Why I don't trust newspaper automotive reviews

Robert Farago, who maintains the Truth About Cars website and podcast, savaged the Subaru Aztek B9 Tribeca in a recent review. In response, the San Francisco Chronicle terminated his column.

At least they ran his often-brutal reviews as long as they did, because it's very hard to find truly objective automotive reviews in American and Canadian newspapers. (The situation in Britain, where you have Jeremy Clarkson and James May writing for the Times and Telegraph, respectively, is much better.) The same papers that never hesitate to savage awful movies will print the worst puff pieces about almost any automobile. Car companies buy more ads than movie studios, I guess.

Among North American magazines, I find that Car and Driver has the best car reviews by a wide margin. Automobile isn't bad either, but the automotive testing in Road & Track - which once wouldn't hesitate to thrash a car if it deserved it - has declined precipitously over the last fifteen years or so. (At least they're picking winners of comparison tests these days, which they wouldn't do for much of the nineties.) The less said about Motor Trend or MPH, the better. I've heard some good things about Autoweek, but I've never seen it on a Canadian newsstand.

Europe's race wars

It hasn't been getting nearly as much attention as it would were white youth involved, but the Lozells Road area of Birmingham, England has been rocked in recent weeks by riots and fighting between the Asian (mostly Pakistani) and Black (mostly Afro-Caribbean) immigrant communities:

Maybe his compassion was exhausted, but the reality suggests that Makaveli had always disliked black people. Either way, within hours of arriving from Pakistan after helping survivors of the Asian earthquake, he was brawling with African-Caribbeans on the streets of Birmingham. It felt natural; all his friends agreed with him that these people were the lowest form of humanity.

Here, 23-year-old Isiah Young-Sam was stabbed to death during last Saturday's race riots as he wandered home; the yellow petals are a dark pointer to the new reality of race crime in Britain. The worst riots to afflict Britain's second city for 20 years challenge the most fundamental assumption of multicultural Britain - that racism is principally a white vice. Almost 40 years after Enoch Powell talked of 'rivers of blood' just two miles from where Young-Sam was murdered, a community has broken down. Powell's inflammatory rhetoric warned that immigration would inspire strife, but few predicted that the immigrants would turn on each other. (Hat tip: Mark Collins)

And in a Paris suburb, Muslim immigrant youth have been rioting for four consecutive nights in response to the deaths of two teenagers fleeing from police:

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy defended his tough crime policies on Monday after a fourth night of riots in a Paris suburb in which tear gas was fired into a mosque.

Youths hurled rocks and set fire to cars in the northeastern Clichy-sous-Bois suburb of the French capital, where many immigrants and poor families live in high-rise housing estates notorious for youth violence.
[...]
The Clichy riots were the latest in a series of incidents in the northeastern suburbs that have attracted the attention of Sarkozy and become the target of his vow to get tough on crime.

Sarkozy, who returned as the interior minister in late May, began a new crime offensive this month, ordering specially trained police to tackle 25 problem neighborhoods in cities throughout France. (via LGF)

Unfortunately, with rapidly growing poor, disaffected immigrant communities in both countries - indeed, in most of Western Europe - this is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And it's not like the nations of Europe can cut off immigration altogether, given their declining birth rates. So how can this be stopped? At the very least, Europeans have to get over their reluctance to even discuss the matter, for fear that someone may tag them with the R-word. When the mainstream political parties are too cowed to even talk about ethnic tensions, beyond the usual platitudes about "multiculturalism" and "diversity", that leaves the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the BNP to fill the void.

Halloween bombs

Total number of trick-or-treaters at my door this evening: six. (And, no, they aren't deliberately skipping my house - the street has been completely deserted all night.)

Guess I'm going to have to eat all these bags of chips myself. It's a dirty job, but...

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Alito's dissent in this case, regarding a Pennsylvania law which required a woman to inform her spouse before getting an abortion, is the one everyone will be arguing about. [Correction: my mistake - the link goes to the Supreme Court decision. The Appeals court decision, to which Alito dissented, does not appear to be online.]

I haven't read it yet, but anyone commenting on the case should do so. My first instinct would be to disagree with his decision, but I want to make sure this isn't another "french fry" case, which opponents of Judge Roberts lamely used to portray him as some kind of fascist who'd have little girls arrested for eating chips on the subway. (In reality, Roberts ruled that the constitution gave him no grounds to overturn the law, and specifically pointed out that it wasn't his job to rule on whether the law was right.)

Moreover, even if I don't like this dissent, I'd have to ask whether that one decision should be enough to keep him off the court. If I were looking for a judge who never, ever decided a case the way I didn't like, I'd have a long, lonely wait indeed.

Update: Patterico has a detailed post on Alito's Casey dissent, including a link to the opinion in question. Long story short: Alito did not feel that the plaintiffs established that the provision imposed an "undue burden", in accordance with precedent set down by Judge O'Connor, on the women affected (as opposed to, say, an absolute ban on abortion).

Reason's Julian Sanchez isn't impressed with ThinkProgress' much-blogged anti-Alito talking points. Neither am I.

It's Alito

President Bush has nominated Judge Samuel Alito, an unambiguous conservative from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, for the Supreme Court:

Legal experts consider the 55-year-old Alito so ideologically similar to Justice Antonin Scalia that he has earned the nickname "Scalito."

A Trenton, New Jersey, native, Alito graduated from Princeton in 1972 and earned his law degree from Yale in 1975.
[...]
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid -- a Nevada Democrat who had recommended Miers -- said Sunday he feared Bush would "try to placate the right wing" with his next nominee, "and that's a mistake."

"That is not one of the names that I've suggested to the president," he said. "In fact, I've done the opposite."

I must have overlooked the constitutional provision that gives the Senate Minority Leader the right to pick the nominee. As for Alito, he certainly sounds qualified, but I'd like to learn some more about his past decisions before I decide whether I'd support him. (My goodness, the Americans are actually going to have another debate over whether a nominee to the highest court in the land deserves to be there. Don't they know the enlightened, Canadian way is to leave the decision entirely up to the whims of the Prime Minister?)

Update: the Washington Post has more background:

While he has been dubbed "Scalito" by some lawyers for a supposed affinity to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and his Italian-American heritage, most observers believe that greatly oversimplifies his record.

Rather, liberals are likely to focus on his opinions and dissents, most notably in the 1991 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
[...]
In the area of church and state, Alito has been consistently supportive of the conservative view that the courts should be more accommodating when considering state entanglement with religion. He wrote a majority opinion in ACLU v. Schundler , holding that a city's holiday display that included a creche and menorah did not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it included secular symbols as well, such as Frosty the Snowman.

My default position on appointments to the Supreme Court - on either side of the border - is that if the nominee is experienced and intelligent enough, opponents of the nomination bear the burden of showing me why he or she shouldn't be nominated to the court. (Here in Canada, I wish opponents would at least get that chance.) Certainly, the Post story makes Alito sound much less doctinaire than his detractors (and the CNN story linked above) say, and considering how long the man has been a judge, I'd have to say I'm in favor, at least for now.

Words I never thought I'd write

The Bears are in first place.

It might be the weakest division in the history of American professional sport, but until they change the rules, winning it still gets you into the playoffs.

More reasons to celebrate Halloween

First of all, this jackass is against it:

President Hugo Chavez urged Venezuelan parents not to dress their children in costumes for Halloween, calling it a U.S. custom that has no place in the South American country's cultural traditions.

"Families go and begin to disguise their children as witches," Chavez said. "That is contrary to our ways."
[...]
In one odd incident a week ago, authorities found more than a dozen jack-o'-lanterns left in spots around Caracas bearing anti-government messages and what appeared to be bomb-like fuses. Police and firefighters removed the pumpkins with caution, though the jack-o'-lanterns reportedly bore messages saying they were not explosives.

He said that is part of the U.S. culture -- "terrorism, putting fear into other nations, putting fear into their own people."

Meanwhile, even some child safety advocates are advising overcautious parents to let their kids go out and have some fun:

Halloween can be a parental nightmare, an event that flies in the face of rules in force every other day of the year.

Best, of the University of Delaware, couldn't find a single confirmed case.

More Halloween links for your enjoyment: Halloween urban legends, Retrocrush.com's list of the 100 best horror-movie performances, and a fascinating profile of infamous anti-Halloween evangelist Jack Chick. Don't eat too much candy!

The cursed franchise

Forget the Cubs. I'm convinced that the Minnesota Vikings are the unluckiest franchise in American professional sports.

They lost four Super Bowls in the 1970s. A few years ago, they went 15-1 but lost the NFC championship game. They lost another NFC championship game 41-0. But this year has been in a class of its own: the most explosive wide reciever in football jumped to Oakland ("the Vikings will have an excellent year without a cancer like Moss in the dressing room," I heard people saying before the season started); the team was mired in an embarassing scandal when word about their charter-boat trip got out; the coach is expected to be fired any second now; and to top it all off, Daunte Culpepper hurt his knee in today's humiliating loss to Carolina, and could be out for the rest of the season.

Here's the thing: I remember a Monday-night game in the late 1980s, when the Vikings absolutely pasted Chicago. At one point, a Minnesota player extended his hand to help a Bears player off the ground - and then let go when he was halfway up, sending him tumbling to the ground once again on national television. So while it's normally not in my nature to take pleasure in other people's misery, I'm absolutely loving every minute of this. (Did I mention that the Bears won today?)

If you have anger management problems...

...don't read Little Green Footballs. Here are a few recent items picked up at LGF:

- antisemitic...sorry, "anti-Zionist" Brownshirts at Harvard. (They always seem to come from the universities, don't they?)

- 9/11 conspiracy theorizing, coming soon to the Cartoon Network.

- Australian police are being told to show "sensitivity" to Muslims suspected of beating their wives.

- Muslim students got a "disrespectful" photography exhibit shut down at an Illinois community college. (I'm sure the ACLU and Hollywood will be all over this one any minute now, yessir...)

Good thing the Bears and the Mags won today, because otherwise I'd be in a really pissed-off mood.

Play-Doh for Halloween

If you don't want to give trick-or-treaters candy for Halloween, and toothbrushes and Jack Chick tracts aren't really your style, this is actually a pretty good idea. (If I had bought the Play-Doh instead of little Hershey bars, I might actually still have some left.)

Evil

DogPundit has photos (from Reuters) showing the bodies of the young girls murdered and decapitated by Islamofascist killers in Indonesia. The pictures are extremely graphic and disturbing, and I can understand if you don't want to see them - but I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by refusing to look at what these people are capable of. (via Andrew Sullivan)

Don't tell me it's somehow "simplistic" or "unsophisticated" to use the word "evil" to describe the people, and the repulsive belief system, responsible for something like this. And don't you dare tell me it's somehow my fault because I don't sufficiently understand their religion.

Can the monarchy survive this man?

The Americans haven't been respectful enough of Islam, says the future King of England:

The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11.

Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, was also at the meeting at St James's Palace. "His criticism of America was a general one of the Americans not having the appreciation we have for Islam and its culture," he said.
[...]
Prince Charles has done more than any other member of the Royal Family in history to understand Islam. He said in 1994 that when he became Supreme Governor of the Church of England, he would rather be "defender of faiths" than "defender of the faith".

A senior aide to Prince Charles said yesterday: "The Prince has never promoted political messages around religion. He has simply said that he wants a greater tolerance and understanding of each other religions which will, in turn, promote better relations between faiths."

So here's my question: during his frequent visits with Muslim leaders, does Charles ever chide them for their extremism or poisonous anti-Semitism? Or does he take their hands and tell them that there's absolutely nothing wrong with their beliefs and culture, and that we Westerners aren't enlightened enough to thank them?

There's nothing new about this, by the way. The Middle East Quarterly published an article about Charles' pro-Islamic beliefs in 1997.

Where pigs run free

Michael Totten, blogging from Lebanon, in response to anti-Piglet insanity in Britain:

Look. I’m in Lebanon. Somewhere around 35 or 40 percent of the people who live here are Christian. Except for around 60 Jews, the rest are Muslims. This is a Muslim-majority country. Muslims outnumber Christians approximately two to one. And yet pork – pork – is all over this place. I had a pizza for lunch today. My pizza had ham on it. Not fake halal “ham,” but actual pig meat. The restaurant that served me this pizza is on the Muslim side of the city.

If Muslims in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East can handle pig meat, I think Muslims in Britain can handle plastic piggy banks and The Three Little Pigs. If they can’t handle those things they need to learn how to handle those things. Tolerance is not only for the majority.

Totten proposes a new rule: "anyone who is in a position of power and who will make policies relating to Muslims is first required to visit Muslim countries." Good idea. Thanks to Saudi oil money, far too many "moderate" Muslim groups in the West are fronts for austere, medieval Wahabbi Islam, and it's about time we stopped assuming they speak for all Muslims.

Class

Robert George deserves some kind of award for the way he's composed himself in the face of despicable attacks and cheap shots from the loathsome Steve Gillard (aka the "Sambo" guy).

People like Gillard couldn't hurt the Democrats so badly if they were on Karl Rove's payroll. Hmm...

Hey, let's not jump to conclusions here

BBC News, on the beheading of three teenagers in Indonesia:

Three girls have been beheaded and another badly injured as they walked to a Christian school in Indonesia.

It is unclear what was behind the attack, but the girls attended a private Christian school and one of the heads was left outside a church leading to speculation that it might have had a religious motive. [emphasis added]

(via LGF)

Two messages:

For the rest of the world:

Iran says it has no intention to attack Israel despite a call by its president to have it "wiped off the map".

Iran's foreign ministry said Tehran respected the UN charter and had never used or threatened to use force.

And for domestic consumption:

Ahead of the UN session demanded by Israel, President Ahmadinejad stood by his "just" remarks.

"Westerners are free to comment, but their reactions are invalid."

The war on Halloween

Another school cancels one of childhood's favorite holidays. (The article doesn't say whether it's to avoid offending Christians or Wiccans.)

Week 8

I was 7-7 in Week 7, bringing my season record to 50-52.

Cleveland at Houston - even the Texans have to win sometime (and if they blow this one, they play the Niners on New Year's Day)
Green Bay at Cincinnati
Arizona at Dallas - upset special.
Chicago at Detroit - I'm picking the Lions because they're at home, but I actually think my Bears can win this division, mainly because they're the only team in it that can plausibly be said to be overachieving.
Oakland at Tennessee
Washington at NY Giants - I really didn't think Eli was going to be this good.
Jacksonville at St. Louis
Minnesota at Carolina
Kansas City at San Diego - the Chargers' average margin of defeat this year: one field goal.
Miami at San Antonio Los Angeles New Orleans
Tampa Bay at San Francisco - the Niners might not have the worst record in football, but they are the worst team.
Philadelphia at Denver
Buffalo at New England
Baltimore at Pittsburgh

Walter Duranty lives

America's "paper of record" turns a hero into a victim. Unbelievable. Actually, perfectly believable.

The beginning or the end?

Everyone else is talking about the Scooter Libby indictment, so I guess I have to write something. Andrew Sullivan says things are going to get much, much worse for the Bush Administration, while the Professor (who has a huge roundup of blog reaction at his site) says this is far, far less than we'd been led to expect.

I'm inclined to agree with InstaPundit - the omnipotent Mr. Rove wasn't indicted, though he remains under investigation, and Libby is not charged with "outing" a CIA agent - but really, it's impossible to say for sure. If Libby or anyone else committed a criminal offence, they deserve to be punished, and that's all there is to it. (For obvious reasons, it's disingenuous for Republicans to now say perjury is no big deal.)

This article by Stephen Hayes, from last week's Weekly Standard, puts the Niger uranium controversy in perspective. The indictment itself (which I haven't read yet) is at - where else? - The Smoking Gun.

The case against juries

Interesting that this piece by Tim Cavanaugh appeared at Reason Online, just as this verdict was handed down in a New York courtroom:

A New York jury said the owner of the World Trade Center was legally responsible in the 1993 terrorist bombing that killed six people and injured 1,000.

``This was an extraordinary victory, and we're deeply grateful to the jurors,'' said David Dean, a lawyer for survivors and relatives of those who died ``This case was never about blaming the terrorists. It was always about the failure of the Port Authority to respond to their own reports and to the advice of others. The garage should have been closed.'' (via Silent Running)

I am a lawyer. I know that a business or organization can be held liable if they fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harm from befalling its customers or patrons.

But the key word is "reasonable".

Update: in the comments section, Dara - yes, that Dara - puts it best: "Those damn shooting victims are all 68% responsible for their own deaths too. It was their duty to be wearing bulletproof vests. Irresponsible fools!"

Hey, they were told not to walk around that neighbourhood after dark...

It worked for Ceausescu (for a while, anyway)

"Spontaneous" displays of support for the regime in Iran:

Ramita Navai, Tehran Correspondent for The Times, was among thousands on the streets of the Iranian capital for annual anti-Israel rallies, at which the President continued his inflammatory rhetoric.

"The majority of ordinary Iranians don't really care about Israel - they have enough to worry about at home with a declining economy and high unemployment.

...and in North Korea (where, sadly, some gullible visitors believe the country is "opening up" once again):

The lights dimmed at the May Day stadium and a rapt crowd of 150,000 fell silent at the start of a spectacle considered so important to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that it has merited a rare, if limited, opening to the outside world.

North Korea has creaked open its doors for Arirang, a festival that celebrates national pride and, this year, commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Stalinist state's ruling Workers' Party. Performers, who numbered almost as many as the spectators, won furious applause for their coordinated displays of rhythmic gymnastics, flying acrobatics, traditional dancing and military taekwondo routines -- all synchronized to a massive video and laser light show.
[...]
North Korea has rolled out the red carpet this month in exceptional style. Tour operators, diplomats and analysts describe the gathering of foreigners as the largest since Kim inherited the leadership on the death of his father and North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, in 1994.

Meanwhile, modest economic reforms made in North Korea since 2002 appear to have somewhat eased the country's bitter poverty and once-rampant starvation. That at least seemed true within the relatively affluent capital of Pyongyang, where people look to be well fed, many buildings have been newly refurbished and street vendors are surprisingly outgoing and eager to make sales to foreign visitors.

Hopefully the political careers of Kim and the mullahs will end the same way as Ceausescu's, too.

This is your brain on drugs

Bloated, drug-addled cheater Diego Maradona is a Castro junkie, too:

Argentine soccer hero Diego Maradona promised Cuban President Fidel Castro on Thursday he would be at the front of an anti-Bush march in Argentina next week.

"For me he is a god," Maradona said of the 79-year-old left-wing Cuban leader, whom he considers a friend and a father figure who helped him kick drugs.

Any questions?

Sulu comes out

This has been quite a week for moderately well-known celebrities to publicly admit being gay. First there was Sheryl Swoopes, and now Star Trek's George Takei:

George Takei, who as helmsman Sulu steered the Starship Enterprise through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers, a biweekly Los Angeles magazine covering the gay and lesbian community.

Takei told The Associated Press on Thursday that his new onstage role as psychologist Martin Dysart in “Equus,” helped inspire him to publicly discuss his sexuality.
[...]
The 68-year-old actor said he and his partner, Brad Altman, have been together for 18 years.

