Bugs

This is a false alternative based on the notion that global warming, as outlined by Al Gore, and his backup at the CRU of East Anglia University, is an actual threat. What if the greater threat is that to our national treasuries, coming from International Treaties that essentially put us under the supervision of the UN? Mr. Harder, with all respect, I think your focus is on the debate rather than the actions. This 'global warming' fiasco has virtually taken the role of public opinion out of the picture, so far as every environmental issue is concerned. The air in my city is variously estimated to kill between 1600 and 4000 a year! On a bright, clear day, you can hold your hand out, and the shadow, three or four feet below, is fuzzy -- that's how much junk there is in the air. Thousands of vehicles spew out a mix of far more noxious stuff that CO2, never mind all the other pollutants. The response: They persecute cigarette smokers! Believe me, the ambient air in Toronto is as bad as any Bingo Hall for pollution. "What can we do?" you might ask. "Sorry, we can't look at that, we're too involved in fighting global warming ..." sez the biggest liar in Canadian politics, Dalton McGuinty. "We've made curly light-bulbs compulsory." Just down the road maybe 100 km is Nanicoke, the biggest environmental blight in the country. It belches out bewildering amounts of CO2, but it also belches out all kind of other stuff as well. Dalton's been promising to close the place since before he got elected. My reading of the situation? I think environmentalism has zero credibility. They are the last people who should be setting environmental priorities. The government is useless. The biggest blights in the country are publicly owned or regulated monopolies. The plain truth of socialist solutions is that the state cannot regulate itself effectively. They'll clean up the mess in Sudbury because that's private, but they avert their eyes when it comes to taking on Ontario Hydro. It's just the way it is.

I don't mean to be petty, It's Christmas, after all ... but what has character got to do with being a vegan? Or multi-lingual, either? Vegans (presumably) make their choices for their own reasons, and see their diet as being the best choices for them. But what has that to do with 'character'? If veganism were a 'code', like a moral code, I could see it -- but how can preferring tofurkey to giblet gravy be a test of character? It would make as much sense to say that it's a test of intelligence, and if someone chooses the tofurkey, they lose 10 IQ points.

Chavez is at it again, this time it's the car companies that have to bend the knee. [quoteVenezuela's Chavez threatens to kick out carmakers Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has told car companies they must share their technology with local businesses or leave the country. Mr Chavez gave the ultimatum to Toyota, Ford, General Motors and Fiat during a public address. If the demand isn't met, he said: "I invite you to pack up your belongings and leave. I'll bring in the Russians, the Belorusians, the Chinese." Venezuela has nationalised most of the oil, metal and coffee industries. Some interesting facts: Last year, car plants employed over 2.000 workers, who produced 135,042 cars and trucks. There are 'currency controls' in Venezuela -- essentially it is difficult to get money out of the country -- and it means the industry is struggling to get enough money to import parts and pay off debts. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8429427.stm

I suspect most of the residents would look at the torch relay coming into their community as a positive thing. Their Council was onside with it. People generally like to pretend that the 'militants' speak for the natives of Canada. That is not the situation. These militants, in fact, often challenge the traditional authority in the communities, as they have here. In fact, the Six Nations are the one group of natives that is different from other natives. They have no 'aboriginal right' to their land -- they got their land from the English monarch, and their forebearers immigrated here, like the rest of us. They have always been the most economically successful of native groups because they have valuable skills, often with heavy machinery, and big construction. Even this 'demonstration' isn't about anything real. "Stolen land!" indeed. It's just the militants twisting Canada's tail. It's just one group arbitrarily ruining the plans of another group. If natives aren't citizens of Canada, why are we giving these non-taxpayers over $10,000 in benefits, per capita?

Keep the Big Tent big By William M. Daley Thursday, December 24, 2009; A15 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/23/AR2009122302439_pf.html This is a statement from the Mayor of Chicago, head of the imposing Daly Machine, calling on moderate Democrats to return to the center ... surely another sign of the dissolution of Obama's support. All it will take is for the 'jobless recovery' to continue, while prices rise and the arrogance continues.

You're being very naive. There are always guns just out of sight. There is a tobacco factory on the reservation. Those cigarettes are sold all over southern Ontario for $3 a pack. No taxes. $billions are involved. They also smuggle guns, etc.

