Islamists and idiot leftists hijack TO rally

Blazingcatfur Productions' new documentary video nails 'em in the act:

Hate the CBC bumperstickers

Hunter is looking for suggestions.

Obama's 'Iran' moment

Obama channeling Jimmy ('The Nitwit') Carter:

As Egypt’s regime totters on the verge of collapse, President Obama is looking less like Ronald Reagan and more like the Gipper’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter. The turmoil in Egypt is markedly similar to the revolution that gripped Iran 33 years ago. Egypt may be to Mr. Obama what Iran was to Mr. Carter. ...

... A hostage crisis may be the only part of this Carteresque rerun Mr. Obama can avoid.

And with US troops gone from Iraq:

.... the U.S. will have little on the ground but the State Department.

But then haven't liberals always been big on "soft-power"?

Each woman needs .......

[H/t Vinney]

Debate: "Muhammad taught that Muslims must wage war against and subjugate unbelievers."

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch debates Muslim author Moustafa Zayed.  Spencer:

Zayed is the author of a purported refutation of my book The Truth About Muhammad that he has amusingly entitled The Lies About Muhammad -- and his book is indeed filled with them.

Western media - spineless appeasers

[via BCF]

Update: I've just sent this e-mail to the Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun and the Toronto Star:

To the editors: 

I've searched the web in general and your newspapers' on-line material for references to the trial of Danish journalist and President of the Danish Free Press Society, Lars Hedegaard, for his so-called "hate" speech. This trial is an attack on free speech everywhere and yet nowhere but on the web (excluding the MSM) is it being covered at all. 

You and your fellow mainstream "news" media are being labeled cowardly appeasers for your stance (or lack thereof) on this and similar cases.

This video by Pat Condell and this blog-post provide cogent additional thoughts on the matter. You should find them very interesting.

 Thank you for your attention.

 Sincerely yours,

And here's Mark Steyn's piece on the subject a few days ago.

Ezra Levant's "ethical oil" notion critiqued at rabble.ca

Posted at rabble.ca is SFU professor Donald Gutstein's article "Ethical Oil and the Right-Wing Echo Chamber".  Heh. A rabble post complaining about a "right-wing" echo chamber. Now isn't that just too rich.

The one comment includes this: 

"...The truly ethical thing to do would have been to let the stinking, rotten capitalist financial system collapse." [Good grief!]

Gutstein's article was first published here with comments from Ezra (But is it really Ezra? It would seem so because here's Ezra on the whole thingy.)

[Via]. 

Hating the CBC

Hunter at Climbing Out Of The Dark opines on a demo in Peterborough:

... Oh my God, they want the CBC recognized as a national treasure? Seriously, these people walk among us....

Feelings of guilt can be a good thing ...

Especially if you're guilty.  In Charles Lewis's column, he lays the blame on secularism for the trend away from personal responsibility, concluding:

... being forced to face one’s own sins can produce guilt, as it should. The point is to feel the pain of those wrongs, make it right with God and move on. It is the reason it is called the Day of Atonement and not the Day of Whining.

... freedom comes from an obedience to greater truths. It demands attention to the details of life. It asks that life not be a blur of excuses but freely exercised choices. And then it asks you to be an adult and take responsibility for all that you do.

Good points, but laying the blame on secularism doesn't quite do it for me.  It's too broad a brush.  The decline of personal responsibility and rise of whining can be more precisely attributed to neo-liberalism which has for decades been promoting bleeding heart social policy, criminal justice, education (eg. the cult of self- esteem), and on .. and on ....  A good case in point is documented in another excellent NP article this week - the remarkable recovery of New York City from decades of decline under liberal policies.  NYC was saved by secular conservatism.

The entire NP series on the death of personal responsibility is well worth the read.

Farewell to a furry family member

Today, we lost our much beloved cat, Rufus, who we adopted from the Ottawa Humane Society in January of 1995 as a one year old. So he's been with us for 16 of his 17 years, moving from Ottawa to Victoria to Surrey. A real character, he took to the leash from the start and always looked forward to his almost daily neighbourhood walks where he enjoyed attention from people and their dogs.

After 5 weeks of battling what we thought was pancreatitis the final diagnosis turned out to be much worse, lymphoma.  So, R.I.P. Rufus, we miss you.

Media aided extortion - the new foreign travel insurance.