I'm cool with it. If Shatner had come out, now, that would have been shocking. (Nothing wrong with it, of course, but shocking nonetheless.)

Aieee! The blogs are coming!

Much of the mainstream media's attitude toward weblogging has been schizophrenic: they sneer that bloggers are insignificant amateurs, while simulataneously warning that unethical, "unprofessional" bloggers have the power to destroy lives and reputations. (Just to cover all their bets, of course, the same MSM outlets have also created their own blogs, to get a piece of the action.)

Like newspapers in the late 19th century which warned against the "horseless carriage" menace, Forbes slanders bloggers as a "lynch mob" in its latest cover story. (Why, bloggers even made up blatantly fake documents in an attempt to bring down the President of the United States. Oh, wait...)

The contrast with, say, the Washington Post - which adds a Technocrati link to its online stories, so readers can see which bloggers are commenting on them - couldn't be more telling. That's why the Post, which seems to get this new medium, will likely still be around in 50 years. I'm not sure we can say the same for Forbes. (Too bad. Like many conservative and libertarian bloggers, I kind of liked Steve Forbes and his magazine up until now.)

BBC readers speak out

A few selections from the "Have Your Say" section of the BBC website, in response to the Iranian President's call for Israel to be "wiped from the map":

Again it shows how religion is the enemy of world peace.

Saying that Israel should be 'wiped off the map' could be interpreted as just saying that there should not be an apartheid Jewish state in the Middle East, it is not necessarily a call to genocide.

Here's the winner:

Iran's Prime minister said "Israel should be wiped off the map". How do we know that he wasn't refering to a peaceful arragement for Isreal to give land back to palistine rather than a violent threat?

Names Named

Paul Volcker's latest oil-for-food report names the individuals, organizations and companies who either bribed or were bribed by Saddam Hussein, including our favorite British MP, Siemens, Lukoil and DaimlerChrysler. (I guess the S-class really is the perennial "dictator's car".)

Saddam Hussein received $1.8 billion in bribes from more than 2,200 companies in the scramble for lucrative contracts under the United Nation's Oil-for-Food programme, investigators claimed today.

Roberto Formigoni, the president of the Lombardi region in Italy, and the Reverend Jean-Marie Benjamin, who once worked as an assistant to the Vatican Secretary of State, are also named.
[...]
Iraq was first allowed to sell limited and then unlimited quantities of oil, provided that most of the money went to buy humanitarian goods. It left Saddam free to choose the buyers of Iraqi oil, and the sellers of humanitarian goods. He manipulated the programme by accepting bribes from favoured buyers and awarding contracts to them.

At the same time, the report says, Iraq gave preferential treatment to France, Russia and China which were perceived to be more favourable to lifting sanctions, and were also permanent members of the Security Council.

The Iraq war's strongest opponents were the oil-for-food program's biggest beneficiaries. Make of that what you will.

If only...

(via the Blogometer)

Who are these people, and how did so many of them get hired by school boards?

The Toronto District School Board is encouraging teachers to cancel Halloween celebrations, for fear that Wiccans and/or immigrant children might be offended:

Teachers should forego traditional classroom Halloween celebrations because they are disrespectful of Wiccans and may cause some children to feel excluded, says a Toronto District School Board memo sent to principals and teachers this week.

For other students, "food products that are marketed heavily during the Halloween period" may conflict with dietary habits that children know from home. An alternative to eating sweets in class would be to "write health warnings for all Halloween candies." [emphasis added]

If I ever move to Toronto, I'm having my kids homeschooled. As usual with this kind of thing, it's not the supposedly offended ethnic or religious groups demanding the cancellation of Halloween, but politically-correct bureaucrats:

Nicole Cooper, a first-degree priestess of the Wiccan Church of Canada's Toronto Temple, agreed. "Frankly, Wiccans are a minority -- an extreme religious minority," she said.

The Halloween celebrations of North American pop culture, she added, are "not actually threatening to my religion anymore than eggs and cute little bunnies are threatening to Easter."

Will the TDSB demand that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny be excised from schools for demeaning sacred Christian holidays? Don't hold your breath.

Update: as one of my readers points out, the ultimate irony here is that the Toronto School Board, in the name of feminism and, um, Wiccan rights, has done exactly what fundamentalist Christians have been trying to do for decades: cancel a "Satanic" holiday. (Go to Google and type in "Jack Chick Halloween".) Once again, the extreme right and the extreme left find themselves on the same side.

You won't have Harriet Miers to kick around anymore

She's officially withdrawn her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to be a Supreme Court justice Thursday in the face of stiff opposition and mounting criticism about her qualifications.

Bush said he reluctantly accepted her decision to withdraw, after weeks of insisting that he did not want her to step down. He blamed her withdrawal on calls in the Senate for the release of internal White House documents that the administration has insisted were protected by executive privilege.

I'm sure Miers is a good lawyer, and I'm sure she'll land on her feet. (Perhaps she could be appointed to a lower federal court, as Mickey Kaus has suggested.) But she simply wasn't qualified for the highest court in the land, and this will likely save President Bush from a devastating schism within his own party and, perhaps, her nomination being defeated in the Senate.

But whoever is nominated in her place will almost certainly be more ideologically conservative, so I think we're just going to see one controversial nomination replaced with another. The difference is, next time around it will be Democrats trying to stop it. (As some commentators have suggested, perhaps Bush will say "they want a conservative? I'll give 'em a conservative!" and nominate Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork is too right-wing even for me, but by God, it would be awesome political theater.)

Further into darkness

Using the language of "cultural protection", Iran's "Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council" has banned foreign movies from the country:

There won't be any liquor-swilling God-denyers on the Iranian silver screen any time soon. Drug takers, secularists, liberals, anarchists and feminists are out, too.

With the decision, Iranians felt one of the first cultural reversals of the opening to the outside world they enjoyed under their former reformist President Mohammad Khatami.
[...]
The clerical council has not said what a film must contain to be ruled as promoting secularism or liberalism, meaning decisions will be made on an ad hoc basis.

Pournejati said terms of the ban were so vague that they may apply to any Western film. Members of the council could not be reached for comment. They are hand-picked by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters.

Keep it up, mullahs. The youth of Iran, who now make up more than half the population of the country, are being pushed closer and closer to the breaking point.

Old stereotypes never die

You're an African-American who dares to - gasp! - run for office as a conservative Republican? Then you're fair game for ugly racial slurs we all thought died out in the 1960s. (For the record, Steve Gillard, the blogger who photoshopped this masterpiece, is himself Black.)

I can think of few things as inherently racist - yes, racist - as this attitude that you aren't "really" Black (or Hispanic, or female, or gay, and so on) if you don't have the right political beliefs. And once again, this groupthink is promoted by the people who pat themselves on the back for being such "independent thinkers". (via Andrew Sullivan)

Buy two and increase your odds to 1 in 7,000,000

Yes, my odds of winning the record $40 million jackpot are around 1 in 14,000,000, but I still bought a 6/49 ticket. It's only 2 bucks, which I probably would have spent on chocolate or something, and it's not like I was transfering all my savings to the widow of former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. (And no, I did not pick 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.)

If I do win, I have my shopping list ready. (Of course, it may have to be revised, now that Volkswagen Bentley has come out with the Flying Spur.)

I wonder what they want nukes for?

The President of Iran calls, once again, for the destruction of the Jewish state:

Iran’s hard-line president called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.

“As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” said Ahmadinejad, who came to power in August.

Update: Sari Stein makes an interesting point in the comments section:

Israel is the only rallying point that all the Arab states have to channel hatred and unite against. Without Israel, they'd go back to fighting one another, and the people would rise up against their autocratic, dictatorial leaders. Iran doesn't actually want Israel destroyed... it just wants everyone talking about it and directing effort and energy towards its destruction.

I think that's true for most of the Arab states, especially Egypt and Syria. But I fear the Iranian mullahs, who have backed and armed Hezbollah for years, really believe they have a sacred religious obligation to eradicate Israel by any means necessary. Hopefully, Israel won't let them. (One word: "Osirak".)

An Islamic Jihad suicide bomber struck in Hadera, Israel today, killing five people.

Prussian Blues

The story of neo-Nazi teenyboppers Lamb and Lynx Gaede, aka "Prussian Blue", has been picked up by newspapers in Britain and Australia, most of which imply that the duo is more talented and popular than Britney Spears. (Then again, these days, they probably are.) The Sun, as usual, had the best headline: "Cute Klux Klan". As of this writing, "Prussian Blue" is the number-two query on Technorati, just behind "Rosa Parks".

Reason's Nick Gillespie, for one, thinks the entire story is another example of mass media hysteria, kind of like "Satanism" in the eighties:

This isn't to say that the 13-year-old twins aren't spectacularly retarded and offensive as a concept--and they've yet to record the inevitable album of David "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fascist" Bowie, Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, and Sid Vicious covers. But the whole story seems so fake, a clear and cynical attempt to titillate the press regarding the supposed lure of dangerous ideas on the rise somewhere in red America. Like the "meth epidemic," neo-Nazis--double losers who inevitably pledge allegiance to the utterly defeated Confederate States of America and the Third Reich--are a topic mainstream media turn to on slow news days.

Until Prussian Blue gets an audience that extends beyond their mother, their record label's owner, and ABC News--or form a band with Prince Harry (hmm, Tony Orlando and the New Dawn?)--I don't think the Olsen twins or Americans have too much to worry about.

Wikipedia hosts an MP3 of one of the girls (calling herself "Elly Mae") calling a talk-radio program to regurgitate the stuff her mother taught her. The host, I think you'll agree, handles the situation beautifully.

The one he's been waiting to write

Christopher Hitchens sticks in the knife:

Just before my last exchange with George Galloway, which occurred on the set of Bill Maher's show in Los Angeles in mid-September, I was approached by a representative of the program and asked if I planned to repeat my challenge to Galloway on air. That challenge—would he sign an affidavit saying that he had never discussed Oil-for-Food monies with Tariq Aziz?—I had already made on a public stage in New York. Maher's producers had been asked, obviously by a nervous Galloway, to find out whether I had brought such an affidavit along with me. I replied that this was not necessary, since his public denial to me was on the record and had been broadcast, and since it further confirmed the apparent perjury that he had committed in front of the U.S. Senate on May 17, 2005. I added that I wanted no further contact with Galloway until I could have the opportunity of reviewing his prison diaries.
[...]
The critical person in Galloway's fetid relationship with Saddam's regime was a Jordanian "businessman" named Fawaz Zureikat, who was involved in a vast range of middleman activities in Baghdad and is the chairman of Middle East Advanced Semiconductor Inc. It was never believable, as Galloway used to claim, that he could have been so uninformed about Zureikat's activities in breaching the U.N. oil embargo. This most probably means that what we now know is a fraction of what there is to be known. But what has been established is breathtaking enough. A member of the British Parliament was in receipt of serious money originating from a homicidal dictatorship. That money was supposed to have been used to ameliorate the suffering of Iraqis living under sanctions. It was instead diverted to the purposes of enriching Saddam's toadies and of helping them propagandize in favor of the regime whose crimes and aggressions had necessitated the sanctions and created the suffering in the first place. This is something more than mere "corruption." It is the cynical theft of food and medicine from the desperate to pay for the palaces of a psychopath.

Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain. [emphasis added]

Hyundai's North Korean nightmare

Hyundai has invested millions upon millions of dollars in North Korea with almost nothing to show for it, according to the International Herald Tribune:

For weeks, North Korea and Hyundai Asan, Hyundai Group's North Korean business arm, have been at odds over the dismissal of Kim Yoon Kyu, a Hyundai executive accused in August of embezzling money.

North Korea has demanded that Kim be reinstated. It argued that, whatever Hyundai had discovered about him, Kim should be Hyundai's point man in North Korea because he has had the extremely rare privilege of meeting the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, on several occasions. Hyundai has held its ground, calling the dismissal an internal company matter.

Last week, North Korea accused Hyundai of "deception and hypocrisy" and said it was reconsidering all its business deals with Hyundai. It also blocked the visits to North Korea of Hyundai officials who wanted to discuss new projects, but it did not mention returning any of the $500 million it had received from Hyundai for business rights.

It is unclear how the dispute will be resolved. On Tuesday, the company said North Korea had agreed to talks on the issue, but gave no details.

Some analysts doubt North Korea's willingness to resolve the issue. "North Korea appears to have determined that it has sucked as much as it can from Hyundai," said Kim Kyu Chol, head of the Forum for Inter-Korea Relations, a Seoul-based group that monitors business relations between the countries.
[...]
There are a few success stories, like Elcanto of South Korea, which runs a successful shoe factory in Pyongyang. But a seldom discussed outcome of Seoul's "sunshine" policy of engaging North Korea is the fate of an estimated 1,000 South Korean businesses and investors who have gone bankrupt or incurred losses because of their dealings with North Korea, according to the Forum for Inter-Korea Relations.

Most were minor players who had been attracted by North Korea's cheap labor and the absence of tariffs, or were driven by a desire to implant capitalism in the isolated state. But in North Korea, they found a country where transportation and utilities are inadequate, deliveries seldom arrive on time and commercial decisions are influenced by political factors. They could not communicate directly with their headquarters in South Korea and did not have freedom to visit the North. Their North Korean partners were often replaced virtually overnight.

"It's very hard to find a success story," said Lim Wan Kyun, head of the Inter-Korea Economic Association, who poured millions of dollars into building factories in Pyongyang before the authorities there blocked his entry into the country last year, citing political tensions with South Korea. "You are a fool if you enter North Korea to make money."

(via Mick Hartley)

More casualties in the War on Pigs

Yesterday, in response to that story about piggy banks being banned by British banks to avoid offending you-know-who, John Derbyshire sarcastically wrote that "someone should put an Extinction Watch on the Three Little Pigs, Porky Pig, Miss Piggy".

And lo and behold, look what Derb found on the BBC website:

A West Yorkshire head teacher has banned books containing stories about pigs from the classroom in case they offend Muslim children.

"We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive."

Many religions prevent their followers from eating certain animals, but to the best of my knowledge none of them prohibit their followers from even talking about them. Once again, I'd love to know whether this nonsense (which has been going on longer than I thought, since the story is from 2003) represents mainstream Muslim opinion in Britain, or whether the radical fringe is dictating what is to be considered "anti-Islamic".

Or, for that matter, whether any of Ms. Harris' Muslim pupils protested the "Three Little Pigs" at all. On the contrary, I'd say most of them enjoyed it. But she probably read somewhere that Muslims consider pigs unclean, put two and two together and determined that it's better to be hypersensitive than sorry.

Last one out of Cuba, turn out the lights

The 40-member National Chorus of Cuba, which specializes in patriotic songs about the glories of the Revolution, is touring Canada. Twenty members just defected en masse in Toronto.

Sadly, they're going to be subjected to many personal attacks and insults from people who will never forgive them for abandoning the worker's paradise. (In Toronto, not in Cuba.)

I got a rock

The most enduring of all Halloween specials, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, airs tonight at 8 Eastern on ABC.

I wish someone would show this one, too.

Rosa Parks remembered

The Montgomery Advertiser has a detailed retrospective on the arrest of Rosa Parks and the subsequent bus boycott, led by a relatively obscure Minister named King. As we saw in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, African-Americans remain disproportionately poor, unemployed and incarcerated - but anyone who says Blacks are "no better off today" than they were in the 1950s (and, yes, people do say that, and they may even believe it) should consider what was enforced by law in some parts of the nation just fifty years ago.

Parks was quoted as saying, "I didn't get on the bus with the intention of being arrested. I got on the bus with the intention of going home." But she will never be forgotten.

Update: from a commenter at LGF:

My Dad joined the Air Force in the mid 1950's from Michigan and was sent to the deep south for basic training. He rode the bus down and then switched buses down there.

My Dad had no idea about segregation and had just gone to the back of the bus to sit. When he got up and moved to the front of the white line, the bus then moved.

There are a lot of things I love about the American South, but stories like this are why I get a very uneasy feeling when people say "the South will rise again".

Closing in on Galloway

The U.S. Senate committee before which George Galloway testified earlier this year says it has proof that Gorgeous George perjured himself about whether he was bought off by Saddam Hussein:

The Palestinian-born wife of George Galloway, the Respect MP, is accused today of receiving $149,980 (about £100,000) derived from the United Nations Iraqi oil-for-food programme.

The investigators concluded that Mr Galloway knew about the payments and that "through his wife was personally enriched" by them. They say that he "knowingly made false or misleading statements under oath before [a Senate] sub-committee".
[...]
Mr Galloway would not appear before the sub-committee again but responded to 44 written questions. He again said that he had not benefited from Saddam's largesse. Asked whether Mr Zureikat had transferred oil profits to his account, he said: "No". Asked whether his wife or his associates, including Mr McKay, had received any oil profits, Mr Galloway said: "I have no knowledge of Mr Zureikat's business affairs."

The report says: "Aziz recalled that Galloway requested the Iraqi government to provide financial support for the Mariam Appeal [to send medicines to Iraq] to defray the expenses associated with conducting the campaign. Aziz recalls that Galloway said he had also asked for money from the governments of the other countries through which his procession had passed."

Galloway has called Aziz a "political prisoner" and demanded his release. If this story were any better, I'm not sure I could stand it.

Update: more details here:

The evidence details what investigators said were direct transfers of oil-for-food profits to bank accounts controlled by Mr. Galloway's wife and by the Mariam Appeal, a charity and political organization founded by Mr. Galloway.

Among the subcommittee's findings:

•Mr. Galloway personally asked for and received from Mr. Aziz and others eight allocations from 1999 to 2003 for the rights to 23 million barrels of oil.

•Amineh Abu-Zayyad, Mr. Galloway's wife, received $150,000 in the summer of 2000 from Fawaz Zureikat, the Jordanian businessman Mr. Galloway acknowledges was his business representative in Baghdad.

•The Mariam Appeal was given at least $446,000 in bank transfers from Mr. Zureikat. These transfers and the one to Mrs. Abu-Zayyad came almost immediately after Mr. Zureikat was paid commissions for deals he brokered under the oil-for-food program.

•Two unidentified oil traders interviewed by the subcommittee said Mr. Zureikat met with them in summer 2000 and that it was made clear to them that the Jordanian was marketing Iraqi oil on Mr. Galloway's behalf. The deal fell through.

•Mr. Zureikat also paid more than $1.6 million in illegal surcharges back to the Saddam government, which demanded bribes from those receiving favorable oil-for-food deals. The Senate investigators said it was highly unlikely Mr. Galloway did not know of the kickbacks, but found no direct proof of his involvement.

A senior subcommittee staffer, briefing reporters on background, said that based on his categorical denials at the May hearing, Mr. Galloway could be charged with perjury, making false statements under oath, and obstruction of congressional proceedings.

Rosa Parks, R.I.P.

The woman who drove a stake through the heart of segregation has passed away at age 92:

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died, Local 4 has learned.

Parks, was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. She lived in Detroit.

A simple act of defiance can change history forever.

