Tonight, Tommy Makem & Liam Clancy sing a paean to sailing ships and sailing men who sail the open waters: here’s Day of the Clipper.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Oh, Shiny Pony!
Ouch.
Best Globe and Mail Column I’ve Seen For a Long Time, or, “lipstick on a pig”
Uproar over Health Council’s demise isn’t worth it
…Either you invest in co-operation to ensure there is a semblance of a national health system, or you don’t.
Our governments, federal and provincial, through their actions if not their words, have opted to not do so. Maintaining the Health Council of Canada in its current incarnation and in the absence of that commitment would amount to putting lipstick on a pig.
Corner Ass
Everybody’s a pundit. Dude, don’t quit your night job.
The Country’s In The Very Best Of Hands
FBI Has Recipe for Ricin on Website
h/t peterj
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.
h/t batb, nick
Beyond Junk
EUROPE’S flagship environmental policy has just been holed below the water line. On April 16th the European Parliament voted by 334 to 315 to reject proposals which (its supporters claimed) were needed to save the emissions-trading system (ETS) from collapse. Carbon prices promptly fell 40% (see chart). Some environmentalists fear that the whole edifice of European climate policy could start to crumble.
Hockey Night in Boston – April 17, 2013
Canadians Win Bronze At Special Ops Competition
The elite Canadian Special Operations Regiment kicked some butt at the fifth annual Warrior Competition held in Jordan last month. The Canadians placed third after two teams from China.
The event is held every year at the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Centre.
The impressive desert site boasts full-sized buildings, passenger planes and gas stations for situational drills including hostage taking and terrorist attacks.
Special ops soldiers and police use the spot to sharpen their skills to become the best of the best.
No Safe Distance
When I began watching this amateur video of the fertilizer plant on fire in West, Texas, I began to wonder if they weren’t a little too close.
Morning update at the Dallas Morning News, “dozens” feared dead.
Reader Tips
Tonight, some catchy pop music ear candy, as the late Kirsty MacColl (the memorable woman’s voice in The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York“) sings a minor hit of hers from 1979 called They Don’t Know.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
If You Want Revenge on a Leftist…
just stay sexy.
Black Caviar Retired
“The owners and myself have had a long chats for the past couple of days [and] this afternoon at lunchtime we decided 25 was a great number,” Moody said when he made the announcement at Caulfield racecourse.
“Collectively we decided the mare’s in great shape, we thought long and hard about racing over the international season.
“I think in our wisdom we thought, ‘what else can we achieve?’ We don’t want to do anything wrong by the horse.
The final 400 meters of each race, with call, including her win by a nose at Ascot – running injured.
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”
The head of a group accused of illegally taping private meetings of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign visited the White House days before the group’s Twitter account began actively attacking the Kentucky Republican, according to White House visitors logs.
Probably nothing.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Via Anthony Watts;
A lecture by professor Hiroko Miyahara of the University of Tokyo provides additional support to the Svensmark theory of cosmoclimatology, finding that both solar geomagnetic activity and the polarity of geomagnetic activity have significant effects upon cosmic rays and cloud formation. The polarity of solar geomagnetic activity flips with a 22-year cycle, with periods of negative polarity [such as the current solar cycle] having a greater effect upon cosmic rays and cloud formation.
The authors also find a remarkable correlation between solar rotational signals, cloud height, and the Madden-Julian Oscillation [third figure below], which may represent yet another mechanism by which small changes in solar activity can be amplified to large changes in climate. Other amplification mechanisms include via ocean oscillations, ozone, and sunshine hours/clouds.
Switzerland: The Legendary Rock Solid Financial Civilization Stumbles
Switzerland is the place that has traditionally stood above all the rest in its reputation for financial stability.
Why? Because the currency was well-managed, the banking system was sound, and the country had a long tradition of treating capital well.
Over the last few years, however, these advantages have collapsed.
Switzerland has voluntarily surrendered banking privacy, and the many Swiss banks are now hemorrhaging cash. Even worse, the Swiss government destroyed its reputation for respecting capital when they pegged the Swiss franc to the euro in 2011 to arrest the franc’s rapid rise.
Why this place is becoming the new Switzerland.
Oh, Shiny Pony!
Looks like he picked a bad week to stop being a backbencher.
The Tolerant Left
One of the nastiest intellectual habits of the intellectual Left is that it prescribes set political agendas or menus which must be followed by rote or diktat, and in full. If the first course is the emancipation and equal treatment of women, the main course must be a smorgasbord of left of centre, politically correct social attitudes. Any deviation from this norm, and from this prescribed package of values and policies provokes a “moral” outrage which requires the vilification of the “deviant” who has strayed from orthodoxy. That vilification can often be carried out with all the zeal of a medieval religious fanatic confronting a so called “heretic”, that is someone who had the temerity not to follow God’s will as revealed to the zealot.
Thus, the Hatred of Maggie.
h/t EBD
Boston Marathon Bomber
Reportedly identified/arrested… developing. Or not …. undeveloping.
Intellectual superior watch:
Ok, the CNN chick just said it’ll be easier to find the guy if he’s a domestic terrorist because “US isn’t that big”. There are no words.
— DrewM (@DrewMTips) April 17, 2013