESTINE!”
This proved to be too much even for some of the other protestors. Meanwhile, LGF has a photo gallery from the L.A. march. ("Cure War, Go Vegan")
New developments in the most important story on earth
Ashton and Demi finally got married.
Hey, if they really love each other, more power to them. (As more than one commentator has pointed out, no one would bat an eye if he was 42 and she was 27.)
Revolt from within
I just read a blog post titled "Can anybody tell me why the GOP should be in charge?" which partly reads as follows:
[Columns] expose a Republican Party - at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue - that has cast aside principles in an effort to buy votes. At some point, conservatives probably will realize that the long-term interests of the nation are best served by a GOP defeat. Can anyone suggest another approach to cleanse the ideological corruption that infests the Republican Party?
A pop quiz: which blog featured this post?
A) Daily Kos
B) Atrios
C) Andrew Sullivan
D) Townhall.com's "C-Log"
Answer here.
America's Jenin
Officials in New Orleans expected to find hundreds of bodies at the Superdome and Convention Center. They found ten, making this one of the least successful examples of ethnic cleansing in history:
After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
The media, and many commentators, were prepared to believe the worst about the people holed up at the Superdome - partly because it would sell newspapers, and partly because it would give them more dead bodies to lay at the feet of the evil Dubya. As word gets out that the worst horror stories were exagerrated rumours, just watch as the same people say they were promoted by racist conservatives trying to make black people look bad.
September 25, 2005
Worse than Adscam?
That's what Peter MacKay saying about the gun registry:
Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser's "Canadian Firearms Program" audit which is scheduled to be released in February -- if we're not in the midst of a federal election campaign.
Fraser isn't doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.
The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.
"The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed," Fraser wrote at the time.
Originally expected to be self-financing by 1999-2000, Fraser and her auditors discovered the target for the firearms program to break even was pushed to 2013 -- an assumption that the program collect $419 million in fees in 2002-03 and about $828 million by 2007-08.
Deputy Conservative Leader Peter MacKay predicts years from now it will be discovered that the gun registry will be an "even bigger fraud on the public purse than the sponsorship scandal."
"It will be like dime-store shoplifting when one starts to compare the money that was involved in this gun registry that's unaccounted for," MacKay told Sun Media.
My problem with the firearms registry is not so much about philosophical objections to gun control or registration, but about a simple analysis of what we've been getting for our money. With the untold millions of dollars spent on gun registration, how many police officers could have been hired, how many more prisons could have been built, and how many more improvements could have been made to an overburdened court system? And what would have done more to reduce violent crime?
Experts debate global warming
Prof. Streisand says more and more people (who need people, presumably) are going to die from global-warming-enhanced hurricanes:
This summer's back to back superstorms are proof positive we have entered a new period of "global warming emergency," artist/citizen Barbra Streisand warns.
Streisand is back on the scene to promote her reunion disc with Barry Gibb.
As hellstorm "Rita" churned in the Gulf, Streisand sat down for a promotional interview with ABCNEWS's Diane Sawyer.
"We are in a global warming emergency state, and these storms are going to become more frequent, more intense," Streisand urgently declares.
[...]
Up next on the weather warning watch, Streisand says to ABC: "There could be more droughts, dust bowls. You know, it's amazing to hear these facts."
Other (less famous) professors disagree:
Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday that we're in a period of heightened hurricane activity that could last another decade or two.
"The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations (and) cycles of hurricane activity driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along with the atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming," he testified.
Mayfield's colleague at the National Hurricane Center, meteorologist Chris Landsea, said two recent studies about global warming and hurricanes raise more questions than they answer. He added that the impact of global warming is "minimal for the forseeable future."
Landsea said the studies indicate global warming could increase hurricane wind speeds and rainfall by about 5 percent --100 years from now. But, he added, more study is needed, looking back at historical data and making it more compatible with modern reporting techniques.
[...]
[Colorado State University's William Gray] first sounded the alarm in 1995, noting that the surface waters in the north Atlantic Ocean had warmed slightly. 1995 saw 11 hurricanes and eight tropical storms, the highest tally since 1933.
By 1997, Gray's annual forecasts warned of "a new era" of hurricanes.