Remind me not to get on her bad side

Kathy Shaidle: "Given the Canadian content rules enforced on the radio up here, it's actually pretty difficult to be a failed Canadian rock star. Somehow, Andrew Cash pulled it off."

The scary thing is, this is what they want the rest of the world to see

On display at the Iranian pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew and other anti-Semitic tracts of even less renown, all published and promoted by the state-controlled "Islamic Propagation Organization". (via LGF)

In a way, you have to admire their honesty. Other governments which promote this garbage, like Saudi Arabia or Malaysia, are slick and media-savvy enough to make sure most Westerners never see it. Not the Islamic Republic of Iran. They hate the bloodsucking Jews, by gum, and they don't give a damn who knows it.

I wonder what they're planning to do with their nuclear program?

First Piglet, now this

Just when you think the situation in Britain can't get any more ridiculous, you read something like this:

British banks are banning piggy banks because they may offend some Muslims.

"This is a sensitive issue and I think the banks are simply being courteous to their customers," he said.

A Muslim Labour MP, Khalid Mahmoud, is quoted as saying, "the traditions and symbols of one community should not be obliterated just to accommodate another...I doubt many Muslims would be seriously offended by piggy banks." Indeed, I have no doubt that this nonsense has come about not in response to some groundswell of outrage from British Muslims, but because of demands from that country's increasingly vocal, perenially outraged Islamic radicals - and some "sensitive" Britons' willingness to give in to their every demand, no matter how ridiculous.

Enjoy your sausages and bacon, my English friends, because they won't be around much longer.

The best advice I've read all day

From a commenter at Reason's Hit & Run blog:

The most important thing a person can do before going to see a movie is check Rottentomatoes and see how many times the words 'relevant' and 'timely' appear. Run like hell if you see more than 2 occurances.

"Lost Rhapsody"

If you don't watch Lost, feel free to skip this. But if you do watch Lost, don't miss it.

The scandal that wasn't

The journalist who filmed American soldiers burning the bodies of dead Taliban fighters says they did so because the bodies were decomposing, not as a deliberate insult to Islam. (via Tim Blair)

Funny how that never made it into the original reports, isn't it?

Brazilians keep their guns

Brazil, which has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the world, put a proposed ban on the sale of firearms and ammunition to a popular vote this past weekend. The measure failed by a wide margin:

Brazilian voters on Sunday decisively rejected a proposal to outlaw the sale of firearms and ammunition following an aggressive campaign by opponents who argued it would leave citizens defenseless against armed criminals.

The referendum marked the first time a country has put a gun ban to a nationwide vote. The defeat disheartened gun control proponents, who had argued that powerful lobbyists for the international gun industry unfairly influenced government policy. They had also argued that a popular vote could have allowed an anti-gun majority to set a precedent for other countries.
[...]
Existing laws in Brazil require gun buyers to be at least 25, not have a criminal record and pass psychological and gun-handling tests. The ban would have prohibited the sale of all guns and ammunition to anyone except police, security personnel and licensed target shooters, but would have allowed those who already legally owned firearms to keep them.

"We already have very tight gun control laws, and those laws only apply to honest people," said Leonardo Arruda, who coordinated a campaign against the ban for Brazil's National Association of Firearms Owners and Dealers. "The ban would only empower criminals, who would continue to get their firearms through illegal trafficking."

I do not support an unlimited, unrestricted right to firearms ownership, but if I lived in Brazil - where people have an obvious need to protect themselves from violent crime, and where there's a long history of repressive, authoritarian governments - I would have voted "no", too.

The last straw

I don't know how much there is to this, but it should give President Bush the opening he needs to withdraw Harriet Miers' nomination:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

Nothing indicates that Miers sought out the judge or engineered the appointments to the panel, but there’s also no indication that she reported the potential conflicts of interest in the case or tried to avoid them.

(Hat tip: Paul Canniff, who says Miers' nomination "will now be soaring like the Luftwaffe over Sussex.")

Piglet strikes back!

He's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore!

Nuke the Rednecks and take their oil

The federal Liberals have done really well for themselves these past few years, playing off Alberta against the rest of the country. So there must have been high-fives all around the PMO this weekend if anyone noticed the latest Corner Brook Western Star column (not available online) by Newfoundland talk-radio host Bill Rowe - who normally bewails the mismanagement of this province's resources by the federal government - stopping just short of demanding Ottawa seize Alberta's oil fields:

Alberta has impeccable credentials to become [Newfoundland's] mentor. By pure dumb luck, Alberta possesses the oil resources of a Saudi Arabia. It's as if they won a gigantic lottery without even having to buy a ticket. And they carry on now as if they invented the oil themselves rather than merely stumbling upon it already there. [That's why the streets are paved with gold in oil-rich Nigeria and Venezuela. - Ed.] Plus, they chastise the rest of us for not being intelligent and hard-working enough to have their wealth and low income tax rate and no sales tax. You've got to love their chutzpah.

And will they share any of their windfall surpluses with the rest of us benighted idiots across Canada? Yeah right. Freeze in the dark, eastern bastards.
[...]
Moreover, Alberta's oil industry spews out many times more atmospheric pollutants than any other province, for which the rest of Canada has to bear the financial brunt internationally.

But no sir, no sharing of their fluky oil revenues. Indeed, many Albertans would still like to dig up Trudeau and put a stake through his heart for daring to make them share during the 1970s energy crisis.

Never mind that as oil revenues increase and the Alberta economy booms, Albertans will pay millions more into federal equalization programs. Never mind that no one ever complains about Quebec refusing to share its massive revenues from hydroelectric power with the rest of Canada. Never mind that no one ever snarks about Ontario being "just lucky" in being right next door to the massive American market, making it a prime location for American (and Japanese) branch plants. Never mind that Alberta and Newfoundland, which is trying to build its own resource-based economy free of Ottawa's meddling, are natural allies. And never mind that the Albertan oil boom has provided high-paying jobs to thousands of Newfoundlanders - some cities, like Fort McMurray, are practically Newfoundland colonies - who would otherwise be stuck scrounging for enough weeks of work to collect Employment Insurance. Never mind all that. Alberta has oil, oil is expensive right now, and they should share the wealth. But they better not get uppity and think they should have any real say in how this country is run!

I have no more respect for "Alberta separatists" than I do for their Quebec counterparts. But at times like this, I have to admit, I can sort of see where they're coming from.

Headlines from Bizarro World

"Cameron Diaz leads a lecture at Stanford University"

The Christian underground

Kathy Shaidle sent me an interesting e-mail in response to yesterday's post about Left Behind: World at War:

Yes, that marketing method worked extremely well for them in the past. The US evangelical church has a long established "underground"/alternative "economy" of books, movies, comics, clothes, video games, etc. that is now about 3 generations old. The infrastructure is all set up, and they were very early web adopters. Pretty impressive for such "backward" people! :-)

These books and movies are theologically unsound but the medium makes the message palatable. Just a really fascinating way that people are subverting "mainstream media" and conglomorates but one Adbusters and friends would never dare write about.

American (and, to a lesser extent, Canadian) evangelicals have created their own parallel pop-culture universe, with Christian books, movies, pop music, news magazines and even video games selling in far greater numbers than you might think. I find it absolutely fascinating, especially the way so many Christian novels and CDs so closely mimic their secular equivalents. (As both The Simpsons and South Park have noted, you can turn almost any song into a "Contemporary Christian" song by replacing "baby" with "Jesus".)

The UN does it again

The UN always finds a way to let me down. I was pretty impressed with its new report holding Syrian officials responsible for the murder of Rafik Hariri, but now comes word that other top Syrian officials - including Bashar Assad himself - were excised from the report at the last minute:

The last-minute alterations made to the Detlev Mehlis report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri may have been made under pressure by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Israel Radio reported Friday afternoon.

A spokesman for Annan had said before the report was issued that no changes would be made to it. [emphasis added; via InstaPundit]

The last-minute changes were only discovered because of a computer error:

The United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.
[...]
But the furore over the doctoring of the report threatened to overshadow its damaging findings. It raised questions about political interference by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary- General, who had promised not to make any changes in the report.

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.

We're fighting in Iraq after all

...on the other side:

The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) says Canadians have joined the insurgency in Iraq.

When asked if CSIS, or the government, could do anything to prevent people from joining the insurgency Judd said he didn't think there was anything legally that could be done.

Any Canadian who leaves the country to take part in terrorist activity should not be allowed back, but the government - and the opposition, for that matter - is at a loss to explain what will be done about these people when they try to return:

But McLellan said the government will deal with Canadian citizens who were insurgents to the full extent of the law, but did not say what law they could be punished under.

MPs from the Conservative Party condemned those who took part in the insurgency, but were at a loss to offer ideas on exactly what sanctions should be leveled against those who went to Iraq to join the resistance against the U.S. forces.

Ed Broadbent, a man I always respected despite his political affiliation, comes disturbingly close to condoning what the Canadian "insurgents" are doing:

NDP MP Ed Broadbent meanwhile said there is nothing that can legally be done about Canadians who partake or who plan to partake in terrorist activities abroad.

Broadbent said if the insurgents have "not violated any Canadian laws and have gone back to their own country in opposition to a war the UN itself is opposed to they won't be violating any laws that I'm aware of."

It's 2005, Ed. Your beloved UN recognizes the Iraqi government against which the Canadian "insurgents" are fighting.

Hitler Youth

I thought this was an elaborate hoax, but some quick googling confirmed that "Prussian Blue" - imagine the Olsen twins in an alternate universe where Hitler won the war - is indeed real. I even found an MP3 of one of their songs, which sounds like amateur night at the Aryan Nations' compound.

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. "They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening," said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins' father. "I'm going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would."

It takes a lot to shock me, but this did it.

It still looks better than Doom

The latest installment in a film series based on one of the best-selling books of the decade will be released on over 3,000 screens today. But you probably haven't heard much about it, because the screens are not in theatres but in Churches:

"Left Behind: World at War," the third movie based on the Left Behind series of novels about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus, will open tonight on 3,200 screens across the country. But it will not be shown in a single commercial theater.

Marketing executives say the decision is part of a major trend. The entertainment industry has discovered there is power, power, product-moving power in selling movies, books and music through churches -- particularly the suburban megachurches that draw thousands of well-heeled worshipers.

The film is being shown at two locations in Newfoundland: the huge First Assembly Church in St. John's, and SonRise Ministries here in Corner Brook. I'm almost curious enough to go see it, but the first Left Behind movie - which NRO's Rod Dreher called "The Day of the Jackal as concieved by Ned Flanders" - took 90 minutes from my life that I'll never get back. Too bad, because with a big budget and the right director (say, Ridley Scott), Left Behind could be made into one heck of a summer blockbuster. The book is just pulp, but as Roger Ebert once noted, great books make lousy movies while lousy books make great movies.

The Christian movie I want to see is Megiddo: Omega Code 2, which The Onion A.V. Club calls a gloriously cheesy B-movie that "offers so much goofy fun, it's sinful." (In fact, I think I'm adding this one to my Amazon Wish List.)

"Operation Rudolph"

The Canadian Coalition for Democracies is accepting donations to send Christmas gifts to our soldiers in Afghanistan. What a wonderful idea.

Week 7

The schedule change for the Chiefs-Dolphins game (which will only be shown in Kansas City and Miami, so rejoice, Ghost Whisperer fans) means I have to get my weekly picks out early. Last week I was 9-5, bringing my season record to 43-45.

Kansas City at Miami
Detroit at Cleveland - the Lions would be crazy not to start Garcia this week.
Green Bay at Minnesota
Indianapolis at Houston - I make my picks straight up, but I'd take Indy no matter how big the spread is.
New Orleans at St. Louis
Pittsburgh at Cincinnati - until Roethlisberger was hurt, this was one of the must-see games of the year. Even without him, it should still be a great one.
San Diego at Philadelphia - why, oh why, did they have to schedule this one for the same time as the Steelers-Bengals game?
San Francisco at Washington
Dallas at Seattle
Baltimore at Chicago
Buffalo at Oakland
Denver at N.Y. Giants
Tennessee at Arizona
N.Y. Jets at Atlanta

Syria did it

A new UN report confirms what we all suspected: that the Syrians, with the assistance of their Lebanese puppets, murdered former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The UN last night accused Syria of involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, setting the stage for a showdown with Damascus.

“There is converging evidence pointing at both Lebanese and Syrian involvement in this terrorist act,” the report concluded.

The assassination of Hariri backfired badly, sending thousands of Lebanese into the streets to force the Syrian military out of their country. Here's hoping this report spreads the revolution to Syria itself.

First Pinter, now this

Another frothing moonbat has won a major literary award. Arrrrgh.

Poll whiplash

Just one day after a CTV/Globe and Mail survey showed the Liberals pulling way ahead of the Conservatives, a new Decima poll says the Tories have closed the gap to within five points:

The federal Liberals' lead over the Conservatives has shrunk to five percentage points, a new Decima survey suggests.

Pollster Bruce Anderson said increased scrutiny on the Liberal government is the reason behind the narrowing lead.
[...]
The NDP remained at 18 per cent while the Bloc Quebecois held a mammoth 28-point lead over the Liberals in Quebec. The Liberals led the Tories by eight points in Ontario.

"The desire for change acts as a ceiling for the Liberals while doubts about the alternative create something of a floor."

Football Friday

Because Hurricane Wilma is expected to hit Florida on Sunday, the NFL has moved up the Chiefs-Dolphins game to tomorrow night at 7PM Eastern. I presume CBS, which has the rights to AFC games, will be showing it.

Yawn

Call me a hard-hearted, insensitive warmonger, but considering what the Taliban stand for, I just can't get too worked up about this:

US soldiers in Afghanistan burnt the bodies of dead Taliban and taunted their opponents about the corpses, in an act deeply offensive to Muslims and in breach of the Geneva conventions.

The burning of a body is a deep insult to Muslims. Islam requires burial within 24 hours.

Yeah, God forbid we do anything which Muslims might find "insulting". (Funny, because I've been assured so many times that violent, totalitarian terrorists who claim to be acting in the name of Islam are "not really Muslims", because Islam is the Religion of Peace.) Well, killing American contractors and stringing up and burning their bodies is a deep insult to Americans. Burning synagogues is a deep insult to Jews. Slitting the throats of Buddhist monks and burning their temples is a deep insult to Buddhists. And banning music and forcing all women into the burka, as the Taliban did when they ran Afghanistan, is a really fucking deep insult to anyone with a shred of human decency.

I've had it. I can understand the controversy about torture of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners - considering that they're, you know, alive - but this is nothing but a blatant attempt by an unabashedly anti-American media outlet (SBS) to fire up the mythical "Arab Street" against the War on Terror. I may regret writing this later, but frankly, I find myself wishing they placed bacon on the bodies and hit them with the soles of their shoes before setting them on fire.

VHS, R.I.P.

Home video companies are going to stop making VHS movies next year:

After 28 years, manufacturers have decided to stop making the tapes some time in 2006.

By the end of 2006, companies within the home video industry will phase out VHS technology, leaving only DVDs (formerly digital video discs, but now known as digital versatile discs) as the way in which people can buy or rent a movie.

A telling sign: this week, Canadian Tire will sell you a "Magnasonic" DVD player for $29.99 after rebate. (I bought one for my bedroom TV, and it works fine.) DVRs are still pretty expensive, though, so I presume blank VHS tapes will be around for a while yet.

My family bought its first VCR in 1984 for $399.99. It was also a "Magnasonic" - and it was a Betamax. Dang, it's good to be living in 2005.

Too true

Lileks: "I don’t mean to start out the day with a polarizing note, but: do you think that if President Clinton had invaded Iraq and knocked Saddam for power in 1998, we’d be seeing a movie about the dictator’s trial right now, with George Clooney as the prosecutor?"

I gotta say, I thought even people who opposed the invasion of Iraq would be a bit more, well, upbeat about the fact that one of the worst dictators of the late 20th century is being put on trial for his crimes. But because Chimpy McLikudburton and the big bad unilateral Americans did it, the reaction has been lukewarm at best. Gwynne Dyer, who savages "the Iraqi government and its American supervisors" for trying Saddam on one piddling little 143-person massacre in 1982, instead of something which can be tied to the Reagan Administration, is so petulant he's using all capital letters for some of his words:

The United States seized ALL the documents concerning ALL of Saddam’s abuses during its invasion of Iraq two and a half years ago. It also has at least half of Saddam’s former senior ministers and generals in its prisons, and could easily find many who would give evidence against him in return for clemency for themselves. If Washington wanted to see Saddam tried for his truly monstrous crimes, then that would happen. But it probably won’t.

The real problem is that the United States was closely allied to Saddam Hussein when he was committing the worst atrocities against the Iranians and the Kurds. The Reagan administration saw the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran as a far greater threat to U.S. interests, and when Saddam’s war against Iran started going badly it stepped in to save him.
[...]
Dujail, on the other hand, raises no awkward questions, so Saddam will be tried on that charge first. It is unlikely that he will ever face other charges, for the death penalty was reintroduced in Iraq last year – the first prisoners were executed just last month – and once Saddam has been condemned to death for the Dujail killings he will not live long. The new law allows him only one appeal, and after that he must be hanged within thirty days.

There are other problems with Saddam’s trial. Iraq’s current U.S.-backed president has already declared him guilty, and his defense lawyers have had little time to study the evidence against him. (Saddam’s lawyers will doubtless request an adjournment, but they will probably be granted only fifteen days.) [They got until the end of November - Ed.] But the real flaw is that the charge has been framed to avoid any discussion of the U.S. government’s share of the responsibility for his atrocities.

Saddam could easily be convicted on the Dujail charge, exhaust his appeals, and be hanged before the end of the year. Iraq’s Shias and Kurds will celebrate his death, but its Sunni Arabs – and a great many people elsewhere in the Arab world – will see him as a martyr to the Arab nationalist cause. He is nothing of the sort, but the hypocrisy of this trial is revolting.

No matter what you do, there will always be someone saying it's unnecessarily "provocative".

Irony's an ugly thing, isn't it?

Last week, Guardian reporter Rory Carroll wrote that U.S. forces in Iraq were "out of control" and implied that they were deliberately targeting journalists. This week, Carroll was kidnapped by the Iraqi "resistance".

Many of my fellow lizardoid minions couldn't resist the temptation to gloat, but the kidnapping of a journalist, no matter what news organization he works for, must always be condemned in the strongest terms. I sincerely hope Carroll is released or rescued unharmed. I also hope that, if the "reckless" Yanks rescue him, he'll muster up enough class to thank them.

Update: Carroll has been released, unharmed, after 36 hours in captivity.

Just bring back Dave, already

I thought Sammy Hagar had reunited with Van Halen, but MTV reports that the band may use its own version of Rock Star: INXS to find a new lead singer:

If CBS brings back its successful Rock Star: INXS for a second season, rumor has it the next band in line is California's Van Halen.

CBS has remained hush-hush on whether Rock Star will return next summer, but MTV reports if it does, look for Eddie and Alex Van Halen along with bassist Michael Anthony in the judges' chairs originally filed by INXS.

