Random Rumours

Being as we're all tied up trying to "rescue" The Rev. Paperboy and I have other consuming issues to deal with, I'll send you on a walk-about.

Reader Cat pointed this out yesterday and Alison presents the plight of Afghanistan's women, seven years on.

Red Tory puts his highlighter to the page. Things that should not be forgotten.

Think Flaherty's budget is is going to show the last year in surplus? That's not his, nor is it a Conservative track record. When you run the numbers, something doesn't look right. The World According to cdlu explains.

In the meantime, if you haven't joined the posse, we're growing to save The Rev.

Random Rumours

There will be light blogging from me today as I do yet another logistical shift. In the meantime, there are some things you should be reading. I call it water-cooler ammunition.

Mike Huckabee has made an appeal to all the supporters of Mitt Romney, now that the Mitt-Mobile is but a memory of lousy fuel economy, because the Huckster is not quitting. At least not like Romney. Sue gives us the details and oh, she finds a headline that speaks volumes. While you're over there, check out what big-pharma is up to.

Again, we'll lead off with Cathie, as she asks just how dumb the media is where it involves Canada's Harper government. Which raises even more questions. Impolitical points out that even after MDS Nordion has said it's piece, the Minister of Natual Resources looks incompetent. It's time someone other than us humble bloggers were the ones holding the feet of these clowns to the fire. In fact, 900 ft Jesus brings to light the fact that the Speaker of The House of Commons isn't exercising his authority properly. It's time he started enforcing the rules at question period and demand that the respondent answer the friggin' question.

Taking you back to this post, I thought I should mention that if you are a member of the combat arms branch of the Canadian army, the promise of one rotation only to Afghanistan, is now gone. The term used to be, I really wish you'd at least kiss me when you're finished.

I had a lot more, but this really thready connection isn't going to let me finish.

More later.

Loose ends, updates and stuff to make you spit milk out of your nose

The mail bag is full, my schedule is chockers, there's lots of good stuff out there and the best I can do for now is tell you where to find it.

Remember this story? It was the account of one Colin Read, a 25-year old, $180,000 per year executive with the London-based firm LEK consulting. Read's claim to fame? He branded his wife with a hot iron after she failed to iron his tacky-tourist shirt. He also stabbed her when she failed to make his sandwiches for the next day's lunch. For his crimes he was handed a $4000 fine and allowed to go free... because, at least in part, the court felt because of his busy and demanding job, that he be allowed to pursue his career.

What career?! LEK consulting obviously takes a dim view of "wife-ironing" and fired him. Thanks to our contact in London, Henry North, for the tip.

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Via Liberal Catnip, we get a view of what it's like to become a refugee of the war that Bush made. Riverbend and her family have left Iraq and arrived in Syria. There's only one problem - Syria is just about maxed-out with Iraqi refugees. There are roughly 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 150,000 in Egypt, 50,000 in Iran and 20,000 in Turkey. In all, there are between 2 million and 2.5 million Iraqi refugees outside Iraq. Syria is having such difficulty and has taken in so many that they are now considering closing their border and requiring a visa to remain in the country.

The United States had offered to take 7,000 refugees this year but lowered that number to 2,000. The actual number of Iraqi refugees which entered the US this year stands at 719. That's right. I did not leave any zeros off the figure. In April and May the US allowed (get ready) ONE refugee per month to remain on US soil.

The Bush administration claims a need to carry out extensive security and background checks on all refugee claimants coming from Iraq. Hmmm.... I wonder how many Saudis wander around the US freely without such checks being done on them?

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Have you ever wondered how they keep that buttery flavour so fresh on your microwave popcorn? Mmmm.... yummy!

It can kill you. The chemical responsible for that wholesome buttery taste is diacetyl. When it is heated the vapours given off can cause bronchiolitis obliterans, commonly known now as popcorn workers' lung or just popcorn lung. No one is certain, but it is believed that diacetyl may have killed at least one consumer. It has killed, or made ill, several popcorn factory workers.

There is one cure for bronchiolitis obliterans - a lung transplant.