But China was never going to allow its sovereignty to be compromised -- which is how the US Senate feels, as well. What major power is going to allow itself to be 'regulated' and 'be responsible to' a rabble of 190-whatever countries, most of them tin-pot dictators or out-and-out tyrants? This has always been the problem with Kyoto -- the loss of national sovereignties. For many of these countries, the boss never has enough German cars ... and that's all it is. Policy can be bought, like sausages. Not only that, but China was never oblique about these negotiations. That's why Harper's line was acceptable to them -- and if you want to keep the big players at the table, you have to take 'enforceable' off the table.

SIX NATIONS INDIAN RESERVE, Ont. - The Olympic torch's journey across Canada was forced yet again to take a detour in the face of aboriginal opposition to the Games, with an Ontario First Nation rerouting its relay amid a protest from a splinter group in the community. While the torch still made an appearance on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford in southern Ontario, the original plan to run the flame through the reserve - supported by the elected band council - was altered at the 11th hour. Instead, the torch was taken directly to a bingo hall on the reserve for a celebration during which some two dozen torchbearers circled the hall with the flame. Although the splinter group of Six Nations protesters did not succeed in blocking the torch from entering the reserve - a stated aim of their demonstration - the fact the original relay plan was scrubbed and the celebration relocated had them calling their protest a success. http://www.metronews.ca/edmonton/sports/article/403225--olympic-torch-relay-rejigged-amid-protest-but-modified-six-nations-show-goes-on?pageno=all You should read the article. It leaves much out. There are threats of violence involved. Apparently these 'warriors' -- the thuggish element on the reservation -- feel they hold a veto on the tribal council's decisions. All of it is rank with illegality. Comments?

A very clever argument. Probably good in a debate, with an appeal to those who've never considered the stakes in war. Among those stakes -- if any Canadian falls into the hands of the enemy, he can expect to be executed, sold for ransom, or tortured to death. This is a war, and these standards of a North American court room are not relevant. Standard troop behavior in these situations -- they go door to door, searching houses for guns, and likely Taliban. They probably aren't too good at it. They have lost lives because they tried to act as if it were a social visit. Even so, if they catch a guy with a AK-47, and he's twitching with hate ... they just might throw him into the back of the truck to take back to see what the Lieutenant thinks. Probably a big portion of the detainees were released at this level, and allowed to go home. The rest were held, and turned over the Afghan authorities. What do you expect them to do?

I grant you your point, but what was our little 2300 person unit going to do? They don't have the personnel to hold detainees, and that has its own dangers. They had to turn them over to somebody. The question is -- who? The logical people, it seems to me, are the Americans. But no, the Americans would not commit to the terms. The Americans were sending high risk prisoners back to Gitmo. Probably because of political interference, the Canadian army people looked for another group to hand them off to. The Red Cross? Doubtful. There weren't many alternatives. They turned the prisoners over to the Afghan authorities. They also negotiated an arrangement about these detainees treatment. There was back and forth about it. No torture on Canadian detainees. Part of the problem is that what was formerly 'robust interrogation' has morphed into a war crime. What is the real joke is that the famous manual defining American interrogation techniques is that they were designed to comply with new UN human rights regulations and definitions about torture. None of their tortures caused pain. Compared to the tortures used by Saddam, for instance, many people would look on this as a distinct step forward. Saddam's victims were hung from the ceiling, doused with water, and hit with electrodes in the parts of the body most sensitive to pain. The body heaves and spasms to the electricity, causing them to pull their joints out. That is, of course, only one of their techniques. It is estimated that Saddam tortured and executed (both) about a million Iraqis during his reign. I include this just to put it into perspective. Saddam was never charged with the war crime of torture. Just as in this case, where the Taliban torture and kill almost all of their prisoners. Sometimes they videotape a prisoner's head being cut off, for something to play at celebrations. Nobody will even think of charging these people with war crimes. Nor will they think of charging the people in Kabul's prisons. No, instead, they will travel to far-off Canada, and persecute the Minister of Defense. Do you really think that what's wrong with the our efforts in Afghanistan is that our troops torture too much?