He put forth the theory that many climatologists, including Mayfield and Willoughby, now embrace -- that hurricanes are driven by cycles of rising water temperature and salinity that affect the speed of currents in the Atlantic.
The technical name for the engine driving the hurricane cycles is the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO for short. It can cause droughts in the West and hatch hurricanes in the East.
"This cycle has been repeating back to the Ice Age," Willoughby said. "It's related to changes in the ocean currents that move heat northward. If it's fast, we get a lot of hurricanes."
Well, the wheels came off that bandwagon pretty quickly
With ten minutes left in the third quarter, Kyle Orton just threw his fifth interception. (That the Bengals are only leading 10-0 is a testament to the Bears' outstanding defence.)
Update: final score: Bengals 24, Bears 7. The Bengals became the first team in 34 years to pick up 5 interceptions in consecutive games.
Cincinnati is notorious for first-round draft picks that don't work out, but Carson Palmer is looking like the real thing. And for what he's done with this perenially dysfunctional franchise, Marvin Lewis has to be considered the best coach in the NFL. Mark Oct. 23 on your calendar: that's when the Bengals take on the Steelers (who lost to New England on yet another Adam Vinateri last-second field goal today).
After 1,813 days, a new champion
I always figured Kimi Raikkonen would be driver to finally dethrone Michael Schumacher as F1 champion, or maybe Juan Pablo Montoya. Or possibly Jenson Button, or even the inconsistent but very quick Felipe Massa. But Fernando Alonso? A good driver, to be sure, but I certainly didn't think he'd win the title before the likes of Raikonnen.
Which shows you I'm not much better at making F1 predictions than I am at predicting the outcome of NFL games. With a third-place finish (behind Montoya and Raikonnen) at Interlagos this afternoon, Alonso clinched the championship Schumacher had held, according to the Speed Channel commentators, for 1,813 days.
Spain has produced some great rally and motorcycle racers, but no F1 champion until Alonso - also the youngest champ ever - came along. Schumacher is the greatest driver of all time, but it's about time somebody beat him. (In fact, after Montoya's win today, Schuey is now fourth in the standings with two races left.)
Why does GM give up so easily?
I want to get at least another winter out of my snow tires, so I'm not planning to trade in my car until next spring at the earliest. But I did take a Chevy Cobalt for a test drive yesterday, and you know what? It's not bad - a lot better than I was expecting, actually. There's more than adequate power (140 hp), the 5-speed transmission feels nice, and there's plenty of room. Best of all are the handling and steering, which are remarkably good for a GM compact car. Yes, the ride is jittery, but you don't expect a smooth ride in an economy car, and I'd gladly give up ride quality for better handling.
So, when the time comes to trade in my Mazda, will I be buying the Chevrolet? Probably not, because compared with the Mazda 3 or Honda Civic, it's so easy to see where GM cut corners. The interior quality is shockingly bad - the dashboard is made of absolutely hideous hard plastic, the shift knob looks and feels like a child's rubber ball, and the seats, though supportive, are covered with cheap, slippery fabric. It simply doesn't feel like a nice place to spend a long drive, especially compared with the new Mazda. Even the Korean-built Chevy Optra5 (sold as the Lacetti in Britain and the Suzuki Reno in the States) has a more pleasant interior.
The frustrating thing about the Cobalt is that it could have been a truly great small car had GM put just a little more effort into designing the interior, but in the end you can tell that some accountant decided it was more important to save fifty bucks per car, since the rubes will never know the difference anyway. Whereas Honda, Mazda and Toyota believe the person who buys a good small car today will buy one of their larger cars or SUVs in a few years, GM seems to put out its small cars as afterthoughts for people who can't be convinced to buy TrailBlazers. I'm sure they'll improve the car with time, but by then it will be too late.
It shouldn't be too hard, guys. Just buy a fleet of Japanese small cars, take them apart and either buy your materials from the same suppliers, or get your suppliers to make them to the same specifications. "Good enough" isn't good enough.
30 days of corruption
Blogger Toronto Tory says he's going to "post an example of a company or individual who has an unethical relationship with Paul Martin, and/or the Liberal party of Canada/Ontario" every day for the next month.
I don't think he's going to be short of material.
