Booking out for surgery

I will not be writing any posts for the next week or so as  I will be going under the saw and knife tomorrow for valve surgery at Vancouver General Hospital. 

This will be my second valve job in 14 years and, confident though I am in my surgeon and his team, I am definitely not looking forward to it.

Ciao for now.

A despicable, cowardly media

It almost goes without saying that the so-called mainstream media has a significantly leftist political bias.  We also know that the MSM is weak on press freedom and is prone to self-censor and to downplay or ignore certain issues.  They do this out of politically correctness (ie. upsetting lib/leftists who share their biases).  They also do so out of simple cowardice in the face of potential physical danger.  Altogether this highly unfortunate situation is just short of earning the MSM the title "despicable".

This week they (the journalists and executives of CTV, Global TV, CBC) crossed the line during the anti-fracking "protests" (riots) near Rexton, NB.  They displayed all of the above near-despicable negatives plus failing to come to the defence of fellow journalists who were attacked by Indian thugs and criminals.

The violence and thuggery of Indian "protesters" was bad enough.  But Ezra Levant hits the right target when he calls out members of the despicable "Media Party" for their cowardice and duplicity:

Charles Krauthammer tries to educate Jon Stewart

Fat chance:

A phony poll to boost a fraud's image

Ezra Levant shows how a poll manipulated by a PR flack at Angus Reid got David Suzuki to the top of a "most admired" list:



Update: Ezra's column.

The Marxist cat-fight in Toronto Centre

Terence Corcoran: Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland stage Marxist battle in downtown Canada

On the left running for the NDP stands journalist Linda McQuaig, co-author of The Trouble With Billionaries, a book that plays to ancient leftist theories of alienation ... She prescribes tax rates of up to 70% and radical confiscation of the assets of the wealthy ...

Ms. McQuaig came out swinging Monday with a direct video challenge to her opponent, Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland. “Hi Chrystia. It’s Linda McQuaig!”  says Ms. McQuaig in her best innocent-friendly trap-setting manner. “You’ve written a book on income inequality and I’ve written a book on income inequality.” But they are very different books, she says, with very different policy prescriptions.  So let’s have a debate, one on one, “any time, anywhere.”

Ms. Freeland’s book is Plutocrats:  The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.  The premise is false—everyone else has not fallen. ... To say that Plutocrats is “very different” from Ms. McQuaig’s The Trouble with Billionaires is somewhat misleading. ...  Both books are identical in their foundations, political tracts that popularize class warfare ... her analysis is no less Marxist in its origins.  She frequently quotes Karl Marx, the granddaddy of state socialism. Marx, she says, understood the dangers of a capitalist class ... 

... The poor voters of Toronto Centre are about to get a heavy dose of such crypto-Marxist revivalism. ...

Foreign-funded homegrown terrorists

Not to mention latter-day-Luddites and Palestinian Wanna Be's:

Influential Canadian climate model one of the most extreme

Study: The Canadian Climate Model 's Epic Failure

The Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis located at the University of Victoria in British Columbia submitted five runs of its climate model CanESM2 for use in the fifth assessment report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The climate model produces one of the most extreme warming projections of all the 30 models evaluated by the IPCC. (See Note 1.) The model badly fails to match the surface and atmosphere temperature observations, both globally, regionally, as presented in six graphs.

... The results from the Canadian climate model were used in a U.S. Global Change Research Program report provided to the US Environmental Protection Agency to justify regulating CO2. The authors of that report were told that the Canadian climate model produces only anti-information. They confirmed this fact, but published their report unchanged. The Canadian government has indicated it will follow the lead of the U.S.A. in regulating CO2 emissions.

... Climate alarmism based on climate models that don't work has so far cost the world $1.6 trillion in a misguided and ineffective effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These efforts have caused electricity prices to increase dramatically in Europe causing fuel poverty and putting poor people at risk.

Note that the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis in Victoria is a division of Environment Canada's Climate Research Branch, formerly run by CAGW alarmist Andrew Weaver (now BC Green Party MLA).  So that's where the feds have been getting the "science" on which to base their "climate change" policy.