Orville, you just knock 'em dead. And I thought handling depleted uranium ammunition was a bad deal.

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Before you read this one, make sure you have swallowed whatever is in your mouth. Do not have a cup of hot liquid nearby. Move the milk gently away from the keyboard. Down that last little bit of rum. Don't refill the Gran Marnier until after you've read this.

Steve Harper is going to lead the rest of the world in fighting climate change.

I know, I know. I should have issued a stronger warning. Fear not, however. He won't be doing that until he's turned northern Saskatchewan into a radioactive landfill. Unlike the Aussies, Harper hasn't told Bush to stuff the idea of returning processed spent fuel to the mineral extracting countries. Did I say Saskatchewan? Just guessing. I have to guess because Steve is keeping this a secret from me, from you and from Parliament.

Secrecy. It's the new transparency. I guess Steve likes George's new lubricant so much that he can hardly wait to try it out on a few Canadian premiers.

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That'll do for now. Thanks also to reader Cat for the tips. May you enjoy your time in Blogtopia. (And, yes. You're quite right. That is a term coined by Skippy!)

Some Tuesday evening random rumours

Jon Swift describes why Rudy Giuliani is the next best hope for President of the United States. Giuliani isn't messing about trying to run on his record. He's running on the basis of his best one-day performance... and right now, he's leading the conservative pack. (Sorry to take so long to get to that, Jon, but anyway.)

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Scott Lemieux points us at something very strange indeed: Jonah Goldberg actually wrote something that makes sense. There's a reason for that. The subject isn't about military strategy, geopolitical events, US foreign policy, the troops or any of the other of a multitude of things with which Goldberg has no real familiarity. No, Goldberg has written about the US political campaigning and the fact that "Democracy is about disagreement...". He's right! And, he's alluded to the fact that politics in the US is more than a little dirty. Now there's something Goldberg knows something about.

Now, excuse me while I go claw my eyes out.

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Laura asks a very solid question. Why, if banning incandescent light bulbs is limiting freedom of choice, (Oh yes, it will! I use fluorescents everywhere. They do impose limits), aren't the usual suspects screaming at the top of their lungs. She too has noticed a strange silence.

Wednesday random rumours

April Reign picks up on three honour students receiving a suspension for using the word 'vagina' in school... while reading from the Vagina Monologues. But they weren't suspended for saying the word. They were suspended for not obeying orders.

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Verbena-19 and Pretty Shaved Ape (with a twist of citrus from Canadian Cynic) provide an update on the Hutto situation. Harper has said he can't dictate in other jurisdictions. No one asked him to, even though he pissed off China doing exactly that.

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Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast displays the selective reality of Fox News.

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Blue Gal hits the bricks running with a really good question.

Sunday Random Rumours

Take a trip to The Woodshed where the Rev has found a rather deeper connection to the Chisum Memo. You thought the great debate over whether we lived in a geocentric universe versus a heliocentric universe ended with Copernicus. Think again. The religious wingnuts are still arguing that everything revolves around the Earth. (Not to mention that all life revolves around them.)

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It was either a boon to mankind or it became the bane of our existence. That's right, I'm talking about the thing that puts you firmly in that recliner and allows you to wallow in your unconsumed calories - the television remote control.

Whatever it is to you, the man credited with sharing in its invention died recently at age 93. According to his wife, Ingrid, Eugene Polley didn't watch much television thus did not consider the remote control his greatest invention.

And, in keeping with the theme of personal entertainment inventions, Ronald E. Wanderlich, is alive, well, and still inventing. Given that cell phones have now become cameras, television sets and web browsers, Ron is taking your personal communications device to, ahem, a whole new level. (You must scroll down to the SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION to get a feel for what it's all about.) It puts new emphasis on reasons for turning off your cell phone in a restaurant.

Brain Dump

The busy season is upon me and working six days a week (with a never-ending cold) does strange things to my poor, pitiful brain. In the spirit of spreading the insanity around, I decided it was time to inflict some of my pain on others. So here goes – a bizarre compilation of various little tidbits I’ve picked up over the last few weeks.