The contestants will be judged on talent, personality, and the speed with which they can remove brown M&Ms from a bowl.

Update: not true.

Why, you'd almost think they're on the other side or something

Britain's venerable Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament claims to oppose even civilian nuclear programs, on the premise that their real purpose is to create material for nuclear weapons programs. So the choice of Dr. Seyed Mohammed Hossein Adeli, the Iranian ambassador to Britain, to address their annual conference and give "Iran's perspective" on the Iranian nuclear controversy seems a bit unusual, no?

A few CND activists actually heckled and jeered Dr. Adeli - and were summarily ejected from the conference:

During his speech to the CND several people were told to leave the room following protests at Iran's human rights record. Several protesters shouted: "Fascists," at the ambassador and the organisers of the conference. Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old peace campaigner who was forced out of the Labour Party conference last month, was in the audience.

A registered trademark of the Chomsky corporation, all rights reserved

TCS has a hilarious, revealing excerpt from Peter Schweizer's upcoming book Do as I Say (Not As I Do), about the marketing of the valuable Chomsky brand:

Chomsky's marketing efforts shortly after September 11 give new meaning to the term "war profiteer." In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from $9,000 to $12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand. He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via email that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press. His controversial views were hot, particularly overseas. By early December 2001, they had sold the foreign rights in nineteen different languages. The book made the bestseller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.

Radicals used to think of their ideas as weapons; Chomsky sees them as a licensing opportunity.

St. Noam is doing nothing a smart writer wouldn't do, and none of this, in and of itself, proves that any of his ideas are incorrect. But Chomsky must be the first "dissident" in history who has his works copyrighted under the very system against which he's struggling. We've lowered our standards considerably since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was forced to hide his books and secretly smuggle them out of the country, haven't we? (I can't help thinking of the difference between Christians or Muslims, who give their sacred texts away freely, and the Scientologists, who will sic a platoon of lawyers on you if you leaf through Dianetics without paying for it.)

But what I love the most is that Chomsky has become a trusted brand name for people who think themselves too intelligent to trust brand names. Put his name on anything, and thousands of hairy college kids wearing Che T-shirts and "Buck Fush" buttons will camp out overnight to buy it. (Schweizer quotes one of the sainted dissident's publishers: "All we have to do is put Chomsky's name on a book and it sells out immediately!") These self-proclaimed independent thinkers are nothing but sheep.

Just what we need right now

Hurricane Wilma is now the strongest storm ever recorded. Mercifully, it's not expected to strike Louisiana or Mississippi, but people in Florida should take cover now.

Speaking of natural disasters, the death toll from the Kashmir earthquake is now expected to surpass 80,000. If you haven't already donated to the Red Cross or other relief organizations, please do so right away.

Bring back the El Camino!

There's a growing movement on the internet (i.e. one article) demanding that Chevrolet build a new version of its car-based pickup truck. Count me in. GM and Ford both make and sell "utes" in Australia, and whichever company decides to import or build them in America is going to clean up.

Saddam on trial

The butcher's first court appearance is today, in one of his own megalomaniac buildings. Irony's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

When Saddam Hussein is led into a court in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone today, the building will look both familiar and strange. Familiar because it once housed an opulent display of gifts to him from international leaders, home-grown admirers and sycophants currying favour; strange, because here he will be tried for his life by a court he refuses to recognise.

Inside the Clock building, instead of the trophies celebrating his rule, he will find an austere courtroom decked out with a metal cage resembling a child’s playpen, where he and seven co-defendants, all senior members of his toppled regime, will face charges of the premeditated murder of 143 Shia men from Dujail, a town just north of Baghdad, where his enemies tried to assassinate him in 1982.
[...]
The choice of the Baghdad Clock complex as the venue for Saddam’s trial is symbolic: it was here that the dictator fed his own cult of personality, displaying gifts from the great and powerful, all of which were later looted as he fled in April 2003, only to be dragged by US soldiers from a hole in the ground near his home town of Tikrit eight months later.

But Saddam is unlikely to have much time to reflect on the vanished gilt-porcelain camels, antique weapons and even the seal of the Senate of California, donated in the 1980s when he was using chemical weapons against Washington’s arch-enemy Iran. The hearing is expected to be brief, with his lawyer pleading for a three-month adjournment on the grounds that he has had insufficient time to prepare his case. Afterwards Saddam will be whisked back to his cell, probably to wait at least another month before his next appearance.

Somebody get me a strong drink

The federal Liberals are surging in the latest polls:

The federal Liberals appear to be emerging from their various storms of political scandal relatively unscathed. According to a new poll voters would re-elect the party today, if given a chance.

The news is not so good for Opposition Leader Stephen Harper, however, as his negative ratings continue to grow -- up eight percentage points since May to 58 per cent.

Paul Martin and his caucus could sacrifice a live puppy to Satan on national television, and if the Conservatives complained people would savage them for being "intolerant".

And maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think things will improve after the Gomery report comes out, if yesterday's report in the Toronto Star is accurate. Gomery allegedly blames Jean Chretien's inner circle, and as one of my commenters noted, that gives Paul Martin and his media backers an opening to say he and his team had nothing to do with it. And recent history suggests that Canadians will buy it.

It would be a workers' paradise, if there were any workers

Nick Kristof (in a column stuck behind the New York Times's infamous subscriber wall, but cited by Tim Worstall) notes that some of the poorest nations on Earth have elaborate laws and regulations designed to protect employees - which is why they remain the poorest nations on Earth:

This land of mud huts and malnourished babies is the very least developed country on the planet, but local regulations stipulate that companies must give all employees six weeks and two days of paid vacation a year. Not surprisingly, there are almost no employers in Niger.

So if we in the West want to help children in countries like Niger, we should send vaccines and mosquito nets -- but we also must push these countries to open themselves up for business. Right now, many African countries are in effect killing their own citizens by making it staggeringly difficult for entrepreneurs to open shop.
[...]
But of the 20 countries in the world where it is most difficult to do business, 17 are African, according to the study, ''Doing Business in 2006.'' Niger ranks 150th, followed by Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso and -- the very worst place to try to do business -- Congo.

Perhaps those rules (typically inherited from European countries during colonial days) sound as if they protect workers. But the upshot is that companies don't come to Niger and don't hire anyone they don't want on the payroll forever. So almost all people toil in the informal labor sector where there are no protections whatsoever.

Worstall cites another writer who puts it even more succinctly: "a poor country cannot just rule itself rich."

Labour standards and wages in many poor countries are indeed appalling by Western standards - but it wasn't that long ago that the average worker's lot in South Korea or Taiwan was pretty grim, too. And the smart money says many of the worst "sweatshop" nations - Vietnam, Mexico, India - will achieve first-world status long before a place like Niger, where the entrepreneurial spirit is smothered in its crib.

How people with no friends spend their money, Part II

Three words: doggie Halloween costumes.

Three more words: kill me now.

Old boxes...check! Ladder...check! Weather-controlling machine...check!

Yes, the Associated Press actually ran a story about the contents of Karl Rove's garage.

Next up: the stuff found behind Andy Card's washing machine.

How people with no friends spend their money

Thirty years from now, we'll look back on this the way we now sneer at Pet Rocks and Mood Rings.

(via Lileks)

Gomery previewed

James Travers says the Gomery report, set for release in less than two weeks, will hold Jean Chretien's loyalists accountable:

Justice John Gomery will report in less than two weeks that the Quebec sponsorship scheme was a narrowly held secret with broadly dangerous implications for government integrity.

By focusing tightly on those around Chrétien, the report both substantiates Martin's insistence he was out of the sponsorship loop and indirectly justifies his decision to order an inquiry that has badly damaged Liberal fortunes, particularly in Quebec.
[...]
Much of what Gomery reports won't be new and it will take an attentive electorate to follow the scandal's twists and turns to the root causes.

Once there, a program that spent, and wasted, millions at a time of national belt-tightening operated without normal controls and beyond the financial oversight that is Parliament's defining responsibility.

I can hear Warren Kinsella making up excuses and personal attacks already.

Recognizing Israel

Muslim states are quietly establishing diplomatic ties with the "Zionist entity" in the wake of the Gaza pullout:

In the aftermath of Israel's decision to pull its soldiers out of Gaza, relations between the Jewish state and Muslim nations are quietly thawing.

While the gestures of some countries are largely symbolic and do not yet amount to recognition, Israeli diplomats here say they are optimistic about their relationship in the region for the first time in years. To date, Egypt and Jordan are the only members of the Arab League to recognize Israel as a state. The state-run press in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran still refer to Israel as the Zionist entity.

Meanwhile, Palestinian society continues its descent into total chaos:

More Palestinians have been killed this year by fellow Palestinians than by Israeli soldiers, according to a Palestinian government report released this week.

In the latest sign that chaos in the Gaza Strip and West Bank is displacing the uprising against Israel at the top of the Palestinian agenda, the Palestinian Authority's Interior Ministry said 219 Palestinians died in internal clashes during the first nine months of 2005, compared with 218 who were killed in battling Israeli forces during the same period.
[...]
Public frustration with anarchy in Palestinian cities and towns has been on the rise in recent weeks amid clashes between security forces and militants of the Islamic group Hamas.

The Palestinian Authority must also rein in armed gangs connected with the ruling Fatah party, which have been accused of carrying out mafialike hits on rival strongmen.

Fatah gunmen have also kidnapped Western journalists -- most recently a reporter for the Knight-Ridder news service and a freelance photographer last week -- as a tool to negotiate for money and jobs from the Palestinian government.

It's in Revelations, people!

MSNBC: "[Britney Spears] may have to return to work after the birth of her son sooner than expected because her cash flow has been in mostly one direction — out — and some are blaming Kevin Federline. ...His latest venture is a multimillion-dollar dance school he’s building with Michael Jackson’s father, Joe." [emphasis added]

That's why it was called "Operation Kill the Ay-rabs and Take Their Oil"*

*Instead of, say, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or something like that.

I have two points to make about the referendum vote in Iraq on Saturday. First of all, George told us in his headlong rush to disaster in Iraq that Saddam had WMD's and that Iraq was culpable for 9/11. George and his band of war monsters still despicably say 9/11 in every major speech in defense of the invasion and continued occupation. He never said "regime change" or spreading "freedom and democracy."

- Cindy Sheehan at (where else?) the Huffington Post.

"Welcome home, Jews"

It will be all beer and Skittles when the Zionist entity finally dismantles itself, predicts The People's Cube:

From Russia to Morocco to Yemen to France, countries are anticipating the arrival of Israelis. In Moscow, an enormous banner was erected that read "Welcome Home, Jews." and erstwhile presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky exclaimed, "I'm going to bake a huge batch of cookies for this homecoming!" And in cities throughout Germany, joyous "Judenfests" were ubiquitous, as local citizens were arranging festivals to celebrate the Jewish arrival. German foreign minister Joschka Fischer indicated that, "For some reason, the Jewish presence in Germany is low by historical standards; many of our citizens under the age of 70 have never even met a Jew. In addition to curing the world's problems, the dismantling of Israel will give our people the opportunity to achieve their main wish in life - to live with Jews."
[...]
Al Qaeda has also released a statement that read: "As the entire world knows, the Zionist presence in our Holy Palestine has been the only reason for our existence. This is why we attacked the World Trade Center and why we murdered Americans in Iraq. It's why we bombed Paris, London, and Bali, why we exploded buildings in Saudi Arabia, and why we enabled murders and terrorist activities in Thailand, Kashmir, Russia, Morocco, Nigeria, India, and the Philippines. But now, with Palestine returned to our brothers, all operations will cease. This is effective immediately and is irrevocable. We will now form The International Peace Corps and of course pay reparations to the non-Israelis who we murdered."

In the new country of Palestine, there are already signs of promise. President Abu Mazen elaborated, "We're adopting the American Constitution as our legal model. We believe that our future is in limited government; free markets, rule of law, respect for contracts and individual rights. And by attracting foreign investment, our highly educated and motivated workforce will soon become the most affluent in the region. In our own country, we will bring to fruition all the programs that we started in refugee camps, such as our breakthroughs in medicine, education, applied and theoretical sciences, nanotechnology, and space exploration."

(via Meryl Yourish, who's interviewed on Shire Network News this week)

Charles Rocket, R.I.P.

The man chosen to be Saturday Night Live's next breakout star - only to be fired in disgrace after one season - took his own life this weekend. He was 56. We may never know why he committed suicide, but I can't help wondering whether he ever got over his demoralizing SNL experience:

Actor and comedian Charles Rocket, who had roles in a variety of movies and TV series and briefly gained notoriety for uttering an obscenity on "Saturday Night Live," committed suicide, the state medical examiner ruled.

Rocket, 56, whose real name was Charles Claverie, was found dead in a field near his home in Canterbury on Oct 7. His throat had been cut, the medical examiner said.
[...]
Rocket was a cast member on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" during the 1980-81 season. The profanity incident happened during a spoof of the "Who Shot J.R.?" plot line on "Dallas," which created a nationwide sensation at the time.

He went on to appear in numerous TV shows, including "Moonlighting" and "Max Headroom," and provided voices for cartoon series. His movie credits included "Earth Girls are Easy," "Dumb and Dumber" and "Dances With Wolves," according to the Internet Movie Database.

Kim Jong Il wasn't available?

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is holding a conference in Rome to celebrate its 60th anniversary. The FAO's self-proclaimed mandate is to "[lead] international efforts to defeat hunger" and to "ensure good nutrition for all," so who better to address the big conference than an insane dictator who deliberately starved his people and destroyed his country's once-prosperous agriculture industry?

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has drawn applause for a speech denouncing Britain's Tony Blair and US President George Bush at a UN event in Rome.

Mr Mugabe described the leaders as "unholy men" at talks on food policy.
[...]
Mr Mugabe used his speech to lambast President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose governments have been among his severest critics.

Delegates applauded Mr Mugabe at the end of his speech. (via LGF)

Mugabe in 2003: "This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources...if that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold."

Rocchead DiHypocrite

This past spring it was MacGyver, and now "celebrity chef" Rocco DiSpirito is the big name (ahem) trotted out to oppose the seal hunt:

Celebrity chef Rocco Dispirito is lending his support to The Humane Society of the United States' campaign to end Canada's annual seal hunt.

In a letter sent this week to chefs across the U.S., Dispirito asks them to boycott Canadian snow crabs until that country's annual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seals is permanently halted. Dispirito, known for being the star of the hit NBC reality series The Restaurant, is also the bestselling author of Flavor, Rocco's Italian American and the upcoming Rocco's Five Minute Flavor.

Richard Foot of CanWest News Service, in a story featured in today's Corner Brook Western Star (not available online), notes some of the culinary delights with which DiSpirito has no problem:

Foie grad force-feeding has been officially banned in some European countries, and also in California, where the humane society itself recently lobbied the state legislature to outlaw the practice.

Even so, DiSpirito promotes not only foie gras, but also a long list of contentious concoctions on his cooking website, including "boneless lamb loins," "breats of veal", sauteed calf brains," and "fattened goose liver - considered a luxury."

Mmm...sauteed calf brains...

The dysfunctional department

The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans has failed miserably in its mandate to protect Canadian fish stocks, but some of its employees have done pretty well for themselves milking the system for free first-class vacations:

A newly released audit of travel expenses at the federal Fisheries Department has uncovered some horror stories -- just as the Liberals try to shake off spending scandals at the Royal Canadian Mint and elsewhere.

The audit, dated Sept. 30, covered two years of spending on travel and hospitality up to March 31 this year.

After the quake

Some good news from devastated Kashmir: the Pakistani government acknowledges all the help they've recieved from India, and says relations between the two countries - who were on the verge of war just three years ago - have been strengthened.

Pakistan's Prime Minister said on Monday that cooperation with India on earthquake relief is strengthening relations between the two countries.

``I think this is a good neighbourly attitude,'' Aziz said of Indian cooperation. ``As the confidence-building measures between the two countries and the peace process moves ahead, all these measures become confidence-building measures themselves.''

The bad news: in areas where the Pakistani government was slow to send in relief workers, Islamofascist terror groups have rushed in to fill the void.

While the army, Government and international aid agencies were only just beginning to respond to the devastating earthquake, the foot soldiers of Dawa had sprung into action, venturing where nobody else had managed and winning hearts and minds among those they helped.

Its field hospital in Muzaffarabad is run by Amer Aziz, a British-trained orthopaedic surgeon most famous as Osama bin Laden’s one-time doctor and detained for his militant links soon after September 11.
[...]
Those who have benefited from the groups’ rescue efforts, however, seem unconcerned by any suggestion that they may be involved in violence. “If Dawa people hadn’t helped us, we would have died,” Mrs Wahid said, nursing her five-year-old son, who has a serious leg fracture. “Nobody else came to help us. We are grateful to them and we offer them our support back.”

Referendum acknowledged

A post about this weekend's extraordinary events in Iraq finally appears at the Huffington Post. Not from Cindy Sheehan or Deepak Chopra, of course, but from an Iraqi Kurd.

The future of television

Teevee's Nathan Alderman theorizes that cult shows like Arrested Development could survive cancellation if enough people are willing to pay for new, downloadable episodes:

Yes, you can now pay a ridiculous $2 each [on iTunes] for Pixar short films and thousands of music videos. ...It’s kinda lame now — copy-protected, sold in a 4x3 aspect ratio at rinky-dink standard TV resolution, and there’s no way yet to burn any of these shows to DVD — but this could be the tip of the iceberg.

Suppose Fox announces that it’s cancelling Arrested Development. Now suppose that Apple and the show’s producers put up a whole new season on iTunes for preorder, promising to crank out the episodes if enough folks pay up to see it. Say the same 2 million or so folks who watch Arrested each week sign up for a 22-episode season at $35 a pop. If Apple gets, oh, 25 percent of that, it still works out to roughly $2.3 million an episode for producers to crank out the further adventures of the Bluth clan. (A quick Google search suggests the show currently costs $1.5 million an episode to produce. Does anyone else hear cash registers?) If those episodes also air on TV, the ad revenue would kick in even more to the budget. And even more money would trickle in over months and years as new folks discovered the show and signed up to download the newly made episodes.

This could be big. This could be Veronica Mars never getting cancelled big. In my sad, sad little dreams, this could even be new episodes of Firefly or Farscape big.

The problem with this rosy vision of the future, of course, would be internet piracy. But $35.00 would be a small price to pay to keep Arrested Development or The Office going.

When you consider that the best-selling DVD in America right now is a made-for-DVD "movie" (three unaired episodes, actually) of a show which is still on the air, you can't help thinking the standard television business model - produce a pilot, hope it makes it to air (or first-run syndication) for at least three seasons, and eventually make a profit from syndication and DVD sales - is going to fundamentally change within the next few years.

Satire, R.I.P.

Ken Wiwa in this weekend's Globe and Mail, cited at Let it Bleed:

One question that has been preying on my mind lately is: Why has south Asia become the epicentre of natural and man-made disasters? I wouldn't have put much money on that part of the world being the scene of two major earthquakes in the space of eight months.