Just saw this on Lisa Laflegm's CTV National news: Family wants man shot in Mexico treated in B.C.:

His daughter Kathy ...  doesn't understand why her dad can't be flown home immediately by air ambulance. She's angry that the federal government isn't doing more to help.

Apparently the injured man was offered commercial travel but that wasn't good enough. Nothing less than luxury evacuation will do. Sounds a little like that idiot Brenda Martin's situation.

It's media aided extortion.  Is that the new foreign travel insurance standard?  Federally funded bailouts, gratis?

Note to the feds - tell them to drop dead.

When the law is an assh*le

There's a growing list of cases where crime victims face charges for the crime of .... defending their own property.  Ontario alone has a string of them. ... from Caledonia to David Chen ....
and now Ian Thomson:
 

...last August ... 53-year-old former mobile-crane operator woke up to the sound of three masked men firebombing his Port Colborne home.

So Mr. Thomson, a former firearms instructor, grabbed one of his Smith & Wesson revolvers from his safe, loaded it and headed outside dressed in only his underwear ... exited his house and fired his revolver two, maybe three times ...

His surveillance cameras caught the attackers lobbing at least six Molotov cocktails at his house and bombing his doghouse, singeing one of his Siberian Huskies. But when Mr. Thomson handed the video footage to Niagara Regional Police, he found himself charged with careless use of a firearm.


The local Crown attorney's office later laid a charge of pointing a firearm, along with two counts of careless storage of a firearm. The Crown has recommended Mr. Thomson go to jail, his lawyer said.

Mr. Thomson said ... "This is just an absolute nightmare, this whole thing". ... "People need to know that this is what can happen to you, and which side of the victim line do you want to stand on? Lying down dead or in court? That's the way it seems it has to go."

Outrageous.  Near useless police and worse than useless Crown attorneys. In these cases, the law isn't just an ass, it's a complete asshole.

Those moderate Muslims

From Blazing Cat Fur comes word that Toronto based 'news blog' TheMuslim.ca is calling for Islamist rule in Tunisia.  The publisher of TheMuslim.ca is Jaweed Anwar, who also happens to be co-chair of the Toronto District School Board.  Lovely. Lots of scary links at BCF.

Incidentally, at the Toronto District School Board web page it's hard not to notice that the TDSB logo is freakishly similar to the Islamist crescent.  Coincidence or creeping Sharia?

Oceans Are Cooling, New Research Says

And a row erupts:

The research based on an analysis of ocean buoy temperature measurements suggests that the oceans cooled between 2003 and 2008 ... this cooling does not support the idea that the oceans are stockpiling heat and ... does not support the idea that the Earth is in positive radiative balance ...

Physicists Robert Knox and David Douglass of the University of Rochester, New York, bluntly state in their paper that their research “does not support the existence of either a large positive radiative imbalance or a “missing energy.””

Climate "scientist" Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) , who made famous the phrase “missing energy”, has reportedly dismissed the paper as “rubbish” ... [well argued, Trenberth] [my emphasis]

[via FOS]

History of Western Culture in 2 1/2 Minutes

Advice to a climate "scientist"

WUWT has published an open letter to climate "scientist" Kevin Trenberth regarding his recent paper to the American Meteorological Society (AMS).  The letter concludes (in part) :

... At this point people don’t trust the IPCC any more than they trust you and your friends.

Great read! Says it all.

Luboš Motl: "... Holy cattle."

Tougher sentencing, bigger prisons

Earlier this week John Ivison criticized Tory spending on increased prison capacity saying it's "tough on taxpayers and bad policy".

A couple of days ago near my neighbourhood there was an armed home invasion where one of the two collared perps was described as:

... a “prolific offender” with “quite a lengthy property-crime record.”

Forgive me for asking, but WTH was this guy doing on the street?  He must have been a known 'bad apple' before graduating to "prolific offender".  We need tougher sentencing.  If we get it and that means bigger prisons then Tory policy is good policy.

Tucson: "The liberal chorus ..."

Jonathan Kay:

Unreason. Hatred. Bitterness. Prejudice. This more or less summarizes the liberal chorus heard in the days after the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. But all of the words quoted in the paragraph above were spoken or printed in 1963, in the days immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

... Sometimes, lone gunmen just go out and do horrible things. Five decades after Dealey Plaza, this is a truth that intellectuals still can’t accept.