Double Helix Nebula

This story is a bit old, but…an unheard-of double helix nebula has been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy.

From the halls of "Even at this angle, I still say you're full of shit"

From Pharyngula. How to respond to complaints that the religious section of your newspaper isn’t paying enough attention to Christians? Well, if you’re the editor of the Columbus Dispatch, you take the complaint seriously, do the research to see if it’s a legitimate complaint, and then you respond:

A couple of critics wanted to know why we were wasting ink on these "false" beliefs when Christ is the only path to salvation. Another caller said he was tired of having "that Islam religion … shoved in my face."

..snip..

To find out, I got a list of all the articles that have appeared on the cover of Faith & Values for the last two years and started tallying them. The results were surprising. The critics are wrong — we haven’t been slighting Christians — but I did find another shortcoming that I’d never suspected.

…snip…

Although Faith & Values isn’t ignoring Christians, my tally does suggest that we are giving nonreligious people less attention than they deserve. We’re already taking steps to correct that.

Woman says the word “menopause”... in public!!!!!!

Dear Ben Smith

Get over it.

In her first tour of Iowa last weekend, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged as a candidate hard-edged enough to threaten violence, yet explicitly female enough to make women feel so comfortable that one mentioned menopause in front of crowd of more than 1,000 people.

Americans and Geography

There’s an old saying; War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. Go to Canadian Cynic and watch this video.

Oh well, so much for that theory!

I Hate Valentine’s Day

I’ve always considered Valentine’s Day to be a capitalistic marketing scheme with all the mental/emotional health benefits of a McDonald’s deep-fried burger. So here are a few ways to combat this spectacularly stupid "holiday":

1. Firebomb all the Hallmark stores you can find

2. Instead of candlelight dinners (that blow the budget for the next 3 months) and boxes of chocolates (requiring some poor soul to quadruple their daily exercise routine to make up for the excess), take all that money wasted on roses, etc. and invest it in copious quantities of booze. And let the fun begin!

3. When you see a couple on Valentine’s Day holding hands, locking lips, and smugly acting like they’re the only people in the world who are capable of finding truuuuue love, go up the member of the opposite sex and scream “Why didn’t you call me!!!! You said that passionate night we had together wasn’t a one-night stand!!!!

4. Send roses to your office enemy, sign the card with the boss’s initials, and let the office rumour mill do the rest of the work.

The True Meaning of Love

If Dave really loves me, he’ll buy me this tax-season survival computer accessory

Dave says if I really love him, I’ll buy him this in return:

And Last but not Least

Philosophical musings from my little green book “ 96 Things a Woman should do in her Lifetime”

Tell Richard Simmons to just shut up and sit down.

Order a whole Peking duck when dining out alone.

Make wine from dandelions growing in your backyard and send a bottle of it to the CEO of Greener Chemical Lawns Inc.

Burn a CD with music you want played at your funeral. Baffle generations to come by including the rap song “I Like Big Butts”

Read James Joyce to telemarketers.

Friday morning at the water cooler...

Some reading for all of you avid readers.

First, Driftglass takes off the gloves, grabs a scalpel and slices New York Times columnist David Brooks to absolute pieces.

Yes, 30% or so of the citizens of this country are a cultural dead-loss. A morally atrophied slumgullion of wasted carbon, bad ideas and straight-grain-stoopid that cannot be reasoned with and should never be indulged.

And they have been feeding off of that steady diet of psychotic rage that their religious, media and political leaders have pumped into our national groundwater. For every ache and pain in their pathetic lives they have been offered the same, simple sacrificial scapegoats over and over and over again:
Queers, Feminists, Activist Judges and Dirty Hippies.

But that 30% is unelectable without a thick undercoating of respectability and a heavy carapace of “Reasonableness” welded to their hides. Without some nice, clean, articulate barker to work the Midway and wheedle the Moderates into Jerry Falwell’s political freak show.

Without a suit, a pair of glasses, soft hands, a moon face, a pink tie and some valuable real estate on the editorial page of the NYT they’re just another mob of racists and Dominionists begging for tyranny and screaming for blood.

