Minneapolis joins the category of cities best observed from a safe distance.
“Australia’s government nannies have officially banned 1,370 web sites.”
They’ve drawn up a blacklist, just like the medieval index of banned books. Right now it’s a voluntary pilot project to which Internet service providers can submit. But if the trial run is deemed a success and made law, anyone who links to a blacklisted site can be fined $11,000 a day. That means it will be a crime not just to provide the contents of a web site, but to merely reproduce its address.
That’s not just like banning books. It’s like banning books, and banning saying the banned book’s title. It’s a lot of banning.
But here’s the tricky part: the government won’t even say what those 1,370 banned web sites are. It’s secret. So there are 1,370 web sites out there that could result in your criminal prosecution in Australia. But you won’t find out what they are — until you link to one of them. That’s right out of Alice in Wonderland. The pretzelian logic goes like this: if the Australian government were to list those 1,370 banned web sites, then not only would they be breaking the rules themselves, but that list would serve as an advertisement. Out of the billions of web pages on the Internet, 1,370 would be given special attention, inviting anyone curious to check them out.
Of course, people who compile the secret blacklist know what’s on it. But apparently they can be trusted not to succumb to the temptation to look at the sites. And the list was sent to selected Australian Internet companies for a trial run. That didn’t work out quite as well. The list was leaked to Wikileaks, the web site that specializes in publishing confidential documents, especially embarrassing internal government memoranda.
And that’s when things got even weirder. Wikileaks published the entire blacklist on one of its pages. So now that Wikileaks page, too, has been added to the blacklist. It’s number 1,371.
Sheila Fraser, Call Your Office
… reports emerged Wednesday that the office of Canada’s privacy commissioner has been used in a brazen scheme that paid department employees for time spent on Facebook … developing…
Reader Tips
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Sweet performing Love Is Like Oxygen from their Level Headed album, in 1978 (7:14).
Nota bene: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the daily SDA Reader Tips entry. It is a place that is provided for you, dear reader, to alert other SDA readers to various level-headed tips you might have, in order to alleviate the shame and embarrassment that would arise from being off-topic in other SDA entries. How to remove wax from a carpet is a tip, SDA is like oxygen is a tip, that Mark Steyn has a great new article here is a tip, if the Large Hadron Collider sees a Higgs Boson that will be a tip, I could go on and on: tips is a pretty broad category. And, the daily Reader Tips entry is a place to make occasional comments about said posted Reader Tips, including the opening LNR tip, comments on those comments, and so on, to a degree.
That all makes sense: not enough and you’re gonna’ die. Nevertheless, you get too much you get too high: Reader Tips is not a place for copying and pasting vast tracts of text from other publications. That’s not only illegal, it’s actually rude. Use a link. It is not a place for you to go on and on and on and on trying to convince all SDA readers that you are righteously correct about some pet peeve of yours. Get your own blog for that, then post an excerpt from and link to your essay here. It is not a place for posting ill-formatted run-on comments. Be considerate of your readers. It is not a debating society. I wish it was, but Kate says it isn’t. And it is not a place for school-yard name-calling of those you don’t agree with.
There is a reason for my saying all this, and that is that to the degree that Reader Tips becomes overrun by excessive commentitis from a small number of activist commenters, signals from otherwise legitimate and possibly interesting SDA Readers’ Tips become lost in the noise of the verbodiarrheic, thus lowering the overall Shannon information value of the exercise for all of us. Remember, my job here (in Reader Tips) is to be like a host to the guests of Reader Tips, and that means I have to know when to (and be willing to) invoke the bouncers (and I am).
Therefore, in order to be reasonable to all the guests of Small Dead Animals who might like to post occasional Reader Tips and occasional comments thereupon, I say to those of you who have recently been trying to use these Reader Tips entries as if they were your personal blog: don’t do that any more. I’m not asking anyone to go away or to not talk about something, it’s just that this is the world-famous Small Dead Animals, so try to be reasonable, please.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
The Tolerant Left
We Learned To Love It
It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
And after that, they’ll make private billing from your doctor illegal, and private “for profit” diagnostics illegal, and well, there’s not a lot they won’t make illegal to ensure that you, your doctor, your technicians, and your nurses don’t desert the system for greener pastures.
