Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Irony is not only dead, but its corpse had been desecrated
The young girl has a lovely voice, yes, but seeing Stephen Harper sing this song is like watching David Duke sing "We Shall Overcome." Someone who was disappointed we didn't get to play in the Iraq sandbox and is destroying our fiscal security to buy unnecessary stealth fighter jets should not be singing peace anthems. It is not merely distasteful, it is hour-long-shower-scrub-with-a-wire-brush disgusting. Maybe this is his energy plan, to hook John Lennon's coffin up to a turbine and provide free electricity to the entire American continent from the resultant spinning.
He says he has his own lyrics for the song - I'll bet. Something along the lines of "Imagine there's no Liberals..." no doubt.
Personally, I'd have thought he'd be more into a different Lennon tune from a year or two earlier, though again he'd have his own lyrics... "You say you want a coalition..." or perhaps "Can't buy me Love."
Crossposted from the Woodshed
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Tuesday, March 29, 2011
This week on Virtually Speaking
Coming up this week on Virtually Speaking:
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Sunday, March 27, 2011
At the going down of the sun ...
Killed due to enemy action.
Je me souviens
Relay via sat
you say impeachment, I say contempt of Parliament
Let's call the whole thing off!
Apparently there are those who interpret Parliamentary law as saying that Stephen Harper is now barred from holding office due to having been found in contempt of Parliament. I'm not sure this is the case since the confidence vote was held before acceptance of the committee report finding the government in contempt could be voted on by the House of Commons. Still, a such a finding even at the committee level is significant. Certainly, the report would have been confirmed by the House, although I suspect the Conservative-dominated Senate would have sent it back to the house.
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Friday, March 25, 2011
Syria becomes serious . . .
Last night there were reports that at least 23 people had been killed, some of them in Damascus, hitherto unaffected; the reports could not be independently verified. Amnesty International put the death toll around Deraa in the past week at 55 at least.
This may not cool down. There's an interesting Syrian site, ALL4SYRIA. Whoever runs it has a number of articles worthy of your attention. One, "Syria’s coming revolution?" makes the observation that
By taking to the streets, even in fairly small numbers, Syrians have crossed a ‘red line’ with their regime.
The revolution that was sparked in Tunisia has given birth to a new pan Arab-movement, a “neo-Arabism”, which privileges freedom and democratic participation of the people over ideology, sectarianism and the interest of dictators.
As we witness a rebirth of a revolutionary neo-Arabism that has infected millions from Morocco to Bahrain, we cannot ignore the birth-place of the original pan Arab movement of the past century – Syria.
• • •
A forty year old red line has been crossed and there is no turning back.
Monday, March 21, 2011
After all, they might spend the cash on pitchforks and torches
On March 15, Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee testified in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee on House File 171. Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. How do you expect people to take care of business like paying bills such as lights, gas, water, trash and phone?”
House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP - and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid - could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.
Which is a actually a partial surrender to all those Cadillac-driving welfare queens in Minnesota - the original bill would have barred those on assistance from getting any cash at all.
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
But remember, trying to get millionaires to pay an extra 2% in income taxes is Marxist class warfare by jealous communists who hate successful people who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. You know, scrappy entrepreneurs like Paris Hilton and all those hedge fund managers on Wall Street who earn every cent of their million-dollar taxpayer-funded bonuses.
I'm guessing the next step will be Oklahoma bringing back indentured servitude and debtor's prisons or Missouri passing the "Modest Proposal Act" requiring all families on public assistance to sell their children to the nearest rendering plant or perhaps the kindly burghers of Indiana will finally pass the "Work will make you Free" Act to provide a final solution to the poverty problem.
(crossposted, as usual, from The Woodshed)
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Sunday, March 20, 2011
Keep calm and carry on
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The PM, the conman, the blonde hooker and the Colonel
When we didn't buy that, he stepped up his campaign of parliamentary obstructionism (dropping over 1,000 pages of documents 15 minutes before the committee session ended, for example) to try to avoid having his government and ministers found in contempt of Parliament. Tune in next week when he tells us that us that the government being found in contempt of Parliament is an example of how Michael Ignatieff hates democracy and is just some Johnny-come-lately who is playing games with the economy and is the son of Russian aristocrats not a "real immigrant"and besides LIBYA! FREEDOM! Democracy! Whisky! Sexy! We are at War! Don't switch horses in midstream!
And if that doesn't work, expect him to try proroguing the house again, just to "save it from itself" and delay the budget so that he can "focus on the economy and the war."
Now, having said all that, let me clarify a few things: While Stephen Harper is a lying, power-grabbing, egomaniac and he may or may not be doing it for the wrong reasons, I think he is doing the right thing on Libya.
Yes, mark the day on the calendar -- I agree with Stephen Harper on something.