Sitting in my home in Nigeria this week, watching CNN's coverage of the destruction in Kashmir, I asked my uncle about this. My uncle is a doctor; I expect him to be the font of scientific wisdom in the Wiwa home. My uncle also has a forensic understanding of international politics. When he quipped, almost as an aside, that Kashmir is where he would have expected Osama bin Laden to be hiding out, I didn't laugh it off. Rather, there was a kind of pregnant pause as his aside gave birth to a conspiracy theory or two.

India was struck by a 7.9 earthquake on Jan. 26, 2001 - just six days after the inauguration of George W. Bush! Connect the dots, people!

Call them what you want, but don't call them "liberal"

A good sign that yesterday's Iraqi constitutional referendum went really well: there's not a thing about it on the Huffington Post blog. Funny, how we right-wing neocon chickenhawk warmongers are thrilled to see Ay-rabs exercising their democratic rights, while self-proclaimed "liberals" are too despondent to even mention it.

The people of Afghanistan, until recently under the jackboot of a tyranny so repressive it banned music, held their own election not too long ago. HuffPo maniac Larisa Alexandrovna, in a characteristically unhinged post recounting the Bush Administration's allegedly dubious achievements, could bring herself to say no more than the following about the extraordinary events in that country:

A once systematically murdered Poppy population, still mere fledglings only hoping for their day to grow up and become Heroin, has been released from the grasp of Afghan talons and is now able to enjoy a non-passport travel policy to any nation and in large groups.

Hey, the Taliban may have been a little extreme, but they made the trains run on time kept the opium trade in check.

I am so bloody fed up with the fine word "liberal" being used to describe these Marxists, nihilists, "anarchists", conspiracy-mongers, Castro/Chavez acolytes, Saddam apologists, "anti-Zionists" and totalitarian control freaks. There's nothing even remotely liberal about them, except for their firm belief that they - and only they - have the right to make the most outrageous statements without their brave dissent being stifled. (By "stifled", I mean "criticized".)

It's time to stop calling them "liberal" and to start using a more accurate word to describe these people. It begins with "F" and it's most commonly associated with a man who allegedly kept the opium trade in check made the trains run on time.

A new dawn for Iraq

It looks like the new constitution has passed:

Iraqis look to have voted "Yes" to their U.S.-brokered constitution, as poll workers counted and recounted piles of ballots across Iraq on Sunday and the possibility of a Sunni minority veto receded.

Even if a majority of Iraqis backed the constitution it could be vetoed if two-thirds of voters in three of Iraq's provinces reject it. But partial returns suggested "No" voters reached this target in only two of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Go curl up in the corner and cry yourself to sleep, Mr. Galloway.

Iraq votes

Turnout for today's constitutional referendum in Iraq: 61%. To put that in perspective, voter turnout in the last Canadian federal election - in which no one, presumably, tried to kill you for casting a ballot - was 60.5%.

The so-called "insurgents" will continue their campaign of murder and terror even if, as expected, the constitution is ratified. But they will not win.

"Your life. In a small, shiny, plastic case."

The backlash against iPods - specifically, against the Apple cultists - is well under way. (via Galley Slaves)

For the record, my MP3 player is a 512MB Sandisk Sansa (the design of which, admittedly, is as much of an Apple knockoff as they could get away with). I see no reason why I should pay more for a "real" iPod shuffle which, for the same price, doesn't even have an FM reciever.

If you smoke pot, you are using your brain

Remember that anti-drug ad from the eighties, which purported to show the brain waves of a teenager who'd been smoking marijuana? A new University of Saskatchewan study suggests that the truth may be very, very different:

While most addictive drugs, legal or illegal, have been proven to slow down or inhibit the growth of brain cells, a new study shows that marijuana might do just the opposite.

The findings suggest controlled marijuana treatments can increase brain cell growth in the hippocampus area of the brain. The region is associated with learning and memory, as well as anxiety and depression.
[...]
But Zhang is quick to caution the findings don't mean marijuana is a miracle drug. His research has shown that using the drug comes with lots of side affects that aren't positive, such as memory impairment, addiction and withdrawal symptoms. And the version used in the tests was potent and pure. Nothing on the street would compare to it, he said.

True - which is all the more reason its manufacture should be strictly regulated. But the rationale for keeping marijuana banned grows flimsier and flimsier by the day.

Week 6

Last week I was 8-6, bringing my season record to 34-40. This week's picks, as usual, are in bold:

Atlanta at New Orleans - even if Vick isn't ready, Matt Schaub played pretty well against the Pats and should be even better against the maddeningly inconsistent Saints.
Carolina at Detroit - upset special. Detroit is pretty good at home, which might be enough to let them win this horrendous division.
Cincinnati at Tennessee
Cleveland at Baltimore
Jacksonville at Pittsburgh - I'm having a really, really hard time deciding on this one, but in the end I'm taking the home team.
Miami at Tampa Bay
Minnesota at Chicago - if the Bears can't steal a win at home against a team in as much turmoil as the Vikings, they may as well forfeit the rest of the year.
N.Y. Giants at Dallas
Washington at Kansas City - a commenter chided me last week for never picking the Skins, who were 3-0 at the time. Happy now?
New England at Denver
N.Y. Jets at Buffalo - but I'd love to see Vinny do it again.
San Diego at Oakland
Houston at Seattle - the Texans have only scored 44 points all year. Aside from the Ravens (47), no team has less than 60.
St. Louis at Indianapolis

Oh. My. God.

This can't possibly be real, can it? She sure didn't look like an "unforgettable business genius" on The Apprentice last night...

Still low, but not that low

Remember that poll I mentioned yesterday, which said President Bush's approval rating among African-Americans was only two percent? Turns out the sample size was ridiculously small, and a new survey from the Pew Research Center puts the figure at 12%. (The Mystery Pollster has more.)

Twelve percent is still a pretty dismal result - although it's actually slightly better than Bush did in the 2004 election among Black voters. Usually, you can get 5 or 6 percent of survey respondents to agree to anything, so I should have been a lot more skeptical of the "2%" result. (You know I'm not normally one for liberal hand-wringing, but I have to ask myself whether I would have been so quick to rush to judgment had the dubious poll results dealt with almost any other ethnic group.)

Reading Chomsky so we don't have to

You have to give Bob Tarantino credit: not only did he read an entire Noam Chomsky book (actually, a collection of Chomsky interviews), he bends over backwards to be fair to St. Noam in his book review.

I'll admit to never having read an entire book by Chomsky, but I've read enough of his essays and columns to get the gist of his work. (I've never been shot in the head or seen The Adventures of Pluto Nash, either, but even without having done so I suspect it would be unpleasant.)

Million Moonbat March

The ADL has revealed more details about some of the people scheduled to participate in Louis Farrakhan's imminent "Millions More March" in Washington, DC:

According to ADL, the pre-march event is being organized by the virulently anti-Semitic and racist Malik Zulu Shabazz, leader of the New Black Panther Party, who has been chosen by Minister Louis Farrakhan as one of the major organizers of the Millions More Movement.

-- Representatives of Dr. Malachi Z. York, the founder of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, a group which has a history of promoting racists and anti-government beliefs. York was sentenced to 135 years in federal prison on child molestation and racketeering charges.

Farrakhan himself is still plugging the "Whitey blew up the levees in New Orleans" theory. Note how he puts the burden of proof on the government to prove it didn't deliberately flood New Orleans, as though a man who believes White people were created in a lab by a mad scientist would ever accept any such explanation:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan says it's up to government to prove that a levee wasn't bombed to flood poor black people out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Farrakhan spoke at a Washington news conference in advance of Saturday's Millions More March on the National Mall. It comes ten years after the "Million Man March."

How Miers snuck through

John Fund, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, has an excellent account of the vetting process through which Harriet Miers became the latest nominee for the Supreme Court.

A much more positive assessment of Miers can be gleaned from this Legal Times article on her background as a litigator. I have no doubt Miers is a very good lawyer who would be more than qualified for a lower court position - but the highest court in America? I've yet to see the Miers or the White House give a compelling reason why the country needs her on the Supreme Court.

Avert thine eyes!

A little-known Korean automaker, Ssangyong, has created a production vehicle even uglier than the Pontiac Aztek.

(Although, if price is factored into the equation, I think you can make a pretty good argument for this being the ugliest vehicle on Earth.)

Less than the margin of error

Take a massive hurricane in which poor African-Americans were disproportionately affected, throw in some ill-advised (and misinterpreted) comments by prominent conservative Bill Bennett, and this is what you get: a two percent approval rating for President Bush among Black Americans. If you polled African-Americans on whether they wish the South had won the Civil War, you'd probably get more than two percent. (The same two percent, I hear the folks at Democratic Underground saying.)

The mythology is now set in stone: Bush is a racist who deliberately left poor Black people to drown in New Orleans. There's absolutely no way anyone can prove such a thing isn't true, and any Black who dares to suggest that the city's Black mayor and Black-dominated city council may share some of the blame will be angrily denounced as an "Uncle Tom" and a "sellout". (Ray Nagin's political fortunes won't be hurt one bit. Just watch.) And it may take another groundbreaking shift in the American political landscape, on the order of the Civil War or the New Deal era, before the GOP will ever get more than 10% of the Black vote.

For God's sake, Sly, let it go

The only way I'll pay ten bucks to see this is if they base the screenplay on Weird Al Yankovic's Theme from Rocky XIII.

A brief history of razors

Like dentistry, modern shaving is an excellent example of how, even with the most mundane activities, people have never had it so good. (I'm not really dedicated to any one brand, but I think the Schick Xtreme 3 is very nice.)

The witch is dead

The thoroughly loathsome Carolyn Parrish will not be running for another term. Good riddance, but I shudder to think who the people of Mississauga will elect next...

Slobo supporter honoured

Harold Pinter, an outspoken member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, has been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature - ostensibly because of his contributions to the dramatic arts, most of which occurred several decades ago, but more likely because of this kind of thing:

The United States is a monster out of control. Unless we challenge it with absolute determination American barbarism will destroy the world. The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder.

In fact there are at least 2 more words to be said, the first is "Resistance". And the second I address to Tony Blair "Resign! Resign! Resign!"

That's four words, Harold.

Update: more Pinter poetry here.

Conservative Ice Age

The Harriet Miers reaction, in computer-animated form.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Kiss of Death

If the Mafia ran a government, it would look pretty much like modern-day Syria.

"Hackocracy"

Yes, I'm pretty sure that in some ways, this much-talked-about New Republic cover story, which lists the fifteen least-qualified political appointees in the Bush Administration, is unfair. (You can tell how the authors cherry-picked elements from the appointees' backgrounds, such as the way one appointee supplied Bush with Altoids while serving as his travel aide, to make them look even more pathetic.) But the prima facie case against many of these jokers, especially the ones who blatantly padded and/or faked their resumes, is pretty strong:

In June 2004, Cristina Beato admitted to her hometown newspaper that she hadn't paid much attention to the details of her resumé. That's too bad, because those silly little details seem to have stalled her confirmation for assistant secretary for health for over two years now. Beato said she earned a master's of public health in occupational medicine from the University of Wisconsin (but the university doesn't even offer that degree). She claimed to be "one of the principal leaders who revolutionized medical education in American universities by implementing the Problem Based learning curriculum" (but the curriculum was developed while Beato was still a medical student). She listed "medical attaché" to the American Embassy in Turkey as a job she held in 1986 (but that position didn't exist until 1995). She also boasted that she had "established" the University of New Mexico's occupational health clinic (but the clinic existed before she was hired, and there was even another medical director before her). For her part, Beato has offered a simple explanation: English is her third language, after French and her native Spanish, and sometimes the language barrier is just too much to handle. How does one say "pants on fire" in Spanish?
[...]
The Pacific Northwest is a catastrophe-prone area-- from tsunamis and volcanic eruptions in Washington and Oregon to wildfires in Idaho and oil pipeline ruptures in Alaska. That's why former Washington Representative Jennifer Dunn knew that fema needed "a natural" to head its disaster response efforts in the region. And that's exactly what Dunn said she found in 38-year-old John Pennington. Pennington would have to be a natural, given his utter lack of disaster-relief experience. A former state representative who ran a coffee business with his wife in rural Washington, Pennington served as Cowlitz County co-chairman of the Bush campaign in 2000. Dunn, who had been the Bush campaign's state chairperson, approached Pennington about the fema post, to which he was appointed in 2001. Alas, in the wake of former fema Director Michael Brown's resignation, Pennington's disaster of a resumé has come under increasing scrutiny. Last month, The Seattle Times reported that, just before he was appointed to his fema post, Pennington received his bachelor's degree from an unaccredited California correspondence school that federal investigators later described as a "diploma mill." Pennington's defenders have responded to questions about his qualifications by arguing that he has surrounded himself with competent staff.

You will not be at all surprised to find out who's number one, considering how much she's been in the news lately. (via Let it Bleed)

Banning the Burka

I'm all in favor of encouraging Muslim women to cast off this medieval symbol of oppression, but I also firmly believe the state has no business telling me what I can and can't wear. That's why stories like this (which always seem to come from tolerant Europe, not right-wing neocon Amerikkka, by the way) leave me feeling somewhat uneasy:

The Netherlands is likely to become the first country in Europe to ban the burka, under government proposals that would bring in some of the toughest curbs on Muslim clothing in the world.

The country’s hardline Integration Minister, Rita Verdonk, known as the Iron Lady for her series of tough anti-immigration measures, told Parliament that she was going to investigate where and when the burka should be banned. The burka, traditional clothing in some Islamic societies, covers a woman’s face and body, leaving only a strip of gauze for the eyes.
[...]
Mrs Verdonk admitted that a complete ban on the garment would be legally tricky because of freedom of religion legislation. However, she said that she would prohibit the garments “in specific situations” on grounds of public safety. The ban is likely to be enforced in shops, public buildings, cinemas, train and bus stations and airports, as well as on trains and buses.

A government spokesman said: “We want to investigate when, how, in which places the burka should be banned. It is a safety measure — you don’t see who is in it.” The Government cites as a precedent existing football legislation, which bans people from entering football grounds covering their faces in scarves.

Dutch Muslim groups, it should be noted, haven't exactly done their part to warm relations with the "Iron Lady":

Mrs Verdonk gave warning that the “time of cosy tea-drinking” with Muslim groups had passed and that natives and immigrants should have the courage to be critical of each other. She recently cancelled a meeting with Muslim leaders who refused to shake her hand because she was a woman. [emphasis added]

(via LGF)

How to solve the Miers mess

It will never happen, but I like Mickey Kaus's idea:

How about appointing Miers to a federal appeals court? She's qualified. Bush could say that while he knows Miers he understands others' doubts--and he knows she will prove over a couple of years what a first-rate judge she is. Then he hopes to be able to promote her. Semi-humilating, but less humiliating than the alternatives. And not a bad job to get. ... Miers could puncture the tension with one smiling crack about being sent to the minors. The collective sigh of national relief would drown out the rest of her comments.

(Just one question: will Bush even get the chance to appoint a third Justice? Maybe, if he cancels the 2008 elections and turns America into a theocratic one-party state, as I'm regularly assured is just around the corner...)

Smurficide

The most-talked-about video on the net can be seen here. The quality isn't the best, but you'll get the gist of it.

The little commies were askin' for it, I says. (via National Journal's Blogometer)

Update: more here. You never saw any of this in the mainstream media, most likely because Papa Smurf* made sure his "minders" accompanied reporters everywhere they went.

*Haiti was once run by a brutal tyrant named "Papa", too. Just sayin'.

Raj in '08!

Former Apprentice contestant Raj Bhakta, who achieved reality-TV immortality by trying to pick up Anna Kournikova and Donald Trump's receptionist, may run for Congress:

Pennsylvania's Raj Bhakta says getting fired by Donald Trump on NBC's "The Apprentice" last season had no effect on his political aspirations.

"Why do I want to get my brains beaten in?" Bhakta told the Inquirer. "Because I've always had a deep love of this country. I have a special appreciation as a first-generation American."

He shot himself three times in the back of his head, and then decapitated himself just to be sure

You know I don't go in for conspiracy theories, but c'mon:

Syria's interior minister, who was head of the country's military intelligence in neighboring Lebanon for nearly 20 years, has committed suicide, officials said.

The 63-year-old Baathist major general died in a Damascus hospital of a gunshot wound to the head, according to the interior ministry and other government ministers.
[...]
Hours before his death, Kanaan had been interviewed by a Lebanese radio station after he called in to refute allegations that aired on Lebanese television Tuesday night that he had accepted bribes and payoffs while in the Lebanon post.

Less than two hours later, he was dead.

Geez, Mr. Assad, at least make it look like a car accident or something, will ya?

Three years ago today

Bombs swept through two Balinese nightclubs on Oct. 12, 2002, killing 202 people. Earlier today, hundreds of protestors marched on the prison where three of the bombers are being held, demanding their execution:

Protesters stormed an Indonesian jail on Wednesday where many bombers behind the 2002 Bali nightclub blasts are incarcerated, just hours after sombre ceremonies to mark the third anniversary of the atrocity.

Wearing traditional Balinese headbands and sarongs, the protesters shouted "Kill Amrozi! Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "We have been waiting for three years."

Many of the dead were Australian tourists, leading the usual suspects to snap to attention and say the bombers were driven by Australia's role in the Iraq war, or even the destructive influence of international tourism. (Damn Aussies, coming over here and spending their money like that.) Nick Cohen, who's on a roll these days, savaged the "Kill us! We deserve it!" mindset in Sunday's Observer:

Before a single fact on the motives of the killers was available, the Independent on Sunday declared: 'There can be little doubt that the bombs in Bali are linked to issues surrounding the war. It is no coincidence that Australia, whose citizens are likely to be the majority of the victims, is fully committed in Iraq.'

Except that the bombers weren't disgruntled room cleaners and taxi drivers. They were members of a totalitarian movement which is against every principle Ms Nowicka professes to support. The first economic consequence of their killings will be to put cleaners and taxi drivers out of work.
[...]
Perhaps it is too easy to mock. When confronted with an ideology which mandates indiscriminate killing on an industrial scale, it is natural to seek rational explanations of the irrational; to pretend that Islamism is merely a reasonable, if bloody, response to legitimate concerns which could be remedied if we elected wiser leaders.

Yet the masochism - 'Kill us, we deserve it!' - the subliminal dislike of democracy and the willingness to turn al-Qaeda into the armed wing of every fashionable campaign from sustainable tourism to the anti-war movement will in the end disgrace the liberals by making them ridiculous. (via Mick Hartley)

A deal with the Sunnis

Some very hopeful news from Iraq:

Members of the largest political party for Sunni Muslims said yesterday they have reached a tentative deal to support Iraq's draft constitution in a national referendum to be held on Saturday.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the Sunni faction that accepted the tentative deal yesterday, had been urging supporters to vote against the draft.
[...]
Details of the constitution deal were still becoming known late yesterday but it appears to make the constitution more flexible in the future, delaying current disputes. A key provision would allow the next National Assembly, which will be elected in December, to form a commission to propose amendments to it. The amendments could be put up to another referendum.