And while you may not learn to love things like “doctor shortages”, “temporary acute care bed closures”, and “dying on waiting lists” right away, your children and grandchildren will, because politicians and union leaders and grade school educators – really, all the leading intellectual lights of your nation – will be hard at work from this day forward, instilling in them the conviction that the health care services they are prohibited from receiving are a cornerstone of your national identity.
So enough with the dissent.
As Canadians can tell you, it’s unpatriotic.
“Che Stadium”
Why, he’s been to games in all 57 states.
The First American Prime Minister In Waiting
Reader Tips
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first of three special Apollo 11 editions of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to that singular time in history forty years ago, here is the original Launch Sequence ¤ video (9:55), as you would have seen it, live, on television, starting at T minus six minutes and counting, on July 16, 1969, at 09:26 EDT. Over three hundred and sixty feet tall ~ a thirty story building. Almost eight million pounds of thrust. Mere words are inadequate.
And here are some things you might not have seen before: here is live footage from a number of the high-speed cameras ¤ involved in the Apollo 11 launch (3:16), and footage from the high-speed engine cameras ¤ of Apollo 8, 11, and 12 (3:48, no audio).
If everything works out as planned, knock on wood, we have some, I think, fine shows in the can for next Sunday night, when we’re on the moon, over two hundred thousand miles away, and a week Thursday night, when we return to Earth. We went a long way from home, folks, in space, in time, in technology, and in the history of our species.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
The Czech point of view on those Visas
Here’s Lubus Motls: Canadian Bastards reintroduce Visas:
A few TV programs on Czech TV stations that were aired after the Velvet Revolution and that showed happy gypsies in Canada – who don’t have to work too much but who have everything they want (it’s partly true because of the Canadian welfare system) – has created a special atmosphere in the community of the Czech gypsies. Many of them just decided to move on. Canada has become their new dreamland.
In average, this ethnic group is demonstrably less attached to the land, the culture, the political institutions, and the general economy than the “majority” white population. The minority’s unemployment rate is around 70%, an order of magnitude above the current 8% unemployment rate in Czechia (and it was lower a year ago). The crime rate is high.
Ten years ago, instead of introducing the visas, the Canadians placed some bureaucrats at the Prague International Airport who were doing the mostly racial profiling, to cap the inflow of the gypsies to Canada. This was of course a more convenient system for the “white” Czechs than the visa requirements. But it was a dirty system, too, especially if you combine it with the absurd Canadian proclamations about their treating everyone in the same way.
An interesting point of view, especially this little nugget:
Canada should understand – and publicly admit – that the high number of applications that follow a similar logic is mainly a result of their asylum system’s being too inviting and provoking people to profitably write similar stuff. The right solution is to adjust their asylum mechanisms so that the impact of this “loophole” is reduced (for example, by making the asylum applications of this kind more expensive, or by reducing welfare for fresh migrants).
This is the main point. There would be no reason to cause this diplomatic incident with a European ally if our refugee system could just reject these bogus claims out of hand. Since the end of communism the Czech republic has been a free and democratic country, not to mention an ally that fights with us in Afghanistan. Any claim to refugee status from a democratic European country is risible and should be dismissed with utter contempt. But our refugee system doesn’t do that – they actually grant many of these claims and the rest get dragged out for years.
That’s the part that should be fixed, not imposing visas on Czechs.
Y2Kyoto: An Informed Denier Is An Effective Denier!
Former Restaurant Critic Tries Hand At Politics
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Warren Kinsella’s Spin Machine – “…we’d like a Minister of Immigration who isn’t a xenophobic mouth-breather…[imposing visa restrictions on the Czech Republic is] taking Canada back to the days when it closed the door to Jewish migrants trying to flee Nazi Europe.”
Paul Wells Wayback Machine – “[The Chretien government] reinstated visa restrictions on the Czech Republic [in 1997] in hopes of discouraging immigration by Czech Gypsies, or Roma, after more than 1,200 arrived this year seeking protection as refugees.”
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Today’s presidential tracking poll is brought to by baseball fans in St. Louis.