So this is what it comes down to:

The Center does not exist anymore because the Right murdered it. Methodically strangled it in full view of the public and the press over the course of thirty years.

The men that killed the Center still rule the Modern GOP.

These are the Modern GOP’s only legacies:
A New Orleans in rubble.
A Constitution in tatters.
A carefully cultivated international reputation in ruins.
A debased media.
A proud legacy of science and inquiry kneecapped by roving bands of Conservative theocrats.
A debt that will hag-ride us for a generation,
And an Iraq ablaze for the next 20 years.

Next, from Chris Clarke who rails on the religious ones who seem unable to restrain themselves from issuing their faith against his wishes after a personal loss.

Here are a few basic ground rules for religious tolerance. Not everybody believes what you believe. This includes the existence of an afterlife, the existence of a soul, the existence of any gods at all much less one all-encompassing one. A person’s failure to believe what you believe does not constitute disrespect for your beliefs. Failure to be obsequious in the face of your religion’s central story does not constitute disrespect for believers in your religion. One can respect Christians as human beings and still opine aloud that the New Testament is a bunch of nonsense, just as one can respect traditional Hopi culture without writing in your Pleistocene paleontology paper that the ancestors of the Hopi emerged into this world from a sipapu in the Grand Canyon.

Both posts are long, but well worth the read. Bookmark them if you have to. Print them and read them later. Make copies and pass them around. Wave printed copies under the noses of wankers and religious freaks then twist them into a cone and, staple first, shove them...

Ah well, you get the picture.

Apologies: After excerpting from Chris Clarke I didn't make sure the link worked. It's now fixed and also here. Sorry about that.

Saturday morning random rumours

This morning is all about grain. Well, sort of. Wheat, rye, grain, whiskey.

The Whiskey Bar is open again (it's actually been open for a few days and I've been hoarding a stool) and Billmon gives us a take on this quote from Condoleeza Rice:

This is a country that is worth the investment because once it emerges as a country that is a stabilizing factor, you'll have a very different kind of Middle East. And I know that from the point of view of not just monetary costs, but the sacrifice of American lives, a lot has been sacrificed for Iraq, a lot has been invested in Iraq.

As Billmon says:

Maybe Condi is just a cold, heartless bitch -- as morally numb and sociopathic as her office husband. But these kinds of comments could also simply reflect the incredibly sheltered life Madame Supertanker appears to have led, especially since she entered the pampered, intersecting worlds of the academic, national security and corporate elites.

Be prepared, now that Condi has said it, to expect her drooling, slathering Canadian puppy to repeat something similar with respect to Canadian losses in Afghanistan.

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Creekside slices through the Canadian Wheat Board fight, now in progress, and the machinations of agriculture minister Chuck Strahl (who used to be a road builder and truck logger - not a farmer). Alison raises the spectre of Canadian farmers becoming little more than share croppers if Strahl's efforts to get rid of the CWB succeed:

Some farmers will privately get a better price from another grain buyer, say - because they live close to the US border and so their transport costs would be lower than that of more northern farmers.

More farmers will switch to this new buyer.

CWB loses power and folds.

Individual farmers are pitted against each other and the price of wheat falls.

NAFTA says no new CWB can be launched.

Farmers have to sell out to whoever is big enough to survive the price drop, ie agribiz.

Farmers become sharecroppers on what was formerly their own land.

Personally, I think she's being overly optimistic. I see a complete loss of food production. The southern prairie farmers would likely survive while farming in the northern prairies would collapse - very quickly. With it, of course, disappears an $800 million advantage in the Canadian balance of trade.

I have two questions for Strahl:

1. Australia is presently led by a conservative government, (and has been for some time now), yet they are strengthening their single-desk wheat marketing board. You might want to explain why your conservative government is unable to comprehend the level of global strength achieved by offering a global commodity through a single broker. Or is it because you've been hearing from this company, or this one, or this one, or this one?

2. How come your website frontpage and website news does nothing but repeat the Conservative Party talking points and doesn't mention anything about what's going on with the Canadian Wheat Board. Nothing!! Explain that. On second thought, don't. We all know why.