September 24, 2005
No excuses
A member of the so-called "Jewish Defence League" just got twenty years for his part in a failed bombing plot against a mosque and a Lebanese-American Congressman. As a contributor at Harry's Place notes, the ADL has issued a full, unconditional condemnation - no weasel words about opposing terrorism against "innocent people", wink wink - and no mainstream Jewish groups or pro-Israel bloggers are coming forward to defend or make excuses for the guy.
Imagine that!
Live from Hurricane Rita
Laurence Simon has stayed in Houston (which, thankfully, has been spared a direct hit) and is live-blogging the storm.
Just before Rita struck, but after it had been downgraded, Simon ran into someone who said the massive evacuation was a hoax so the Bush Administration could sell more gas. Hurricanes can destroy entire cities, but they can't blow away moonbattery.
Week 3
This time around, I'm not letting any coin make a fool out of me. No way.
Cincinnati at Chicago - but if Da Bears can shut down the league's hottest offence - yes, the Bengals have the league's hottest offence - we may as well give them the NFC North right now.
Atlanta at Buffalo - upset special, mainly because of Vick's injuries.
Cleveland at Indianapolis
Tampa Bay at Green Bay
Jacksonville at NY Jets
Oakland at Philadelphia
Tennessee at St. Louis
Carolina at Miami
New Orleans at Minnesota - the Vikes' problems go a lot deeper than the absence of Randy Moss.
Arizona at Seattle - upset special #2. You wouldn't know it from the Cards' 0-2 record, but Kurt Warner ranks 4th in passing yardage so far this season.
Dallas at San Francisco
New England at Pittsburgh - will we see the mighty Patriots lose two in a row? I think we will.
NY Giants at San Diego - I don't believe the Giants are really that good, nor that the Chargers are really that bad.
Kansas City at Denver
September 23, 2005
What would Jesus do?
Probably not this:
A 14-year-old student was expelled from a Christian school because her parents are lesbians, the school's superintendent said in a letter.
Shay Clark was expelled from Ontario Christian School on Thursday.
"Your family does not meet the policies of admission," Superintendent Leonard Stob wrote to Tina Clark, the girl's biological mother.
Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices "immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship," The Los Angeles Times reported in Friday's edition.
Stob could not be reached for comment by the newspaper. Shay and her parents said they won't fight the ruling. (emphasis added)
Les Gangstas Francaises
In America, radical rappers and punk bands at least pay lip service to supporting freedom of expression, even though most of them would have people like me lined up against the wall and shot in the unlikely event they ever took power. So I'll give the French rap group "Sniper" some credit - they're honest enough to admit they don't believe in freedom of expression:
During the mid-1990s, rap entered the mainstream of French popular culture. Since then, some of the most successful groups in French pop music have been rap bands made up mostly of French citizens of Arab or African descent. Among the most popular is NTM (which stands for Nique ta mère, "F--your mother"), a Sony Records group. NTM is famous for lyrics which attack France and especially the police. During a concert in 1995, NTM sang: "I f--the police, I sodomize and pee on the law! Our enemies are the men in blue" (French cops wear blue uniforms). This outburst earned NTM members a three-month prison sentence, later commuted to a fine (though NTM member Joey Starr has been in and out of prison for 15 years for drugs, assault, weapons charges, domestic-abuse, and for spitting on police).
By contrast, the popular rap band Sniper was recently handed a victory in a legal action brought against them in 2004 by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy over incitement to violence and hatred in their song "La France." They sing: "We're all hot for a mission to exterminate the government and the fascists. . . . France is a bitch and we've been betrayed. . . . We f--France, we don't care about the Republic and freedom of speech. We should change the laws so we can see Arabs and Blacks in power in the Elysée Palace. Things have to explode."
But the kingpin of rapping French Francophobes is Mr. R. In his latest single--entitled "FranSSe," from the March 2005 album "PolitiKment IncorreKt"--he likens France to the Third Reich, singing: "France is a bitch, don't forget to f--her to exhaustion. You have to treat her like a whore, man! . . . France is one of the bitches who gave birth to you. . . . I am not at home and I don't give a damn, and besides the state can go f--itself. . . . I pee on Napoleon and General De Gaulle. . . . My niggers and my Arabs, our playground is the street with the most guns. . . . F--ing cops, sons of whores. . . . France is a lousy mother who abandoned her sons on the sidewalk. . . . My Muslim brothers are hated like my Jewish brothers were during the Reich"--at which point Mr. R's video shows footage of Hitler and of Nazi concentration camps.