Good point.  More validation for Thomas Sowell's assertion: "Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect."

Massacre memorial speeches - Obama v Bush

Good speech. But what's with the audience's cheering, hooting and whistling - like it was a pep rally? Poor show - distracting and very undignified.

Compare and contrast with Pres. Bush's speech at the Virginia Tech memorial (note the link to Malkin).

Ah ... another "moderate" Muslim

[Via Blazing Cat Fur]

"Don't ask what your government can do for you ..."

"Ask your government to get out of the way ... "



[Via]

Tucson: "... an ideological dog's breakfast"

Chris Selley analyzes Canadian press pundit's commentary on the Tuscon shootings:

... three main narratives have emerged: (1) It’s all but inconceivable that the assailant wasn’t influenced or motivated by the violent rhetoric of certain Tea Party followers. (2) It’s all but inconceivable that he was influenced by them — insanity is just insanity, always. (3) He may or may not have been influenced by them, but while we’re here, let’s say how much we deplore violent political rhetoric, because nothing occurs in a vacuum, words have meaning or [insert alternative vacuous text explaining why we’re railing against something we just said might be irrelevant]. (4) What the hell is wrong with you people? We have very little idea what motivated him, and what we do know is an ideological dog’s breakfast.

In Camp One we have Judith Timson in The Globe and Mail, ... the Globe’s John Doyle, ... in the Toronto Star, we have Linda McQuaig, for whom there’s absolutely no doubt that “hostile, right-wing extremism” is to blame, along with the media who tolerate it. ... 

And so on, ending with:

... people do realize Loughner’s going to have a trial, right? It’s reasonable to hope we’re eventually going to find out rather precisely what allegedly drove him over the edge. [Methinks this is a tad dubious. I'm not sure we can expect much precision from a madman as to his true motives. Plus, he's going to have lawyers who will do their best to mudify things sufficiently to keep their client off death row, including blaming "right-wing rhetoric".]

... Ultimately, the rush to judge is, at best, incredibly unhealthy — at worst it’s disgustingly partisan.

All in all, excellent points, funny lines.

"Kremlin capitalism" - an oxymoron

Peter Foster is ticked off by abuse of the language:

It is galling ... that Mr. Putin’s thuggish regime is constantly referred to as “Kremlin capitalism,” “state capitalism,” or “crony capitalism.”

Kremlinism, statism, and cronyism are all in fact negations of capitalism, which is a system based on private property and the rule of law. Government is needed to protect the system, but that does not mean that it is compatible with anything that government chooses to do.

... Many people understandably fail to grasp that capitalism is not necessarily what is either practised or preached by capitalists. Capitalism is an ideal, but unlike the socialism of state control it is an attainable, and moral, one. ...

Unintended (but predictable) consequences

Holy crap! Saskatchewan's CO2 storage facility has sprung a leak:

A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases that were supposed to have been injected permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken-up soda pop. ...

It's a predictable risk that has been assessed as acceptable and manageable [until it isn't]. More consequences of global warming hysteria?

Anthony Watts responds to a skeptic.

Support Israel, win an iPad

It's win, win! Aussie Dave at Iraellycool:

I am very excited to announce the commencement of the Pro-Israel Blog-Off for 2011, my new initative designed to showcase the blogosphere’s best pro-Israel material in a fun and exciting manner.

Bloggers are invited to submit one ”pro-Israel” entry, whether it be a blog post, podcast, or video no older than 1 month. ... The process continues until we get to two finalists competing for an Apple iPad [woo hoo!].

[via Blazing Cat Fur]

Tucson: David Frum and other suspects call for rhetoric "tone down"

About a microsecond after the shootings the MSM and every other leftist source on the planet began linking them to "extreme rhetoric" from Palin, the Tea Party and the right in general.  Not much later some Republicans and RINOs like David Frum climbed on that bandwagon (pretty much anyone who wants Palin and the Tea Party to shut up and disappear).

While Frum acknowledeged:

" ... It makes no sense to talk of the “motive” of someone who is fundamentally irrational."

... he then went on to say:

... this talk did not cause this crime. But this crime should summon us to some reflection on this talk.

Even the NYT has a backgrounder on the shooter that suggests he was not only deranged but lib/lefty to boot:

“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. [and] oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,” the former classmate, Caitie Parker, wrote..."