He’d Rather Crawl On Broken Glass Than Vote Liberal
Friends In Low Places
Since nobody else seems willing to stick up for them;
A North African offshoot of al-Qaeda has China in its crosshairs because of its treatment of Muslim rioters in Urumqi last week.
A group called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQM) is threatening attacks on the 50,000 Chinese workers in Algeria, according to a report prepared by international risk consultants Sterling Assynt and revealed in the South China Morning Post Tuesday.
The Chinese government is taking its first threat from Osama bin Laden’s deadly network seriously. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters: “We will keep a close eye on developments and make joint efforts with relevant countries to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of overseas Chinese institutions and people.”
Via Andrew Keyes, (who’s waiting for a reaction from the left that will never come).
Reader Tips
Welcome to the day-early Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s featured song is from Tom Lehrer, a math professor and part-time musical satirist whose musical success happened almost by accident: while attending Harvard, where he first arrived to study math at age 15, Lehrer wrote “Fight Fiercely Harvard” — “hurl that spheroid down the field” — and put it, along with eleven other original songs, on a record he recorded in one hour for $15. His intention had been simply to sell a few records on campus, but the word of mouth on Songs by Tom Lehrer soon led to mail-order requests from across the country, and within a few years he became a — somewhat reluctant — international success.
For a year or so after Lehrer stopped touring in the early 1960’s he performed satiric, topical songs like Werner Von Braun and National Brotherhood Week on the American version of the (originally) British TV program That Was The Week That Was. Tonight’s musical selection, from an album of his songs from the show called That Was the Year That Was, was written about the then-topical subject matter of the forward-looking Second Vatican Council. Lehrer: “There’s been a great deal of ferment in the Roman Catholic Church lately, involving certain reforms which are taking place. For one thing, they are allowing the use of native languages to replace Latin in portions of the mass…also, they are permitting the use of secular music in portions of the liturgy; I thought it would be a nice idea to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have chosen the ragtime form….”
Here then, without further ado, part-time humorist and piano player Tom Lehrer sings The Vatican Rag.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
California: Not Broke Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
San Francisco Chronicle – California will report its June job totals later this month. Thursday’s bleak federal numbers suggest that the state unemployment rate, already at 11.5 percent, could head higher.
Business Wire – “A new study released today found that small businesses in California will pay an additional $49,691 as a result of the California Air Resources Board’s implementation of AB 32.”
It’s not a recession. It’s suicide.
The Sound Of Settled Science
[A] remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the “consensus” bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing “cap and trade” scheme, which would devastate Australia’s economy, it being 80 per cent dependent on coal. The bill still has to pass the Senate, which is so precisely divided that the decisive vote next month may be cast by an independent Senator, Stephen Fielding. So crucial is his vote that the climate change minister, Penny Wong, agreed to see him with his four advisers, all leading Australian scientists.
Fielding put to the minister three questions. How, since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?
The written answers produced by the minister’s own scientific advisers proved so woolly and full of elementary errors that Fielding’s team have now published a 50-page, fully-referenced “Due Diligence” paper tearing them apart. In light of the inadequacy of the Government’s reply, the Senator has announced that he will be voting against the bill.
The wider significance of this episode is that it is the first time a Western government has allowed itself to be drawn into debating the science behind the global warming scare with expert scientists representing the “counter consensus” – and the “consensus” lost hands down.
Unprecedented!
Keep your eyes on the face of CNN’s Don Lemon…
Via Michelle Malkin, h/t Soccermom
Japan, Stimulated
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
WSJ, July 13th – Japan’s government raised its overall economic assessment for the third straight month in July […] The upgrade gives embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso grounds to claim his government’s fiscal stimulus measures have helped the recession-stricken economy turn a corner ahead of general elections …
Bloomberg, July 13th – Default rates on loans underlying Japanese commercial mortgage-backed securities rose to an “unprecedented high” of 53 percent in the first half, Fitch Ratings said. […] A total of 58.6 billion yen ($635 million) of 92.3 billion in CMBS-related loans maturing in the six months to June 30 didn’t repay when due, Fitch said in the statement. For its analysis, Fitch is assuming all CMBS-related loans maturing in the next 12 months will default, it said.
(h/t Sean)
Meanwhile, Japan’s armies of the unemployed continue to rust….