I think the moral choice with regards to Libya is at this stage is intervention by the international community. Libya is not Iraq, it is not Vietnam, it is not Bahrain. The closest comparison I can think of is Spain in the 1930s. There is a brutal, corrupt, autocratic ruler. There is a viable democratic opposition engaged in a popular revolution that has shown it has the hearts and minds of the population behind it. The regime in this case is being propped up by superior military firepower. The loyalists in the Libyan armed forces are mostly mercenaries and those who have profited from their affiliation with the regime. There have been numerous defections from the military by those troops and commanders who have refused to attack their own people.
As it would have been in Spain, the moral thing to do here is to side with the people against an autocrat that would crush them and murder those who dare to dissent.
The right thing to do is to freeze all of the Colonel's assets abroad, deny him jet fuel, artillery shells and other munitions.
The right thing to do is level the playing field by arming the people in Benghazi and Tobruk and elsewhere to allow them to defend themselves.
The right thing to do is to prevent the Colonel from bombing his own people or turning his tanks and artillery on the people who seek to be free from his corrupt and brutal regime.
It isn't a matter of sending troops into a quagmire, it isn't a matter of sticking our nose in where it isn't wanted.
It is a matter of dropping a few bombs and firing a few missiles to avoid a genocide and another generation of oppressive, autocratic rule in Libya, by a man who has supported terrorism in numerous forms (the Lockerbie bombing, arming the IRA, etc etc)
Just because Stephen Harper supports it doesn't make it a bad idea.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Stevie gets to strap on a .45 . . .
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada will send CF-18 fighter jets to help enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, despite Moammar Gadhafi's ceasefire declaration.
Canada's six war planes will join an international effort authorized by the United Nations Security Council on Thursday night.
"If Col. Gadhafi does not comply with this Security Council resolution, Canadian armed forces working with other like-minded nations will enforce this resolution," Harper said.
The jets were to leave Canadian Forces Base Bagotville in Quebec as early as Friday afternoon for an air base in Italy. About 150 support staff will be joining them.
There's something righteous about enforcing resolutions that chuffs the scolding fundamentalist psyche. Consider that the French and the Brits have way more than enough 3+ generation fighters to run the show out of Egypt, they've even got enough AWAC capability to manage the show, so they'll get along just fine without our 6 F-18's. But it's good to keep up our deployment skills, even if our presence is really only required for the self-desired Stevie display.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
But where's Verkuktastan?
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Purple Haze . . .
Augustus Owsley Stanley III, AKA the "Bear," died in a car crash in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia today. He was 76. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley homebrewed more than one million doses of LSD in the San Francisco Bay Area fueling a revolution in consciousness, music, art, and the counterculture. The recipe came from a copy of the Journal of Organic Chemistry he found in the UC Berkeley library. The Grateful Dead's first sound engineer, Stanley also pioneered several technologies for live sound.
According to Wikipedia, Owsley traveled with funny people:
In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; by this point Sandoz LSD was hard to come by and "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard. He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters by Tom Wolfe. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully and provided the LSD.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Reach out and touch someone . . .
Operating from a remote patrol base in Helmand, two British snipers were responsible for killing 75 Taliban fighters in just 40 days. In one remarkable feat of marksmanship, two insurgents were dispatched with a single bullet.
Apparently, the twofer is known as a "Quigley".
The Waiting
The earthquake and tsunami that struck north-eastern Japan on Friday and the subsequent nuclear crisis are frightening events that hit very, very close to home for me and mine.
As many of you know, I spent many years in Japan and Mrs. Rev. Paperboy is a Japanese national. Furthermore, Sendai is pretty much her hometown and her parents live in a nearby village in Miyagi Prefecture, well inland from the city. Neither of us has had much sleep since Friday and we still have not received any word about her parents.
We are grateful for the outpouring of concern among friends and family and we thank you for your emails, phone calls, tweets, visits and other expressions of support. Pardon us if we don't respond swiftly or at all for the moment, we appreciate your kindness.
But we are still waiting.
At the moment there is still no electricity or telephone service in the affected area and we are still trying constantly to get through via telephone and email to our family there. Meanwhile, we are doing our best to keep calm and carry on.
The best thing you can do to help us right now is give money to the Red Cross (click the link or text the word ASIA to 30333 to make a one-time donation of $5) or go out and give blood.
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Sunday, March 13, 2011
Before and after . . .
Perspectives . . .
IMGUR is an interesting ad-hoc collection of pictures. "Monstrous Discrepancies" is worthy of attention.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Sun News gots ICBMs !
David Akin wants to know what we think of the new Sun News theme and on-air graphics.
Well, let's see ... there's kind of a storyline to it, isn't there ...
An ICBM smashes into the centre of Canada and Sun News rises up out of the ashes like a .... giant 70's gyro disco ball ... which then splits the country in half, leaving the provinces to float in a grey limbo.
Did I get that right? I'm not too good with media subliminal messaging.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
The Crazy Years . . .
Well, in Florida, a state representative has introduced a bill that would impose fines of up to $5 million on any doctor who asks a patient whether he or she owns a gun.