So, David, explain why something that had zip to do with the event should "summon us to some reflection" on anything?  But assuming you could explain that, what is "this talk" you're talking about? Just Palin's and the Tea Party's?  What about the clearly toxic daily rhetoric at leftist sites like MSNBC and Daily Kos? And isn't it odd that there should be fevered calls to stifle "the rhetoric" now, after eight years of Bush Derangement Syndrome complete with calls to "Kill Bush", "Hang Bush".

Update [via Celestial Junk]:  "People who inspire [the shooter] include Barack Obama, Saul Alinsky, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, and Yassir Arafat."  OK, if so, now what, Dave?  And there's a lot more at CJunk - especially the Victor Davis Hanson reference.

Also here's Blazing Cat Fur.

RCMP personality disorder?

The RCMP is a big organization, its officers have a tough job to do and it takes all kinds so it's bound to exhibit multiple personalities over time.  But, of late, there just seems to have been a lot of weird crap:

One day they're in ridiculous, touchy-feely pc-mode - apologizing to Muslims for arresting a Muslim during Ramadan, for example. (BTW, excellent commentary over at Blue Like You on this.)

The next day they're caught on video kicking some poor schlub in the face because he didn't get down on all fours quick enough.

Before that it was watching live jaihouse porn and drunk driving. (Maybe there's something in the Okanagan water supply.)

What gives? No doubt many have been wondering the same thing, especially since the infamous Taser death at Vancouver International.

But maybe it's a just statistical blip in what's been happening ever since the Klondike Gold Rush.  My closest personal experience with questionable RCMP behaviour dates back to my teen years when my older brother was best buds with a local constable (they drank white lightning together).  Said officer eventually went AWOL and was arrested for car theft.

Tucson shootings incite deranged leftist rhetoric

Well before the facts were known in the Tucson shootings, the usual suspects were busy pointing fingers at 'the right's violent rhetoric' - "...the Tea Party ...", "... Sarah Palin" ... blah, blah.

Glenn Reynolds gathers relevant evidence.

Blazing Cat Fur has more.

Must be a corollary of Godwin's Law at work here.  Any leftist discussion inevitably degenerates to a  reductio ad Palinum (or Tea-Party-um) ... or somesuch.

Dennis Miller: "... two types of people..."

[via Ezra: "Wonderful video. Probably illegal in Canada"]

Boehner gavels Pelosi

[h/t Vinney]

Most published global warming research findings are a crock

Dr. Roy Spencer applies a medical research article to argue that most published global warming research findings are false:

...While the article comes from the medical research field, it is sufficiently general that some of what it discusses can be applied to global warming research as well.

I would argue that the situation is even worse for what I consider to the central theory of the climate change debate: that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere causes significant warming of the climate system....

The first problem ...
A second related problem ...
A third problem ...
A fourth problem ... -- the source of funding ... I can’t think of a single scientific study that has been funded by an oil or coal company.  But what DOES exist is a large organization that has a virtual monopoly on global warming research in the U.S., and that has a vested interest in AGW theory being true: the U.S. Government.

So, when some scientist says we “know” that warming is human-caused, I cringe at the embarrassing abundance of scientific ignorance on display. No wonder the public doesn’t trust scientific predictions — just as suggested by the 2005 study I mentioned at the outset, those predictions have almost always been wrong!  [But what about that 97% 'consensus'?]

[Via FOS]

US EPA attempting to end-run Congress on GHG regulation

From FOS:

"Time magazine, the Dallas County News Examiner and Fox News provide their views on forthcoming battle between the incoming Congress and the Administration over carbon emission limits announced by the Environmental Protection Agency. A dozen states have filed suit to block the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases, and Texas is outright refusing to comply with the new rules.

"Pajamas Media, in a reasoned argument, asserts that the EPA is attempting an end-run around democracy by using the 1970 Clean Air Act, with non-elected bureaucrats, trial lawyers and activist judges determining the content and direction of national policy."

This is a big deal for Canada because the declared Tory government "climate change" policy is to mirror US policy.

