Weimar Canada?

If you've been following the spectacle of various Canada's Human Rights Commission's (functional equivalent of the Thought Police) inquisitions "prosecutions" of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, you'll love Steyns latest salvo.

(via Overlawyered)

The Price of Rice....

.....is definitely on the rise. We went to Lee Lee Market, our local Asian grocery store where we do a lot of our shopping today. There is no shortage of rice here but since I last bought a bag of the Double Horse brand Thai jasmine rice that we use, the price has risen from $14.99 for a 25lb bag to $19.99. It was only a month or so ago that I last bought it. The reason there is no shortage here is that the marketplace has curtailed demand by increasing the price. That's OK for me because I can afford the increase but for someone for whom rice is a staple part of his diet, or corn, this is a serious problem.

The solution to this is to reverse the market-distorting government mandates and subsidies that are making it more attractive to turn food into a fuel that very few vehicles can use than it is to make sure people can afford to eat.

Mark Steyn on unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences

(via Tim Blair) I've blogged before on some of the unintended consequences of attempting to "save" the environment. Mark Steyn has an article in the National Review Online that, as usual, puts it into perspective far better than I ever could:

Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S.
added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

And it isn't just the cost of our food that is going up as a result of this idiotic policy. It's the cost of our fuel as well. Read the whole thing of course.

Recommendation: Excellent Bluetooth Headset

I don't spend a lot of time chatting on my cellphone and I especially don't like to use it when I'm driving, even if I am hands-free. It's not what you are doing with your hands that's the problem, it's what you are doing with your brain. However, there are times when it is necessary to have a brief conversation and anything that makes it easier to expedite it is welcome.

A month or so ago I bought an Aliph Jawbone bluetooth headset on the recommendation of a friend. It's distinguishing feature is a noise cancellation circuit. In a noisy enviroment such as a car, or even the waiting area at an airport gate, the noise cancellation feature takes out most of the background noise, both for you and the person at the other end of the call. The friend who recommended it to me would call from an airport and I could hear nothing but him, loud and clear. In addition to the noise cancellation technology, the headset features several interchangeable earpieces, so you can get a custom fit to your ear, and four additional ear loops, two for each ear, so the headset will hang over your ear and stay snugly in place, whichever side you prefer to wear it on. I bought mine at Amazon at a discount of roughly 50% from list and at least 30% from what I saw it selling for at a local store. I highly recommend it to anyone who has to spend any time talking on a cellphone. Here's the link to Amazon. Go check it out for yourself.

The Climate Change Debate Is Not Over......

....It's just being stifled.

"Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I -- no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out."

Rachel Lucas Feels the Pain

Rachel is doing her taxes. It hurts. I can suggest a cure for her pain.

(Via Instapundit)

Htichens on Hillary and Her Lying Habit

Writing at Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens makes the case for why Hillary Clinton's penchant for lying should disqualify her from the presidency. In this particular instance he cites her claim about landing under fire in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1996:

"...........it would be quite impossible to imagine that one had undergone that experience at the airport if one actually had not. Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes, she had exposed herself to sniper fire in the cause of gaining moral credit and, perhaps to be banked for the future, national-security "experience." This must mean either a) that she lies without conscience or reflection; or b) that she is subject to fantasies of an illusory past; or c) both of the above. Any of the foregoing would constitute a disqualification for the presidency of the United States."

The sheer brazenness never ceases to amaze me. Read the whole thing.

It's Good to Have a Backup Plan

In these uncertain economic times it's good to have a backup plan.


Powered By Adult Toy Shop


It's nice to know one has options.

(via Instapundit)

Now can we stop panicing?

The evidence against global warming and carbon dioxide continues to accumulate as this interview transcript from The Australian illustrates.

Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"

Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

The tide may be starting to turn but there's still this to cope with:

"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have
a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental
precepts................."

So we wait and see.

Income Taxes Are Evil...

From Samizdata: "Income tax is an evil. It is an evil not because it is a tax, but because of the way it works." Find out how it works and why it is evil here. It's as true for the US as it is for the UK.

The Debate Is Not, Apparently, Over - More Evidence Against Global Warmening

Via Tim Blair, we have this article talking about two hungarian climate scientists, one a former True Believer: "Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was." Why did he change his mind? Another Hungarian scientist, working for NASA, didn't get the memo about the debate being over and discovered a flaw in the climate models in use:

"Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential
equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

Did NASA applaud their man's work? No. They forced him to resign. Why?

Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

It's always about power and the money.

Global Warming - Follow the Money........

....You'll be surprised where the trail leads (unless you're me that is). The New York Times has a good article by John Tierney today about the influence of money in the Great Global Warming Debate (no, it is not over) and how the skeptics are portrayed (unfairly) as "fronts for big oil" or "tools of big corporations." Where the big money is really being made is on the other side of the debate. He also cites the example of the dietary fat wars of the 70's to illustrate the same phenomenon:

".....the money from food companies was trivial compared with the money being doled out by government agencies. One of the researchers who’d supposedly been bought off noted that he’d received $250,000 from the food industry in his career versus $10 million from government agencies — and wondered why this didn’t make him a “tool of government.”

It's working the same way with ethanol and it worked the same way with recycling. Read the whole thing.
(via Instapundit)

The Tax Man, Liberty and Democracy

It's worth reading this whole post about tax havens at Samizdata but a couple of points bear emphasizing because they speak to the way our constitutional republic is not the same thing as a true democracy. The latter is nearly pure mob rule. While we elect our representatives democratically, our Constitution is designed to protect individual liberty against the tyranny of straight majority rule.

"....a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters."

And this:

"......democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may - may - be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence."

This is exactly what deTocqueville was warning about when he said (and I paraphrase) that democracy would only last "as long as it took for the populace to figure out that it could vote itself largess from the public treasury." Perhaps if we take away the keys to the kitty from our elected representatives by enacting the FairTax, we could at least delay this process for a while longer by slowing down their give-aways to favored constituencies.

Genetically Modified Potatoes

As we were sitting down to have our dinner, C1D1 exclaimed that her sister's (C2D2) potato was smiling at her. Sure enough, it was. This is a genetically modified red potato, bred to enjoy being boiled and eaten.

John McCain's Citizenship

I keep hearing callers to radio talk shows raise the question of whether or not John McCain qualifies as a "natural born citizen" because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, then a US territory, now a part of the Republic of Panama. My understanding has always been that as long as one or both of your parents is a US citizen, then any children they have, no matter where they are born, are considered natural born citizens also. As it turns out, the first Congress took care of seeing to it that was made clear:

"The First Congress, in the first law that it enacted concerning citizenship, declared that “the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens”, with the proviso that their fathers must have resided in the United States at some point. I Stat. 104 (1790)."

Now, can we please get on with discussing real issues?