Newfoundland's real flag

Today's Globe and Mail has a story about the growing movement to replace Newfoundland and Labrador's hideously ugly provincial flag with the pink-white-and-green tricolour:

What started as a lark has grown into a full-fledged movement to replace Newfoundland and Labrador's provincial flag with a traditional, more rebellious one.

Newfoundland nationalists have flown the pink-white-and-green since before the province joined Confederation.
[...]
It is popularly believed that the "Newfoundland tricolour" was originally designed during the 19th century to make peace between competing Irish and English sealers in St. John's.

"To me it is a sign of hope and strength for our future. I feel it is a symbol of a new attitude that Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans have taken on; an attitude that says we are not going to be pushed around any more," Mr. Pike said. "This campaign is not about separation. This campaign is about changing our current geometrical mess of a flag into something meaningful for our province."

You don't have to be a Newfoundland separatist to support replacing this mess with a real symbol of our history, culture and pride. The online petition mentioned in the article is here.

The best new show on television

[cross-posted to Blogcritics.org]

Mediaweek's daily "Programming Insider" has a brief rundown of the major American networks' new shows and their chances for renewal. Bones, Commander in Chief and Ghost Whisperer - yes, Ghost Whisperer - will almost certainly be around for the whole season, but I wouldn't get too attached to Night Stalker if I were you.

My getting attached to a half-hour comedy - Action, Undeclared, the doomed Arrested Development - is usually the kiss of death for said show. But by some miracle, NBC's My Name is Earl, starring Jason Lee as a redneck small-time criminal who wins the lottery and dedicates his life to making up for all the bad things he's done, has been renewed for the rest of the year.

Earl is a very funny show, with a great ensemble cast and plenty of in-jokes for the careful viewer (when Earl's ex-wife painted "U R AN ASS" on his El Camino, in later scenes it was changed to "U R AN ASTRONAUT"). But what I really like about My Name is Earl is that even though the main characters are obvious redneck stereotypes - did I mention that Earl drives an El Camino? - they're also sincere and extremely likable. Earl, bless him, is dead serious about making amends for his wasted life, and his quests to scratch old wrongs off his list are treated with a surprising degree of sincerity. You're laughing at Earl, but you're genuinely rooting for him at the same time.

An example: in the second episode, Earl apologizes to the cross-eyed maniac who went to jail for the robbery he committed. It turns out the guy became a born-again Christian in prison (and got a tattoo showing the parting of the Red Sea, in a place where you really don't want to see a tattoo showing the parting of the Red Sea), and all is forgiven. But the guy's mother is furious that her son was taken away from her for two years, and demands that Earl somehow give her back all the time she missed. So, he ties her to a chair and makes her quit smoking - which would have taken two years off her life, right?

Yes, it's all very silly, but I'm darned if I wasn't kind of touched by the end of that episode. A lot of critics have compared My Name is Earl to Raising Arizona, and the similarities are obvious - but that film had a lot of heart, too.

Like most new shows, My Name is Earl hasn't really hit its peak yet. Some unfunny bits go on way too long, and the character of Earl's trashy ex-wife (played by a seriously uglified Jamie Pressley), who believes herself entitled to half his lottery winnings even though she left him before he won, doesn't really work as a regular character. (In guest appearances she'd be great, but endless variations on the "Joy tries another crazy scheme to steal Earl's money" plot are going to get tiresome really quickly.)

But this quirky, likable show has a lot of potential, and in a way, it's a good thing it's on struggling NBC. The Fox network actually turned down Earl because of its unhappy experiences trying to make people watch Arrested Development, and even if they had picked it up, they probably would have dumped it after six airings if it wasn't pulling in CSI numbers. But NBC, whose highest-rated show these days is the fifteen-year-old Law & Order, actually appears ready to stick with My Name is Earl and nurture it into an established hit. Here's hoping the show keeps getting better, and that the promising ratings hold up.

(By the way, Earl's lead-out, the American version of The Office, has improved dramatically since its shaky start. It's tanking in the ratings, so check it out while you still can.)

"Kashmir is a graveyard"

The death toll from this past weekend's earthquake could top 40,000, and it's starting to look like a disproportionate number of the dead were children:

Pakistan mourned a lost generation of children in the earthquake-devastated Kashmir area yesterday. United Nations officials predicted that the number of deaths among young people would rise to 15,000.

But three days after the earthquake vast tracts of the region were still without help and hope was fading rapidly for most of those trapped under the wreckage of flimsy buildings.
[...]
...Damien Personnaz, a spokesman for Unicef, the UN children's fund, said in Geneva: "It is a logistical nightmare to try to rescue the survivors. Most of the children who died were at school.

The UN has raised its estimate of the number of people made homeless from 2.5 million to four million.

Even if the worst reports turn out to be untrue, we're still dealing with destruction on an almost unimaginable scale. For now, all we can do is hope, pray - and give.

Quote of the Day

Houstonian Laurence Simon: "The difference between David Carr and Madonna is that she's paid to have men throw her on the ground and pile on top of her."

Hate marches on

Hatemongering psychopath Louis Farrakhan is hosting a "Millions More Weekend" in Washington, D.C. from Oct. 14-16, and in response to concerns from the ADL, Russell Simmons is telling the Jews to keep their mouths shut:

As Chairman of The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, I know that your above quoted statements and the urging and pressure of the ADL for African American leaders to reconsider their support of the Millions More Movement and the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March will do nothing more than increase the polarization of relations between millions of African Americans and Jewish Americans. It is a sad commentary that your actions will only help to spread anti-Semitism rather than help to end it.
[...]
Simply put, you are misguided, arrogant, and very disrespectful of African Americans and most importantly your statements will unintentionally or intentionally lead to a negative impression of Jews in the minds of millions of African Americans. Similar to how you single-handedly caused millions of persons to flock to see the "Passion of Christ" in defiance of your call for non-attendance, you are going to precipitate a tremendous negative defiance of your demands that will again severely hurt and harm relations between Jews and African Americans.

You should refrain from pressuring African American leaders to denounce Minister Farrakhan and the Millions More Movement. This commemoration is as a real opportunity for establishing healing, reconciliation and fostering a more effective environment for constructive dialogue between Blacks and Jews. We want a society and world were there is no hatred, anti-Semitism, violence, or poverty. For the record, we do not and would not support or endorse any person's viewpoint that is anti-Semitic, racist or hateful. You should, therefore, be working with us toward building more compassion and love among and between all people. [emphasis added]

So, what's the ADL so concerned about? This, for starters:

In the run-up to the October 14 – 16 march in Washington, Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic and racist leader of the Nation of Islam, has promoted a conspiracy theory that the flooding of Black neighborhoods during Hurricane Katrina was a deliberate act of sabotage. This is one in a series of racially divisive remarks made by Farrakhan as he has toured the country visiting shelters for hurricane victims and garnering support for the march, which he is touting as a 10th anniversary commemoration of the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C.

In a September 23 speech in Memphis, Farrakhan repeated the allegation that the levees were purposely destroyed and read at length from an essay posted on a Web site by Hal Turner, a hardcore anti-Semite and former member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. The essay claimed that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had found chemical traces of "military grade" explosives at the New Orleans levees. (Incredibly, there is nothing new about the Nation of Islam teaming up with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.)

A partial list of those teaming up with Farrakhan this weekend:

The Millions More Movement is being orchestrated by a broad coalition of national organizations including Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Dr. Dorothy Height and the National Council of Negro Women, Bruce Gordon and the NAACP, Mark Morial and the National Urban League, Russell Simmons and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, Dr. Charles Steele and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Reverend Jesse Jackson and the National Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Reverend Al Sharpton and the National Action Network and Congressman Mel Watt and the Congressional Black Caucus, among others...

...Hip-hop leaders helping to galvanize the movement include Reverend Run, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Damon Dash, Jermaine Dupri, Kanye West, Ludacris, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Common, Wyclef Jean, Missy Elliott, Foxy Brown, David Banner, Snoop Dogg, Ice T, Jim Jones, Juelz Santana and Jha Jha of the Diplomats, Masta P, Juvenile, Erykah Badu ?Questlove of The Roots, MC Lyte, Fab Five Freddy, Biz Markie, Kid Capri, Cassidy, the Wu Tang Clan, Xzibit, Tony Austin, Humpty Hump, the Ruff Ryders and dead prez, among others.
[...]
Other celebrities endorsing or participating include Harry Belafonte, Cornell West, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Susan Taylor, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and many others.

It's bad enough that the once-great civil rights movement, which stood for decency, equality and tolerance at a time when racism was much, much worse than it is today, has degenerated into such a swamp of paranoia, partisanship, groupthink, conspiracy-theorizing and incompetence. But it's downright disgraceful that the Jews, who more than any other ethnic group stood with African-Americans in the fight against segregation, are being singled out for hate.

Louis Farrakhan is a cancer, no matter how many "empowerment" or "self-help" programs he sets up. And anyone, Black or White, who makes excuses for the man should be automatically disqualified from being taken seriously on racial issues. Or any other issues.

Chicago's loss

That's not a reference to the latest Bears game, but to the University of Chicago's decision to deny tenure to Daniel Drezner. The New York Sun wonders whether his blogging might have had something to do with it:

Under normal circumstances, a scholar who is denied tenure assumes that the decision was simply a reflection of a department's assessment of scholarship. In this case, Mr. Drezner and others are wondering whether the blog may have had an impact on his tenure status.

Academic bloggers interviewed say the most common problem they face is convincing their colleagues that their online activity does not come at the expense of scholarly research. While some of the nation's most prominent scholars have started their own blogs, most notably Chicago giants Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Richard Posner, a federal judge, blogging is still perceived by some academics as a slight activity lacking in intellectual value.

That may not just apply to academics. I have a disclaimer on this site stating that my own blogging does not necessarily reflect the views of the law firm for which I work, but even then, to preserve my own professional reputation, I try to be somewhat careful about what I write. (Needless to say, gossip about this firm or the local legal community is strictly off limits.) And, of course, blogging at work is to be kept to a bare minimum - which is why this site is usually updated early in the morning, over the lunch hour, or in the evening.

Drezner's post on the subject is here. I'm sure he'll land on his feet somewhere before too long.

Animation treasures lost

Just as the Wallace and Gromit movie was opening at number one at the box office, the Aardman animation studios in London - where Chicken Run and the original Wallace and Gromit shorts were made - was destroyed by fire:

"About 30 years of Aardman history represented by props and models has gone up in smoke," said Kieran Argo, the company's events and exhibitions manager, during a visit to the building in Bristol.

Asked what Wallace would have done, Mr Argo said: "There would have been a 'sprinklomatic' system in place detecting smoke well in advance of any flames."
[...]
The company said that the sets and models from the Curse of the Were-Rabbit were safe, as they were either on display at a Bristol exhibition or at the production company's headquarters in the city. But the sets from A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave were thought to have been destroyed, along with some from Chicken Run, Aardman's first feature-length release.

Storyboards and some of the many awards that the company has accumulated were also lost. However, none of the negatives from films was affected.

To his credit, Nick Park is taking it a lot better than I would:

Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, said it was "dreadful news" for the company. However, he added that it was "not a big deal" compared with the earthquake in Pakistan.

Robert Fisk wasn't available?

The Guelph Conservative riding association is hosting a fundraiser with Gwynne Freaking Dyer?

(via Adam Daifallah)

Dodge Neon, R.I.P.

Autoblog has an amusing, school yearbook-style tribute to the Neon (called the SX 2.0 in Canada, for some reason), which just went out of production after 11 years.

I know a lot of people who rushed to buy Neons when they first came out, only to swear off Chryslers forever when something inevitably went wrong. At least the insane SRT-4 version was cool, and its upcoming replacement, the Caliber, looks promising.

Merkel wins, sort of

Angela Merkel will be the next chancellor of Germany.

That's the good news. The bad news is, the Social Democrats will continue to play a major role in the new "grand coalition" government, and much-needed economic reforms may not be implemented:

It means Ms Merkel's plans for radical reforms of the unions, the tax system, rigid labour laws and the influence of unions at boardroom level in most major German companies will be watered down at best: at worst, they will fail in endless partisan bickering, meaning the only real solution may be another general election before very long if the perceived logjam in the Bundestag becomes reality.

Power ballads from Hell

This guy has compiled a list of the ten worst hair-metal ballads of all time, and I can't argue with most of his selections. I especially like what he wrote about Bon Jovi's "I'll be There For You":

What about that whole "steal the sun from the sky for you" bullshit? Is that supposed to be an incentive for this chick? What would a woman do with the sun, anyway? The last time I checked, women don't usually want gifts that will SET THEM ON FIRE when they get within several million miles of them. They want diamonds and shit.

That said, Bon Jovi recorded a much, much worse power ballad: "Bed of Roses", which features what I firmly believe to be the worst lyric ever committed to paper ("with an ironclad fist I wake up and French kiss the morning"). And how can any list of the all-time worst power ballads leave out "Love of a Lifetime" by Firehouse? "I'll Never Let You Go" by Steelheart? Or (oh, God, merely writing this gives me a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach) "When the Children Cry" by White Lion?

Africa's shame

It's already well-known that African leaders, most notably South Africa's Thebo Mbeki, will not criticize Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe. What's even more disturbing is that Mugabe remains a hero to many ordinary Africans for standing up to "colonialism", regardless of whatever disasters who has inflicted upon his country. Worst of all, the cancer is spreading to other African nations:

Even beyond political circles, Robert Mugabe also appears to enjoy wide-spread popularity on the African continent. When the monthly magazine New African had its readers vote for the "100 greatest Africans" last year, the despot from Harare managed a respectable third-place finish, topped only by über-father Nelson Mandela and Ghanaian independence hero Kwame Nkrumah. "Unlike some of his counterparts," writes one reader, in seeking to explain a poll outcome that is surprising for Europeans, Mugabe has avoided "becoming a neo-colonial puppet." A columnist for the paper wrote that "African nationalism is on the way to achieving a true victory."

An equally unsettling situation is unfolding in Namibia, where the government just expropriated farmland from a white family for the first time. Protestors recently marched down Windhoek's Independence Avenue carrying a banner which read: "Kill all Whites."

Africa is not the only place on earth which was brutally colonized by the Europeans, but it seems to be where the people remain the most resentful and angry of Western "imperialism". It is also the poorest continent on earth, by a margin that seems to get wider every year. There's a lesson there somewhere.

History's Greatest Monster, continued

Another must-read essay on Mao and his bloody legacy, inspired by the publication of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's landmark biography, appears in the latest issue of Commentary. The author, Arthur Waldron, notes that China's ruling Communists have never undertaken anything like Khrushchev's re-evaluation of Stalin, and that things in China haven't changed nearly as much as we like to think:

Mao is, indeed, still revered in China as the wise and heroic founder of the People’s Republic. There has never been any public criticism of him remotely comparable to Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning Stalin. Not only does Mao’s embalmed corpse, with its guard of honor, lie in the midst of Tiananmen Square, visited daily by throngs of Chinese who form long lines to pay their respects. Not only does his portrait continue to hang at the Gate of Heavenly Peace a few steps from the Forbidden City, the traditional center of the Chinese cosmos. In addition, the deep structure of today’s China remains as Mao made it.

What of the formation of government policy? Again, it would be pleasant to report that decision-making in China has become more rational since the demise of Mao, who regularly ordered up insane projects like the destruction of the old city of Peking, or the backyard “steel” furnaces of the Great Leap Forward, or, in the days of the Sino-Soviet split, the building of immense and useless barriers outside the capital to defend against Soviet tanks. Have Mao’s followers done any better with the Three Gorges Dam, or the huge concrete aqueducts intended to divert water from the south to the parched north, or the slash-and-burn industrialization (as it has been called) with its profligate waste of resources and its utter neglect of sustainability?

This is extremely disturbing, to say the least, as China continues to assert its growing power and influence. The country may no longer have a Communist economy, but its political system is as bad as ever.

Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian readers. And happy Columbus Day to my American readers.

It won't be a day off for me, because I'm putting in a day at the office so I can take a different day off down the road. It's amazing how much you can get done when the phone isn't ringing every three minutes.

Anti-semitism and the British left

Nick Cohen isn't even Jewish - but the fact that a man named "Cohen" would dare to challenge leftist orthodoxy is too much for a "peace" movement in which blatant Jew-hatred is firmly embedded:

On the Saturday of the great anti-war demonstration of 2003, I watched one million people march through London, then sat down to write for the Observer. I pointed out that the march organisers represented a merger of far left and far right: Islamic fundamentalists shoulder to shoulder with George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party and every other creepy admirer of totalitarianism this side of North Korea. Be careful, I said. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has spewed out predatory armies and corpses for decades. If you’re going to advocate a policy that would keep a fascist dictator in power, you should at least talk to his victims, whose number included socialists, communists and liberals - good people, rather like you.

Rather than pander to racism, I directed my correspondents to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a member of the Socialist International which had decided after being on the receiving end of one too many extermination drives that foreign invasion was the only way. No good. I tried sending them to the Iraqi Communist Party, which opposed the invasion but understood the possibilities for liberation beyond the fine minds of the western intelligentsia. No good, either.
[...]
I could go on. The moment when bewilderment settled into a steady scorn, however, was when the Guardian ran a web debate entitled: “David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-Semitic”. Gorgeously, one vigilant reader complained that the title was prejudiced - the debate should be headlined: “David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man, or woman, anti-Semitic.”

(via Stephen Pollard)

Welcome to the NFL, kid

First-overall draft pick Alex Smith: 9-of-23 for 74 yards, no touchdowns, 4 interceptions (and a lost fumble), sacked five times. It can only get better from here.

Uh, never mind

The first time I've ever seen this happen: in the Atlanta-New England game, a Patriots player called for a time-out just as the Falcons were attempting a 58-yard field goal. The kick was way off, but then the referees gave the Patriots the very time out they had asked for - which, of course, gave the Falcons another shot at three points. And sure enough, they made it.

Don't you hate it when that happens?

Signs of hope, signs of trouble

The Sunday Telegraph reports that Haifa Street, once one of the most dangerous parts of Baghdad, has been pacified - by Iraqi troops, no less:

American soldiers christened it Purple Heart Boulevard, in grim recognition of the dozens of troops who earned that decoration by being killed or wounded there. Iraqi troops called it Death Road.

"Life is much better," said Ahmed Mahmoud, 40, the owner of a supermarket on Haifa Street. "A year ago, most of my customers were either dead or too afraid to venture out. Things are still very bad in Iraq but I am beginning, slowly, to have hope once again."

But serious ethnic divisions remain - and could completely blow up at any time:

Not all, of course, is going as well as Haifa Street suggests. There is growing tension, fuelled by fear, distrust and paranoia, between the minority Sunnis and the majority Shia, whose mass turnout in January's elections established a government that American diplomats fear is at least partially in thrall to Iran's Shia leaders.

A senior figure in Iraq's Interior Ministry spoke last week of an "undeclared civil war" between the rival Muslim groups. Opponents of the Iraq invasion often cite fears that it is a new Vietnam but senior coalition figures speak of an equally ominous comparison - Lebanon in the 1980s.