But wait — it gets better:
The nation’s state legislators seem to be troubled by a shortage of things they can do to make the National Rifle Association happy. Once you’ve voted to allow people to carry guns into bars (Georgia), eliminated the need for getting a permit to carry a concealed weapon (Arizona) and designated your own official state gun (Utah — awaiting the governor’s signature), it gets hard to come up with new ideas.
This may be why so many states are now considering laws that would prohibit colleges and universities from barring guns on campus.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Boogity boogity twang . . .
A 1948 Gibson guitar once played by Eric Clapton, being held by Alicia Scalera at the auction house Bonhams in New York. Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Fortunately, social scientists have been hard at work on the answers. After conducting experiments and interviewing guitar players and collectors, they have just published papers analyzing “celebrity contagion” and “imitative magic,” not to mention “a dynamic cyclical model of fetishization appropriate to an age of mass-production.”
Bunch of raving nutters. A decade or so ago, I ran across this gem:
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Showtime!
Multi-Kulti BS . . .
THE POLITICALLY-CORRECT ARE BECOMING TIRESOME, and the sooner we can slap some sense into their darling little minds, the better. According to Licia Corbella at The Calgary Herald, there is lunacy in Winnipeg. Apparently a number of Islamic families are upset and demanding changes to the Winnipeg public school curriculum to make it more like a fundamentalist madrassa.
About one dozen families who recently immigrated to Canada are demanding that the Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg excuse their children from music and coed physical education programs for religious reasons.
The families believe that music is un-Islamic - just like the Taliban believe and then imposed on the entire population of Afghanistan - and that physical education classes should be segregated by gender even in the elementary years.
The school division is facing the music in a typically Canadian way - that is, bending itself into a trombone to try to accommodate these demands, even though in Manitoba, and indeed the rest of the country, music and phys. ed are compulsory parts of the curriculum.
Officials say they may try to have the Muslim children do a writing project on music to satisfy the curriculum's requirements. The school officials have apparently consulted the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, and they have also spoken to a member of the Islamic community suggested by those very same Muslim parents.
In any event, the school district is trying to find a way to adapt the curriculum to fit the wishes of these families, rather than these families adapting to fit into the school and Canadian culture.
So, we have these politically-correct aparatchiki in the Winnipeg educational establishment who cannot do enough to get rid of our Canadian social values. Well, Mahfooz Kanwar, a member of the Muslim Canadian Congress, is really upset with these weasels:
"I'd tell them, this is Canada, and in Canada, we teach music and physical education in our schools. If you don't like it, leave. If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hellhole country you came from or go to another hellhole country that lives under sharia law," said Kanwar, who is a professor emeritus of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
That might be putting things a little more forcefully than most of us would be comfortable with, but Kanwar says he is tired of hearing about such out-of-tune demands from newcomers to our country. "Immigrants to Canada should adjust to Canada, not the other way around," he argues.
Kanwar, who immigrated to Canada from Pakistan via England and then the United States in 1966, says he used to buy into the "Trudeaupian mosaic, official multiculturalism (nonsense)."
He makes it clear, that like most Canadians, he is pleased and enjoys that Canada has citizens literally from every country and corner in the world, as it has enriched this country immensely. But it's official multiculturalism - the state policy "that entrenches the lie" that all cultures and beliefs are of equal value and of equal validity in Canada that he objects to.
"The fact is, Canada has an enviable culture based on Judeo-Christian values - not Muslim values - with British and French rule of law and traditions and that's why it's better than all of the other places in the world. We are heading down a dangerous path if we allow the idea that sharia law has a place in Canada. It does not. It is completely incompatible with the idea and reality of Canada," says Kanwar, who in the 1970s was the founder and president of the Pakistan-Canada Association and a big fan of official multiculturalism. Kanwar says his views changed when he started listening to the people who joined his group. They badmouthed Canada, weren't interested in knowing Canadians or even in learning one of our official languages. They created cultural ghettos and the Canadian government even helped fund it.
"One day it dawned on me that the reason all of us wanted to move here was going to disappear if we didn't start defending Canada and its fundamental values." That's when Kanwar started speaking out against the dangers of official multiculturalism. He has been doing so for decades.
Well, if Mahfooz can figure it out, what's the problem with the weasels in Winnipeg?
Nasty bitch . . .
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Demotivators . . .
PUNDIT KITCHEN is a division of the I Can Has Cheezburger empire. Delightfully irreverent.
Friday, March 04, 2011
Tune in, turn on
Sunday, March 6
5 p.m. Pacific/8 p.m. Eastern
VIRTUALLY SPEAKING SUNDAY; MAPLE SYRUP EDITION
This week host Kevin Wood speaks with blogger and performing artist Lindsay Stewart aka PSA about copyright, the Canadian federal budget and the likelihood of a federal election in Canada this spring. Listen live or check the archives
6 p.m. Pacific/9 p.m. Eastern
Monday March 7
VIRTUALLY SPEAKING SUSIE
Listen to all the Virtually Speaking shows right here
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