Sharon Begley Good Riddance to Copenhagen Can we now try climate talks that actually have a chance of working? Dec 18, 2009 "That sound you'll hear in 2010 is a can being kicked down the road. Again. In the wake of the failure of the international negotiations in Copenhagen to reach a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, you'll hear a lot of talk about how the world has two good chances in the new year to achieve what it failed to do at Copenhagen. Don't believe it." .... http://www.newsweek.com/id/227515 The supporters are obviously looking for a silver lining. In my view, there's every reason to clean up our worst blights, which have gotten a decade long reprieve because 'global warming' sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and other issues of conservation suffered in neglect. If we are wise, we will start doing something about our biggest blights, often coal-fired electricity plants which are publicly owned and regulated. There are 'issues of the commons' to discuss with international players, besides the air. The oceans, certainly. So there is reason for international cooperation. But creating cash flows to foreign countries to atone for 'climate debt', something given a monetary value purely on the basis of social policy ... that's the kind of thing that happens when countries have been conquored by a tyrant.

I think you're really pressing it. Who got charged with a war crime for this murder in Iran? How is the case proceeding? Perhaps it would be OK, in your eyes, if Peter Mackay got the same treatment as whoever was bureaucratically responsible for Zahra Kazemi's torture? I think that would be appropriate, why not?

Why do we think this is about the environment at all? I don't see any reason, except ... they tell us so. These new mouth-warriors come from the same organization that, in the person of Kofi Annan, hung up on Romeo Delaire so that the coming massacre could unfold. The UN -- why should any Canadian pay any attention to such people when they dishonor us so? Why are they deserving of more credibility now than then? How many of them skimmed an extra cent per barrel off Saddam's notorious 'Oil for Food' scam? It ended up, it was an 'Oil for Palaces' program. And on it goes ... I don't want to go so far as to say I know what strategies are in play, but it seems obvious that, after the science fell apart, nothing changed. In fact, their behavior is entirely consistent with the kind of rush job you would expect from swindlers pushing their mark. Why are the current crop any different? [http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/20/follow-the-money-ipccagw-edition/] I don't think this is a left-right thing, and I am really trying to see if anyone else is bothered by the fact that we seem to have pulled back, a tad, from taking on onerous obligations to faceless bureaucracies that is not democratically constituted, and is demonstrably corrupt. (Corrupt to the point that The Sudan -- the last country on earth to allow slavery, complete with regular auctions -- was elected head of the UN Human Rights Commission!) All in the service of a mythic threat, on the basis of dummied up science. This seems to me to be the financial equivalent of the World Trade Center attacks. It seems to me we are coming to the point where we have to wonder if the UN isn't so compromised, as an instrument, that we ought to go around it as much as possible, if we are serious about getting things done.

There is great gnashing of teeth, now that the scam has failed. Even with all the panic-inducing 'facts', even with the embarrassing sham of the CRU kept submerged, the heavy weight of this albatross brought the whole rickety structure down. The pleasure is exquisite. These people have lied to us for a decade now, and perhaps we can be forgiven our own celebration at the end of this threatened oppression ... This, an article from the other side, lists the statements on faux anguish, from some of the main manipulators and purveyors of lies. ==================== Copenhagen: the sweet sound of exploding watermelons By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 19th, 2009 I take it all back. Copenhagen was worth it, after all – if only for the sphincter-bursting rage its supposed failure has caused among our libtard watermelon chums. (That’s watermelon, as in: green on the outside, red on the inside). As Damian reports, on Twitter they’re all planning to cleanse Mother Gaia of their polluting presence Jonestown-style. The Great Moonbat is sounding more unhinged than ever: Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns. And Polly Toynbee is blaming the whole fiasco on false consciousness. Most leaders in Copenhagen were out ahead of their people. Most understand the crisis better than those they represent, promising more sacrifice than their citizens are yet ready to accept – while no doubt praying for some miraculous technological escape. Sometimes we’re inclined to dismiss Polly as a loveable comedy figure, what with her lovely house in Tuscany contrasting so amusingly with her prolier-than-thou politics, and the never ending japesomeness of her deft, lighter-than-air prose. But you know what? When she reveals her true colours, as she does here, I think she’s really, really scary. Her whole article teeters on the brink of demanding an eco-fascist world government to save us all from ourselves. She yearns, like a woman wailing for her demon lover, for the righteous apocalypse which will teach us the error of our ways: What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe – New Orleans was the wrong people – with London, St Petersburg and Shanghai wiped out all at once. What she really wants, though, as you see from the plaintive, yearning tone of this sentence is global dictatorship: As things stand, politics has not enough heft nor authority. One day, Polly dear. One day. UPDATE: Christ on a bike! You thought Moonbat and Pol-Pot were barking. Wait till you read Johann Hari’s tearful summation in the Independent. Throughout the negotiations here, the world’s low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives – quiet, sombre people with sad eyes – as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored. Does he mean the man in the bow-tie from Tuvalu who wept openly for his island’s fate but on closer cross-examination – as Andrew Bolt reported – turned out to live nowhere near Tuvalu (whose sea-levels, in any case, have not risen in several decades)?