Earthquake Aid

World Vision Canada is seeking donations to help the victims of this weekend's devastating earthquake.

Update: a commenter responds, "I'll give them money when they give us Bin Laden." Just like Hurricane Katrina, to which many leftists responded by saying a state that voted for Bush didn't deserve charity, an earthquake in a Muslim country is making all the hard-hearted, ideologically blinkered idiots reveal themselves.

Bye bye, Gerhard

After weeks in denial, it looks like Gerhard Schroeder is finally going to face reality and concede the chancellorship of Germany to Angela Merkel:

Angela Merkel, leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Union, may emerge as the nation's first female chancellor following a meeting today with incumbent Gerhard Schroeder, said analysts including Karl-Rudolfe Korte.

An agreement would clear the way for the country's first ``grand coalition'' government since 1969 and end the gridlock that has prevailed after elections Sept. 18 failed to produce a decisive majority for either of the two main parties. Merkel, 51, and her allies hold a four-seat lead in seats in parliament, after a delayed election in Dresden on Oct. 2.

Happy anniversary

Che Guevara, hero to millions of idiots all over the world, assumed room temperature in Bolivia 38 years ago today. A useful summary of his "achievements" can be found here.

Horror in South Asia

At least 3,000 people, mostly in Pakistan, have been killed in an earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale. Nothing specific on the Canadian Red Cross site yet, but you can be sure they'll be collecting funds for the victims of this disaster.

Update: Tim Blair notes that the death toll may now be somewhere between 18,000 and 30,000. He's asking bloggers to donate at least as much as they gave to relief efforts following the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

From a fundraising perspective, this catastrophe couldn't have come at a worse time, with people so recently having given so much to help the victims of Katrina. "Charity fatigue", if I may call it that, is the last thing these people need right now.

Segregation demanded

That's not what they're calling it, of course. But special-interest groups in Toronto are agitating for what amounts to separate justice and social-services systems for Black Canadians:

Decades after the civil rights movement fought for racial integration, a Toronto coalition of 22 black community groups disgusted by gun murders in the city wants a separate set of rules and institutions for blacks — from a government department to a diversion program for minor crimes.
[...]
Among the more far-reaching solutions proposed is a new provincial ministry office on African-Canadian affairs, created to help black Ontarians get access to services that alleviate poverty, help keep youth in school and allow them to thrive culturally.

- Police to keep race-based statistics. [Not kept in Toronto, precisely because of pressure from the very same people now demanding them. - Ed.]

- Repeal of the zero-tolerance school discipline policy, which the Ontario Human Rights Commission is investigating for accusations that it deals more harshly with blacks.

The coalition also supports calls for a black-focused school and envisions a vibrant African-Canadian cultural centre.

In response to the inevitable complaints, activists note that similar programs are in place for other ethnic and cultural groups, most notably Native Canadians:

Society is already segregated for certain groups who have been granted their own schools and social services, such as aboriginals and francophones, they point out.

"For them, it's all about creating a level playing field. But when it comes to blacks, it's segregation," said Margaret Parsons, executive director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, a coalition partner.

That's true, and look at how much it's done for the aboriginals.

Week 5

My predicted winners in bold:

Baltimore at Detroit
Chicago at Cleveland - this is what I once heard Chris Berman describe as a "broken windshield" game. That is, if you leave two tickets on the dashboard of your car, you'll come back to find your windshield smashed - with four tickets on your dashboard.
Miami at Buffalo
New England at Atlanta - I just can't see New England losing twice in a row, though I won't be paralyzed with shock if it happens.
New Orleans at Green Bay - they gotta win sometime, and it might as well be a home game against an itinerant team.
Seattle at St. Louis
Tampa Bay at N.Y. Jets - in 1988, when rookie Vinny Testaverde was on his way to breaking the league record for most interceptions in a season, did anyone predict he'd still be playing in 2005?
Tennessee at Houston
Indianapolis at San Francisco
Carolina at Arizona
Philadelphia at Dallas
Washington at Denver
Cincinnati at Jacksonville - are the Bengals for real? I think so.
Pittsburgh at San Diego

Last week I was 8-8 - the first time all year I finally reached the .500 mark. My overall record is 26-36.

Correction: actually, I was 8-6 last week, making my season record 26-34. Now that every team has a few games under its belt, it might be easier to pick winners.

The pro-tyranny left

Bob Tarantino quotes Rick Salutin:

Before the U.S. invasion, it was hard to imagine a worse life for Iraqis than under Saddam. Yet here it is. ...At least the torture and terror are gone, or are they? Look at Abu Ghraib. Most Iraqis had made a grim accommodation with their psychopathic regime, in return for electricity, education, jobs, secularism, some gender equality and limited stability, while hoping for better times. Now they face civil war, a nightmare their British and U.S. invaders left far behind in their own bloody pasts. [emphasis added]

There's a reason I use the word "leftist", instead of "liberal", to describe people like Rick Salutin.

Catching up again

Pollara puts the Conservatives just six points behind the Liberals as of mid-September.

Of course, that growth won't do us a bit of good, in the greater scheme of things, if it's all in Western Canada.

Quote of the Day

Democrats spent decades practicing the policy of spending lavishly to win elections. Republicans refined the practice in just a few years. ...More fundamentally, it took the Democrats four decades to fully succumb to the temptations of power, ruthlessly abusing their control of Capitol Hill. After only one decade the Republicans are proving to be even worse.

- former Special Assistant to President Reagan, Doug Bandow. (The really astonishing thing is not that a former Reagan official is calling for the GOP to lose control of the House next year, but that his column originally appeared on the American Spectator website!)

A meme in the making

In a new BBC documentary, the Palestinian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister - and if you can't believe Palestinian officials, who can you believe? - say President Bush told them that God asked him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan:

President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

The "moral and religious obligation" quote sounds legit, but the "mission from God" stuff sounds like the left's most entrenched stereotypes about Dubya - which is why this story, which Bush can never adequately disprove, will be accepted as God's own truth on the left side of the blogosphere. And not just the blogosphere - already, The Independent is accepting the Mazen/Shaath version of events as established fact.

What did Bush say to the Palestinians? I dunno, but in 2003 - when this story was first broken by Ha'aretz - a Religious Studies Professor writing for the far-left site CommonDreams.com noted that the remarks were translated several times over:

"According to Abbas, Bush said: 'God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.'"

Before you jump to any conclusions, remember that you are reading a translation of a translation of a translation. Mahmoud Abas does not speak English. Bush does not speak Arabic. If Bush said these words, or something like them, Abas heard them from a translator. Then Abas repeated them, as he remembered them a couple of weeks later, in Arabic. Some unknown person wrote down what he thought he heard Abas say. Then Regular, or someone at Ha'aretz, translated them back into English-or perhaps first into Hebrew and then into English.

(This is CommonDreams.com, so it should be noted that the Professor assumes the comments, or something very much like them, were indeed made by the President.)

My own theory? I think Bush said something like the "moral and religious obligation" quote, and it was more or less translated and interpreted as "God told me to" - which sounds very much like what a politician in the Middle East would indeed say. (Laurence Simon and Judith Weiss agree.) And guess what? It doesn't matter one bit, because for the "reality-based community", the way Abu Mazen recounts the story is simply so good it must be true.

(via Tim Blair)

Correction: I changed the last sentence of this post to make more sense.

Update: Scott Burgess has more, including a photo of the front page of today's Independent. Even the most jaded Indy-watchers will be astonished.

According to the Guardian, the BBC itself is backing away from this story - not because the story is complete bunk, mind you, but because of Rupert Murdoch or something:

BBC programme editors turned lukewarm on a claim by a BBC2 programme that George Bush believed God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan after a strong denial by the White House.

Just 24 hours after accusations that the corporation's news coverage was backing away from risk-taking, some of the BBC's key outlets decided not to run an exclusive story unearthed by BBC2 about the US president.
[...]
The lukewarm response by other BBC outlets to a BBC News exclusive in the wake of a denial by the US government is likely to dismay the new head of television news, Peter Horrocks.

It is perhaps inevitable that suspicions may be raised about any cautious reception to BBC stories that do not present Mr Bush in the best light following Rupert Murdoch's comments that Tony Blair had told him BBC World's coverage of Hurricane Katrina was "just full of hate for America and gloating about our troubles".

The feel-good movie of 1980!

This is absolutely brilliant. (via Lileks, who rightly calls this kind of thing "a new and fertile genre".)

Update: two more.

Terror alert in NYC

Security officials in New York City have warned of an Al-Qaida plot to bomb the city's subway system:

Authorities stepped up security Thursday after receiving what city officials called a credible threat that the New York subway could be the target of a terrorist attack in coming days. But Homeland Security officials in Washington downplayed the threat, saying it was of "doubtful credibility."

A counterterror official, who was briefed about the threat by Homeland Security authorities, said the intelligence was considered doubtful because it did not reflect "on-the-ground, detailed" information. Rather, the official, who also insisted on anonymity, said the intelligence was similar to "what can be found on the Internet and a map of New York City."

Not surprisingly, even though the warning did not come from the federal government, and even though it's actually being downplayed by the Department of Homeland Security, the "reality-based community" seems pretty much convinced this is another Bush Administration scam to divert attention from the latest news about Karl Rove. (Of course, if an attack took place without warning, these same people would be screaming bloody murder about the Administration's failure to stop it or warn people it was going to happen.)

ElBaradei, IAEA win Nobel Peace Prize

By and large, there are three categories of Nobel Peace Prize winners: brave dissidents who put their very lives on the line while fighting totalitarian oppression; political leaders who achieve landmark peace agreements or diplomatic triumphs; or relatively toothless but supposedly well-intentioned international organizations, as often as not associated with the UN. This year's recipient falls into the third category:

The 2005 Nobel peace prize has been awarded jointly to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency that he leads.

The prize, which is worth $1.29m (£725,000), will be presented in December in the Norwegian capital.

It's not as bad as Yasser Arafat or Kim Dae-Jung winning, but I have a feeling this one isn't going to look so good in retrospect if Iran achieves its goal of nuclear weapons. Personally, I would have awarded the Prize to someone who led this past year's democratic uprisings in Lebanon, Ukraine or Turkmenistan.

It's not Stalin's body, so maybe Putin will allow it

Fark.com has formally offered to buy Lenin's body from the Russian government.

History's greatest monster

In the New Criterion, Keith Windschuttle reviews the highly acclaimed biography Mao: The Unknown Story, which reveals the Chairman as a sadistic fraud who condemned seventy million of his countrymen - more victims than Hitler and Stalin combined - to the cruelest deaths imaginable.

There is too much about Mao's atrocities to excerpt, so I encourage you to read it all. It's a bit long, but worth every word. It's hardly news that Mao suckered several generations of utopian leftists (including a young Canadian writer named Pierre Trudeau) into thinking Red China had discovered the one true way the Third World could develop and prosper. (Many poor nations, egged on by well-meaning Western liberals and not-so-well-meaning Chinese economic aid, did indeed adopt elements of the Maoist economic model, with catastrophic results all around.) But as Windshuttle notes, Richard Nixon - whose many detractors consider his opening of relations with China the only good thing he ever did - was suckered too:

As much as Western conservatives might enjoy learning how badly the reputations of their political and ideological adversaries suffer from what we now know about the Maoist regime, they can take little comfort from this terrible story. Two characters who do not emerge well from Chang and Halliday’s book are Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The main reason Nixon went personally to China was to bolster his chances at the 1972 election. Kissinger’s aim was to take strategic advantage of the Sino-Soviet split. In the deals traded between China and the U.S., it was all one-way traffic, with the United States making concession after concession and getting almost nothing in return. Nixon agreed to pull out American troops from Vietnam, thereby abandoning the South Vietnamese regime. Kissinger promised to pull out “most, if not all” American troops from Korea before the end of Nixon’s next term. He failed to extract any guarantee the Chinese would not support another Communist invasion of South Korea. They sold out America’s old ally Taiwan, by getting Peking into the United Nations, with a seat and veto on the Security Council. [As Claudia Rosett notes, this might not have been such a bad thing for Taiwan - Ed.] Looking at the U.N. vote, Mao declared: “Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Canada, Italy—they have all become Red Guards.” In their personal meetings, Mao was haughty towards Nixon and cut him short. Afterwards, he instructed his diplomats to continue to treat the U.S. as Public Enemy No. 1 and to denounce it fiercely in public. Despite Nixon’s overtures, Mao was intent on maintaining his claim to be the global anti-American leader.

What a waste. What a monster. And what a disgrace that, knowing all we know about Mao today, you can still publicly wear his face on a T-shirt without being spit on.

(By the way, Mao: The Unknown Story is on my Amazon Wish List. Just sayin'.)

What happened in Oklahoma?

Zombie, best known for his hilarious (and disturbing) photos of ultra-leftist demonstrators, has a good rundown of news about a possible suicide bombing (or "work accident", in the Hamas sense) just outside of the University of Oklahoma's packed football stadium.

Not long ago, several bloggers were reporting on an alleged incident in which a missile was fired at an America West airliner, which didn't pan out. This time, we know that some guy blew himself up, but other aspects of the story - including the would-be terrorist's connections with radical Islamic organizations - remain unconfirmed. (Zombie, to his credit, relies on credible news sources instead of rumour-mongers like World Net Daily.)

I'm somewhat skeptical for now, but I do wish the mainstream media would look into it. Then again, after the mess they made of Hurricane Katrina, perhaps it's best if they don't.

Quote of the Day

Kathy Shaidle:

Once upon a time, when entertainment options were limited, I guess proms gave kids a rare chance to dress up, socialize and blow off steam.

Today, all kids DO is socialize.

I feel dumber just having read this

Tex has posted more excerpts from his online arguments with Thom Lyons, a conspiracy-obsessed, Castro-worshipping moonbat who ran as a candidate for Australia's Green Party. You can actually feel your brain cells committing suicide as you read Lyons's theories about economics:

And do you really believe market forces set prices? How foolish you are. Where is there demand for $4 gas? yet its all over. There is a demand for $1 gas but you see none of it do you. Capitalism is the ultimate example of price fixing and corruption. Its as bad as the old communist system.

I have no demand for a $2 gallon of gas but I do have demand for a 50 cent gallon, BUT the free market doesn't seemed to be reacting to my supply and demand.

Oh, yeah, and the Holocaust was all the fault of those Jewish cowards for not fighting back:

perhaps if they stayed and fought the guy all the horrors would not have happened. men with guts take up arms against fascist governments rather than running.

Wussies!

"Everybody heard, nobody saw"

According to the Washington Post, the outrageous Katrina-related rumours and hysteria spread by the media and even government officials may have actively hampered the relief effort:

Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.

"Rumor control was a beast for us," said Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who was stationed at the Superdome. "People would hear something on the radio and come and say that people were getting raped in the bathroom or someone had been murdered. I would say, 'Ma'am, where?' I would tell them if there were bodies, my guys would find it. Everybody heard, nobody saw. Logic was out the window because the situation was illogical."
[...]
Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, said that reporters got bogged down trying to tell people how bad the situation was rather than "gathering facts and corroborating that information."

Read the whole, depressing thing. Once again, the parallels to the Jenin "massacre" - in which the media reported the most outrageous rumours and lies, in no small part because they wanted them to be true - are striking.

The fine line between tolerance and cultural suicide

One of the more depressing stories which developed while I was away: a British municipal council banned all "pig-related items" after a Muslim employee complained:

NOVELTY pig calendars and toys have been banned from a council office — in case they offend Muslim staff.

Councillor Mahbubur Rahman, a practising Muslim, backed the ban. He said: “It’s a tolerance of people’s beliefs.”

Mark Steyn has more:

A couple of years ago, when an anxious-to-please head teacher in Batley was banning offensive "pig-centred books", Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain commented that "there is absolutely no scriptural authority for this view. It is a misunderstanding of the Koranic instruction that Muslims may not eat pork." Mr Bunglawala is a typical "moderate" Muslim - he thinks the British media are "Zionist-controlled", etc - but on the pig thing he's surely right. It seems unlikely that even the exhaustive strictures of the Koran would have a line on Piglet.

After all, how daffy does a Muslim's willingness to take offence have to be to get rejected out of court? Only the other day, Burger King withdrew its ice-cream cones from its British restaurants because Mr Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe, after a trip to the Park Royal branch, complained that the creamy swirl on the lid resembled the word "Allah" in Arabic script.
[...]
Offence is, by definition, in the eye of the beholder. I once toured the Freud Museum with the celebrated sex therapist Dr Ruth, who claimed to be able to see a penis in every artwork and piece of furniture in the joint. Yet, when I suggested one sculpture looked vaguely like the female genitalia, she scoffed mercilessly.

When every act that a culture makes communicates weakness and loss of self-belief, eventually you'll be taken at your word. In the long term, these trivial concessions are more significant victories than blowing up infidels on the Tube or in Bali beach restaurants. An act of murder demands at least the pretence of moral seriousness, even from the dopiest appeasers. But small acts of cultural vandalism corrode the fabric of freedom all but unseen.

(via Cox and Forkum)

I'm ba-ack...

I'll be busy unpacking, doing laundry, and watching The Apprentice: Martha Stewart (shut up) and Lost this evening, so my posts will resume in earnest tomorrow morning. Thanks so much to Mike, Mike, Ran and Rick for keeping the site going while I was away. You can guest-post here as often as you want.

In the meantime, go here and vote "no". If you have to ask why, you're reading the wrong blog.

What is to be done with Lenin's corpse?

Lenin's body has been in a glass case for eighty-odd years, and has so far survived the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. That may be about to change:

Time has been unkind to Lenin, whose remains here in Red Square are said to sprout occasional fungi, and whose ideology and party long ago fell to ruins. Now the inevitable question has returned. Should his body be moved?

Revisiting a proposal that thwarted Boris N. Yeltsin, who faced down tanks but in his time as president could not persuade Russians to remove the Soviet Union's founder from his place of honor, a senior aide to President Vladimir V. Putin raised the matter last week, saying it was time to bury the man.

"Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime," said the aide, Georgi Poltavchenko. "I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin."

In the unending debate about what exactly the new Russia is, the subject of Lenin resembles a Rorschach inkblot test. People project their views of their state onto him and see what they wish. And so as Mr. Poltavchenko's suggestion has ignited fresh public sparring over Lenin's place, both in history and in the grave, the dispute has been implicitly bizarre and a window into the state of civil society here.

...

Some still see in him the architect of a grand and daring social experiment. Others describe an opportunist who ushered vicious cronies to power, resulting in a totalitarian police state. "It is time to get rid of this horrible mummy," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, head of the Democratic Union, a small reform party. "One cannot talk about any kind of democracy or civilization in Russia when Lenin is still in the country's main square."

She added: "I would not care even if he were thrown on a garbage heap."

One of the puzzling aspects of 20th century communism was the cult of personality that grew up around its most heinious leaders. Think giant posters of Chairman Mao, massive paternalistic statues of Uncle Joe, even the ongoing deification of everybody's favourite ronery dictator, Kim Jong-Il. Note, too, how Saddam Hussein rummaged through the ol' commie bag of tricks during his reign.