Related: New Mexico reversing environmental regulations:

New Mexico is the only state besides California which has moved forward on comprehensive global warming regulations. The two states joined three Canadian provinces (British Columbia [Thanks Gord!], Ontario and Quebec) in the Western Climate Initiative. [Hmmm ... Ontario and Quebec in a "Western" initiative? A better handle would have been "Loony-Tunes Initiative".] Now, the new Republican Governor, Susana Martinez, has removed all members of New Mexico's Environmental Improvement Board because of its "anti-business" policies. The Governor also issued an executive order halting all pending regulations by executive branch agencies, to determine whether they hurt businesses in New Mexico.

Crisis in "surplus housing"

George Monbiot has apparently been "thinking" too hard - 'cause something snapped.  David Thompson critiques his latest idiocy:

George “laughing boy” Monbiot has spotted another crisis. ...

... Yes, there are spare rooms in some private houses - space that, according to Mr Monbiot, people just don’t need. And which, therefore, they shouldn’t be allowed to have.

... Sadly, Mr Monbiot doesn’t share with us the details of his own living arrangements, such as whether or not he frivolously uses a room purely as an office or study - say, for the writing of Guardian articles. But perhaps his colleague Polly Toynbee will be spurred to throw open the doors to one of her two rather spacious estates. How about that nice villa in Italy? Or maybe Monbiot’s employer Alan Rusbridger could find a wiser, fairer use for the space currently occupied by his £30,000 grand piano?

[via]

"... the rot that has eaten away at the rich world's 'left'"

From another fine piece by Terry Glavin, ...A Corrosive, Reactionary Parochialism On 'The Left':

... It's my own view that on the so-called "anti-imperialist" left, the truly progressive heart had already stopped beating at least a decade ago. True enough, the zombies have been stumbling around for much longer than that.

... The thing about the contemporary iterations of that decadence that gets at me like fingernails scratching on a blackboard is its cynical disregard for the bravery of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, especially, who every day take greater risks and make greater sacrifices in the struggle for the rule of law, free speech, womens rights and civil liberties than any of the rich-kid "anti-imperialists" have undertaken in their entire lives. ...

Great writing.  It's easy to see why the Gaza flotilla (ie. Hamas) sponsoring loons at rabble.ca so hate Terry's guts.

[Via]

A cherry-picked climate consensus

Lawrence Solomon analyzes the pundits' new favourite consensus number (97%):

... This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.

In other words, it's just another exercise in politicized junk "science" with "researchers" setting out to confirm their biases and/or mislead the public.

Meanwhile, over at No Frakking Consensus: 'If You Don’t Believe in Global Warming, the Terrorists Win' [via]

Tory Cabinet tweak

Today, Stephen Harper adjusted his Cabinet:

... "small shuffle" ... In fact [he] barely cut the deck — a new Environment Minister, in the form of Peter Kent, to replace Jim Prentice, two new Ministers of State in Ted Menzies (Finance) and Julian Fantino (Seniors) and a Minister of State switch for Diane Ablonczy from Seniors to Foreign Affairs.

Yet another non-portent of doom

Or is it portent of non-doom? Anyway,  global sea surface temperatures are falling:

Related: The non-correlation of temperature and CO2

On second think maybe the doom portended is far worse than the warmists' hysterical fears - global cooling.

And on third think, perhaps it's neither.

Free dope and needles ...

Liberal public safety critic, Mark ("The Mouth") Holland, says the Liberals will support a House Public Safety Committee  report recommending "harm reduction" programs for prisons.  "Harm reduction", as we all know by now, is progressive-speak for needle exchanges and "safe" injection sites aka "free dope and needles for dope addicts".  Liberal enablers! Bah!

Thankfully, the Conservatives disagree with the "opposition dominated" committee:

... Illicit drugs in federal prisons compromise the safety and security of correctional staff as well as our communities. Providing needles, even if it is done under the guise of harm reduction, means putting a potential weapon in the hands of convicted criminals. Further, drugs undermine the success of rehabilitation programs. ...

Exactly! "Harm reduction" is, um ... harmful.

[via halls of macadamia]

Afghanistan wasn't always a medieval backwater

Celestial Junk posted a link to a very interesting article looking back at a prosperous Kabul half a century ago.

What happened? Soviet imperialism, Pakistani meddling and, as CJunk put it, Islamism: the Dogshit in the Ice Cream.

"whiny ... censorious loser"

That's Ezra Levant's description of NDP natural resources committee member, Nathan Cullen, who complained that Ezra's testimony (+Q&A) was being televised.