The video borders on pornography. It shows violent acts supposedly committed by the French Army. France is represented by two naked white women called "Gauloises" (a reference to the ancient inhabitants of France) who perform lewd acts with the French flag while a group of blacks make an obscene gesture. As a disclaimer Mr. R says, "When I speak of France, I don't mean the French people but their leaders. They've been exploiting us for a long time, from slavery to colonization, and they're still jerking us around." Tellingly, in the last words of the song, "France" is replaced by "Europe": "Europe is a bitch, don't forget to f--her to exhaustion. You have to treat her like a whore, man!"--which suggests that the rapper's grievances extend past France to include much of the West. [emphasis added]
The French love American "dissidents" like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Noam Chomsky, so it's tempting to snicker at the likes of "Mr. R" giving them a taste of their own medicine. But in the end, if it comes down to a choice between a liberal democracy - a hypocritical, occasionally infurating democracy, but a democracy nonetheless - and a mob of Marxist, Islamofascist and nihilist thugs, there's no doubt about which side I'll be on.
Another symbol of a failed revolution
So, what nation has the highest rate of opiate addicts on earth? The United States, with its blighted inner-city ghettos? Holland, where drug use is tolerated? Guess again:
According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2005, Iran has the highest proportion of opiate addicts in the world -- 2.8 percent of the population over age 15. Only two other countries -- Mauritius and Kyrgyzstan -- pass the 2 percent mark. With a population of about 70 million and some government agencies putting the number of regular users close to 4 million, Iran has no real competition as world leader in per capita addiction to opiates, including heroin.
When an earthquake leveled the city of Bam in 2003, among the emergency supplies rushed to the scene were doses of methadone, a synthetic drug used to treat heroin and morphine addicts, for the 20 percent or more of the population believed to be addicted. So many Iranians rely on opiates that an influential government analyst suggests the state itself should consider cultivating poppies.
[...]
For many young people in Iran, one reality of everyday life is powerful boredom. Though rules enforcing Muslim dress have been relaxed in the past three years, there is little to do, even in a city of about 10 million. The stillness of a Tehran street on a weekend day is almost sepulchral.
"People here can't have a drink in the pub. The young people can't go to a music club," said Bijan Nasirimanesh, director of Persepolis, a drop-in center for drug addicts. "You have the paradox in this country of, coming at you from inside, everything is totally religious, and from outside, MTV and Western culture."
Located in an alley in Tehran's southern plain, Persepolis serves the capital's most hard-core addicts in its poorest neighborhood, a gray warren of shops, garages and rowhouses. Among the dozens of former heroin addicts milling in the lobby one morning was Davood Safdari, who said he used to be a dealer.
"I never had to go to anyone," he said. "Everyone found me."
Bahman Akbarizadeh, 25, wore a gray shirt and an intense look. "I think if people had hope and entertainment in their life, they would never go to heroin, because they know the risks."
The youth of Iran are fed up - and the country's population is getting younger and younger every year. Eventually, something has to give.
Meow!
Jenny, from idontlikeyouinthatway.com, on Cameron Diaz complaining about photographers at a press conference:
She was a press conference, for chrissakes. Did she think the press would leave the cameras at home and draw caricatures or mold her likeness out of play dough instead? Cameron is one of the most punchable celebrities in Hollywood. She's an overpaid, overrated, lacklustre actress who is completely average in practically every way. And when her face isn't shellacked with foundation, it looks like the surface of the moon.
Explosion in Texas
Breaking news: a bus carrying evacuees from Hurricane Rita exploded, killing at least one person.
Almost no details yet.
Update: MSNBC says a mechanical problem started the fire, and the explosion was caused by an elderly patient's oxygen tank. Several passengers were saved by the bus driver, but up to 20 people may have been killed.
Spot the difference
A classic example of how you can subtly spin the same story very differently: first, here's The Dai