Not that any other proof were needed, but to me this was always the most glaring evidence that a supposedly rational and "scientific" political ideology was anything but.

What to do with Lenin's body? Don't throw him in the garbage, fitting though that may seem. Put him in the ground, preferably an umarked pit, so we'll have the opportunity to dance on his grave.

Today's toon

In honour of this thread:

Political cartoons courtesy Artizans Entertainment

Great Line

"I've seldom so thoroughly enjoyed a book with which I've so strenuously disagreed."

From Stop Smiling

Another Side of Peace

Another Side of Peace is one of the best "movies" I've seen this year and it's really just a one hour documentary that was broadcast late one weekday night on PBS.

It's about Israeli and Palestinian families whose hearts have been so broken by the loss of their children that the thing they want most is to console eachother and make peace.

The main focus is on Roni Hirshenzon. His older son was killed in a suicide bombing and his younger son committed suicide after his best friend died in a similar way.

He said he wakes up every morning and asks himself "Why am I alive?" And, the only thing that means anything to him now is meeting with other bereaved families.

His opposite number is Ghazi Briegieth who admits to being a rock thrower during the first intifada but now risks the wrath of his neighbours to build an organization with Roni.

The "weakness" in the film is the lack of a big picture but the warmth born of grief is so moving that it's hard to believe that this isn't, in part at least, where the future of peace may lie.

And, in fact, in Coming Home To Jerusalem, Wendy Orange claims that sometimes people who are movers and shakers at the political level are personally exposed to this sort of dialogue group and take the lessons back with them.

The Bereaved Families For Peace site is here.

And it's goodnight from him...

Ronnie Barker, RIP.

Shocker of the day

Are you sitting down? Take a deep breath and brace yourself for some shocking news.

Dingwall is going to get his severance, so sez the PM:

Prime Minister Paul Martin says government lawyers have advised the Liberals that they must provide former Mint head David Dingwall with a severance settlement.

”The fact is that we have sought legal advice and legal advice has told us that there is an obligation and that we must meet that obligation.

But he emphasized that Mr. Dingwall will not receive the maximum amount.

Well, that's a relief. Maybe he'll only get $499.99k.

It bothers me, but obviously I'm not surprised, given what I wrote Saturday:

Although the PM may have the ability to [withhold severance], I doubt very much that it will happen. I think it would be a shrewd publicity move, even if Dingwall ended up suing the government to procure his severance. At very least, it would show that Martin is doing something to address the widespread corruption that has come to characterize the federal Liberal party.

But of course, to do that would require Martin to a) admit that what Dingwall did was truly beyond the pale, and b) show some bloody backbone for a change.

Update: Mark Collins has an excellent post in the comments. He explores an important question: if the Liberal lawyers have determined that there's no choice in the matter, why haven't they cited a law or precedent to justify their position? Read it all.

'Toon of the day

Political cartoons courtesy Artizans Entertainment

RAT ATTACK!!!!

Giant rats are invading my home town:

SOUTH WOODSIDE – Rats the size of small housecats have invaded the South Woodside area of Dartmouth, sending residents scurrying for traps and poison.

“These rats are tunnelling into gardens, they’re tunnelling into homes. They’re running across people’s decks,” said Woodside-Eastern Passage Coun. Becky Kent. “I had one resident who said she could hear them inside her walls.”

No one’s entirely sure where the rodents of unusual size came from, but construction workers stationed on the Highway 111 interchange project near South Woodside have seen “droves” of rats displaced from the wet, swampy ground.

In other rat-related news, Diamond Dave Dingwall has spawned his own mini-rock opera, right in the House of Commons:

For a brief few moments on Monday, being in the House of Commons was like being at a rock concert.

The Conservatives broke into a rendition of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall to reveal their disgust at the excessive spending habits of David Dingwall, the former head of the Mint who retired last week amid allegations that he and his staff spent $740,000 last year.

Tory revenue critic Brian Pallister began the rendition with his version of the tune: "You don't need no information, We're in charge of thought control, Fine wines with caviar in the backroom.”

The other Tories finished with the chorus, "Hey Tories! Leave those Grits alone.”

At that point, Speaker Peter Milliken cut off the song. It wasn't clear whether his ears were hurting.

Awesome.

Coming Home To Jerusalem

Coming Home To Jerusalem is one of the most interesting books I've read this year. It's by an American psychology professor named Wendy Orange who suddenly falls in love with Israel, moves there, and becomes a journalist covering Gaza and the West Bank.

It's an odd book in that, first, she gets you very enthusiastic about Israel and then she portrays the Israeli government as the bad guy in the occupied territories. The election of Netanyahu is presented as a tragedy and Bibi, specifically, is blamed for destroying the Oslo peace accords.

Much of the book focuses on the warm personal relationships she builds with numerous Palestinians who seem to want peace.

She regularly mentions the more violent Palestinians but they remain in the distant background whereas a hostile Israeli army and hate-filled settlers are just off centre stage.

The strength of the book lies in the compelling human face she puts on Palestinians for Jewish readers. It's weakness is the lack of analysis of the Palestinian extremists. She doesn't seem convinced that they will reconcile themselves to Israel but she does not delve into this topic very deeply.

I, myself, was captivated by the book. I happened to pick it up at Chapters and I couldn't put it down. It is well-written, very personal and, seemingly, quite honest. It shouldn't be the only book that you read about the Middle East but it should be one of them.

You can read the first chapter here. Though I don't know if it's a good teaser because it precedes the main story rather than giving you a good idea of what's in store

I Am Canadian/Je Suis Canadien

A week or so ago the nice people at Sony/BMG Canada sent me the fourth volume of Shout Factory's excellent SCTV DVD series to review. It's a good one - just after the Bob & Doug craze was finally spent, the first where Martin Short really got a chance to shine, and the one that featured the classic CBC parody.

If you remember it - and I think most people edging closer to 40 in this country probably do - it's the one where the janitors at SCTV go on strike, and Guy Caballero has the brilliant idea of using CBC feed to fill airtime until they break the strike. (There's some topical irony in there, but it's really not worth dwelling on.) Among the more than usually cruel parodies are shots at Hinterland Who's Who ("The woodchuck..."), Front Page Challenge (featuing John Candy as the guy who does the Hinterland Who's Who voiceover - he stumps the panel), and Don Shebib's Goin' Down The Road, done up as Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice.

Shout Factory included two nice bonuses on the disc, including an actual Hinterland Who's Who ("The woodchuck..."), and an explanation of Goin' Down The Road meant for Americans (and Canadians under 30 blessed with no memory of the film). Beside the fact that Jayne Eastwood was in both the original and the parody, it included scenes from Shebib's movie that brought back awful memories of just how ... dreadful, how ... dismal and grey and drab and ugly Canadian movies were back then. It was like they'd never actually seen a film, but had them described to them, got handed a camera and told to "go out there and give'er, lad!"

It led to a discussion with my wife about that whole period, and she recalled that you could actually send away to Ottawa for Hinterland Who's Who trading cards. She even recalled getting a board game one Christmas, produced by the Canadian gov't, where you used Lite Brite pegs on a big circular cardboard world map to collect languages and dialects. I have no memory of this, but I know that the federal gov't was constantly producing these knicknacks and giveaways - perhaps someone out there remembers this particular little collectible. We laughed, but there was this sense of dismay - of rage - building inside me. I can't help it, but if there's one thing I know it's this:

Government shouldn't be in the board game business.

Slumping ute sales continue to drag down GM and Ford

GM and Ford recorded disappointing sales in September, and are bracing for a rocky October:

General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. on Monday posted big declines in U.S. vehicle sales in September as employee pricing discount programs lost their allure and sales of traditional SUVs plunged on higher gasoline prices after hurricanes ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast.

And U.S. automakers don't see sales getting any better this month as the generous summer deals pulled fall and winter customers into the market earlier.

"I expect October to be a bit rocky," Paul Ballew, GM's head of global market and industry analysis, said, adding that industry sales on a seasonally adjusted annual basis will be around 16.4 million vehicles in September.

Interestingly, Chrysler's sales went up in the same period:

But in a bright spot for Detroit, the U.S.-based Chrysler unit of Germany's DaimlerChrysler said September sales rose 4 percent. Both Ford and Chrysler followed GM's lead in offering employee discounts.

I don't know if this just means that GM and Ford have more SUV/truck-heavy lineups than Chrysler, or if Chrysler's gutsier design choices (and the related success of the 300) have helped it weather the storm so far.

That said, I drove past a local Chrysler dealer the other day and it was stocked with Dodge Ram 1500/2500s as far as the eye could see. Now would be a very good time to haggle for one, I bet.

Yippee.

The CBC has reached a tentative agreement with the union:

A memorandum of agreement was reached early Monday between the CBC and more than 5,000 employees who have been locked out for seven weeks.

The basic concepts behind a tentative agreement were reached late Sunday under the supervision of federal mediators, but both sides will continue to work out the details and language of the deal, said Canadian Media Guild spokesman Arnold Amber. While the agreement will be signed Monday, it was not immediately clear when the CBC workers would return to work because both sides must still work out a return-to-work protocol.

...

The bitter dispute also saw Liberal MPs jumping into the fray, prompting some to suggest that the federal government re-examine the Crown corporation's right to lock out employees in the future. That would mean either changing labour laws or re-examining the mandate of Crown corporations.

Various unionized CBC groups have been locked out three times in the past five years.

Backbenchers also complained that due to the lockout, many Canadians were not getting the public service they deserved, particularly those living in rural areas.

[Labour Minister Joe] Fontana congratulated the two sides and the federal mediators early Monday.

"This is great news for the Canadian people, who have been voicing their concern over the length of this dispute," he said.

I can honestly say that, aside from the bizarre spectacle of CFL games broadcast without commentary, the lockout utterly failed to register in my household. It's as if the Ceeb wanted to publicly demonstrate its obsolescence every few years. Hockey Night in Canada notwithstanding, of course.

Today's Dingwall open thread

Political cartoons courtesy Artizans Entertainment

Amphibious Houses

What a neat idea:

"Tomorrow does not look any better, according to the weather forecast," she says, calmly sipping her coffee. She does so in spite of the fact that her house stands directly on the Maas dyke - on the side facing the river, to be exact. Yet the nurse, sitting on her garden chair under the awning, feels as cozy and safe as if she were "snowed in up in a mountain hut, with a log fire glowing and the pantry full." The Maas can go on rising as much as it likes, for all she cares. Her house can swim. As the water level climbs, the house itself can move up five meters, if necessary. "The elements don't bother me," she says.

There are 37 houses strung along this branch of the Maas like a row of beads. At first glance, they seem quite unremarkable. Two storeys high, semicircular metal roofs and yellow, green or blue facades - hardly any clues let on that these are The Netherlands' first amphibious houses. The cellar, in this case, is not built into the earth. Instead, it is on a platform - and is much more than a mere storage room. The hollow foundation of each house works in the same way as the hull of a ship, buoying the structure up above water. To prevent the swimming houses from floating away, they slide up two broad steel posts - and as the water level sinks, so they sink back down again.

It sounds cool, but you know that if you bought one you'd be secretly hoping for a flood -- despite all the human suffering and misery it would cause to those around you -- just to try it out. Well, I would, anyway.

Typhoon Well-Endowed News

Potentially deadly storms aren't funny. Except this one. All I can say is, where the hell was this typhoon when I was in junior high? My friends and I could have milked this joke for years.

Radical Chic

Do you ever wonder what Che is doing these days? I can tell you. He's recruiting executives for US business.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa had an essay in New Republic describing how Che has become a capitalist brand. You can find it here. And, here's a great example. Talentzoo, an online job board and recruiting firm has a blog called Hiring Revolution. Guess whose picture provides the theme?

And, call me crazy but now I notice that the dot in Talentzoo.com is a red star. I know, Texaco has a red star too, but this one seems a little different.

Talentzoo was chosen by Forbes for its Best of the Web list in the Job Hunting Category. I guess that means they're in on it too. In on what? I don't know.

Good for your digestion

I'm not in the habit of watching TV while eating supper, but it's nice to know that there's no shortage of great supper-hour programming on the schedule.

Like this.

One of the times listed is smack dab in the supper hour here.

Damian the Greek: Week 4

Let's see how Damian's Week 4 predictions are working out so far today, shall we? Here are Damian's picks (correct predictions in italics):

Buffalo at New Orleans
Denver at Jacksonville
Detroit at Tampa Bay
Houston at Cincinnati
Indianapolis at Tennessee
San Diego at New England
Seattle at Washington
St. Louis at NY Giants

2 for 8, so far. Not looking good, but there's still a chance to make it 8/14! Still to come:

N.Y. Jets at Baltimore
Dallas at Oakland
Minnesota at Atlanta
Philadelphia at Kansas City
San Francisco at Arizona
Green Bay at Carolina

Update 7:26 PM MST: Things are looking up! He correctly called Baltimore, Oakland, Atlanta, and Philly. He needs one of the remaining two to break even.

"Ironically, it unleashes hell"

A magazine advertisement for Boeing/Bell's Osprey is causing some controversy because it

depict[s] U.S. Special Forces troops rappelling from an Osprey aircraft onto the roof of a mosque.

"It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell," reads the ad, which ran this week in the National Journal and earlier in the Armed Forces Journal. The ad also stated: "Consider it a gift from above."

CAIR is involved in the brouhaha, naturally. Regardless, I'm of the opinion that the folks who came up with that ad have poor taste and/or didn't think this through. I'm sure some of you will disagree with me in the comments, though.

(Via Fark)

Your surreal Sunday link

Ran across this blog a while ago, but not everyone has experienced its, um, uniqueness:

THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE

p.s., HE IS YELLING ABOUT THE PIZZAS!!!

Svend set to steal our hearts all over again

Political cartoons courtesy Artizans Entertainment

It's the Svend of the world as we know it

Everybody's favourite light-fingered, anti-Israel Canadian politician is back, baby (maybe). Sven Robinson is close to announcing his bid to win re-election to the Commons, this time in the riding of Vancouver Centre:

"I'm pretty close," Mr. Robinson said in an interview. "It would take something pretty significant for me not to go ahead now. And I just don't see what that would be."

He will make it official in two weeks' time and when he does, the former New Democrat MP will announce he's running against Liberal MP Hedy Fry in Vancouver Centre, a riding many see as a natural for Mr. Robinson because of its large gay community. In 1988, Mr. Robinson became the first MP to declare his homosexuality, and went on to become a passionate crusader for gay and lesbian rights in Canada.

I can't say I'm even remotely surprised by this. Politics is the only stage big enough for Svend's ego.

What did surprise me a little is the insouciance of the constituents of Vancouver Centre (emphasis mine):

[Jumpin' Jack] Layton suggested Mr. Robinson commission an opinion poll to see if he stands a chance against Dr. [Hedy] Fry.

And, of course, to find out how much of a factor the ring plays.

"We had to put that question in the poll and I wanted it to be a hard question, not soft," he said.

"So, it read something like: 'In 2004, Svend Robinson was caught stealing a $64,000 diamond ring for which he received a conditional discharge and one year's probation. Would this make you more likely to vote for him, less likely or would it make no difference at all?' "

More than half the respondents said it would make no difference whatsoever, he said. Four per cent said it would make them more likely to vote for him, a group that must have been impressed by how he handled himself during the ordeal, he surmised.

The rest said the incident would make them less likely to vote for him, a group that included people who wouldn't have voted for him anyway, he said.

Anybody else get the feeling that, for politicians at least, the era of the career-ending scandal ended a long time ago? Marion Barry, I'm looking in your direction here...

A. I. D. and G. O. D.

Longtime friend of Daimnation!, blogger Andrew Ian Dodge offers:

"Well my band of nutters Growing Old Disgracefully could always use a plug. We are waiting patiently for out muso producer to finish the final mixes on our soon to be released EP 'Cry Freedom'.

Kind regards,

Andrew"

(Thanks for the heads-up Andrew!)

More terrorist bombings in Bali

A couple of restaurants and a crowded shopping mall were the targets this time:

BALI, Indonesia - At least two bombs exploded almost simultaneously Saturday in tourist areas of the Indonesian resort island of Bali, killing at least 22 people and wounding about 50 others, officials said. The blasts came a month after Indonesia's president warned of possible terrorist attacks.

The wounded included at least two Americans.

The blasts at two packed seafood restaurants in Jimbaran beach and a bustling outdoor shopping center in downtown Kuta were the work of terrorists, Indonesian President Suslio Bambang Yudhoyono said. He also warned that more attacks were possible.

...

The attacks occurred nearly three years to the day that bombings in Kuta killed 202 people, mostly foreigners. Those attacks, and subsequent deadly bombings in 2003 and 2004, were blamed on the al-Qaida-linked terror group Jemaah Islamiyah.

With all this oil, how can they afford not to build nuclear plants?

Apropos of Preserved Killick's post on Disengagement yesterday:

Political cartoons courtesy of Artizans Entertainment

Severing Dingwall's Severance

According to the Tories, Paul Martin has the authority to deny David Dingwall his golden handshake:

The Conservatives say government documents show the federal government isn't obligated to give severance pay to David Dingwall.

Tory MP Brian Pallister says the decision whether Dingwall should get severance is in the prime minister's hands. Dingwall, who resigned Wednesday from the Royal Canadian Mint following allegations of questionable spending and lobbying, is poised to get a healthy severance package.

But Pallister argues Prime Minister Paul Martin could decide not to issue Dingwall a cheque.

Although the PM may have the ability to do this, I doubt very much that it will happen. I think it would be a shrewd publicity move, even if Dingwall ended up suing the government to procure his severance. At very least, it would show that Martin is doing something to address the widespread corruption that has come to characterize the federal Liberal party.

On a slightly related note, yesterday's alliterative headline for the Dingwall cartoon was inspired by a headline that once appeared in the Halifax Daily News, years ago: "Dingwall's Dad Dies."

Update: In the comments, David Simpson brings up the point that, ordinarily, if you quit a job you're not entitled to severance. I don't really know, but perhaps someone with more HR experience would (doesn't Canadian Headhunter comment here sometimes?). This article, however, suggests that a generous severance deal may be customary for executive positions such as Dingwall's.

Update2: Fixed link in the first update.

Still knockin' em dead after all these years

OJ Simpson made an appearance yesterday to sign autographs. At a horror movie convention. On the tenth anniversary of his acquittal on murder charges (anyone else remember that?)

"I don't keep these dates in my head," [Simpson] told The Associated Press while signing various items with the inscription "O.J. Simpson '68 Heisman," a reference to the year he won college football's Heisman Trophy.

He said the only anniversary he observes is when he and his children mark their mother's birthday with a cake.

...

"This is kind of an unusual venue," said Simpson, who now lives in a Miami suburb. "Friends were really excited when they heard I was coming to this, but I find this strange."

So, what would you say to the Juice if you happened to find yourself in front of his booth at the convention?

"Hey, OJ! As a fan of gory slasher movies, I really admire your work!"

p.s., No, it is never too late for OJ jokes. Just ask Leno.