Not only that, but we have a Charter right to a speedy trial. The only time anyone cashes in on this right are those cases in which the Courts connive to release crooked coppers. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/01/31/drug-officers.html See how it works?

One place the money doesn't come from is the sweat and energy of the Six Nations. Did you know that the Six Nations got their land from the Queen, and have no aboriginal rights? Hmmmm?

Would this be an example" Wikipedia’s climate doctor Posted: December 19, 2009, 2:53 AM by NP Editor By Lawrence Solomon The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm. The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD. The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history. The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition. But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.” Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma. The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier. Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.” In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago. But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming. Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties. Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period. All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement. The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear. Financial Post [email protected] Normal 0 0 1 32 184 1 1 225 11.512 0 0 0 Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/370719.aspx#ixzz0aCoUmtO6 The National Post is now on Facebook. Join our fan community today.

Liberal or Conservative are names of organizations. It isn't even important, because both parties are 'pragmatic' more than principled. What makes minimum sentences for repeat offenders a Liberal or a Conservtive issue, for example? Either party could support these legal changes because they don't involve a very big change, and it is selective, aiming for the very people you'd most want in jail. But that doesn't mean the legal profession doesn't have lots of ideology -- they do. At contemporary Canadian universities, the law schools are hotbeds of ideologies, none of which have much relationship to Canadian political parties. They are into radical feminism and all the gender stuff to the max. They are also into human rights, and get themselves into new forms of inequality that, so far, to citizen has seen fit to seek a remedy at Court. Same sex marriage is a big issue ... Some of them are probably figuring out how to base a law practice on protecting animal rights. These are the ideologies to fear, because, when coupled with Human Rights arguments, and the power of the Law, they are preparing revolutionary changes in laws that will never go through Parliament. The implications are frightening.

I was shocked at how precisely the Americans could hit their targets, and by initiating attack on the Moslem sabbath, could take most of the state infrastructure out of the picture without barely an Iraqi casualty. It's quite a contast to Saddam-style rule, where he might gas a whole village to get half a dozen. The attacks were successful in initiating a process whereby the Iraqi Army's will to fight was destroyed. Compared to the way they fought the Iranians, they almost turned the country over to the Americans intact. If you could curb your hostility to America, you could probably understand that this is a good thing. It's not that the Americans have achieved perfection. Not by a long shot. It's more like they have crawled further out of the swamp than the contenders. You tick off the Americans for the 'video game' aspects of the attack, which is probably the least significant thing about it. What national style of conquoring would you prefer? Russian style involves a real subjugation of the people, including rape and loss of property. The fact is, the American invasion of Iraq was undertaken, and Saddam toppled, in a manner contrived to disturb ordinary Iraqis as little as possible.

Of course, there's always the risk that you give these engineers of people's souls the information they need to more perfectly design the media strategy that they will use to deceive the public. It isn't as if the Obama gang are into 'listening' to the people.

I wish you'd give us an example of what you're talking about. Who has done a better job of subverting the Charter than the judiciary?

I don't think that's the situation, Topaz. I don't deny there's a certain amount of suffering out there because of job losses, but outside of auto and timber workers the job losses haven't been that serious. I don't think this article isn't speaking about autoworkers, who, after all, have more benefits than any other workers in the private sector. They are talking about people who don't have pensions of any kind, beyond CPP, the way I see it. The CPP just isn't adequate, and they are probably looking for various incentives they can use to make it smart to have some other source of income.

Love to know why. What's 'climate' but a running average of weather? When winters over large areas of the earth start sooner and last longer than they did a decade ago, and when this is happening over whole continents, possibly that will affect the running average? Unless, of course, you depend upon the CRU for your information. They produce scientific data designed with your mind in mind. I think that saying that the the science is settled, and that weather has no relationship to climate, is simply a way of ducking the issues.